This thesis addresses questions of identity and ontological legitimacywithin the commercial shark fishing community of Bass Strait,Australia. I consider the implications of competing discourses for theintegrity of fisher identity, environmental conservation and publicnarratives on environmental ‘crises’. I draw upon ethnographic materialdeveloped with commercial fishers and, to a lesser extent, fisheries‘experts’, to explore ambiguities in understandings of individuality andperceptions of the marine environment. Informing this analysis aretheories of practice, particularly notions of embodied relationships andknowledge, the role of ‘luck’ in enabling a particular expression of‘individuality’, the ‘skipper effect’, a consideration of nation-statesanctioned and popular media representations of the environment, andthe peculiarly Australian experience and representation of individuality,both as performance and as trope. These themes are consideredagainst a backdrop of the physical and social activities involved incommercial fishing, and the 2001 nation-state-initiated introduction ofan Individual Transferable Quota management system.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/245769 |
Creators | King, Tanya J. |
Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
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