The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Risk, Uncertainty and Decision-Making by Victorian Fishers

In pursuing their livelihood, and in a variety of overlapping contexts, commercial fishers must rely on information that is often incomplete. To fish successfully requires not only careful judgement of variable weather and water conditions and the likely movement of fish, but may entail exploration of new or less well known grounds. Fishers must also weigh up the fluctuating prices on offer for different species and qualities of fish, and make decisions on the basis of the actual or likely behaviour of other fishers with whom they cooperate or compete to supply the market. And they must negotiate the shifting regulations and advice that emanates from those who are charged with managing fisheries. In this article we explore decision-making among ocean-going, commercial fishers of Lakes Entrance, in the state of Victoria, southeast Australia. We consider three idealized contexts in which fishers make decisions on the basis of incomplete information. These are, first, the physical and biological environment that they encounter when fishing; secondly, the socioeconomic environment as represented by both middle-men (buyers, processors) who move fish from points of landing to retail outlets and other fishers whose actions may affect disposal options and prices; and, thirdly, the environment of management as represented primarily by decisions and edicts emanating from State and Commonwealth (Federal) Government authorities charged with managing fisheries. We explore each of these contexts with reference to ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’. The former term covers situations in which relevant actors are able to assess the likelihood that particular events may occur, and the latter covers situations in which no such assessment is possible (Cashdan 1990:2-3; Knight 1933). We recognise that fishers may, in different circumstances and for reasons of their own, construct the same context as being either risky or uncertain. Within the frame of these constructions we identify the general form of expected responses by fishers and discuss their actual responses to particular circumstances. At the close of the article we turn to more general considerations of ‘risk’ and ‘risk society’ as these topics have been discussed by theorists of late modernity (Beck 1999; Giddens 1991, 1999). We propose that fishers, like many other decision-makers, simultaneously experience contexts of remarkably different sorts – contexts that influence their attitudes and understandings with respect to certainty, social identity, personhood, agency and temporal orientation – with the outcomes that their life-worlds must be understood as complex, multidimensional and potentially fluid. Our argument here serves as an anthropological challenge to the implication, found in some of the work of Giddens and Beck, of an historical trajectory from a “pre-modern” to a “late modern” state in which, at any time, a particular society assumes a specific condition with respect to “modernity”; that is, we dispute the essentializing and universalizing tenor implicit in the work of these social theorists (Caplan 2000a). In developing this argument we outline a comparative frame for future anthropological analyses of multidimensional life-worlds. Different methods are available for the analysis of decision-making in contexts of incomplete information. In broad terms a contrast may be drawn between scientific ecological approaches and ethno-ecological approaches; approaches that, in earlier anthropological literature, were referred to as ‘etic’ and ‘emic’ respectively (Harris 1968:568-604; Pike 1954:8). In the present article our emphasis is with the latter. At the same time, however, we intend that our ethno-ecological approach, in which the perspective of fishers is prioritized, does not do a disservice to potential quantitative analyses that might, for example, draw upon game theory (e.g. Davenport 1970). Indeed, we note that each of the