B. Especificaciones alternativas
5. Descomposición de la productividad laboral
I sat with Hawa on the wharf one morning, as she pointed out the different boats in the distance, calling each of the sailors by name as they slid towards the horizon. To her trained eye, each of those retreating boats was as instantly recognisable as the fisherman’s face would have been, according to the distinctive pattern of its colourful patchwork sail. ‘Like, my man's sail, for example, it’s red and orange. So when I come to the beach, I can see him straight away.’
There had been a time — only a few decades ago — when it had been common for Tissana’s boats to spend their entire day fishing in the shallow waters within sight of the shore. It does still happen, occasionally, that shoals of bonga congregate in the waters immediately around the Shenge Peninsula. On these days, if you stand on the beach and look out to sea, the water seems to be teeming with slow-‐motion activity. During lulls in more interesting gossip, women on the wharf would often look up, and idly point out to one another which fishing grounds looked to be popular that day, and where the different individual fishermen (entirely indistinguishable to my eye) were coming from or going to land.
Yet, however rich this sheltered coastal shelf may once have been, we saw in Chapter 4 that these shallowest inshore waters have been rapidly decimated in recent decades by the profusion of unsustainable dragnet techniques. This decline in the fertility of Tissana’s most local waters has combined with improved seafaring technology, to foster the emergence of a quite different kind of fishing culture: one in which men routinely travel far greater distances each day in search of fish. Nowadays, boat captains begin their days by listening to the rumours circulating amongst their fellow fishermen, about which of the Yawri Bay’s many fishing grounds have recently seen fish ‘dying’ in the greatest numbers. Even in the absence of any specific piece of intelligence, they know their greatest chance of landing a decent catch is to make their way directly into deeper waters — and beyond the view of those of us on land.
It has become fashionable across anthropology to enlist images of watery ‘fluids’ wherever we want to allude to the increased mobility and interconnectivity of the globalising world (Helmreich 2011). However, as we have begun to see over the past two chapters certainly does not hold true for everyone in Tissana that the sea figures in their lives as a medium of free movement and frictionless connectivity. On the contrary, for the town’s non-‐seafaring residents the watery horizon is more likely to appear as a barrier through which they watch others pass, but beyond which they can neither move nor see. I return later in this chapter to explore the implications, for those on the coast, of living with the knowledge that much of what affects their livelihoods most takes place in a seascape hidden tantalisingly beyond their view. Before returning to the land, however, I want first to develop a stronger sense of the social and spatial dimensions of the world into which the fishermen disappear each day.
There is a second respect in which my ethnography speaks to this growing ‘oceanisation’ discourse. For, even whilst social scientists refer ever more often to economies defined by ‘fluid’ movements of peoples, things and ideas, the dominant image we have come to accept of waterscapes themselves is of a curiously flat, socially characterless space: albeit one that we now expect to connect people and places, rather than separate them. As Kären Wigen notes here, a continuing oversight of research exploring the social life of ocean basins is that ‘sea space… comes across as essentially a two-‐dimensional (and practically friction-‐free) surface for the coming and going of ships’ (Wigen 2006: 720).
Tim Ingold epitomises this attitude rather neatly in his statement that ‘we humans stake out our differences on the land; the sea, however, is a great dissolver — of time, of history, of cultural distinction’ (1994: x). However, for the many thousands of working fishermen who make their living from the Yawri Bay, this small, intensively utilised seascape is anything but a ‘great dissolver’. When Tissana’s fishermen go to sea each day, they may leave behind the relationships that characterise their social lives on the land, but they enter another equally complex social world, every bit as riven through with rivalries, conflicts and secret alliances.
I had been living in Tissana for almost a year before, one morning, a visiting boat owner from Plantain Island had taken a long stick and sketched me a map of the Yawri Bay in sandy ground outside Pa Sila’a cookery. Aside from the coastline, which I recognised
easily enough, Tomi’s map revealed a topography altogether unfamiliar to me. He did not bother to mark any of the villages, roads or rivers, which I tended to think of as the region’s most prominent landmarks. Rather, he carefully parcelled out an intricate mosaic of distinct watery spaces, the defining characteristics of which — the depths of their seabed and the strengths of their currents — were all utterly invisible to me. To the far side of Plantain Island, for example, Tomi marked a series of small fishing grounds running away from the coast toward the Atlantic Ocean. He pointed to them in turn — ‘Konah, Kaisa, Pokeh, Katatabul’ — and explained how each differed from its neighbouring fishing ground in some important aspect of its invisible, underwater terrain. Beyond that, where the continental shelf slides off into the deep Atlantic: ‘We call that “Open”, that’s the big, deep sea, there, where those trawlers pass. It can be rough there. Then here, all along here, between Bompeh and Konah grounds, there is a deep channel of water. We call that “Gutta [gutter] Ground”’.
