The Sea Commands: Community and Perception of the Environment in a Portuguese Fishing Village 9781789209129

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THE SEA COMMANDS

EASA Series

Published in Association with the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Series Editors: Jelena Tošić, University of St. Gallen; Sabine Strasser, University of Bern; Annika Lems, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle Social anthropology in Europe is growing, and the variety of work being done is expanding. This series is intended to present the best of the work produced by members of the EASA, both in monographs and in edited collections. The studies in this series describe societies, processes and institutions around the world and are intended for both scholarly and student readership. Recent volumes: 40. THE SEA COMMANDS Community and Perception of the Environment in a Portuguese Fishing Village Paulo Mendes 39. CAN ACADEMICS CHANGE THE WORLD? An Israeli’s Anthropologist’s Testimony on the Rise and Fall of a Protest Movement on Campus Moshe Shokeid 38. INSTITUTIONALISED DREAMS The Art of Managing Foreign Aid Elz˙bieta Dra˛z˙kiewicz 37. NON-HUMANS IN AMERINDIAN SOUTH AMERICA Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs Edited by Juan Javier Rivera Andía 36. ECONOMY, CRIME AND WRONG IN A NEOLIBERAL ERA Edited by James G. Carrier

35. BEING-HERE Placemaking in a World of Movement Annika Lems 34. EXPERIMENTAL COLLABORATIONS Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices Edited by Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Sánchez Criado 33. BACK TO THE POSTINDUSTRIAL FUTURE An Ethnography of Germany’s FastestShrinking City Felix Ringel 32. MESSY EUROPE Crisis, Race and Nation-State in a Postcolonial World Edited by Kristín Loftsdóttir, Andrea L. Smith and Brigitte Hipfl 31. MANAGING AMBIGUITY How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina Cˇarna Brkovic´

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THE SEA COMMANDS Community and Perception of the Environment in a Portuguese Fishing Village

Paulo Mendes Translated from the Portuguese by Luís Pires

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2021 Paulo Mendes All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mendes, Paulo, author. Title: The sea commands : community and perception of the environment in a Portuguese fishing village / Paulo Mendes. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2021. | Series: EASA series ; 40 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020026221 (print) | LCCN 2020026222 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789209112 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789209129 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Azenha do Mar (Portugal)--Social conditions. | Equality—Portugal—Azenha do Mar. | Azenha do Mar (Portugal)--Social life and customs. | Fishing villages—Portugal— Azenha do Mar. | Village communities—Portugal—Azenha do Mar. Classification: LCC HN600.A98 M46 2021 (print) | LCC HN600.A98 (ebook) | DDC 305.509469/42—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026221 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026222 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78920-911-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-912-9 ebook

To my father To my son

Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction Chapter 1. A Monographic Overview: Azenha Do Mar’s Place in Space and Time Chapter 2. Archaeology of a Thought: Maritime Anthropology, Sea and Perception of the Environment Chapter 3. Fishing, Everyday Life and Relationships Chapter 4. Personal Experience and Fieldwork Chapter 5. ‘Camones’ and ‘Natives’: Tourists and Self-Consciousness Chapter 6. Community: Residence, Identity and Environment Conclusion

1

139 174

References Index

183 198

19 46 71 94 117

Acknowledgements

You may be alone out in the sea but you cannot catch fish with no people onshore. —Francisco Escaleira†1

My first acknowledgement must be for the Azenha do Mar people. They always made me feel welcome, always collaborated with me even when they did not understand completely what I was looking for. If I could, I would be among them more often, as they know. With them I learnt that as long as there are fish in the sea, one does not need much more. With them I learnt that if we love the place we dwell in, life becomes better and worthy. This book, now published in English, would not be possible without the encouragement and support of Brian J. O’Neill, João PinaCabral and Thomas Hylland Eriksen. Brian J. O’Neill was my professor at ISCTE-IUL (Lisbon), and later my PhD supervisor. Brian knows this book like nobody else, and his help on this English edition was crucial. All my thankfulness to him. L. Jen Shaffer, whom I never met, wrote a review of the Portuguese edition of this book in American Anthropologist,2 triggering me to consider an English version. To her, my gratitude. To Paula Godinho, a colleague and a friend, professor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa (NOVA), particular recognition. The Portuguese edition of the current volume would not exist without her commitment. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (FCG) was the publisher.

Acknowledgements ◆ ix

The time I spent at Goldsmiths College (University of London) was critical to scrutinize some key ideas. Olivia Harris†, Steve Nugent and Brian Morris kindly spent hours of their time discussing my ideas and writings. Matthew Hodges was not only a great colleague and friend, but also a great source of ideas while discussing possible ways of doing, mainly in regard to writing. To all of them, my sincere gratitude. I also acknowledge the support of my university, Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD). The Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA), the research centre to which I am affiliated, and the Fundação para a Ciência em Tecnologia (FCT) are the funding institutions behind the research that led to this book. Their support has been fundamental. At Berghahn Books, I must address my gratitude in particular to Tom Bonnington, Caroline Kuhtz, and the copyeditor Charlotte Mosedale. Their professionalism, commitment and support have been invaluable. I am certainly forgetting some of the people onshore. To all of you, my best and sincere gratitude. We will meet soon. Finally, a word to my family. Their support and kind-heartedness are always there. My expressions of appreciation will never be sufficient.

Notes 1. A father who never fished but taught his sons how to fish, and how to live in tranquillity. A man full of wisdom and with the kindest smile. 2. L. Shaffer, Review of ‘O Mar é que Manda: Comunidade e Percepção do Ambiente no Litoral Alentejano’, by Paulo Mendes, American Anthropologist 117(4), December 2015.

