Reflections on Fieldwork and Fishing in France

By Charles R. Menzies

Before leaving Vancouver for France in 1992 I had worked up a list of possible sites in which fishing would be one of (if not the most important) economic activity in the region. I was looking for an area with a small to medium sized fleet operated by family enterprises. Because of my theoretical interest in social reproduction as it applies to simple-commodity production I ruled out the larger industrial ports such as Bolonge and Lorient immediately. Instead I concentrated on visiting the many smaller and out of the way fishing villages that are spread along the coast of Brittany between St Malo in the north and Vannes in the south.

As I toured the coast the rumbles of the coming crisis could be heard on every dock. Fishers complained of poor fish prices, declining catches, and non-E.C. fish imports. A major fishing co-operative was forced to reorganize and consolidate its operation (in the processes it laid off close to 100 workers). Fishing skippers were beginning to have serious difficulties in making their mortgage payments. Though the problems seemed to be wide spread it was in the fishing ports of the Bigoudennie (the primary artisanal district of France and ranked fourth in overall production after the industrial ports of Bologne, Lorient, and Concarneau) that the problems seemed the most acute.

I travelled the bigouden coast from St. Guénolé eastward into Loctudy twisting over small coastal roads. I stopped at each port and walked along the docks looking into net sheds, watched the fish auctions, and talked with fishers. I returned the following day with Veronica and our boys and together we retraced my steps. Near the end of our day's travel we stopped to rest behind the church in Pont L'Abbé. As our boys played in the playground we agreed that this would be the place we would return to for my doctoral fieldwork.

My impressions of the "field" are vicariously inscribed in my notebooks, files and, more graphically, in the family photos I took during our stay in the Bigoudennie. As I glance through our albums and hold our slides up to the light, I "see" the passage of our fourteen odd months in Brittany recorded in the "special days and holidays" of my family?s life. These photos record the time we spent as a family. They mark special events, trips away to Paris, Britain, Spain, and Italy, birthdays, guests and anniversaries. The place, that is to say the "field-site," enters this record as glimpses of landscape and blurred backgrounds against which the normal life of family progresses.

Our arrival in Brittany is captured in a series of pictures of my boys, Jarek and Tristan, playing on a beach near our first temporary lodgings. It is late in the afternoon and the setting sun colours the landscape a warm orange tone. In one picture, the boys are standing behind an inscription etched in the sand: "Jarek and Tristan, Oct. 16, 1994, Brittany." This photo masks the anxiety of navigating along highways and county lanes, searching out what is for us, strangers here, difficult and incomprehensible. Now, having finished with the necessities of shopping, signing leases, and cleaning up, we have retreated to this beach to relax and take stock of the place we shall be for the next year or more.

My experience of this "field" is overwritten by my experience as father and partner. I attend the "fete des ecoloes publique" like all the other parents and make my recordings of the event with still and video images. Some sunny afternoons we pile into our car and take a picnic on the beach or along some nearby lakeshore or wood. On the way home from the afternoon fish sale in the port I often stopped to "pickup a few things" at the local supermarket. These are not earth-shattering events. But they are part of a family life which continues irrespective of whether or not we are in France, Canada, or the United States. Too often, I feel, we anthropologists deny the normalcy of our lives in our writings of "strange and far off" peoples and places.

In one of the few photos in which I am in the picture I am standing on the edge of a quay in Lesconil (one of the four Bigounden fish ports). One boy is perched precariously near the edge. I am holding the other steady on the seat of an adults? bike. Of to the side an old-style dragger is coming alongside the dock. The white washed sides of stone houses are just visible across the harbour. This is not a photo of a classical ethnographer: "a snapshot of the anthropologist standing among ?his? natives? in the center of the picture" (Geertz, 1995:64). While my presence is clearly expressed, the skipper of the dragger is barely a silhouette framed in the window of his wheelhouse. The clues to his identity are locked within the silhouette of the boat and in its registration number. Much can be learned from a reading of the boat: age, rigging, gear-type, crew size, port of registry, etc.?. These faceless objective data, however, pushes the skipper and his crew further into the shadows.

Families in the Field

Whether one is in the field alone or with their family has an affect on the fieldwork experience. A single individual may have greater flexibility in terms of going places and meeting people. One most certainly won't have to check in with their partner or rush off to pick-up the children. As a parent one is (potentialy) less threatening. In France we met people through our children at school and on the playground. Being a parent is an understandable social category. Through this role, one is able to move outward and, to a certain extent, disarm the fear of the outsider. As I became integrated in to the life of my children's school in France I gained an insight into French society that, had I arrived alone, I doubt I would have ever known existed.

