Watery Introductions

Abstract

The book’s introductory chapter outlines its ambitions, aims and objectives. Fish, fishing and fishing communities are perhaps among the most opaque and little-studied developmental ecosystems. Equally, North Korea is one of the most difficult to study and confusing research sites on the globe. In introducing this book, its shape and objectives, this chapter aims to give a coherent and comprehensive sense of how this opacity and difficulty might be overcome and managed. In particular, the chapter engages with the literature of vibrant, lively and non-human matters, as this is the lens through which the author seeks to explore the realm of fish, fisherpeople and fishing. Following the work of scholars such as Jane Bennett and Sarah Whatmore, the interactions and exchanges that mark out such a complex ‘web of life’ will be explored in a wide variety of scales, sites and situations. Vibrancy and liveliness of such fishing matter(s) will be considered in the context of both abundance and scarcity, vitality and degradation within this book and an introduction sensitive to thoughts and theories, which might bind these varied situations together is important to that consideration. Vital to this watery introduction to will be a sense of the nature of the web of life within which these vibrant matters function, especially in the political and politico-social sense of that web, focusing as it does on North Korea, a national polity possessed of its own peculiar, distinct and local form of politics. While Jason Moore, who coined the notion of the ‘web of life’ used within this book, sought to unpack the place and role of nature within a web of capitalist life, of course, North Korea is anything but a conventional space of capitalism. This book roots its analysis of Pyongyang’s ideology within that produced by Heonik Kwon and Byung-ho Chung, which holds it to be characterised by a theatric or charismatic politics recognisable to both Max Weber and Clifford Geertz. Finally, this introduction engages with the methodologies and literature of fishing histories and geographies across the globe. The watery terrains of this book, therefore, from North Korea and its neighbours are complex assemblages of the symbolic, constructed and co-produced as well as the concrete and the vibrant.