Map 0.1 Map of (continental) Portugal

Map 0.2 Map of District of Beja

Map 0.3 Map of Municipality of Odemira District Maps created by the author.

Introduction

Prelude It’s almost 1 a.m. Z. calls me. I am staying at his home, on the sofa that we built a few days earlier in the living room. I should have slept but wasn’t able to. I rarely go to bed so early and the sense of expectation doesn’t help the sleep to set in. I get up. I put on the yellow rain gear and my rubber boots while Z. prepares something to eat. L. is already outside. He waits for us. We leave with a piece of sausage in one hand and a piece of bread in the other. It’s cold, but not windy. L. says that V. and C. have already left. To the sea. He doesn’t know where they went. They said they were heading north. ‘Maybe!’, they added. In these situations, you never know if what a fisherman says is true or not. Most times even they are not sure where they are going. And because everyone knows that the sea is in charge, no one takes it personally. At the end of the street we see F. He is silently heading to the laredo (a term that designates a slushy type of shore gravel), like someone who doesn’t want to upset the others’ rest. We do the same. We go down the street, go around the café and follow the path that leads to the laredo. The day before, F. had left everything ready for another night at sea. The ‘fishing rigs’ were baited, with salt on the bait and covered with waterproof gear, inside the boats. The salt keeps the bait, made from pieces of sardine or squid, from rotting. The waterproof gear over the boats, held down by rocks, protects the bait from stray cats or more daring birds.

2 ◆ The Sea Commands

At the laredo we meet other fishermen. There don’t seem to be many of them going out to sea tonight. ‘These guys don’t like to work!’, someone states ironically behind me. ‘They’re chickens!’, continues another. ‘And they say that fishing doesn’t work. Of course not! In bed, it doesn’t work, of course not!’ ‘If it’s summer, it’s because they also have the right to rest; if it’s winter, it’s because the sea is rough. . .’ ‘It’s none of that, the men now use more nets and creels . . . and, you know, now they only go out to sea in the morning.’ ‘When they feel like it, you mean!’ In the meantime, they all look for the ‘rollers’, small eucalyptus trunks on which the boats roll through the rocks in the sand, making their way into the water. ‘Let’s go!’ ‘Hop in!’ The boat moves out on its stern for a while, until it can manoeuvre itself in deeper water. It’s still dark out and quite foggy. No one speaks. L. looks to the side and sees F. practically next to him. He speeds up. Passes among the rocks that give access to the open sea. ‘So we are going down there?’ asks Z. ‘Let’s see. . .’ We move into the open sea for a few minutes. Then we turn south. The undulation is not bothersome, but it’s enough for us to hear the bottom of the boat hitting the water for every wave that goes by. The noise resembles a door shutting far away. Curiously, it’s a sort of thump. ‘Is everything okay?’, Z. asks me. ‘Yes’, I answer. ‘You are going to end up a fisherman.’ ‘This is great, we don’t think of anything else’, says L. ‘It makes us want to keep going south . . . One day I’ll go to Cape Verde. . .’ he goes on. ‘And I’ll go with you, but first we must fish!’ adds Z. ‘Once, dude, towards Sagres, I was in the boat and started to see a huge stain moving in the water. I thought it was the shadow of a cloud, but, since there was no moon, it was impossible . . . The thing started to get closer and I started thinking this wasn’t going to end up well . . . It wandered there for a while and it went away. I thought it could be a whale. A few days later I saw a TV show on the whale shark. I am sure that I saw the same thing . . . it’s rare to see this kind of thing. In the Algarve, I have seen sharks, but here, in the north, it’s unusual. Every once in a while we see some dolphins, but even those are rare. . .’ Z. asks again, ‘Are you all right? It’s a pity you can’t always come; with the rig and all, it’s not easy to bring people along with us. As soon as we get a larger boat, you just let us know when you want to come.’ I am at the bow of the boat, on signalling floaters. L. and Z. are at the stern. L. manoeuvres the outboard motor. A powerful, almost new Honda motor. Every once in a while, one or the other stands up to look at the sea. They confirm their intuitions: a wave that seems

Introduction ◆ 3

higher than the others, a stain or shadow that could be a tree trunk or even a container that has gone astray, all kinds of things that may endanger their lives. For me, lying on the floaters or standing, everything seems uniform and normal. I know it’s dark, that the sea has waves and that it is beautiful. The moon reflects on the lead and titanium coloured water, the noise from the motor, the boat riding the waves, the splashes, the smell of the sea and even the cold, is all exhilarating. We left Azenha a little after one in the morning. We have been at sea for about two hours. L. pushes the motor to its limit, always considering the seafaring conditions. He keeps his eyes on the probe to ‘see’ the bottom of the sea. When the line is straight, it means we are passing sand; when irregularities show up, it means we are navigating over rocks. Through the probe the fishermen also know where they are. This is because they already know the bottom of the sea. For example, shortly after leaving Azenha, towards the south, the probe traces a long straight line. They are certain that it is the beach at Odeceixe, even when the fog doesn’t allow them to see any light or other reference points on the coast. This time L. and Z. look for a ‘crown’ that they will recognize by the triangulation of several reference points: an area of sand that will remain behind, lights on the top of a cliff and the probe graphic that will show a long, rocky and shallow area. This area is called ‘Atalaia Point’, located in front of a small promontory with the same name just before the village of Arrifana and just after Amoreira beach, revealed by the probe. When we reach this zone, L. seems to search the sea with his eyes. He looks alternately at the sea and the probe, until he questions: ‘Here?!’ ‘Let’s go’, answers Z. I have to leave the bow. They ask me for a signalling floater (or flag). This is merely a piece of Styrofoam tied with nylon ropes to a cane that has a piece of cloth at the end, serving as a flag. They grasp one end of the madre (pelagic longline) and tie it to a big rock that we found on the laredo the night before, and throw it into the sea along with the floater. Then Z. holds the madre over his left wrist and L. goes towards the motor. He starts to manoeuvre the boat slowly in the direction of the current, while Z. lets the madre slide over his left forearm and wrist. Suddenly, the first fishhook shows up, followed by another and yet another. There are more than two thousand. Each one of them is a weapon that could pull Z. into the sea or, at the very least rip open the fisherman’s hand while launching the rig. I knew this was the most delicate moment in this art of fishing. I had not imagined, however, the real danger,

