Environment, Labour and Capitalism at Sea Working the Ground' in Scotland [Hardcover]

This book explores how fishers make the sea productive through their labour, using technologies ranging from wooden boats to digital GPS plotters to create familiar places in a seemingly hostile environment. It shows how their lives are affected by capitalist forces in the markets they sell to, forces that shape even the relations between fishers on the same boat. Fishers frequently have to make impossible choices between safe seamanship and staying afloat economically, and the book describes the human impact of the high rate of deaths in the fishing industry. The book makes a unique contribution to understanding human-environment relations, examining the places fishers create and name at sea, as well as technologies and navigation practices. It combines phenomenology and political economy to offer new approaches for analyses of human-environment relations and technologies.

Introduction

Part I: A metabolism of labour and environment

1. 'Working the ground'

2. From Wullie's Peak to the Burma: naming places at sea

Part II: Techniques and technologies

3. Techniques to extend the body and its senses

4. From 'Where am I?' to 'Where is that?' Rethinking navigation

Part III: Capitalism and class

5. 'You just can't get a price': the difference political economy makes

6. Capitalism, subjectivity and violence in ecological systems

Conclusion: Labour, class and anthropology

Index

As Howard makes clear capital and its drive to profit must be challenged-this book is a weapon in that fight. - Sarah Ensor, International Socialism, A quarterly review of socialist theory

How do the fishers relate to each other, their boats, their technologies, the sea, their catches? In this deeply researched book, written with an intimate feel for fishing and the sea, Penny McCall Howard answers these questions. Based on the Scottish industry, this important book shows how class relations conl“p