Getting In

I arrived in France with what I imagine to be standard issue letters of introduction to local officials and academics working in my field. However, before I could begin to even think about using these letters I first had to find a place to live. I often wonder how other anthropologists find a place to stay. I have come across the occasional mention of being put up in a hut at the back of the village or a brief word of thanks to X for letting a room to a wayward graduate student, but overall it seems to be an ignored topic. I suppose the basic mechanics are not that difficult to figure out, especially if one is working, as I did, in a western European country. For me, the two weeks of searching for a place to live taught me a great deal about social fabric of my field site. It is a rare occasion to be allowed into someone's home and left to wander almost at will inspecting everything from under the kitchen sink to the bathroom fixtures.

My first big "entree," in terms of gaining access, came several weeks into my research in late November. The weather was terrible and I must have been conspicuous in my presence on the local quays. I had been hanging about the port watching the coming and going of the men and their boats in between my meetings with government and fisheries association representatives. At one of my meetings I was invited to join a group of fishers going down to Nates (about 300 kms to the south of the Bigoudennie) to demonstrate their support for six of their colleagues who had been charged with destroying fish during a demonstration in June, 1994.

On the morning of the planned demonstration I arrived promptly at the port only to find it deserted. The wind was so strong that waves were breaking over the parking lot I had been told we would gather at. I worried that I had missed the bus and was just about to leave when I caught site of a couple of fishermen I recognized. I joined up with then and together we found the bus. The trip down to Nantes and the proceedings of the court case were quiet and uneventful. The trip back was a different story. Not since my days on the high school basketball team have I had such a trip.

The bus was barely pulling away from the courthouse when the men started passing around bottles of beer. By the time we had arrived back in Le Guilvinec I had been invited to sea by several skippers and offered a guided tour of the port by one of the men. In some small way this trip broke the ice and I was able to move from speaking primarily with the officialdom to an engagement with the men that I had been watching everyday unloading their boats. There are two groups of men who, even in the dead of winter, gather to watch the boats' daily return from fishing: retired fishers who might hope to pick up a piece of fish from a younger relative, son, or friend. The other group is a rag tag collection of men, some of whom are on pension, others with jobs elsewhere in the industry, or fellow fishers on shore leave. This second group often helps the fishing crew unload and for its effort receives fish and/or drink in the form of exchange. It is into this latter category of men that I seemed to fall into.

Initially I had fit into a "journalist" model. My arrival in the middle of the fall rainy season automatically excluding any possibility of my being a "typical" tourist. In between my first trip to Brittany and the Bigoudennie and my primary fieldtrip a broad based social movement sprung up in reaction to a crisis in production which was rooted in changing international market forces, diminishing fish stocks and high debt loads carried over from the heady 1980s when there seemed no end to the expansion of the local fishing industry.

When I arrived in the fall of 1994 journalists from across France and Europe were gathering to see if there would be a third winter explosion of demonstrations, direct actions, and strikes. As it became apparent that nothing like the preceding two years was about to happen the journalists gradually left the Bigoudennie leaving me in their wake. As my image as journalist faded I eventually came to be classified as one of the men who hung around the port waiting to talk and help unload the boats.

Holes in the Proposal

Almost immediately upon arriving I realized there was a problem in my methodology. This is not I think an unusual experience; the reality of fieldwork rarely matches with our idealized conception of it in our research proposals. Before leaving for the field I had noted that a major shift was occurring in the structure of employment opportunities in the French fishing industry. Between the 1950s and 1993 the number of fishers in Brittany dropped from 25,000 to 8,000. In order to understand how fisherfolk were surviving --or failing to survive-- I planned to "compare two groups of respondents. The primary group will be selected from among fishers and their families whose base of operations in the port of Le Guilvinec. The second group will be comprised of former fishers and their family members."

I had chosen to work with active and former fishers and their families for two reasons. First, even though fishing itself occurs in an almost exclusively male environment I believe that no adequate analysis is possible without including a consideration of the gendered relations of work onshore and within the family. Second, by recovering as much as possible about those who failed at or left the fishing to go into a different line of work and/or left the region I felt that I would be better situated to understand how fisherfolk organized their activities in a crisis situation.

My first problem was that I couldn't find any former fishers. My second was gender based. My interactions were almost exclusively with the men working on the boats.