4 ◆ The Sea Commands

only overcome by automated gestures repeated many times through experience and expertise. Every once in a while, as often as the fishermen think convenient, the boat stops in order to tie another rock and floater to the madre. But this moment cannot take too long, otherwise the rig may ‘roll up’, when it is essential that it remains well extended at all times. The madre has around two thousand fishhooks, each one about an arm and a half’s distance from the next. This means that the madre is no less than four thousand metres in length. Two rigs are launched into the sea. This is eight kilometres of line, four thousand fishhooks. It doesn’t take long. One hour of silence and total concentration, no more. The last floater is tied to a big rock. The boat is tied to this last floater. Now all we can do is wait for the fish to bite. We need to wait. ‘So, are you all right?!’ Z. asks again. ‘This is tough, this is the most boring part; if a guy is not careful, there goes a finger.’ The fishermen’s hands are full of deep marks caused by the gliding nylon line and by the fishhooks that rip the skin. The sea salt dries the wounds but doesn’t let them close or completely heal. With the passing of the years, the hands become as hard as leather, especially the parts that hold the madre. ‘And now what do we do?’, I ask. ‘We wait . . . we use the opportunity to get some sleep.’ The boat is no more than four metres in length and less than one and a half metres in width. It has two cross-bars that divide it into three parts: the stern, which is closed by a wooden lid; the space between the two crossbars, in which are kept the fishing gear and the probe box; and the bow, where two fishermen complete the crew and also where the fuel tank is situated that maintains the outboard engine. ‘Sleep?! How?!’ I ask again. ‘If the sea is not too rough, it is more or less possible to sleep . . . you may feel sick though; with the boat moving, it’s not difficult, but, with the boat still, those who aren’t used to it almost always feel sick. . .’ I sit at the end of the boat, near the stern. Z. lays himself in the boat, also inside. L. remains next to the bow, half lying down, half sitting, on the seat next to the motor. We speak with our eyes closed. ‘Well, I’m going to eat something’, says L. They have brought bread, sausage, water, liquid yoghurts and apples. I get up, eat an apple and start to feel the boat undulating. I can’t manage to vomit. ‘You should have eaten more. It’s better to eat than to be on an empty stomach and not be able to vomit. The nausea won’t go away like that . . . don’t worry, we have to start pulling the rig’, remarks Z. ‘How long do you usually wait?’, I ask. ‘Two or three hours, but it depends on the size of the rig or on how the sea is feeling . . . today we have to start now . . . which is not that great.’ The fog that never left us is now thicker. The

Introduction ◆ 5

waves seem to be getting stronger, but I really don’t know if they are or if it feels that way because I am not feeling well. ‘We have to move fast!’ says L. He unties the boat from the floater. Z. grabs the tip of the madre and keeps pulling the line into the box. The first hook brings no fish, neither does the second. The physical force and resistance needed to pull the madre from the bottom of the sea to the boat are massive. This is where the fishermen’s work scars their hands. The fourth hook, just like the third, also has nothing on it. ‘This is a hassle, sometimes a box of sardines, as bait, is wasted at sea, in exchange for nothing’, says L. Z. continues to pull the rig. ‘It’s stuck!’, he declares. L. stops the boat to help pull the madre. It got loose. ‘Sometimes it gets stuck on the rocks and we have to cut it and leave it in the sea’, he explains. The undulation is stronger. ‘If it happens again, I’ll cut it’, threatens Z. ‘Right, don’t waste time. . .’, agrees L. We have pulled hundreds of hooks and there are still no fish. The floater appears and with it the first fish: a (safio) lenge. And then another. Larger. A moray eel comes right afterwards. ‘Let’s see if this compensates for the cost!’ says L. The first rig is finished. There are no more than a few dozen fish. Two large moray eels and six or seven congers, also large, lie at the bottom of the boat. ‘Do you think it will be enough?’ asks Z. ‘If it gets worse, cut the line and we’ll leave’, answers L. The waves are visibly higher. Z. pulls the first floater of the second rig. He cuts the line that was tied to the rock and starts to pull the madre. There is a ‘rascácio’, a typical fish of the Portuguese coast. As he keeps pulling, more fish start to appear: sea bass, sea breams, more moray eels and congers. ‘Ah, this is better!’, states L. Shortly after he says, ‘We have to go’. ‘Just a little longer’, suggests Z., while he takes a fish off the hook. ‘The last floater is just over there.’ More than three hours have gone by. It doesn’t take long; the rig doesn’t get caught in the rocks as it often does. ‘Let’s go.’ L. holds the compass and points the boat northwards. The boxes of the rigs are full of the tangled madres and hooks. At the bottom of the boat, next to the boxes, lie the fish. L. and Z. are at the stern. The floaters, placed in a disorderly way, are all in the bow. I sit on the last crossbar facing the stern, but with each wave that passes by I am thrown up in the air. ‘Maybe it’s better if you move toward the bow; try sitting in the bottom’, advises L. I move some of the floaters to make space among them. I end up sitting on one, this time with my back turned to the bow. L. and Z. remain silent. Their faces seem to be tense and thoughtful at the same time. We proceed, until a larger wave makes the floaters slip over me. I look forward, in the direction of the bow, and I understand the expressions I see on Z.’s