Although he carefully labelled these deeper waters into small, named grounds, Tomi’s map dismissed the entire wide, shallow shelf along the coast of the Shenge Peninsula as an undifferentiated non-‐fishing ground, which he referred to as ‘Bar’. Like most fishermen based on Plantain Island, his fishing equipment was unsuitable for these inshore waters. If he cast his twenty-‐fathom (36 metres)-‐wide net here, where the seabed lies only seven fathoms (12 metres) beneath the surface, they would almost certainly tear. Tissanan fishermen, by contrast, tend to use narrower nets and do still class these shallow seas as a series of distinct fishing grounds, albeit ones that they expect ever less often to provide them with a bounteous catch. For their part, they can only reach deeper waters by heading out beyond Plantain. It is partly for this reason that even the most homebody of Tissanan fishermen so often opt to save their fuel money — or even better their aching muscles — by passing the night ‘on alehn’ on Plantain.
It was Tomi’s map that had first revealed to me just what a clear sense experienced fishermen have of the hidden, three-‐dimensional topography they traverse each day in their boats. But he also emphasised what a thoroughly populated and highly socialised space these fishing grounds around Plantain had become. ‘First time’, he told me, ‘when you went to sea, you were on your own’. Captains had relied purely on their experience to intuit where the fish might be concentrated in the ocean. Depending on the tide, the season and weather conditions, a knowledgeable man could look at the water and make
an informed guess as to where he might find fish. But really, he readily admitted, fish are not that predictable: ‘where they go — it is only God who decides that’.
The density of boats working in the Yawri Bay’s waters has increased dramatically in recent decades. This, combined with the introduction of mobile phones five years earlier, has radically changed the social character of the sea: transforming it into a space in which fishing boats are far less isolated than they once had been:
There are over a hundred and fifty boats now, on Plantain.37 When we go to sea, we all scatter. But now, it’s not like before. We can communicate. If I’ve got a friend in another boat he might call me, and say, ‘Are the fish dying where you are? Because here at Poke Ground, there are loads!’ The fish — they don’t scatter in the sea, you know? They move in groups — so it can happen sometimes that there are loads in one place. So then I’d just ace my engine, and I can be there quick-‐quick. Because, before, we had to paddle, but now God has given us these engines, so it’s easy.
The image Tomi painted, of fishermen generously collaborating to help one another at sea, is only one part of the picture. Most of the men I asked agreed it is fairly rare to encounter fish in such massive numbers that it warrants actively inviting another boat to come and share in the plenty. In fact, in an environment where all men are essentially competing to catch the same shoals of fish, the dynamic between different fishing boats is more often one of intense, sport-‐like rivalry.
Travelling aboard one of the large passenger canoes (pampas) that commute twice weekly from Tombo to Shenge, the journey gave me and the other women on-‐board a tantalising glimpse of a male world from which we were usually excluded. In the rainy season, these journeys could be hair-‐raising — and dangerous. In the dry season, however, when the surface of the Yawri Bay is as calm and smooth as a millpond, the crossing usually passes without drama (see Figure 10). If the weather is clear, one barely loses sight of Freetown’s mountains before the low-‐lying houses and trees of Plantain Island appear over the horizon ahead. In every direction, brightly painted fishing boats are scattered motionless across the glassy surface of the sea.
At moments like this, one had a clear sense of the sea as a densely populated social space. The fishing grounds to the north of Shenge are deeper than those to its south and west, and are favoured by larger, so-‐called ‘Ghana’ or ‘channel’ boats, with their deeper nets and crews of fifteen to twenty men. In the course of a three-‐hour pampa journey, we might pass close enough to shout greetings to the men aboard a dozen or more of these boats, as they stood under the glaring sun, patiently scanning the horizon about them, scrutinising the water for evidence of hidden fish, shoaling just beneath the surface: ‘Yes, when you see them all like that, near-‐near to one another, it means that the fish are there. In all those boats, they are all watching, watching, watching the water’ (Yusef, crewman). Seeing these multiple boatloads of fishermen scanning the same waters for the same shoals of fish, it would be easy to forget the possibility that each crew set sail from a different wharf town that morning. Occasionally, we happened to pass one of these large boats just at the moment when its crew had broken their vigil. Their engine would be on full blast, churning the water behind them, as the boat swerved to intercept a shoal of fish they had spotted. All the men on-‐board were in motion, working rapidly as a team, to cast their net before any of the boats nearby were able to move to catch the same fish. On another occasion, my pampa passed a crew just as they were hauling their net from the water. From our cramped perches along the edge of the passenger canoe, we all turned and craned to see what kind of catch they had landed:
‘Do you see those men there? They’re pulling their net! Ah! That’s hard work, there!’
