Prawns, justice, and relationships of care in Stilbaai, South Africa

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Abstract This story is concerned with the intersection of governance, stewardship, care taking, and extraction. It is centred on insights gained through repeated encounters with bait prawns during 7 years of fieldwork in Stilbaai, South Africa. These prawns are intended as angling bait, but they are entangled in a host of complications—or relations—the discovery of which eventually led me see them differently than before. More recently, I have looked into the role of marine protected areas in the everyday lives of residents, researching conservation management in Stilbaai in connection with the Southern Cape Interdisciplinary Fisheries Research project. In that work, I use the idea of relationality, as understood from an anthropological perspective, to speak about what long-term stewardship needs to take into account. Understanding more about the mudprawn and where it lives in the ecosystem, how people extract it, what it is used for, and how it is thought of has provided an access point for me into thinking about coastal social–ecological systems and how to communicate their needs. In this story, I reflect on these creatures as they live in my research, showing what this species can teach about coastal sustainability more generically.