Abstract
This article discusses the future of indigenous Sami fisheries in cybernetic fisheries systems characterized by increasing effectivization and industrialisation. It empirically investigates the past and present development of a small-scale fjord fishery in Porsanger, northern Norway, which has been a major part of the material basis for indigenous Sami culture and settlements in the area. The article utilises historical vessel registries and fishers’ vessel career narratives from the post-war period to the present to analyse how relations between vessels, fishers, technology, ecology and the society at large have changed, and to what extent the small-scale fishery of the past seems to be disappearing in a fisheries system characterised by increasing cyborgization especially in the period after 1990. The main finding is an identification of diverse ways of organising the small-scale fishery in Porsanger in the past which had an influence on which types of vessels and fishers stayed put in the post-1990 period. This process was influenced not only by the introduction of the vessel quota system but also by ecological conditions and changing social and material relations in the local fisheries. In particular, the fishery with small open vessels with outboard engines experienced a golden age prior to the 1990s, but then abruptly decreased due to a combination of ecological conditions and management interventions. The fishery with decked, coastal fishing vessels however remained relatively stable throughout the period and continues to dominate the Porsanger small-scale fishery. The case study demonstrates diverse and flexible ways of organising relations in a coastal Sami community over time, thus implying that a cybernetic future may be possible also for small-scale fisheries.
Highlights
In northern Norway, traditional small-scale fisheries seem faced with eradication in the face of what Johnsen (2013) describes as a process of cyborgization that transforms fisheries systems and results in ‘an increasingly efficient and self-controlled, but more depopulated, fishing industry’
Based on the career narratives of Roald, Arnulf, Ragnar, their families, and the circulation of their fishing vessels in the larger collective of fishers and vessels in Porsanger, it can be stated that Sami small-scale fisheries are affected by what Johnsen et al (2009a, 2009b) call processes of cyborgization that have taken place in Finnmark, Norway and the North Atlantic in general
When analysed as a collective of fishers and vessels, it has become evident that a diversity of factors contributed to this development, which contains sudden twists and turns that cannot be explained by the cyborgization process alone
Summary
In northern Norway, traditional small-scale fisheries seem faced with eradication in the face of what Johnsen (2013) describes as a process of cyborgization that transforms fisheries systems and results in ‘an increasingly efficient and self-controlled, but more depopulated, fishing industry’ (ibid.p. 13). In the post-war Norwegian society where building of the welfare state and national economic growth went hand in hand with rural outmigration and flight from agriculture (Hidle et al 2006), the coastal Sami fisher-farmer adaptation was practically gone by the late 1980s From this point of view, the prevalence of small vessels, conventional gear, and moderate fishing effort among Sami fjord fishers prior to 1989, and their disappearance in the following years, was interpreted as a result of the destructive effects of Western modernization and global capitalism on a resilient indigenous culture (i.e. Bjørklund 1991; Nilsen 1998). Arnulf Andersen Arnulf Andersen was born in 1956 and started working as a 16-year old with the fish buyer Bull in Indre Billefjord, before he started fishing in 1974 with his own small vessel on the grounds in the innermost part of the fjord He was not registered as an owner in the vessel registry, but used a family boat for fishing for saithe with nets in the autumn and for cod during winter and early spring. Some of the older decked vessels have stayed fishing and are still in operation along with smaller leisure boats, while new and modern vessels have been put out of the fishery along with the open and wooden vessels of the post-war period
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