As I have explained, part of my problematic was to contrast the pushed-outs with the left-ins. I had initially conceived of this as being represented in terms of men being pushed off the boats into waged-labour either in or outside the region. To a certain extent this was confirmed by occupational genealogies I completed. My ideas about being pushed out stem from my experience and research in British Columbia where licensing changes introduced in the herring and halibut fisheries during the 1980s resulted in an obvious and easily measurable decrease in jobs. Men who had fished since childhood had been made redundant and where forced, if they where able, to seek employment in other areas. However, the pushing-out in France occurred long before the men even reached the boat.

In the post-war period a new openness in the educational system allowed more working-class and peasant families to give their children a post-secondary education. In the context of the expanding welfare-state jobs were plentiful. Add to this a dramatic change in family size. In one generation family size dropped from 5-9 children to 2-4. In my occupational genealogies I noted a move away from manual labour and into white collar occupations based outside the region. As my work progressed I realized that those who had kept a foothold in the fishery were predominantly those whose family had owned a fish boat.

The potential problem of displaced fishers also seemed to be controlled through the educational system. Like many occupations in France you must go to a specialized school to become a certified fisher. Advancements from deckhand to mate or mechanic, or from mate to skipper require additional certificates. French fishers can retire after 37.5 years of work to a pension starting at about $2,000 per month. The official age of retirement is 55. Understandably men over 55 are rare onboard a french fishing boat. Thus surplus labour is siphoned off by a process of early retirement and is inhibited from developing by restricting enrolment at the special fishing schools.

I thus found myself in a situation in which there really were no 'former-fishers' in the sense that I had first envisioned. The exercise of searching for this mythic group, however, forced me to move beyond the narrow confines of the local and come to terms with how the structure of the state is crucial in understanding local cultural configurations.

I encountered a potentially more damaging problem with respect to the issue of gender. Doing research in an area in which the social division by gender is pronounced can pose many problems for the researcher. It was crucial for my work to speak with women, not just as an exercise in counter-balancing gender bias, but because it was the women who controlled the day-to-day financial affairs of business and household. The men either wouldn't tell me or, more likely didn't know the financial specifics of their businesses. In my interviews with women I was often shown detailed financial records and planning exercises.

Because my primary point of contact was with the official fishers' organizations and government bodies I met mostly men. For the most part the women that met were introduced to me by their husbands. In the few case in which I made contact with women involved in the fishing industry directly it was almost always mediated through political organizations such as the Green Party or the local association of fishermen's wives. In the one case that was not mediated in such a fashion the women's husband was less than polite.

I first met "Jane" at the shipyard were she was filming the breaking up of her husband's old boat. Under the government's current decommissioning plan (the melick plan, named after the socialist minister who introduced the program in the mid-80s) a fisherman with a boat of more than 20 years will be paid to have it destroyed. She saw me taking photo's and asked if I was a journalist. I explained what I was doing, gave her a summary of my project and asked for her name, address, telephone number, and name of their new boat. I subsequently saw her and her husband at the quay in Le Guilvinec.

Over the course of the next several weeks I tried unsuccessfully to arrange an interview with her husband. Finally I was told that if I wanted to interview him I would have to go fishing as he didn't have any time to talk when he was onshore. We made an arrangement for the beginning of the following week.

The trip began at about 4 in the morning. His boat is typical of the draggers here though the wheelhouse space is more cramped than on other boats that I have seen and it is awkward to get into it either from below decks or topside. Once the skipper installs himself in the wheelhouse he is practically sealed off from any interaction with the crew. I didn't know either of the two crewmembers on this boat and unlike my previous experiences the skipper made no effort to introduce me. As is the practice, once the boat is out of the harbour and on route one of the two deckhands takes the wheel and the others sleep. I kept myself entertained for the first hour or so getting to know the ship's mechanic.

The cook prepared the skippers meal (boiled meat and deep fried potatoes) before making lunch for the two crewmembers. He had just come in off the deck from two hours on his hands and knees sorting the catch of the first tow. This is the most tiresome work onboard. An average tow takes between one and two hours to sort. The sorting is done on hands and knees often with the water washing around and over you. The cook had just started to cook the potatoes for the crew when the skipper came down from the wheelhouse and told him to get ready to haul back. The skipper stuck his head in through the galley door and yelled at the cook to quit cooking and get to work. When the cook protested the skipper simply reached across to the stove and turned it off. Turning to his crewman he said: "work first, then eat."

