Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with climate and culture in relation to the sea. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork between Catalan fishermen in a town near Barcelona (Spain), which focus in fishermen knowledge on climate (forecasting from water surface, cloud forms, wind qualities, fish and bird behaviour, etc.). In this paper I explore two main questions: First, a theoretical reflection on folk knowledge on climate or ethnoclimatology starting form Palsson's view about the human-environmental relations; and, secondly, the voice of fishermen, when the ideas about climate change meet the social and economical reality of small-scale fishery today. My point is that fishermen's knowledge on climate is an expression of the intimate relationship between human and nature, and that this relation is being "colonized" (as proposed by Crate & Nuttall 2008) by modernity, which has one of its more prototypical expressions in the climate change.