6 ◆ The Sea Commands

and L.’s faces. The waves are higher than the boat. I lie down across the floaters, and slip my feet under the edge of one of the boat’s rails. I pull the elastic of my hood tight, and grab onto the other rail. I am tired. The sun has risen, but it doesn’t look like it. The fog is like a white cloud that has landed on us. We keep heading north, I have no idea for how long. L. and Z. remain silent. They don’t utter a word. I feel like I’m going to fall asleep. I feel myself going into a state that I can only describe as dreamy, until I hear L. asking Z.: ‘Have we already passed Azenha?!’ The probe had revealed the long sandy shore of Odeceixe beach, I realized later. Shortly after, it should have revealed another plain line signifying the small Azenha cove. Perhaps it didn’t show it due to the heavy undulation. The fog limits visibility to only a few metres. In these conditions it is not possible for the boat to approach the beach, as it wouldn’t be able to avoid the rocks. The compass is therefore the only method of orientation. North is guaranteed. Azenha do Mar is, in fact, behind us. However, L. seems to proceed to the north. Shortly after, I note that we have waves over the stern, contrary to what was happening a few minutes earlier. We are already facing south. It isn’t possible to change directions rapidly, given the state of the sea. The boat had made a huge arch until it faced the opposite direction. A few minutes later it’s possible to see the rocks that protect the laredo. The waves pass over the small quay located on the south side. Everyone from Azenha is near the fish auction place. Men, women and children. L. manoeuvres the boat up next to a rock. Z. jumps into the water and grabs the hook that secures the boat. Up above, a fisherman manoeuvres the electric winch and starts pulling the boat to land. I jump to the sand, grab a roller and someone asks me, ‘Prosaste?!’ (‘Did you get sick?!’). *** This account is a descriptive exercise of a night spent at sea. It comes from personal experience, of course, and represents an attempt to make coherent and readable the notes that I made in my fieldwork diary,1 which ended with the following phrases: As soon as I arrived at the fish auction, P. was saying out loud: ‘I already knew that the sea was going to get rough! It was visible yesterday. I’ve been around for many years. . .’ . . . Z. and L. caught 56 kilos of fish that were worth around seventy-two thousand escudos (not forgetting to exclude taxes and what they invested). (21/05/1997)

Introduction ◆ 7

With the (re)writing of these notes, I want to introduce the reader to what marks daily life in the fishing community of Azenha do Mar: the relationship with the sea and the certainty of impermanency. These facts attain a huge magnitude in a community that thrives on the sea as practically its sole source of livelihood (the individuals who are a part of it have no land and rarely look for other sources of income) and whose daily lives are therefore marked by the uncertainty of access to the most basic resources. At the same time, I intend to begin to reflect on what I present in the following chapters, keeping in mind what I don’t say. While writing this introductory chapter after finishing all the other chapters, and reflecting on what I have written, I cannot avoid thinking also about some of the material that I omitted from this text. In an article published in 2001, Rolland Munro suggests the notion of disposal, which, translated into Portuguese, produces a reflection on what may be set aside (Munro’s suggestion), but also on what we don’t think about. However, what I have dispensed with from the focus of my analysis (namely, from the following chapters) is what I have often thought through, but that I obliterated or is simply implicit. In other words, for the creation of meanings that I present here, there are experiences, ideas, emotions, feelings that are not explicit. However, this in no way means that their importance is minor in justifying my reflections on Azenha do Mar or for the comprehension of my experience of it. Sometimes, what remains hidden or implicit (between the lines, perhaps) is just as important as what is explicit. For example, there are various ‘elements’ of the life of Azenha that I cannot, should not and do not want to make public. This is sometimes due to self-censorship, at other times due to ethical duty or even because I was asked to keep certain types of information to myself. Stories of smuggling, drug trafficking, prostitution and pandering, sexual abuse of minors and rape all happened, but I must not reveal them. However, they serve my reflection and analysis in a determinant way. Frequently they are the argument that allows us to understand some aspects of the community’s life. They were occasionally moments of epiphany in the field. Without those moments, I would not have understood, for example, the establishment of differentiated relations of proximity, the unequal accumulation of wealth, alliances and family ties that seemed ‘strange’ to me, or the unexpected actions of the police force.2 Simultaneously, the text is crossed with implicit meanings that must be clarified. The one that worries me the most is the ‘hidden’ place attributed to women. I must clarify that women are rarely ex-

