Category Archives: key words

03/19/19

Masculinity, Fishermen, and Gender

Fishing narrowly understood is a masculinest occupation. Crews and skippers are overwhelmingly men, not just in my homeport of Prince Rupert, but globally. That does not deny the fact that the wider social world of fisheries is a human multi-gendered social world. Donna Lee Davis and Jane Nadel Klien were among the early cohort of researchers who documented the integral role women play in fisheries communities (1988). Much of the focus of the work that preceded Davis and Nadel Klien highlighted the crew at sea (see, for example: Orbach 1977; Zulaika 1981; Cohen 1987). Other approaches retained an anthropology of the village and wrote about peasant-like settings (see, for example: Firth 1966; Faris 1966). The turn to view fisheries within a wider gendered lens developed through the1980s; one important result of which is the normalization of an approach that assumes gender is relevant as opposed to merely something to add after the fact (Neis et al 2005; see also, Menzies 2011:99-110).

The social world of fishing communities is not a homogenous space – it is riven by class and gender just as aspects of the wider society are. While the early maritime anthropologists (such as: Orbach 1977; Zulaika 1981) focused on the crew at sea as the sum total of the fishing community as an occupational culture, this paper zeros in on how aspects of onboard work are implicated in the reproduction of gender, specifically masculinity while appreciating this occurs within a wider social field than the boat itself (Davis 1993; Yodanis 2000; Power 2004; King 2007).

In a paper explaining why women don’t fish, Carrie Yodanis argues, “women are women because they do not fish” (2000:268). She found gender to be defined in relation to the at sea practice of fishing. Yodanis’ study was based in a Maine lobster fishing community. Her observations are similar to my own among British Columbian fishermen (Menzies 1991). Yodanis goes on to say “‘Man’ is defined as one who fishes and ‘women’ is defined in opposition to that which is a fisherman” (2000:268). This echoes Nancy Chodorow’s1978 observation that gendered parenting –motherhing and fathering (as opposed to simply an androgynous parenting)- is at the root of societal gendered inequalities. In her rendering girls simply grow into women while men are made as their masculine identity is severed from their mothers as they become ‘not women’ (Chodorow 1978). There are, of course, women who fish (Wilson 2014, 2016). Yet their presence on the boat is constructed in such a way as to maintain normative hegemonic masculinity (Menzies 1991; Meyer 2015; McMullen 2018).

Julianne Meyer explores the question how women who fish are gendered and asks what does this say about masculinity on boats (2015). She does this through a study that combines active participation in two seasons as a Bristol Bay setnetter and at fisherpoet festivals in Oregon where she spoke with women about their experiences, ideas, and performances as fishermen and fisherpoets. Meyers notes that women fishermen and fisherpoets “must show they are prepared to engage in the hypermasculine culture of commercial fishing” (2015:18). While they are not explicitly excluded, “women have a difficult time breaking into and remaining in the occupation” (Meyer 2015:19). She further notes “working in a male-dominated industry, women often struggle to keep their jobs if they are not involved in a relationship. Women often find work in industry through familial or romantic relationships and those women who chose to enter the occupation without relationships face additional struggles. … Men in the occupation occasionally expect women to have sex with them, based solely on the demographics of the occupation. … In addition to this, women must also be ever vigilant in their activities in the industry because of the looming threat of sexual violence” (Meyer 2015:22).

Building off of Meyer’s work with women, Bradford McMullen explores the ways in which male fishermen who are also fisherpoets define masculinities. He too notes the overtly masculinist tone of commercial fisheries as a contemporary occupation. While observing a variety of masculinities at play among fishermen (even a variant that includes women as masculinized) he locates them all within the wider sense of hegemonic masculinity – straight, androcentric, and valuing competency and credibility. He defines these last two attributes as follows: “Competence in the context of the fishing industry is the ability to perform well succeeding as a fisherman by doing one’s job and surviving the stresses that accompany it. Credibility in fishermen speak could also be called trustworthiness: one’s credibility resides in other people’s belief that fishermen will live up to their promises and accomplish the things they are expected to do, no matter their difficulty” (McMullen 2018:17). Becoming a man, in the eyes of the fishermen’s world, is all about demonstrating one’s ability to do the job and do it reliably. That women might also do the job doesn’t necessarily take away from this masculinist conception as they either aren’t there (Yodanis 2000) or they take on the masculinist attributes (while remaining female) that reinforce the idea of the maleness of the world of fisheries (Meyer 2015).