The whole day seemed to stretch out in front of me. I must say that I was glad that I didn't have to work for this man, that I had my own lunch, and that if things went as normal we would be heading into port by 3:00 pm. I did get my interview with the skipper and was able to talk with both of the crewmembers. Yet, I feel that the skipper's response toward me was at least partly a product of my having been introduced to him by his wife as opposed to him having introduced her to me. Thus underlying the apparent power of women that the ethnologist Martine Segalen talks of in several of her works is bound up within a tightly guarded world to which access is controlled (or at least an attempt is made to control) by men. By forcing me to come out onto the boat it was as though the skipper was trying to shift the relations of power so that I was clearly in his territory. But once he got me there he wasn't quite sure what to do with me (my experience on this boot was more than offset by other interactions with fishers, especialy with the Skipper and crew of the Lorelei, with them I had a most enjoyable trip).

Pasts and Presents

Many of my professors conducted their doctoral research during the heady days of the 1960s or early '70s. They may have been part of the optimistic and progressivist social movements of their time or not, but they certainly would have been affected by the changes then occurring in the 'traditional' fieldsite of anthropology --Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the so-called 'fourth-world' of aboriginal peoples. Beginning first with India and China the grand movements of decolonialization and anti-imperialist nationalism forced anthropologists to reconsider anthropological practice. Crumbling Euro-American empires made it more and more difficult for anthropologists to gain access to the so-called third world on their own terms. If one did gain access the ethical content of one?s work was open to question: for example the participation of American anthropologists in intelligence activities during the Vietnam war threatened to "disembowel the American Anthropological Association (Vincent, 1990:310). The era of naive fieldwork, if such a beast ever existed, was over. While the tool kit of anthropological fieldwork may have remained relatively unchanged the manner in which we approach and use this tool kit has necessarily been changed.

The early prescriptions for change argued for a radical reappraisal of anthropology as a discipline. Most notable, Del Hymes' Reinventing Anthropology, Tlal Asad's Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, and Kathleen Gough's 1968 article in Current Anthropology: "New Proposals for Anthropologists" sought to redefine the field in such a way as to make anthropology socially relevant as an agent of social change. These critiques relied on the personal commitment of the anthropologist to radical change and exhorted the anthropologist to act as an agent of social change. Here the anthropologist as fieldworker was challenged.

Since the mid 1970s workers' struggles have been defensive and the provisions of the welfare state have come under attack. Yet, the experience of intellectuals who had been radicalized during the 1960s and early '70s was fundamentally different than the rest of the workforce. As the economy contracted the 1960s radicals:

began to enter middle age. Usually they did so with all hope of socialist revolution gone --indeed, often having ceased to believe in the desirability of any such revolution. Most of them had ... come to occupy some sort of professional, managerial or administrative position, to have become members of the new middle class, at a time when the overcomsumptionist dynamic of Western capitalism offered this class rising living standards (a benefit often denied the rest of the workforce: hourly wages in the US fell by 8.7% between 1973 and 1986) (Callinicos, 1990:168).

This is not to suggest that the contemporary moment of creative engagement with a multitude of techniques of writing is simply the product of radical intellectual disillusionment and cooptation. It is, however, to suggest that the social context within which people live does indeed shape how they come to see the world around them.

The world of my teachers was very different from the world in which we exist today. Job opportunities, funding possibilities, and the economy in general were much better then. Dare I say that in those far off golden days people had expectations and that their expectations were optimistic. But it is, I think, this underlying economic reality that created a social climate in which progressive demands were not just advanced but won. This was the context in which our teachers found their way into the academic establishment.

For a brief moment during the 1960s, amidst popular working class uprisings and the attainment of the political independence of much of the third world, it was possible to advance anthropological approaches which might have 'reinvented anthropology.' It has been in the context of economic restructuring, funding cuts, and high levels of unemployment and imperialist-globalization that the textual critique in anthropology emerged. Anthropological practice today is informed by a critical stance that is more interested in the word than in the act.

I find it an uncomfortable job prying into people?s private lives; asking them about not making it in a world in which most everything is measured in terms of economic success. I am bothered by what is for me an underlying voyeuristic aspect of anthropological work. To often we anthropologists are just playing games. We arrive at the "fieldsite," impose ourselves on the goodwill of those who are willing to talk to us, and then we leave. I have less difficulty rationalizing my right to "impose" when I write about my own community, fisherfolk in Northern British Columbia (Menzies, 1990;1994;1996); though it does not make it any easier for me to "impose" my questions.

A great deal of anthropology, like most other intellectual endeavours, appears to me as an elaborate game. Unique, exotic, strange cultures exist for the pleasure of the anthropologist who, after a rather brief sojourn in the field returns to the Geertzian "world of lecterns, libraries, blackboards, and seminars... The world that produces (and licenses) anthropologists" (Geertz, 1988:129). I am interested in an anthropological practice that at least tries to be different. This difference is not found, however, in a more radical language nor in ones ability to navigate successfully through a post-modern political correctness. Rather, this anthropology is self-consciously involved in the world outside of "the groves of academe" (Geertz, 1988:129).

