Eating and Existence on an Island in Southern Uganda

Abstract

This article examines contemporary ontological conflicts between people who make their living on an island with fish that are considered by fisheries managers to be “commercially extinct” and people who make their living managing “commercially important” fisheries for this region as a whole. It is an experiment in worlding, the work of wading between content and contexts to configure webs of relevant relations through which the politics of eating and existence play out along Uganda's southern littoral. By attending ethnographically to observable actions and concrete practices, I suggest that fishworkers and fisheries managers enact multiple, relatively distinct versions of food, fish, bodies of water, and fisheries. Attending to this multiplicity is crucial for rendering plausible already existing alternatives to an overdetermined future of death, depravity, and collapse that features within scholarly, popular, and policy-oriented accounts of Lake Victoria's fisheries.