In the early 1980s I had been part of an anti-pornography campaign to remove magazines like Hustler from the campus bookstore. Our campaign was inspired by writings in the edited collection Take Back the Night (Lederer 1980). Thinking that this might be a good way to approach the onboard pornography and sexist attitudes pervasive on many coastal fishboats of the time, I made copies of several chapters of Take Back the Night to use as educational materials during the herring season that year.

In the 1980s commercial herring seining lasted from late February into early April. There were a hundred or so boats in the fleet. We would travel from opening to opening, waiting for a week or more at remote fishing grounds for a chance to load up that might last a little as a few minutes. A season could be made or lost in ten minutes after having waiting for weeks on anchor. Aside from waiting there wasn’t much to do but socialize, do a bit of sport fishing, share food, booze, and other stuff. Pornography was a major item circulating amongst the fleet. So, I thought I might do a little bit to change things.

I had periodically been placing the copies of Take Back the Night chapters onto the galley table in the boat that I worked on. It looked like other crew members from our boat and visiting boats had been picking them up and reading them. But I was soon disabused of any positive interpretation. About three weeks into the season our boat cook sat down at the galley table across from me. He seemed to be reading one of the pamphlets. He glanced over at me, looked back at the pamphlet, then asked me:

“So, Charlie. What is this miss-ogg-ah-knee?”

“Misogyny, I corrected.”

“Hmm.” He said.

“It means women hating.”

He looked me directly in the eyes

“So, what man hates a women.”

He tossed the pamphlet onto the table and returned to his cooking. It was then I realized two things: (1) the cook was the sole person (not the crew) who was using the pamphlets (and not as I had anticipated), and; (2) I had really misunderstood my audience.

Male centered ideas of sexuality, as presented by the onboard pornography, were a physical manifestation of the definitional masculinity of the space on the ship. Unlike the more polite and public spaces ashore, the display of pornography and sexualized images of women were explicit boundary markers. These spaces were felt to be private male worlds within which women were not expected to enter or to participate in. Shoreside, when wives, girlfriends, or daughters were expected to visit the boat the skipper (or more often, the cook) would make certain the most explicit materials were swept away out of sight – though the calendars of partially glad women would almost always remain untouched. This ideology of sexuality and gender undergirds the working world and the ways that one learned the fishing trade. The inclusion of a few women in the occupation served to underscore, rather than alter, the masculinity of fishing labour and the process of becoming a fisherman (Menzies 1991, Meyer 2015, Yodanis 2000).

03/5/18

Friends, Research, and Misunderstandings

One of the things about being a public anthropologist, a professional actively engaged in public issues, is that people will at times misunderstand what I have said (usually by mistake, but occasionally deliberately). Normally that is okay. But some things are potentially damaging and hurtful.

Many years ago I was at a research workshop on fisheries and the organizers had representatives to speak from all sectors but First Nations. That’s a long story in and of itself, suffice to say I was annoyed. I wrote a position paper on the spot and latter revised it to a full length paper.

In that paper I mentioned the fact that anthropological fieldwork is based upon friend-like relations. I went on to comment that many anthropologists go on to form life long friendships with the people we have lived with and written about. But that wasn’t the focus of the paper and I went on to pick up the main themes leaving behind my reflections on friendship. But it is this thread that has been misunderstood and misrepresented.  

I have continued to tell students in my teaching that anthropology is based on friend-like relations. AND because of this one needs to be especially careful about ethical considerations. When anthropologists (students or professionals) come from privileged wealthy backgrounds and have been accustomed to getting their own way they may well misunderstand and take advantage of how people they have come to visit might respond to them. The student, especially, arrives into a situation that is temporary and ephemeral. They are in part more cultural tourist than ally (though most take on the role of ally).