In the preface to Shattered Images: Dialogues and Meditations on Tsimshian Narratives, John Cove describes his encounter with the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en peoples of the upper Skeena River in northern British Columbia. Cove had initially intended to study the connection between myths and masks among the Tsimshian people and he assumed the local Tribal Council (Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Tribal Council, GWTC) would raise no objections to his research. For their part, the GWTC were loath to allow yet another sight-seeing anthropologist into their territories and refused to allow Cove access on the basis of the "irrelevance of [his] topic to the needs of the people, and questions of insufficient native control over data and reporting" (Cove, 1987:2-3).

Cove reveals how he was forced to confront his own appropriation of Gitksan culture: "I was exposed as a games' player whose orientation was one in which Gitksan culture existed for my pleasure" (1987:4). As he prepared to leave the field the president of the Tribal Council took him aside for a talk: "In the course of an otherwise friendly conversation, he commented: 'Well, I guess we'll never see you again. You anthropologists come in and get what you want, then leave. We're still here, and never seem to get anything back in return'" (1987:3).

Cove's particular response included eight years of part-time work for the Gitksan and opened up a process of inner reflection: "I started to see that my interest in Tsimshian mythology could encorporate self-comprehension. ... Six years after my first encounter with Tsimshian myths, I had something to ask of them for both professional and personal reasons. I wanted to learn how the Tsimshian defined being human, and to use it in understanding western cultural definitions" (1987:5). A quest for self-comprehension is not a solution applicable to every anthropologist nor for every anthropological situation. What is applicable is his challenge to reflect on the relevance of our anthropological projects, not just to ourselves but also to those with whom we work.

Self-conscious anthropology forces us to come to terms with the fact that all writing, all anthropological practice is aligned. That is, anthropological practice "variously expresses, explicitly or implicitly, specifically selected experience from a point of view" (Williams, 1977:199). Alignment is, in this sense merely an admission that the participants of a particular social formation cannot separate their production (i.e. ethnographies) from the social relations in which they are a part. To deny alignment is an implicit commitment to the dominant social order. Commitment, if it is to mean anything "is surely conscious, active, and open: a choice of position. ... commitment is a conscious alignment, or conscious change of alignment (Williams, 1977:200,204).

I take head of Williams warning that "social reality can amend, displace, or deform any merely intended practice, and within this ... commitment can function as little more than an ideology" (1977:204). My personal social reality is defined by the duality of being both fisher and anthropologist and in my responsibilities as parent and partner. It is the "fisherman who makes it possible for me to become an anthropologist and to carry out my responsibilities as parent and partner.

I once read an anthropological account of west coast fishers in which the author searched for significance in the colour of the underwear the men wore. The fisherman in me laughed at the foolishness of the idea. The anthropologist blushed at the gullibility of the researcher. Too often we are pushed toward turning the least relevant aspects of our respondents lives into a hyper-significant sign in our endeavour to create a hyper-text of culturally significant meaning. We end up loosing sight of the problems of "actually-lived" life --running a fishboat, being a parent, or simply the problem of paying the bills-- and the lived experiences of our respondents become obstacles in our path.

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As my friend and collegue, Anthony Marcus says::

"With the end of the cold-war, scholars, social critics, and politicians observed a change in the planetary Zeitgeist. Supporters of the post-cold-war boom describe a "consolidation of democracy", as would be Che Guevaras in the mountains of the third world trade in AK 47's for government jobs, leaders of social democratic organizations and trade unions, "modernize" their organizations to become the human face of neo-liberalism, and ex-communist bureaucrats oversee the sale of collective economies, labor and resources for world financial markets. Competition and "the war of every man against all" has become the rule across the planet, with rising rates of exploitation, intensified state sector austerity, speed-ups, the lengthening of the work day, and a declining overall social wage.

In face of this onslaught, many radical scholars have retreated from their ideals of a society based on justice not power and cooperation not competition, seeing little hope in the current period. Despite huge defeats of those who have claimed to represent these ideals, there is reason for hope. Now more than ever, it is possible and necessary for radical anthropologists to return to the source. In the cleared field of post-cold-war political consciousness there are new opportunities to draw balance sheets on past mistakes, strengthen the explanatory power of our work and write and make history" (Marcus, 1997).