8 ◆ The Sea Commands

cluded from the term ‘fishermen’. As a matter of fact, the large majority of domestic groups in Azenha do Mar are also businesses (including in a legal sense) composed of both men and women. Both are fishermen. One goes to sea and fishes; the other stays on land preparing the technologies that help in the fishing activity. Men go out to sea; women stay on land. However, both participate in the same work. It is true that they operate in different moments and with distinct chores. Nevertheless, as the women make a point of stating, they are also ‘licensed’ fishermen (it is common for women to have a seaman’s booklet or a legal status that makes them ‘partners’ of their husbands in the fishing business). In this way, the women are implicit in the text and are not, in any way, dismissed from my analysis. In terms of gender studies, what may be absent is a more feminine worldview. It goes without saying that my masculine entity meant I was closer to the men than the women during my fieldwork; it is useful, however, to recall the fact that during my first field experience, I had the privilege to have as a colleague Inês Meneses, with whom I had written a first book on Azenha do Mar (Se o Mar Deixar, 1996) in which gender issues are addressed. We clarified the fact that, already at that time, women’s daily life in Azenha did not correspond to the generally stereotyped images of feminine gender identity in nonurban spaces or, even, to those acted out by women living in proximity to the community. This is well noted mainly in the distinction between private and public spaces and, especially, in women’s access to the latter. Before proceeding with the presentation of the chapters that make up this volume, the following extract is worth noting: Quite different is what happens with the women of Azenha [by comparison with women from nearby communities]. During the day these women remain mostly outdoors or use the structures that are situated on the periphery of the housing area: small patios, warehouses or garages, or even an exterior kitchen. . . . These are the quarters that, when shown to an outsider of the domestic group, signify the existence of a certain degree of intimacy with that person, as they represent the territory where the women, in fact, conduct their daily activity. Often, it is there, outside the house, where we find them, focused on daily chores or simply in conversation with small groups of family members or neighbours. In this area around the house, where the woman carries on her work and socializes most of the time, when present, men are the ones who seem less at ease, and are often the object of fun for the groups of women. The majority of these women may be seen during the day in short but frequent wanderings through the village and the surrounding space, complying with their duties, visiting other women (generally with the pretext

Introduction ◆ 9

of having to plan some kind of collective work, or to make an offer or exchange various sorts of objects). . . . The outside, within or outside the community, is definitely, as we were able to observe in the practices of the population, a space used by women more so than men. We must not forget that even when there is fishing activity, the majority of men are at sea during the morning, and so the women have the opportunity to ‘invade’ even the most masculine spaces (like the café or the lookout point over the sea) without any constraints. What we had the chance to see was a constant negotiation process, where there is an attempt to appropriate this or that space alternatively or simultaneously by men and women, being defined as a special framework in constant mutation, with various appropriation levels and time periods. Such appropriation depends heavily on another more general level, with the differentiated use of several cultural elements that constitute gender ideology. There was not a particular ‘woman image’, but rather a framework made up of several images, always subjected to recomposition, either in the choice of pertinent elements in this or that situation, or in the relative value attributed to those elements. It should be noted that these recompositions cannot be seen as pacific and consensual processes but rather as an object of conflict and differentiation, when opposing or uniting, according to concrete situations, these or those individuals, favouring different types of relations with different objectives. Only in this way does the ideology of gender obtain the contours of a ‘social fact’: social and, therefore, relational and situational. (Meneses and Mendes 1996: 70–71)

With this I do not wish to state that matters of gender are less relevant in the context of Azenha do Mar. I only intend to clarify that the use of the masculine pronoun ‘fishermen’ does not relegate women to second place. They are an essential group for fishing activity, the appropriation of space and the establishing of community feelings. As stated above, the ideology of gender is both relational and situational. I have not ignored it in my analysis; rather, I have integrated it into the relational whole made up of these individuals and the environment (to which they belong), which is after all my main objective. With this idea, I ‘use’ Azenha do Mar as an ethnographic example. Ethnography is an exercise of similitude and likelihood. What I describe, what I tell only produces meaning for the reader because they associate what they read with something that, in some way, is familiar to them. This can be a field of knowledge (other ethnographies, for example) or personal experience (which is, perhaps, constituted by a visit to an ethnographed place). It is in this similitude that the likelihood of ethnographic narratives rests. Because of this, but also because I consider that fieldwork with observer participation is

10 ◆ The Sea Commands

the nucleus (and a surplus) of anthropology, I have centred the description of my research objective on an ethnographic example that I consider particularly heuristic: a fishing population that appeared only recently or, in other words, without ‘antecedents’ (cf. Fernandez n.d.), and little anchored in time, as we shall see in the following chapters. In this volume, in Chapter 1, I begin by looking for the antecedents of the population and I distinguish different moments of its history. The reconstruction is based essentially on oral tradition, on interviews and on the information that I collected while doing fieldwork. Who first gives rise to a place, the different times of territorial occupation through the different types of buildings and the main migratory movements that start to sediment the town constitute themselves as aggregating elements of the narrative. I cross and frame these elements within the economic and social history of the region and the country (particularly with the introduction of mechanical equipment in the fields and with the economic recession that took place in the mid 1970s). It is, therefore, a chapter that attempts to reconstruct simultaneously, the historical depth that, ultimately, is a trope for the group’s existence as a (‘real’) social unit, and a classical form of the ethnographic text, the monograph. Chapter 2, has the purpose of also reconstructing the becoming of a trend of thinking. I try in this chapter to show some moments lived in the field and the analytic and conceptual proposals of some authors in order to construct my own way of looking at Azenha do Mar as well as the perspectives that I conceived through time. This is a reflective exercise on what influenced me and determined my way of thinking and how I looked upon my field experience. For these purposes, I establish chronological and theoretical landmarks, as I explore the history of some current concepts, ways of thinking and sub-areas of anthropology: maritime anthropology (and/or fishing anthropology), anthropology of individuality and the notion of self and ecological anthropology. The latter is envisaged in a chronological line that attempts to show the pertinence of an analysis that considers the relation of concomitance and of mutual correspondence between the social/cultural and the natural environment. Anthony P. Cohen (especially his texts related to self-conscience, but also to community building) and Tim Ingold (regarding matters of environmental perception and the relationship between human beings and ‘nature’) are central authors in this reflection. I therefore create an archaeology of a thought, whose beginning I place in the binomial

