Download all the Abstracts for panel 4 (254 Kb) or read them below.

Fish matters. On the question of care and accountability for uncountable beings

Panelist: Karin Ahlberg

In The Frames of War, Judith Butler traces different processes through which human life counts, or ceases to count, morally or affectively: “An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.” This paper turns attention to framing and naming practices of fish along with other marine creatures, and asks: Can we extend care to creatures, make their lives count, if they in everyday language and in specialist discourses remain uncountable and unaccounted for? In everyday speech, the plural of fish – fish and fishes – often functions as an unaccountable noun (like water or sand), lumping together individual fish into an indistinguishable mass. In expert discourses, the dominating term “stock” reconfigures living individual beings into abstract populations or potential commodities (Telesca, 2017). Integral to caregiving is accountability – a commitment of ensuring the wellbeing of the being cared for. A prerequires for accountability is countability: the singling of the individuals to be cared for. If our language fails to account for individual fish by turning fish into “abstract biowealth” (Telseca, 2017), what are the conditions – hopes – for making ourselves accountable for the lives of fish? 

Invading Invaders: Pacific Oysters and Rubber Glove Ethnography

Panelist: Ivana Maček

Magallana gigas, also known as Pacific Oyster, has been classified as an invasive species in Sweden. This project started six years ago when I noted that the appearance of this relatively unimportant mollusc on the West Coast of Sweden caused extremely strong but also contradictory affects: from hate and wish to exterminate the species, to fascination and interest to understand better the effects of pacific oysters on the environment as well as their potential uses.
This presentation is based on fieldwork conducted on the West Coast of Sweden during the summer of 2022, with marine biologists and ecologists who are specialists on pacific oysters. As our boots crunched the oysters, and we picked up clusters of oysters and other marine species in order to count the oysters, our own invasiveness (for strictly scientific purposes) became more and more obvious. Further, my own presence was a sort of interruption of marine biologists scientific business as usual, albeit not only for the worse. Using Levinas’ ideas on human potential for genocide and the effects of close personal encounters, as well as taking inspiration from Bubandt et al. (2023), I use the concept and practice of “rubber glove ethnography” to discuss multispecies relationships and multidisciplinary methodology.

Care for Jellies, Care for Humans – a Microplastics Story

Panelist: Rasmus Rodineliussen

With this paper I tell a story about the human induced slow violence of microplastics on the ocean environment. The story, however, centers on the idea of care, in this case the care of humans when they seek to remove these microplastics. Here it is important to ask: who is cared for, and who pays the price for this care? Toward answering these questions, I begin by briefly outlining the way plastics have developed in human societies and how it started to move from homes into the environment. We will then follow the way water (and microplastics) travel from human homes to the ocean – via wastewater treatment plants – before looking into the situation in the marine world. Oceans of today are increasingly affected by human societies, and this has led to a situation wherein the jellyfish thrives. These ocean creatures have been around for a long time, they are older than the dinosaurs, but lately their numbers have increased drastically. This increase has started to become a nuisance for many humans as jellies interfere with human infrastructure and fisheries. Meanwhile, it has recently come to light that jellyfish bodies have properties that can be utilized by humans to catch microplastics. This has led to an initiative to create filters for wastewater treatment plants that will use jellyfish bodies to catch microplastics from the wastewater. Humans thus seek to provide care for the marine world through the removal of plastics, but in doing so they are (ab)using the bodies of jellies. 

Uncaring for Dagaa: The exploitation of small-pelagic fish in Zanzibar

Panelist: Björn Trägårdh

In this paper, I will present findings from my recent fieldwork amongst fishermen in Zanzibar City for my upcoming master’s thesis. Due to overfished fish stocks, fishermen on the west coast of Zanzibar have, in the last decades, turned to night fishing for small pelagic fish. These fishes, locally known as dagaa, have become central in discussions on food security among the local population. Dagaa has also developed into a lucrative export product to the Democratic Republic of Congo, amongst others. But the dagaa is also food for the bigger fish. Overexploitation of dagaa could threaten the existence of bigger fish even further. Whilst younger fishermen I met engaged in fishing for income, family and career, older fishermen were worried since they perceived the dagaa species as already decreasing. Yet, both groups continued to fish dagaa. During moonless nights the horizon was lit up by hundreds of fishing boats lying side by side, hauling nets.
I would like to nuance aspects of uncaring for this small pelagic fish in the context of food scarcity, struggles for income and deficient authorities. In Zanzibar, I encountered what I understood as a change in local knowledge among fishermen. Something which I claim mirrors a tension between social and environmental sustainability that could be seen globally in the era of the Anthropocene.

Fishy Friends: Cuddling Sharks, Kissing Groupers, Patting Moray Eels, and Other Forms of Underwater Relationship Building 

Panelist: Hans Tunestad

What kind of relationship can a human have with a fish? In line with the oceanic turn in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the development of more-than-human ethnography, this presentation takes an interest in new alternative ways of thinking about the relationship between humans and other sea living organisms. Humans have often related to fish through forms of exploitation or objectification – as in fishing, snorkelling and scuba diving tourism. But scuba diving has also made it possible for humans to become part of the underwater world in a way more consonant with its other inhabitants. In this presentation I look at contemporary stories about ways divers have tried to form intimate friendly relationships with fishes. The examples have been collected mainly through nethnography, but also terrestrial and underwater ethnography. These stories tell us of an alternative way of thinking about, and relating to, fishes. Fishes are here not mainly exploited or objectified, but rather subjectified. Fishes are in these stories portrayed as not merely sentient beings, but as actively engaged in forming, so to speak, more-than-fish relationships. The presentation concludes with some reflections on the crucial role of recent technological advancements in the production of this human-and-fish-intimacy discourse.

Caring for Sea Cucumbers. Domesticating Ocean Cleaners in the Blue Economy

Panelist: Paula Uimonen

Farming sea cucumbers for export to China is an emerging form of mariculture in Tanzania. It is encouraged by the government’s Blue Economy development paradigm, which aims to raise income in fishing communities while protecting the ocean. This paper interrogates sea cucumber farming in Kaole, a coastal fishing community where humans and sea cucumbers have coexisted for many years, although the jongoo bahari has lived as a wild creature in the ocean, not as a commodity in bounded farms. The paper probes the relationship between humans and sea cucumbers, focusing on interdependencies in the politics of care in a pluriversal multispecies world in the making (Escobar 2020, Ingold 2018, Puig de la Bellacasa 2018). It also explores the web of shifting political and ecological relations that are entangled in the practices and politics of domestication in the political ecology of blue growth (Barbesgaard 2018, Swanson et al 2018). The paper draws on ongoing fieldwork for Swahili Ocean Worlds (2022-2024), a research project carried out in collaboration with researchers from the University of Dar es Salaam, supported by the Swedish Research Council/Development Research. See swahilioceanworlds on YouTube and Instagram, and on the university website.