Summary of SEAA READS, session eight, 2/2024
Heather Anne Swanson 2022 Spawning Modern Fish. Transnational Comparison in the Making of Japanese Salmon.
https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/
As the winner of the 2023 Francis
L. K. Hsu Book Prize in East Asia Anthropology, the February session was hosted
by committee chair, Christine Yano, where all together 16 participants across
time zones in Europe, New World, and East Asia spent the first hour talking
about the book’s impressions and reactions to each others’ remarks, too. Then
the author joined the conversation for the final 45 minutes. See the full award
comments at https://seaa.americananthro.
In the limited time online
several readers identified the central idea of comparison introduced
early in the book to make sense of the particular decisions and aspirations of
the 150+ years of salmon management in and around Japan, as well as elsewhere
around the Pacific coastal countries in both hemispheres. In the special
meaning of the book, Comparison is about the benchmarks to fish hatcheries
abroad. The terms may mingle several strands within comparison in some
cases: akogare (aspiring to distant standards), seken
no me (peer pressure; not to fall behind), FOMO (fear of missing out;
not being up-to-date), readapting to local markets and mindsets, and so on.
Other readers remarked on the rich historical detail and the command of
biological and environmental processes intimately tied to the lives of the fish
and by extension to the livelihoods of the fishers, too. Each chapter had a
slightly different lens on the subject with chapter 5 in particular being the
deepest ethnographic portrait. “Multi-species Ethnography” is well illustrated
in this book about human and salmonid mutual influences.
And along with
the storytelling vividness of the writer, readers were fascinated by the way
that distant geopolitical constraints and opportunities translate down to the
regional terrain of parts of Japan, the villager working lives, and the
lifecycle of salmon; how cognitive matters translate into material facts. Much
like gravity, the ever present pressures of nation-building may not be visible
directly, but its effects can still be traced. This same work of tracing out
large geopolitical forces as they touch upon local terrain and lives may be
equally revealing and productive for rereading ethnographies from other times
and places, too; seeing not just what is on the page or in the pictures, but
also looking out for the invisible but powerful external events that may send
ripples to the locale being documented.
The title lends
itself to double meaning: Spawning-Modern Fish (the fish that contributed to
Japan’s infrastructure; its modernity), and Spawning Modern-Fish (how fish
biology has been modified by conditions imposed in the processes of nation-building).
And while the author acknowledged that this approach of scrutinizing biological
matters intersecting social science questions, and the Comparison patterns of
communications and study-tours, etc may not be equally effective in all places
and times, some of the questions about how geopolitical forces are manifested
on the ground (and in the water) can be seen outside of the fieldwork sites in
Japan, Chile, and North America’s salmon rivers. One of the readers
specifically pointed to colonial years of Japan building infrastructure,
organizing labor, and extracting resources in their nation-building work and
the global context of Great Powers: benchmarking or Comparison-making also was
at play there, as well.
Books mentioned that touch on
Comparison in the focus of development include Matei Candea 2018,
Comparison in Anthropology,
the impossible method https://www.cambridge.org/
How People Compare (Eds. Mathijs Pelkmans, Harry Walker 2023)
https://www.routledge.com/How-
When the author joined the video
meeting, several questions came up. One topic was the great potential of mutual
gain by matching natural science thinkers with social science ones. An obvious
arena is longitudinal studies, since natural science since the 1970s has begun
documenting historical context for observations and experiments. So history is
a common ground in both ways of seeing people, places, and things. Part of that
conversation comes in the concept of “telecoupling” of distant landscapes in supply
chains, extraction, consumer appetites and interests, and so on. See also
Swanson’s article intended for biology thinkers about social science's place in
their fieldwork and thinking, https://www.sciencedirect.com/
When asked about fieldwork conditions and the presence of local thinkers
talking to her about the project, it was the fishermen who took keenest
interest in ways to faithfully interpret the records they keep and how to view
them. As for feedback from those who are featured on the pages of the book,
some passages before publication were rough-and-ready translated for local feedback, but the
response mainly was about fine-tuning of corrections and more of the social
relationship between researcher and local sources; not so much about the
intellectual argument and vision that organizes the book.
About the
decision to choose the word “Comparison” instead of “triangulation” (false sense of
precision) or “calculation” (too linear), one of the main reasons was direct
translation of a frequently used expression she heard in Japanese, “…to kurabete” [by
comparison with…] Related to parallel fish hatchery developmental histories of
facilities, operations, and thinking is the idea of exceptionalism – both at
the “we Japanese” level and at the regional “we Hokkaido people.” The flip-side
of ‘we also do that’ is “but we differ on that matter.”
One reader
pointed out the risk of applying the principle and habit of ‘Comparison’ too
generally and at various scales. Much of the fish-and-human story is about
connections and mutual dependence before modernization of the nation-state and
today, as well as the dimension of coeval influences on each other – not always
visible or able to be verbalized, but still consciously developing together
through time – people with their society and livelihoods and fish.
Finally, on
the subject of future work by Heather Swanson, one study is about the
introduction of rainbow and brown trout to places once under the British
Empire’s sway, "Global Trout." The other involves an
interdisciplinary team in Denmark to restore a river: How would you repair
land/waterscape; to restore a river by combining input of historians,
hydrologists, biologists, social scientists, and local city administrators and
staff.
The next SEAA Reads gathering online is April 27, 2024 and will feature Borderland Dreams: The Transnational lives of Korean Chinese Workers by June Hee Kwon (Duke U. Press)
https://www.dukeupress.edu/
Comments
Post a Comment