Introduction ◆ 11

field/literature of maritime anthropology, to reach environmental anthropology and the relationship between individuals and ecological contexts of belonging. In Chapter 3, I return more explicitly to Azenha do Mar and rehearse a description of day-to-day life marked by the exploitation of fishery resources, trying, in this way, to establish a relational framework between the community’s daily life and its environmental context. In other words, I try to put into perspective contexts of mutual determinacy between labour (the tasks associated with fishing activity) and the binomial environment/landscape where that same labour takes place. The technologies used in fishing activity, the organization of chores and the uncertainty and/or incapacity of controlling resources are, therefore, understood in a perspective that relates the interaction between human knowledge and the natural/environmental framework in which they occur. I proceed in Chapter 4, titled ‘Personal Experience and Fieldwork’, with a reflection on the production of anthropological knowledge. It is my own fieldwork experience with participant observation that I concentrate on as the object of my analysis. This had the specificity of dividing itself into two different time periods: an initial one, which was developed through team work with another anthropologist, Inês Meneses, and another, carried out on my own, five years later. This fact was determinant for the different approaches and points of view that I follow throughout this chapter. Simultaneously, I explore the fieldwork experience as being itself a space for knowledge production. The relationships and friendships that I maintained with my hosts and informants, the house or the place where I lived, are overlapping elements of analysis, helping to explain some of my conclusions. As an example, Brejão, the closest place to Azenha do Mar, where the houses I lived in during the fieldwork are located, revealed itself as a place of reflection in two distinct but inseparable ways. On the one hand, it allowed for some personal ‘shelter’, which facilitated the analytic work on the data that I collected; on the other hand, it constituted, continuously, a ‘mirror’ of the fishermen’s place, contributing in a very determinant way to the explicitness of the identitary image attributed to the fishermen. In reality, this chapter aims to be an exercise centred on ways of producing anthropological knowledge and, therefore, it presents fieldwork with participant observation as a process and not a methodology. At the same time, I want to solidify the exercise of verisimilitude that I mentioned earlier. Ethnography is a result of the contexts

12 ◆ The Sea Commands

of interaction between individuals, which deserve to be explained and clarified so that the similitude and verisimilitude of ethnographic texts is not merely something plausible, but also comprehensible in the precise ways in which they are first established: in the relationships with other beings. In spite of this more reflective option, the methods and techniques that sustain research in the social sciences were used during the fieldwork and, although they are not considered necessarily or exclusively the instruments that shed more ‘light’ on what is being observed,3 they deserve some recognition. The literature in Portugal on methodology in/for anthropology is rather sparse. The works of Carlos D. Moreira, Planeamento e Estratégias da Investigação Social (1994) and Teorias e Práticas de Investigação (2007), along with one other book of a more reflective nature, Experiência Etnográfica em Ciências Sociais, edited by Telmo Caria (2005), are notorious and, together, help to offset the lack of methodology manuals in the social sciences written by anthropologists for anthropologists.4 It is therefore necessary that some methods and techniques used in the research process for this volume should be commented upon. The population census, an instrument that made it possible to know each one of the domestic groups, and at the same time allowed the presentation of the researcher(s) and their objectives, was followed by the selection of the population, and was based on a form with previously prepared questions that inquired about the composition of the household – among other things, the number of members, genealogy, places of origin, education, professional occupation, type of housing, date of settlement, fisherman or not, what type of vessel, company, fishing technology and so on. This same census gave rise to the structuring of a questionnaire that was applied to the population and that attempted to discover the individual reasons behind the migration movement to Azenha do Mar. At that point, due to doubts and gaps in the information, but with enough data to design open-ended interviews, we proceeded to what is called participant observation. That is to say, the ‘field calendar’ was now determined by the people with whom we were in contact, taking into consideration their professional commitments and other factors. Therefore, the interviews and/or questions (for example about the art of fishing and the various species) were conditioned by the population’s daily life and, sometimes, by their suggestions and requests. It should be noted here that no tape recorder was used, simply because it was re-

Introduction ◆ 13

quested by most people. This established a pattern of research that aimed to create equal terms among ‘informants’, avoiding situations of doubt and suspicion. Finally, a note about using photography. As we know, visual anthropology has established itself and, at the same time, has reached a position of notoriety (Banks 1997). However, in this research, perhaps due to the lack of specific preparation, video was not used and photography was always considered a technique of accessory research that tended to the static fixation of the population’s daily life and to document artefacts used for fishing. In spite of this, after two periods already spent in the field, looking at the pictures taken, they stand out not only for their aesthetic quality, but essentially for their ambivalence, showing compositions that are susceptible to being analysed independently of the larger context in which they happened, as well as drawing our attention to what is beyond the fixed frame. If these references to methods and techniques used during fieldwork are justified, I believe that a deeper analysis of the process of immersion in the field is required. This is to say, ‘life’ in the field as a research ‘method’ acquires larger relevance when we recognize that participant observation is without a doubt and in a very determined way conditioned in its objectives by the inherent subjectivities of each researcher. Hence the option used for Chapter 4. Azenha do Mar, while not being a very touristic place, is located on an extension of coastline where tourism has grown exponentially in recent decades. If in Chapter 3 I explore the relationship between individuals and ‘nature’, in Chapter 5 I relate the building of a community and the local scenario with the presence of tourists. I privilege the approach that considers the individual’s consciousness of themselves as the first locus in establishing the social and, in this, the phenomena of inter-communication between hosts and guests. I divide the latter into two distinct groups: ‘residential tourists’ and tourists (those who visit but stay no more than a few days). In order to establish this distinction, I trace the region’s tourism ‘history’, and here I make evident the role of some of the tourists and the specificity of their interrelationship with the inhabitants of Azenha. This interrelationship has contributed to the transformation of the value that the locals attribute to the natural scenario of the region, changing the notion of relative periphery and the ways in which they see their way of life and themselves. In Chapter 6, I return to the concept of community and confront it with what is experienced, lived, in Azenha. With that objective, I

