The Practice of Fishing

Abstract

By taking the reader onboard of a coastal fishing vessel, this chapter investigates how contemporary coastal fishers cope with a highly technisised and unstable work environment. By highlighting the mundane and everyday aspects of fishing this chapter stands in light of what has been widely summed up under the label ‘Theories of Practice’. Accordingly, social order can be explained neither as the sum of cognitive and conscious interaction patterns between atomised individuals, nor as some abstract reality sui generis that is separated from human agency. Thus, the world of fishing is not simply a more or less static, taken-for-granted, objective lifeworld separated from the mind, nor blindly reproduced as incorporated habitus. Rather, we will see that the world of fishing is grounded and reproduced in the contingent situatedness of socio-technical practices, which allow fishers to skilfully cope and coordinate their activities within a rough and highly volatile work environment.