The Common Property Theory and the Social Anthropology of Fishing: The Pitfalls of Problem Formulation

Abstract

"The 'tragedy of the commons paradigm' has been at the center of many debates between fishing experts over the last decade, drawing attention to biological reproduction of marine species, the viability of fishing as an economic activitiy as well as to the political struggles between producers and state representatives. While stimulating interaction and contracts between practicionners involved in various disciplinary fields related to fisheries development and leading several of them to adopt less sectorial views of issues at work, it also forces social scientists to engage in a re-examination of their internal paradigms and to seek ways to better adjust them to the diversity of empirical forms they progressibely dealt with. The aim of this paper is to look at this process within socio-antropological studies of maritime communities. Without aiming at reconstructing in an exhaustive way the various phases illustrative of this situation, it will rather focus on some institutional and ideological orientations that led anthropologists to react to the above paradigm and to re-orient their methods and objectives."