Environmental anthropologists also go to sea, as fisheries management is critical in terms of food supply. There are major issues about the ecological sustainability of fish populations, as well as the social sustainability of the many communities who depend on fishing for their livelihoods.
Fisheries anthropologists have worked long and hard to find, document, and recommend solutions to the problem of a resource that has no owners . . . Most significantly they have placed notions of co-management – the call for local communities to share in the management of their own resources – firmly on the agendas of state and international resource management. (Van Willigen 2005: 98)
A ‘resource that has no owners’ raises complex questions about who should have rights of access, and as anthropologists have shown, this is very much an arena in which power and politics are critical, both at an international level, in negotiations over quotas, and locally, between different groups of resource users and managers. Thus Bonnie McCay (2000, 2001), who works on fisheries policy issues, seeks ways
communities. There are some useful ethnographies of diverse local management schemes, and these are not always conventional: for example, James Acheson (1987) produced an ethnography about the ‘lobster gangs’ who protect communal access to resources in Maine, ensuring a greater density – and so more effective conservation – of lobsters in ‘their’ territories.
Environmental anthropologists are also keenly interested in broader conservation issues, and there is a fast-growing area of research concerned with human–animal relations and ‘animal rites’ (as well as animal rights). Classically, this has involved research exploring the various ways that cultural groups categorize and relate to animals (for example, as totemic beings, or as spiritual creatures) or examining how societies have made use of animals in systems of production, either hunting them as prey, or domesticating them to varying degrees.
Gregory Forth’s (2003) research in Indonesia, for instance, considers how the Nage people incorporate birds into religious ideas, myths and poetry, and regard them as having prophetic abilities. Paul Sillitoe’s (2003) ethnographic work with New Guinea Highlanders considers how animals – in particular pigs – are classified and dealt with in consequence. Understanding how particular societies relate to animals is useful in a variety of ways. It provides insights into their cosmological beliefs and understandings of the world; their interactions with ‘nature’; the ways in which they organize themselves socially; and their ideas about identity and personhood. It also helps us to understand why people think some species are – or are not – worth conserving and protecting.
Anthropologists have often worked with communities whose way of life is bound up with particular animal species. For example, Gideon Kressel’s (2003) research on shepherding in the Middle East and Israel considers how groups are struggling to preserve a traditional form of pastoralism that they see as their cultural legacy, while also encompassing the political realities of the region. Such lifeways are integral to
the preservation of cultural diversity, and many anthropologists believe that it is important to record and publicize ethnographic accounts of them in the hope of broadening the wider political reality to encompass and valorize these groups and their cultural traditions.
From a very different perspective, James Serpell’s (1996) research takes a look at how many societies have created the idea of ‘pets’, and incorporated animals into their domestic lives. This work shows how cultural groups think about animals as semi-persons, or as fellow members of the family, and how their worldviews use animals creatively as categories of characteristics (feline or foxy) or behaviour (being boorish, bullish, bovine . . . or chicken). These understandings help to explain how people interact with the particular range of species in their environments, as well as revealing the way that they organize social relationships and evaluate behaviour.
The social and cultural meanings of hunting, even in urbanized industrial societies, have been considered by anthropologists such as Matt Cartmill (1993) and, more recently, Garry Marvin (2006), whose research with English foxhunting groups informed highly contentious debates on whether this activity should be banned. Rather than taking sides in the conflict, Marvin sought to articulate the deeper meanings and ideas located in hunting:
What I wanted to do was something different – I wanted to understand what foxhunting is per se. I sought to understand the social and cultural processes that constituted foxhunting. As an anthropologist I have a particular interest in human-animal relations, and it seemed to me that at the heart of hunting were some complex configurations of such relations . . . I regularly heard those who participated in foxhunting defend it against attacks from the outside but that defence never seemed to tally exactly with how they spoke about hunting, the experiences they had of it and the meanings it had for them when they were talking amongst themselves. (Marvin 2006: 193, 194)
Marvin was asked to act as an anthropological consultant in the Home Secretary’s enquiry into ‘hunting with dogs’, and to produce a neutral account interpretatively describing a ‘typical’ hunting day with comments on its cultural meanings. This was considered by the enquiry alongside material from both pro- and anti-hunting groups. He was then hired by the Countryside Alliance to help with a legal challenge to the banning of foxhunting by producing a report on the potential social and
understandings that it provided.
As species extinctions have reached unprecedented levels, research on human– animal relations has become more focused on the social and economic practices that result in the loss or degradation of plant and animal habitats, and in the pressures on endangered species. Quite often there are clashes between environmental groups and local communities whose view of animal (or other) species may be less protective. Such conflicts have been analysed by Dimitri Theodossopoulos, who investigated ‘troubles with turtles’ on a Greek island (2002), and by Adrian Peace (2001, 2002), whose research – which includes ‘an ethnography of whale watching’ – considers diverse cultural perspectives on dingoes, whales and sharks in Australia.