14 ◆ The Sea Commands

trace a history of the concept of community in the social sciences, especially in what pertains to anthropology; I set it alongside the ‘emic’ expressions that allow us to understand how the feeling of community arises within the population. I understand the notion of community as an ethical expression to translate other expressions and, above all, inclusion and distinction, feelings of belonging and exclusion felt by people who belong to a certain group. In this perspective, I proceed with the analysis of images that are projected about Azenha, particularly those that derive from Brejão. As such, the fishing activity and the images that are centred on who practises it are contextualized, simultaneously, in the day-to-day of the population, in its own history and in the possible historical justifications for the images that were being drawn of the majority of the population and fishermen. I also return to the relation between settlement and natural scenario, and I attempt a ‘human ecology’ to understand Azenha as a society. For this purpose, I make use of Tim Ingold’s proposals on perception of the environment and (re)settlement of human beings as organismpersons, therefore subject to development processes not detached from ecological contexts. As such, I propose an understanding that considers the individuals and their ways of social organization as part of an intricate relationship among themselves (as entities, as well as collectives) and the scenario in which they live and integrate. I am, therefore, finishing a train of thought in which Azenha do Mar is understood as an ‘adaptive response’ to social contexts (historical, economic and cultural), but also to ecological frameworks. The use of technologies, the social and professional competencies, the individual intentions (often shared), the competition that may be seen in lying and secrecy appear, in this way, as elements of a social life that cannot be disconnected from the ecological contexts in which they occur. But, as I suggest, this does not mean that the processes of individuality and/or of adaptation override the search for ways of social and cultural organization. On the contrary, the objective of the entire text is, in brief, to try to understand how social ties are established, the sense of community, and what relevance the perception of nature has for social organization. These are the answers that I look for. Azenha do Mar, being a recent settlement, is a good place for a reflection that questions why we organize ourselves in certain ways and, therefore, how the situations in which we integrate and, at the same time, what surrounds us are implied in those same forms of social organization.

Introduction ◆ 15

Kay Milton, one of the authors who has worked more on ‘environmental matters’ (whether environmental movements, emotional relations that individuals establish with the surrounding environment, or the concomitant relation that is established between forms of social organization and the ecological contexts in which they occur), similarly to Tim Ingold, considers that it is not possible to ponder social learning processes without considering the ways in which individuals perceive the surrounding environment (see, for example, Milton 2002; Ingold and Kurttila 2000). In fact, listening to the individuals of Azenha do Mar talking about their lives, we are able to understand that the sea is what determines their day-to-day. The sea is always an imperative common denominator of the ways in which time and space are occupied. For a better understanding of how the sea emerges as a structuring factor, one has to recall the moments (which may extend for months) in which it is not possible to go out to sea to fish and, therefore, families’ financial resources are drastically reduced (or non-existent), with all the inherent consequences. Therefore, the recurrence of the expression that designates this text, ‘the sea commands’, assumes the outline of an axiom for one of the structuring factors of Azenha do Mar’s social group. For the fishermen, the proposition is in fact quite evident. This is to say, the power of the sea is not thought of in a figurative sense. It is, rather, experienced corporeally and daily. Making use of a fisherman’s words, ‘the prices at the fish auction may go up or down and we earn more or less, but it is the sea that gives and takes away our food’. Finally, a word on some options that inform, structure and organize this text from an epistemological and formal point of view. Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (a posthumous volume that compiles a cycle of six conferences on literary values for the twenty-first century, which took place at Harvard University) advocates ‘Lightness’, ‘Speed’, ‘Exactness’, ‘Visibility’, ‘Multitude’ and the ‘Beginning and Ending’ as elements that should be preserved, developed and made visible in literary production (Calvino 1990). These same values, these same conferences surpassed the field of (fictional) literature and became, somehow and for some, philosophy and/or an ethic. I certainly do not comply with Italo Calvino’s suggestions. However, I try to keep the text light, fast and exact. At the same time, I attempt a multiple approach to what may result from the experience of participant observation (as will be evident in the different chapters), and I wish to give visibility to that multiplicity so that I may finish what I believe to have started, with

