Struggles to Control the Commons: Social Movement or Cultural Emplacement?

Abstract

From Introduction:

"In this paper, I examine a case like many of the others discussed in this conference: a set of villages with small-scale artisanal fishermen, in this case the fishing villages on the Peruvian shores of Lake Titicaca. In this setting, each fisherman has ready access to any portion of the fishing grounds associated with the village (they do not have private fishing spots). Moreover, this case displays what can be called 'an informal system of common property management.' In each of the villages, the fishermen and their fellow villagers protect their fishing grounds. They defend these grounds by keeping a close watch for incursions into them, and by chasing away or otherwise attacking intruders.

"My purpose in this paper is to discuss and compare three forms of analysis of these communal fishing grounds. The first view examines the local practices as a set of rules that allocates certain rights (access to fishing grounds) on certain principles (membership in village communities) in exchange for certain obligations (participation in the management and defense of these grounds). I find this view useful for many purposes. It facilitates comparison among different cases of common property management, and it permits dialogue among academics, resource users, administrators and other citizens. However, it also strikes me - in this case at least - as incomplete. It ignores the historical and cultural dimensions of resource management - or, if it does not ignore them, it downplays them systematically, which amounts to the same thing. It suggests that resources are understood by material frameworks of value measurement, in economic and ecological terms.

"These limitations have led me to explore two other frameworks of analysis. To this end, I have temporarily revived an old-fashioned word, now little used, which can be applied to both of these other frameworks. The word is 'struggles.' I use it to convey the depth of commitment of the villagers to the control of their own lives and to suggest the scale of the on-going conflicts between the villagers and outsiders, particularly the state. The first of the frameworks involving 'struggles' is the notion of 'social movement' - the idea that fishermen might organize around issues of resource control, much as workers might organize around issues of wages, working conditions, and the like, or women might organize around issues of employment, education and physical well-being, or other, less well-defined populations might organize into social movements around environmental issues, or human rights, or, to take an example probably less popular with the present audience, the rights of gun-owners. Some contemporary social movements take the form of 'identity politics,' in which a population organizes around some basic primordial identity, like race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or physical disability. Since the Lake Titicaca fishermen are in many senses of the word indigenous, this notion of social movement might seem appropriate. However, this term tends to locate the struggle predominantly, or exclusively, within a public political arena, and to frame it in terms of national and international historical trajectories. I thus prefer an alternative form of casting the protection of fishing grounds as a struggle - a framework that I will provisionally call 'cultural emplacement' which contrasts doubly with 'social movement.' The adjective 'cultural' contrasts with 'social' to suggest that struggles involve daily life and collective memory, as well as formal political organization. The noun 'emplacement' contrasts with 'movement' to suggest that the people who are involved seek long-term autonomy and some measure of autarky, as well as transformations of a larger political whole. For this final framework, I will temporarily revive a second old-fashioned word, also little used now, which can be applied to this framework. The word, derived from the substantivist economic anthropology of the 1960s, is 'embedded;' it suggests that resource management systems are thoroughly intertwined with local history, culture and daily life."