Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the implications for fish and for fishermen of the imposition of current risk management strategies, the ideology and logic of which are underwritten by reification, commensurabilty, categorization and anonymity.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we ask what happens to fish and to fishermen who are subjected to modern forms of risk management. On the first count, we are asking how fish are being or have been reconfigured in the imagination of, at the least, all those who have some tie to the fishing industry. On the second count, we are asking how the imagination of fishermen is being reconfigured by the imposition of management strategies that, ultimately, translate the uncertainties inherent in macro-level biological and economic systems into lived experience. The two trajectories of meaning are connected. Each influences the other and each entails an appropriation of understandings. We shall argue that the two trajectories are driven by the same process; a process, that, in summary, may be understood as disembedding and, more precisely, as implicit in an imposed ideology and logic that are underwritten by reification, commensurability, categorization and anonymity.