In Fish pluralities- Human-animal relations and sites of engagement in Paulatuuq, Arctic Canada , Zoe Todd articulates the ways that human fish relationships reflect and enact political relations in the arctic. Via two case studies the author argues that the anthropocentric lens inherent in western scientific tradition is ill equipped to comprehend the complexity of Paulatuuqmiut human-fish relations. The author presents the reader with a window into the Paulatuuqmiut worldview, in which the decentred human is contextualised by their relations to community, to land, and to other species.
For the Paulatuuqmiut, both their relationship to fish, and to fishing practices, are deeply imbued of cultural meaning. The author argues that scientific and anthropological ideas about fishing practices in Alaska have failed to understand the complexities of relationships between the Paulatuuqmiut and fish. Fish are understood in many different ways that cannot be easily translated into western models, such as metaphors, food sources, trophies, or prizes, and a more-than-human species, imbued of an agency that reflects humans relationships to land. Fishing for the Paulatuuqmiut peoples is a skill that springs forth from an embodied way of knowing the land. It is a skill whose success is due to local Indigenous knowledge which is entwined within the traditions and relations embedded in Paulatuuqmiut community.
Fishing is not just about the catch of a fish, it is an enactment of relations and rituals that are deeply embedded in cultural and social practices. Fishing highlights the relationships between those who fish, the fish themselves, and the landscape, which both shapes the practice of fishing, and is shaped by the highly detailed cosmology of the Paulatuuqmiut peoples.
I found this intriguing paper to be an interesting commentary on what we are learning about the inherent biases within science and assumed hierarchies of knowledge in western scientific thought. Reading this paper lead me to: Science and other Indigenous Knowledge Systems in the book: Knowledge: Critical Concepts, Volume 2 , in which the authors argue that scientific knowledge should be viewed as local in as much as it is formulated by a conglomerate of people, places, strategies, practices and skills. All localised. The authors argue that Indigenous knowledges must be given equal value to scientific knowledge as both are in part formulated by locality, and Indigenous knowledge enacts an inherent power in Indigenous knowledge systems, which cannot be squeezed into or reduced into the western model.
This idea is prevalent in Todd’s paper, page 14, where she explains that to be a successful fisher in Paulatuuq one must understand what it is to be part of that community, to know what it is to “dwell” in that landscape and to move through it in a way that is “embodied and skillfull”. Similarly, Todd’s mention of “a complex Inuvialuit cosmology” on page 6, alludes to the complexities inherent within Indigenous human animal relationships. If western science is to begin to comprehend these complexities, it would seem that to be quiet and to listen, would be a good first step.
Bibliography
Stehr, Nico, and Reiner Grundmann. Knowledge: Critical Concepts. Taylor & Francis, 2005.
Todd, Zoe. ‘Fish Pluralities: Human-Animal Relations and Sites of Engagement in Paulatuuq, Arctic Canada’. Études/Inuit/Studies 38 (1 January 2014): 217. https://doi.org/10.7202/1028861ar.
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