I also talk about the importance of performatively marking out when one is being a researcher. I suspect this is a complicated idea. I mean, how can I mark off that moment when I am Charles the researcher from Charlie the cousin and friend? Ultimately they are the same person. My point is that given the friend-like relationship upon which anthropology is based one must be very clear about when one is actively collecting information – one needs to mark off these boundaries clearly and obviously. There are many areas wherein one can slip up. My good friend and colleague Caroline Butler and I have recently written a paper about this very issue using our personal research histories and our personal identities to understand and explain it.

I often caution students that they should not take advantage of their privilege and the friend-like relationships that lie at the base of anthropological research. In places where I am a member, like my home nation of Gitxaala, I am especially concerned about students who may prey upon the good nature of others. So much so that I no longer organize so-called field schools, but instead arrange research internships that are directly under Gitxaala’s control. This setup leaves no ambiguity in anyone’s mind as to who is in control (Gitxaala Nation), who owns the data (Gitxaala Nation) and who decides what can be published and when (Gitxaala Nation).

Despite one’s good intentions one can not control how others hear oneself. It saddens the heart to learn that someone may have misunderstood the idea of friend-like relations so grievously incorrectly as to think they were being told they couldn’t make friends. I feel even worse to think that someone may have understood that the idea of friend-like relations was being advocated to trick others into revealing deep rooted secrets in order to build a professional career. Such characterizations are misunderstandings of an analogy used to explain something.  “Friend-like relationships” are none of those things.

Anthropological research is built upon friend-like relationships. This is our strength and our weakness. We make friends because we care about the people we get to know over the years, if not decades of close association. When we are also insider researchers, like I am, it is even more the case since we are writing not only about our friends, but also about our families. This is a special responsibility that as an insider anthropologist we take on. We care about family, friends, and home in a way that no outsider, however well intentioned can do.

I grew up on the north coast of BC and have been privileged to continue to work along the coast in my home, with friends and families. It is a pleasure to write about my experiences and to reflect upon what I have learned through nearly six decades of life. Any sadness that accumulates along the way is cleansed in the certainty that I have a place to call home and that I know who my grandfathers are. It roots me to a deep history and a powerful future.

05/16/15

Indigenous Rights, Title, and Sovereignty: is there a place for anthropologists?

I had the pleasure of participating in a plenary session of the CASCA 2015 annual meetings in Quebec City (May 13-16, 2015). Organized by Natacha Gagné & Sabrina Doyon (U. Laval), the session invited each participant to consider our (as anthropologists’) view of, and role, in politics. What follows below is an edited version of my speaking notes.

Additional context and background to this presentation can be found in two papers I have written:  Oil, Energy, and Anthropological Collaboration, and Standing on the Shore with Sabaan.  The first dissects the history of anthropological/Indigenous collaboration on the northwest coast.  The second examines the idea that anthropologists and anthropology must invert the gaze and stop using Indigenous peoples as data and our societies as laboratories.

———————

When I began my journey into anthropology I used to say that while Anthropology was the methodology, Marxism was the discipline. For those trained in classic extra-parliamentary politics (and some Foucauldians) you will understand the multiple meanings. As I was professionalized I became beguiled by the idea of anthropology as discipline. Today, having shed many things, I have returned to the idea of anthropology as method.

I should also caution you that I have, to a large extent, left behind the study of anthropological subjects for the study of anthropologists. So, I suspect that as natives you [the audience] will find my generalizations, abstractions, and theorizing, disconcerting. You may only recognize figments of your selves in my words. As an Indigenous scholar I can appreciate your imminent surprise and disquiet. Yet, in your own words you hold power, you cherish ways of giving voice to the unvoiced.

So, here we go: I shall speak.

