M. E. Lien

Slippery: Field notes in empirical ontology

This paper explores empirical ontology by arguing that realities are enacted in practices. Using the case of Atlantic salmon, it describes a series of scientific and fish-farming practices. Since these practices differ, the paper also argues that different salmon are being enacted within those different practices. The paper explores the precarious choreographies of those practices, considers the ways in which they enact agency and also work to generate Otherness. Finally it emphasises the productivity of practices and notes that they generate not simply particular realities (for instance particular salmon), but also enact a penumbra of not quite realised realities: animals that were almost but not quite created.

‘Emergent Aliens’: On Salmon, Nature, and Their Enactment

Atlantic salmon aquaculture has become one of the most profitable industries in Norway, a country which is also known for its large population of wild salmon. We explore some ways in which Atlantic salmon, an icon of wilderness, is enrolled in regimes of domestication. Inspired by material semiotics, we treat domestication as a set of practices whose character defines and enacts Atlantic salmon in different, though partly overlapping ways. Approaching salmon through its various enactments, we also address the foundational division of nature from culture in Euro-American thought. We suggest that the domesticated Atlantic salmon is indeed emergent, complex, and historically contingent. A central claim is that salmon and nature are performed together, through various acts of differentiation that constitute what they both are. This article is based on an ethnographic fieldwork in West Norway.

‘King of Fish’ or ‘Feral Peril’: Tasmanian Atlantic Salmon and the Politics of Belonging

The focus of this paper is Tasmanian Atlantic salmon, and the ways in which this object has served historically to enact, to produce, and to challenge key boundaries and continuities in the construction of Tasmania as a distinct place in the world. Tracing the object and its trajectories in time and space, I shall argue that the making of place involves practices, images, and experiences that connect and disconnect a place to significant places elsewhere. It is argued that both species and the spaces they inhabit are sustained by hybrid networks which stretch across time and space and thus escape the timeless boundedness and genealogical purity inherent in contemporary visions of nature.

Roots, rupture and remembrance: The Tasmanian Lives of the Monterey Pine

Why do certain landscapes become contested sites for claims about identity? In responding to this question, we approach landscapes as assemblages of human and non-human elements that reach beyond the confines of their immediate physical and temporal locations. Our empirical focus is a small group of pine trees in a Tasmanian suburb, where remnants of human and non-human migration are inscribed and live on in the landscape and in human memory. We demonstrate how the trees simultaneously invite and resist purification through binaries such as nature and culture, wild and domestic, then and now. The histories and futures of belonging assembled in and through these trees are nothing less than active, idiosyncratic and ongoing processes of differentiation that shed light on the working out of postcolonial, globalizing societies and ecologies.

Anthropology and STS: Generative interfaces, multiple locations

In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also sites of difference—where complex groupings, practices, topics, and analytical grammars overlap, and also exceed each other, composing irregular links in a conversation that produces connections without producing closure.

Fluid subsistences: towards a better understanding of northern livelihoods

In this collection we learn about varied livelihoods that are roughly grouped as northern small-scale fisheries. Two messages are particularly salient, and hence they connect nearly all the papers: First, that small-scale fishing is paramount for social and cultural livelihoods, and an indispensable resource for reproduction of coastal communities. And second, that certain fish related practices are changing, or currently under threat, and thus threatening the core subsistence of coastal communities.