Abstract
There has been recent interest in the emotional attachments to nature that appear to be bound up in people’s willingness to protect nature. Within this work, the emphasis has been on the places and experiences people have in nature that help to form a sense of identification with their environment. This chapter seeks to build from these insights to explore how fishermen’s embodied interactions with the spaces and places of fishing are integral to their understandings of ‘nature’ and ‘fishing’. As fishermen move from their boats, to the pier, to the meeting room, embodied, emotional and importantly, political transformations in what it means to fish occur. I argue that these transformations are crucial to how fishers understand and seek to protect (or not) their fishing grounds and the political space within which they fish. These transformations are vital to understand in the Scottish context where there are increasing efforts to devolve fisheries management to fishers’ associations, spaces where conflicts over how people care and seek to use the resource are profound and contentious. By exploring the embodied interactions that produce particular kinds of attachments to ‘nature’, new channels for fostering cooperation can emerge.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Professor Jim Atkinson and colleagues have done recent research in the inner Minch of Scotland (west coast) that shows morality rates from creel discards is substantially lower than discards from trawl nets. In addition, they have done experiments on ‘ghost fishing’ of creels and found that creels abandoned or lost on the sea bed do not continue to fish but rather become dens for crabs.
References
Allen, A. (2002). Power, subjectivity, and agency: Between Arendt and Foucault. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 10(2), 131–149.
Bondi, L. (1993). Locating identity politics. In M. Keith & S. Pile (Eds.), Place and the politics of identity (pp. 84–101). New York: Routledge.
Bondi, L. (2005). Making connections and thinking through emotions: Between geography and psychotherapy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30, 433–448.
Bondi, L., & Davidson, J. (2003). Troubling the place of gender. In K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile, & N. Thrift (Eds.), Handbook of cultural geography (pp. 325–344). London: Sage.
Brady, E. (2006). The aesthetics of agricultural landscapes and the relationship between humans and nature. Ethics, Place and Environment: A Journal of Philosophy & Geography, 9(1), 1–19.
Braun, B., & Castree, N. (1998). Remaking reality: Nature at the millennium. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Castree, N. (2005). Nature. London: Routledge.
Castree, N., & Braun, B. (Eds.). (2001). Social nature: Theory, practice and politics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Catchpole, T. L., Frid, C. L. J., & Gray, T. S. (2005). Discarding in the English north-east coast Nephrops norvegicus fishery: The role of social and environmental factors. Fisheries Research, 72, 45–54.
Clayton, S., Warden, L., & Opotow, S. (2003). Identity and the natural environment: The psychological significance of nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Crean, K. (2000). Contrasting approaches to the management of common property resources: An institutional analysis of fisheries development strategies in Shetland and the Solomon islands. Australian Geographer, 31(3), 367–382.
Cronon, W. (1996a). The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature. In W. Cronon (Ed.), Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature (pp. 69–90). New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Cronon, W. (Ed.). (1996b). Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Davidson, J. (2000). ‘…the world was getting smaller’: Women, agoraphobia and bodily boundaries. Area, 32, 31–40.
Davidson, J. (2003). Phobic geographies: The phenomenology and spatiality of identity. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (pp. 87–104). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gibson, K. (2001). Regional subjection and becoming. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19, 639–667.
Gibson-Graham, J. (2002). Beyond global vs. local: Economic politics outside the binary frame. In M. Wright & A. Herod (Eds.), Geographies of power: Placing scale (pp. 328). Oxford: Blackwell.
Hanson, S., & Pratt, G. (1995). Gender, work and space. London: Routledge.
Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™. New York: Routledge.
Henriques, J., Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C., & Walkerdine, V. (1984). Changing the subject. London: Methuen.
Hinchliffe, S. (2007). Geographies of nature: Societies, environments, ecologies. London: Sage Publications.
Little, P. D., & Watts, M. J. (1994). Living under contract: Contract farming and Agrarian transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Longhurst, R. (2001). Geography and gender: Looking back, looking forward. Progress in Human Geography, 25(4), 641–648.
Longhurst, R. (2003). Introduction: Placing subjectivities, spaces and places. In K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile, & N. Thrift (Eds.), Handbook of cultural geography (pp. 282–289). London/New Delhi: Thousand Oaks/Sage Publications.
Mahoney, M. A., & Yngvesson, B. (1992). The construction of subjectivity and the paradox of resistance: Reintegrating feminist anthropology and psychology. Signs, 18(1), 44–73.
Malone, K. R. (2000). Subjectivity and the address to the other: A Lacanian view of some impasses in theory and psychology. Theory and Psychology, 10(1), 79–86.
Massey, D. (1994). Space, place and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McDowell, L. (1983). Towards an understanding of the gender division of urban space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1, 59–72.
Milton, K. (2002). Loving nature: Towards an ecology of emotion. London/New York: Routledge.
Nightingale, A. J. (2006). The nature of gender: Work, gender and environment. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24(2), 165–185.
Nightingale, A. J. (2011a). Beyond design principles: Subjectivity, emotion and the (ir-)rational commons. Society and Natural Resources, 24(2), 119–132.
Nightingale, A. J. (2011b). Bounding difference: The embodied production of gender, caste and space. Geoforum, 42(2), 153–162.
Probyn, E. (2003). The spatial imperative of subjectivity. In K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile, & N. Thrift (Eds.), Handbook of cultural geography. London: Sage.
Ridgway, I. D., Taylor, A. C., Atkinson, R. J. A., Chang, E. S., & Neil, D. M. (2006). Impact of capture method and trawl duration on the health status of the Norway lobster, Nephrops norvegicus. Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 339, 135–147.
Rose, G. (1993). Feminist and geography: The limits of geographical knowledge. Oxford: Blackwell.
Scott, J. (1991). The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry, 17(3 (Summer)), 773–797.
Scottish Executive (2005). A strategic framework for inshore fisheries in Scotland. Edinburgh: Scottish Executive.
Tuck, I. D., Chapman, C. J., & Atkinson, R. J. A. (2000). Population biology of the Norway lobster, Nephrops norvegicus (L.) in the Firth of Clyde, Scotland. II. Fecundity and size at onset of maturity. ICES Journal of Marine Science, 57, 1227–1239.
Whatmore, S. (2002). Hybrid geographies. London: Sage.
Wilson, N. (2001). Butler’s corporeal politics: Matters of politicized abjection. International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies, 6(1/2), 109–119.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nightingale, A.J. (2012). The Embodiment of Nature: Fishing, Emotion, and the Politics of Environmental Values. In: Brady, E., Phemister, P. (eds) Human-Environment Relations. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2825-7_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2825-7_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-2824-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-2825-7
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)