There are two public images of anthropology in North America:

One put forward by Florida Governor Rick Scott  (it’s a waste of time and money) and another promoted by New Age style populists who, like white knights to the rescue, race to save the hordes of endangered peoples, places, and languages.

Rick Scott understands the anthropological problem personally. His own daughter was a major. I can appreciate the father’s sense of anguish that one’s child will go down a rabbit hole of missed opportunities and wasted studies. Maybe he also watched the TV show “Community” and happened to catch that wonderful parody of an anth prof by Betty White. If you haven’t seen it, I urge you track it down: it’s worth it.

Scott’s point was that while a nice pastime, Anthropology doesn’t create jobs or build the economy. Anthropologists, understandably, reared up and said oh yes we do! And in so doing totally missed the point; we don’t actually build the neo-liberal economy or support the growth industry. We build something different. The response was predictable. The AAA’s letter to Scott summed it all up: “Perhaps you are unaware,” chided the AAA president Prof Dominguex, “ anthropologists are leaders in our nation’s top science fields, making groundbreaking discoveries in areas as varied as public health, human genetics, legal history, bilingualism, the African American heritage, and infant learning.”

Wow. That should set the governor in his place.

That answer, which was mirrored by YouTube videos, Tumblr pages, blogs, commentaries, across the US spilling over a bit into Canada as well, really did little to change the mind of Governor Scott.

Scott is not alone in this attitude. I can count among my extended family a great army of folks who share versions of  Governor Scott’s viewpoint. Even among the guild of anthropologists there is an underlying insecurity. Maybe, we worry,  there is no real value to the discipline: hence the many exhortations to make it count and to assert that one’s work is in fact making a difference.

Let’s not forget the other side of the public coin of imagination: the new age defenders who are valiantly selling coffee table books while saving the worlds languages, peoples, and special places. Whereas the Rick Scotts of the world focus on anthropology’s deficits (materially and figuratively), the new agers celebrate cultural diversity and their unique ability to translate this wonder of human diversity for the common man and woman.

“Renowned anthropologist’s first lecture earns applause and praise” begins the Vancouver Sun’s coverage of a recent appointment to UBC’s department of anthropology. “African voodoo, Haitian zombies, shamanic healing and a live demonstration of paralytic blow darts are all par for the course in [this]s first-year anthropology class.”

This is a kind of anthropology that captures public perception just as strongly as the Rick Scott version. It’s not that this type of anthropology builds the economy (at least not a wider public economy). This anthropology plays on populist and colonialist ideas of the noble savage, the wonder at the exotic, and the desire to possess the experience of difference.

Both public images of anthropology are partially correct. Perhaps guild members don’t like this representation, but a lot of mainstream anthropology is essentially locked within obscure debates (nothing in principle wrong with that) impenetrable to wider publics. The guild has deserted the main stage to the curators of cross-cultural exoticism. Charming crusaders stand on the stage in front of images of Indigenous peoples selling the masses an image of anthropology that makes the mainstream of the guild cringe.

That said I want to make clear that I do find value in a theoretically informed, content rich anthropology irrespective of whether it does anything practical or not. There is a place for an intellectual pursuit not constrained by the real politic of capitalism and related political struggles. I appreciate that my critique of theory rich anthropology can rankle. I also know that from time to time I also indulge in the delight of theory for theory sake. Today’s presentation, however,  is about the idea of a useful anthropology; anthropology that might make a difference.

Outside the mainstream of theorists and performers are a few of us whose membership in the guild harkens back to an earlier moment when we may well have used labels like science, objectives, and rigorous methodology in place of reflection, entanglement, or complicate.

We are a strange small corps of Canadian anthropologists who work preparing expert opinions and traditional use studies with and on behalf of First Nations in their struggle to defend their rights and title under Canadian law (I have for a moment excluded those working for the private sector proponents). Our work deploys ideas of thorough empirical content driven research. The ultimate audience for our work is the court.

