Mapping economic diversity in the First World: the case of fisheries

Fisheries are understood within a binary frame that is both spatialized into the First and Third Worlds and founded upon a developmentalist discourse of fisheries that produces the conditions for capitalism. The result is an inevitable march toward privatization of resources abstractly understood and their utilization by individuals as capital. The Third World is allowed to diverge from this inevitability because of its inherent characteristics of subject and space read as fisheries-based community and territory. These different imaginaries of subject and space produce very different prescriptions for economic development; the First World must choose capitalism whereas the Third World might explore other options, albeit at a local scale. Producing alternative forms of fisheries management in the First World, then, requires both a strategy of valuing that which has been relegated to the periphery (for example, community, cooperation, and participation) as well as a blurring of binary categories generally. Undermining the presence of capitalism in the First World and making space for that which has been excluded (for example, community-based and territorial fisheries) requires a new economic and spatial imaginary. DOI:10.1068/a36296 (1) Although the term `Third World' is somewhat standard within political ecology as a way to characterize and distinguish the bulk of political ecology work (for example, Bryant and Bailey, 1997), here I use the term `Third World' to emphasize an economic and developmental binary (First and Third World) where one term (that is, the First World) is dominant and the other (that is, Third World) is subordinant. 1994; Ruddle, 1998) but as forms of fisheries management to work toward (for example, Community Fisheries Section, 2000). Although fisheries across the First World/Third World divide clearly share similar characteristics of overcapacity, overfishing, and environmental degradation, there is a very different imagination on either side of the divide in terms of the viability of particular solutions to the problems of fishing. The spatial binary of fisheries management corresponds to a dominant imaginary of economy in which the First World is inscribed as coextensive with a capitalist economy and the Third World is its frontier where economic difference may exist albeit temporarily and as deficient relative to capitalism. In this imaginary, capitalism is unitary, singular, and totalizing (Gibson-Graham, 1996). In spatial terms, capitalism has a coherent center from which it expands and penetrates into the spaces of noncapitalism. Noncapitalism, insofar as it exists, is peripheral and in retreat, unable to challenge or replace the dominant capitalist formation. Gibson-Graham have made clear the power of capitalocentric discourse to reify this image of capitalism and to limit the possibility of recognizing and enacting noncapitalist formations and futures (see also Community Economies Collective, 2001; Gibson-Graham et al, 2000; 2001). New representations of economy as diverse (for example, Lee et al, 2003) have, however, the potential to disrupt dominant economic discourses and suggest a variety of economic possibilities. Cartographic representation, as metaphor and as actual mappings, is here used as a method to investigate and deconstruct the dominant capitalocentric representation of the fishing economy (in the First and Third Worlds); in addition, maps will be the medium by which alternative economic futures will be imagined. Fish harvesting highlights well the processes and mechanisms that are deployed to produce and maintain the (ever-expanding) First World as everywhere capitalist. That is, fisheries are stubbornly resistant to adopting relations of production that are typically associated with capitalism, and an enormous effort is needed to rein in and discipline fisheries such that they too mirror the singular and hegemonic image of the capitalist economy. The dominant discourse of fisheries suggests that this difference from capitalism is the source of the recurring economic and resource crises of fisheries (Anderson, 1986; Charles, 1988; Rees, 1985), that it is an essential flaw that must be corrected through the imposition of (first and foremost) private property (for example, Keen, 1988; Scott, 1988). Fisheries in the Northeast US, and indeed across the globe where millions of people rely upon nonindustrial fish harvesting (http://www.fao.org), are, however, sites where private property, wage relations, the primacy of a market system of exchange, the alienation of communities from common resources, and topdown regulation of resources are not easily implemented and are actively debated and struggled over. The fish harvesting industry and representations or mappings of it in both the First and the Third World offer insight into the discursive production of capitalism (for example, via ontologies of fisheries and fishermen,(2) methodologies of data collection, the institutionalization of particular forms of analyses, and a host of performance sites) such that privatization, rationalization, and capitalism itself seem the natural and inevitable solution to the problems of fishing. The scientific and management discourse of fisheries provides a location within which can be embedded a particular understanding and implementation of the inevitability of capitalism. In this paper I explore this discourse for the roots of its capitalocentric logic (2) Here I use the term `fishermen' to signify the imagined individual, independent, and competitive fisher of fisheries bioeconomic theory. The term fisher, used throughout this paper, refers to all people who work as harvesters of fish within commercial enterprises regardless of their position and assumes nothing about their relationships with each other (for example, cooperative or competitive). A fisher may be any one of several crew members (for example, captain, mate, engineer, deckhand) and may or may not own a fishing boat. 960 K St. Martin