‘Look at all those fish! They are happy today! Look, the other crews are all watching them.’
And it was true. The sea was so congested that day that three or four other similarly sized boats were close enough in the water to have an easy view of the successful fishermen. The others had not cast their nets yet, and were standing watching as their rivals dragged their heavy, glittering catch from the sea. As our pampa slid through the water between them, the tension had felt palpable. I recalled Pa Brima’s comment, only a few days previously in Tissana, that: ‘In the town, you see us, we fishermen all have one heart. But when I’m at sea, I don't want any man to get more than me!’. Here, Mohammed paints a vivid image of the kinds of strategic games played out between rival crews as they compete against one another in the sea:
When you're all there in an open place. That boat is standing there; that one is standing there; that one is standing there: they’re all watching, watching, they are all watching to see. Perhaps I might be standing here, but I can see there are fish over there [behind you]. I don't hurry-‐oh! I paddle small-‐small, I come. I paddle small-‐small, I come. I paddle small-‐small, I come.... If I see fish in the water near your boat, I wouldn't call to tell you they were there-‐oh! No! I’d wait... wait... wait... for the right moment… then, BAM! – I’d heave my net. Whoever casts their net first, it's done! Even if you were right there, closer to the fish than me, you don't have the right to cast your net now.
Parallel attempts to capitalise upon ‘knowledge differentials’ are an essential characteristic of many economic environments — from the stock market to the bazaar (Geertz 1978; Walsh 2004; Berry 2007). Yet there can be little doubt that fisheries have certain particular material characteristics that work to infuse this competition with a heightened sense of urgency. In a context in which everyone in the sea is vying to catch the same evasive resource, then very often the only thing separating a triumphant boat from the many others who return home empty-‐handed is the fact that one crew learned, fractionally faster than its rivals, where exactly the fish were to be found.
Indeed, it is a recurring characteristic of oceanic life, in otherwise disparate fishing cultures around the world, that intense competition is often paired with ‘clear signs of secrecy, misinformation, and deceit’ (Palmer 1990: 157; cf. Andersen 1980; Acheson 1981). As Mark Busse reminds us here, ‘The materiality of property matters. The kinds of property claims that can be made depend upon the materiality of the things being claimed’ (Busse 2012: 120). Or, as Pa Brima had gone on to put it, rather more pithily, ‘Fish get problem-‐oh!’ If there can be any doubt as to the depth of the competition felt between rival crews, fishermen often told me that it was common for tensions to erupt into violence:
It’s a war! It's a war! It's like this: you see fish — the distance is there, far over there. I see them, too. I want to go and catch them — you also want to catch them. So you'll paddle; I’ll paddle fast to try and go and catch them. Fishermen can fight at sea-‐oh! Eeeee, bone to bone! Physical! Boats, they can come near to each other, like this – FIGHT! They know how to fight at sea. (Alusine, crewman)
Yes, they can fight! Sometimes they heave broken bottles at one another! At the sea now, some people, they cuss-‐cuss-‐cuss — abusive language! When they go to sea, all men are trying to fish. (Usifu, crewman)
In theory, men who fight at sea are subject to the same laws as those who fight in town, and ought to receive a fairly heavy fine from the town chief for such aggressive behaviour. However, as Alusine goes on to describe here, fishermen collaborate to keep a clear separation between the two social worlds — ensuring that the details of their individual antagonisms remain largely invisible to their neighbours on the land:
For example, you and me, we fight at sea. You catch. Me, I don't have anything. When we land, I'll go to you, you'd wap for me [give me a gift of fish]. So we take it now as something fun. When we’re here on land, we just take it up as a joke. I’d say, ‘Ah Jennifer — the other day, when we were at sea, don't you remember how I hit you?’ We all laugh. But when we were out at sea, it was serious. EH! Serious! If anyone did that in town, it would be a major problem. But it doesn't come to town.
We are beginning to get a sense, then, of the complex layers of partially obscured vision that riddle Tissana’s seascape. On one hand — and I return to this important point in more detail shortly — non-‐seafaring fisherfolk, left behind on the shore, are ever-‐ conscious of this disquieting fact: however crucial the sea is to their own fragile livelihoods, they can never know with any certainty what is taking place in that maritime world across the horizon. Yet even if we remain, for now, with the seagoing fishermen themselves, it is clear that what knowledge they possess of their work environment is, by definition, slippery. Regardless of how experienced a boat’s captain might be, there is more to mastering that endlessly fluid environment than accumulating a static corpus of knowledge. Aside from steering across a topography, the physical contours of which are hidden from view beneath the water, fishermen are also working to navigate an equally complex field of socially produced knowledge, in which their friends and colleagues in other boats are as likely working to distort or conceal important information as they are to share it.