The anthropological guild’s contemporary models and theories are unhelpful in this endeavor, potentially even antagonistic to FN rights & title. It doesn’t help securing Aboriginal Rights and Title if one’s model of culture is rooted in ideas of entanglement, hybridity, creolization, etc. Like it or lump it practitioners are working in a landscape of certitudes, objective facts, real data. All of which has serious real world implications for the communities concerned. So we have an obligation to think very carefully about what we have been asked (even told) to do. This is not simply a matter of one’s personal career; these reports are tiny pieces in a social drama that will affect the life outcome of many.

So, is there a space in this landscape for an autonomous academic research path?

The current context in work with Indigenous communities raises a question about the possibility of autonomous academic research. This is not to say there are no academics doing research: there are. This is not to say that each academic project is tied to a corporate or Indigenous agenda: it is not. This does say that most projects—archaeological, sociocultural, biological—are embedded in a compromised position, and as university researchers we need to be honest about this. Raymond Williams spoke about how social productions are aligned to particular structures of power. He described how social products (which we can understand as research, reports, and publications) are necessarily aligned to the dominant social order. As producers of these works either we find ourselves unconsciously accepting our social location within the fields of power or we take a position of self-conscious alignment.

I would suggest that a good number of academic researchers have abdicated their own responsibility to self-consciously acknowledge their positionality by hiding behind a veil of collaborative, community-based research. In so doing they forge alliances with “their” community, ignore research that contradicts their own community’s outlook, but then consider their work autonomous and objectively located above the fray of the corporate-counterpoint conflicts. That is, they act as though their own work is objective and somehow located outside of real contemporary struggles and conflicts. We can see this in a persistent academic orthodoxy that has emerged on the North Coast.

Finding a way out of such situations is difficult. I know. I personally have to deal with similar pressures in my own work on the North Coast. It’s not that people try to compel conclusions directly—they don’t—but one does know what it is they hope for. It takes a certain resolve to stand up in front of a room of hereditary leaders and offer a report that may not be to their liking. However, to be an effective resource and a true collaborative partner one must be willing to be honest and direct.

I suspect that my social location as Tsimshian, with real roots in the North Coast, gives me a perspective that provides guidance to my academic training. My academic training also provides guidance and context to my Tsimshian perspectives. This hybridized social location simultaneously positions me as outsider and insider. I am in this sense able to equivocate between perspectives. It is not always a comfortable position. It does, however, provide a vantage point to see that others, without social ties in the Tsimshain world, worry they are vulnerable to exclusion and desperately want to find their place on a team. Thus they blind themselves to their own engagement in the production of stories that masquerade as objectivist academic publications.

Many years ago Del Jones critiqued the naiveté of the outsiders coming to do “research for the community.” But who was the community? How did the outsider choose between factions within the community? Did the outsider even understand that such factions exist? How do these choices (made unwittingly or otherwise) shape the outsider’s alliances with other researchers? One of the inopportune lessons taken from the radical critique of anthropology is that all research must be for the community, even when the researcher has no understanding of whom or what might in fact constitute “the community.”

Academic research in decolonizing contexts will necessarily be embedded in current and historical conflicts and struggles. Claiming that one community has authorized a project does not negate the possibility that another community is opposed to the same project. Even within a particular community, the existence of factions and divisions will productively suggest the real possibility that “the community” is itself a figment of the researcher’s imagination. Ultimately, the obligation rests with the academic researcher to acknowledge and identify the ways in which one’s own work is embedded and aligned with local and larger social forces. To ignore that and to imply that one’s work is simply a matter of evidence and testing reveals a kind of intellectual bankruptcy.

Increasingly Anglo-Canadian anthropology is practiced by a guild that is more and more controlled by people dislocated from the places they work, by the performers of exotica, and by the corporate managers who have taken hold of our universities.

As a discipline anthropology has no agency, no unifying mission, no manifest destiny to be the universal comparative science.  As method, as part of a social tool kit, anthropology does has a place within the landscape of Indigenous North America. For the moment anthropologists need to set aside any naive belief in a capacity to conduct autonomous research or that they build local capacity through their own research. The value of anthropology is as method operating under the discipline of Indigenous peoples.