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Title
Fishwork in Uganda: A Multispecies Ethnohistory about Fish, People, and Ideas about Fish and People. |
Full text
http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/110502 |
Date
2014 |
Author(s)
Johnson, Jennifer Lee |
Contributor(s)
Diana, James Stephen; Hardin, Rebecca; Peterson, Derek R.; Bavington, Dean Louis |
Abstract
Located between the dry world of humans and the wet world of fish, the littoral, or shoreline, generates dynamic and sometimes confusing mixtures of people, fish, and ideas about how best to organize life at the shore. By foregrounding women???s work with diverse species and forms of fish ??? both indigenous and introduced ??? alongside linked social and ecological transformations, Fishwork in Uganda retheorizes the intersection of gender, history, and sustainability around Africa???s largest body of water. Known to English speakers as Lake Victoria, this lake has long been a crucible for transformative social dynamics characterized by the littoral. It is a place of heightened prospects for mobility mediated by alternative moralities of sexual and economic exchange and competing valuations of space and the material and metaphorical stuff of life, including fish. Lake Victoria is represented in popular culture as an ecosystem in constant crisis ??? a ???sick giant??? still ???in the heart of darkness.??? This dissertation offers a very different account. It demonstrates that a seemingly singular body ??? Lake Victoria ??? is ontologically multiple, that is, there are at least four bodies of water brought into being over time through the everyday and eventful practices of working with fish; Victoria Nyanza, named in honor of Imperial England???s Queen Victoria, associated with resistance to the establishment of colonial rule and the dangers of recalcitrant nature; Lake Victoria, the so-called modern lake tamed by technology and managed by a transnational cadre of fisheries and development experts towards the intercontinental export of the Nile perch, a large invasive species; Ennyanja Nalubaale, the ???lake of the feminine guardians??? who were widely considered to influence wellbeing along the littorals of this ???Pre-Victorian lake;??? and Nyanja, the contemporary lake as its residents know and experience it, where concepts, preferences, and species from Ennyanja Nalubaale, Victoria Nyanza, and Lake Victoria converge and reveal possibilities for a ???Post-Victorian??? vision of this body of water attentive to the multivocal and multispecies concerns of littoral residents and fish on their own terms. |
Subject(s)
Fisheries; Uganda; Multispecies Ethnography; Women's History; Sustainability |
Language
en_US |
Repository
Michigan - University of Michigan
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Added to C-A: 2015-02-09;12:48:11 |
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