Tragedy of commodification: Displacements in Alutiiq Fishing Communities in the Gulf of Alaska

• Main Author: Courtney Carothers
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Gulf of Alaska; alutiiq; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1040.8771; http://www.marecentre.nl/mast/documents/Mast2010_9.2_Carothers.pdf

Abstract Processes of marine enclosure are radically shifting ocean governance and marine-based livelihoods across the globe. Drawing on ethnographic research with indigenous Alutiiq fishing villages in the Gulf of Alaska, this paper explores the displacements generated by the privatization of fisheries access. Social and economic relationships between Alutiiq villages and salmon canneries in the twentieth century facilitated flexible commercial-subsistence fishing engagements. More recent property rights forms of fisheries harvest have brought about a dramatic alienation of local fishing rights and place-based livelihoods. The commodification of fishing rights is based on conceptualizations of human-environment relationships fundamentally opposed to the cultural logics of social dependence and informal economy of village communities. Privatization discourses and policies represent fishing participants as efficient, professional, fully engaged in commercial economies, and geographically and occupationally mobile; fishing motivations as profit-driven; and fishing rights as alienable commodities. These conceptualizations have excluded and marginalized certain kinds of fishing operations, lifestyles, communities, and rights.