"Any Comments on the Sociology Section, Tony?": Committee Work as Applied Anthropology in Fishery Management

Abstract

I suppose this paper was provoked more than inspired.' In 1979 Miller and Van Maanen (1979) published an otherwise excellent article on Gloucester fishermen in which they sharply criticized the fishery management process established by the U.S. Fishery Conservation and Management Act (FCMA) of 1976 (Public Law 94-265). Though sympathetic to the local Regional Management Council, Miller and Van Maanen attacked the concept of "optimum y ie ld and the "gross insensitivity" of government policies (1979:384; 377) that engendered hostility, systematic law-breaking, and conflict among the fishermen themselves. I agreed with much of what Miller and Van Maanen had to say and welcomed their much-needed concrete, ethnographic data on the responses of fishermen to management measures. Nonetheless, I felt that their broadside against the management process unnecessarily tainted their arguments and would hamper rather than promote solutions to precisely the kinds of fishery management problems they so clearly and deftly documented. Moreover, by association I felt personally abused; I am one of those few anthropologists who are members of committees that advise regional fishery councils, noted by Acheson (1 98 1 : 304). Since 1978 I have been a member of the Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council (GMFMC), first as a member of a special Socio-Economic Committee, then, since 1979, a member of the Standing Committee. This essay is not about fishermen, fishing, or maritime anthropology; it is about applied anthropology in the rather specialized context of the fishery management committee on which I have served. "Maritime anthropology" has come of age, as evidenced by Acheson's recent (1 98 1) chapter in the Annual Review of Anthropology, and a few anthropologists have achieved considerable national visibility in fisheries management. Nonetheless, the involvement of anthropologists at the regional level, where fishery management plans are initiated, is rather anonymous and obscure. Thus, I am making this report to my colleagues. In effect this is a brief ethnographic report, perhaps "autoethnographic" report, on the role of an anthropologist in the Scientific and Statistical Committee of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council. As an applied anthropologist I present these remarks in the spirit of George Foster's (1969:91) now rather commonplace-seeming but nonetheless important dictum that "knowledge about the social and cultural forms of the innovating organization, about the structure and functions of bureaucratic institutions, is just as essential as knowledge about recipient peoples to successful planned change." My "findings" are based upon participant observation spanning a four-year period encompassing 12 meetings of the Committee, comprising some 22 days of activity, plus reading of an astounding number of reports, memoranda, and other documents. I have been very much more a participant than an observer. I have written not a single "field note" on my experiences, and now some of my own comments recorded in official minutes of meetings are incomprehensible even to me. The press of simply understanding the many issues before the Committee and performing responsibly as a Committee member precluded any detached field study of the Committee. Hence, it might be wisest to describe the basis for this paper as "participant-retroflection," to coin a phrase. The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council is one of the eight Councils established by the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976. The Gulf Council is one of the largest of the eight, having 17 voting members, the same as the New England Council and exceeded only by the MidAtlantic Council with 19 members. The Gulf Council is charged with developing management plans for the "fishery conservation zone" encompassed by the entire Gulf coast from the Florida Keys to the Mexican border. This region's fisheries "account for over 34 percent by volume and 21 percent by value of the U.S. commercial harvest" (GMFMC 1980:2). Commercial fishing on the Gulf Coast varies from beach seining and oyster tonging in the inshore fisheries to roller trawling and long-lining in the offshore fisheries. Likewise, the Gulf Coast attracts millions of recreational fishermen, ranging from those far out at sea in the wake of the Hemingway mystique searching for the dramatic blue marlin, to those humble souls like myself who are content to dangle a chicken neck from a bit of string in some shallow inlet hoping to snag a few blue crabs. As of June 1982 the Gulf Council with 1 1 plans led all the regional councils in number of fishery management plans in development, extending from corals to sharks (NMFS 1982:s-7). The Gulf Coast is a region of great human variety as well. Coastal communities range from sprawling metropolises to