Fishers At Work, Workers At Sea: Puerto Rican Journey Thru Labor & Refuge - Softcover

Griffith, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566399114 ISBN 13: 9781566399111

Publisher: Temple University Press, 2002

Synopsis

Small-scale fishing, a household-based enterprise in Puerto Rico, rarely provides sufficient income for a family, but it anchors their culture and sense of themselves within that culture. Even when family members must engage in wage work to supplement household income, they think of themselves as fishers. As the authors say of one of these wage workers: When he was quite young, he left the island to struggle in other lands, to work, to raise a family, to send home the money he earned. Ten, twenty, thirty years passed...during which he did not once fish or even see the ocean. But in a boat-building factory in New Jersey, in a bakery in the Bronx, on the production line of a chemical factory, on dozens of construction sites, every single day he made a mental review of the waters, the isles and cays...and entertained no thought that was not related to his return. Fishers at Work, Workers at Sea describes Puerto Rican fishing families as they negotiate homeland and diaspora. It considers how wage work affects their livelihoods and identities at home and how these independent producers move in and out of global commodity markets. Drawing on some 100 life histories and years of fieldwo

About this title

From the Publisher:

The human dimension of globalized labor.

From the Inside Flap:

"Fishers at Work, Workers at Sea makes a major contribution to the literature on the anthropology and sociology of fisheries by providing an intelligent analysis of Puerto Rican fishermen which extends beyond a description of their fishing techniques and strategies and, more recently, the implications for public policy. The authors present a wealth of rich and thick data in an organized and coherent fashion...and focus upon the detailed complexities of what these fishermen bring to the increasing conflict between labor and the forces of capital." —Robert Lee Maril, Chair and Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Texas Pan American, and author of Waltzing with the Ghost of Tom Joad

"The stunning accomplishment of this book is the way in which the authors have theoretically and ethnographically related deep cultural meanings not only to ecological contexts but to the stuff of political economy—the material social relationships entailed in class formation, the commodity form, and globalizing capitalism generally. Griffith and Valdés Pizzini focus on the praxis of Puerto Rican fishers and their families through a sophisticated theoretical framework that is as illuminating as it is powerful. These are the kinds of heights to which anthropology should strive. This book gives me hope for the discipline's future." —Kevin A. Yelvington, University of South Florida, and author of Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace (Temple)

"This book masterfully shows how combinations of wage labor and informal independent production are still at the heart of global capitalism and the reproduction of proletariat households. Offering some of the best anthropology of labor around, the authors examine the multiple and contradictory meanings of small-scale commercial fishing in Puerto Rico: subsidy to capital, space for rest and therapy, source of pride, identity and livelihood for workers." —Rubén Hernández-León, University of California, Los Angeles

About this edition

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1566399114
• ISBN 13: 9781566399111
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280