16 ◆ The Sea Commands

Inês Meneses, in Se o Mar Deixar (1996). For this reason, every time I thought it would be useful, I ‘revisited’ that text and integrated it into this new account of my personal and ethnographic experience of Azenha do Mar. If, with this text, I am opening new paths for analysis that I would like to pursue, I would also like to finish what I started in If the Sea Allows It and, above all, get closer to possible answers to the many questions, doubts and ‘dissatisfactions’ that remained at the time. The multitude of approaches that I seek is based on the various textual style forms that I used and in the different perspectives that I tried. As I said earlier, this introduction is followed by chapters that are more ‘orthodox’ and ‘ethnographic’ in form, and others in which I have tried a more essayistic style, more prone to interpretation. At the same time, I tried to look at Azenha do Mar from different perspectives, considering that the multitude is what structures a community. Therefore, the perspectives that I use may claim an ontological anthropology or an ethnography of material culture. In this way, I tried to consubstantiate the recent proposals of Viveiros de Castro, which may be, provocatively, summed up in the phrase ‘The anthropologist necessarily uses his own culture; the native is sufficiently used by his’ (Castro 2002: 114), and I attempted a writing style that would contribute to an anthropology that not only tries to think the ‘other’ from his own discourse, but is also capable of being shared outside the academy walls, for it not only avoids the excessive strange conceptualization of the ‘native’, but tries with the description to refer possible questions and answers to the arguments presented locally. It is exactly here that I consider the pertinence of nature or/and how it is perceived. If we know that there are several factors that contributed to the ‘birth’ and maintenance of Azenha do Mar (see Chapters 1 to 3), in the discourses of the locals who inhabit it, ‘nature’ is exalted as the main element in their lives. I understand, therefore, that the perception of the environment contributes to particular worldviews that, in turn, condition forms of social organization. This is uniquely notorious in the ways in which the territory, the scenario is perceived and valued locally (see Chapters 5 and 6). As I have stated, the sea emerges as a metaphor especially apt for this perception, as it materializes in one of nature’s elements over which we have less control. To make the metaphor evident is a daily exercise carried out by the fishermen. Thus, I repeat, the title ‘the sea commands’.

Introduction ◆ 17

Notes 1. The use of a diary, a ‘tradition’ of anthropological research which culminated in the controversial publication of Bronislaw Malinowski’s diaries in 1967 (a publication that was authorized and published by Malinowski’s second wife, and with an introduction written by his student, Raymond Firth), was a constant throughout my field research. I gathered descriptions, accounts, ideas and even reviews of texts in several notebooks during and after field research. In these volumes I made daily entries in which I accounted for all that I had done during the day. Usually, I wrote at night. As the fieldwork went on, the entries became more selective and, I now realize, written with more prospective reflections, more than mere descriptions; I took note of ideas with the possible text in mind. Perhaps I was, then, moving from an ethnography to an attempt at an anthropological essay. 2. Another aspect that may eventually require a more complete explanation has to do with smuggling and drug trafficking. I distinguish these two activities not because of imposing moral or legal reasons of my own, but because they are locally understood/judged in a totally different way. The first activity mentioned, smuggling, was widespread in the recent past (until Portugal joined the European Union); it was practised by a large part of the population and considered a legitimate source of income, although recognized as illegal and subject to sanctions. It is still carried out, although with much less frequency. The second activity mentioned, drug trafficking, is not common; it is carried out by very few individuals and is not accepted as a legitimate activity. But both activities, as I mention in the following chapters, were/are vital in order to understand some social changes (and even the buildings and landscape) in Azenha. I do not explore them in my analysis, because (a) I do not think I should contribute to limiting anybody’s liberty; (b) I should not reveal what I always understood to be the population’s ‘secrets’; and (c) because I was asked not to speak much about these matters. 3. This is to say, I do not believe that the set of techniques and methods applied during anthropological research (interviews, census, life or family stories, etc.) is a more valid tool for data collection than the apparently simple act of ‘being there’, to invoke Clifford Geertz’s famous expression (1988). On the contrary, it seems to me that it is the fact of remaining in the field for quite a long time that allows us to: (a) collect more information; (b) select, with pertinence, the appropriate research techniques and methods; and (c), above all, highlight the advantage of anthropology: the communication of information based on personal experience. 4. In 2016, myself and Humberto Martins edited a book, Trabalho de Campo: Envolvimento e Experiências em Antropologia (Fieldwork: Involvement and Experiences in Anthropology) with the aim to close

18 ◆ The Sea Commands

this gap. In 2019, again with Humberto Martins, I edited another book, Contos Antropológicos (Anthropological Tales), on personal fieldwork experiences but specifically asking the different contributors to give freedom to their literary creativity in order to put into written words what is usually recalled as an anecdote or silenced in academic texts.

1 A Monographic Overview Azenha Do Mar’s Place in Space and Time

‘What I can tell you won’t be of much interest to you . . . or maybe it will. Go and talk to my father instead . . . although I’m not sure if you will manage to get anything out of him anyway, because if you talk with A. he’ll tell you something different . . . you’ll notice this is a fishermen thing, each one has their own story . . . it’s not like everything is a lie, maybe it is all true, but they never tell you everything, only what they want. . .’ These words appear related to the (inter)subjectivity and relativity of the information collected during fieldwork. What I would hear, the fisherman reminded me, would not necessarily correspond to past events. It would not necessarily be a lie either. Instead, it would be an expression of compromised memories with a present that would be (re)making the past. Therefore, it would be good to recall, as we begin this chapter about Azenha do Mar, the words used by Bilo Kasi, the Orung Ulu elder, to prelude her narratives: ‘They lie, we lie’.1 I’m sure they did not lie to me. And so I believe I will not be lying either. It is worth recalling, however, that memory is always a construction that reconstructs, and that oblivion is a part of it. Hence, the picture I am presenting to you of the place of Azenha do Mar in space and time is an exercise in similarity and verisimilitude, more than truth. Azenha do Mar belongs to the parish of S. Teotónio, one of the eleven administrative units that make up the municipality of Odemira.2 Its existence, as will become evident throughout this work, is intimately connected to nature’s whims and the consequent

20 ◆ The Sea Commands

formation of a natural bay open to the Atlantic. Obviously, other conditions were essential to allow a group of people to settle there in the mid 1960s. If the search for a source of livelihood was one of those conditions, no less relevant was the search for a space of individual freedom and a better future. This freedom and future were consolidated in what the first migrants believed they would find by the sea: work without an employer, an uncertain but freely accessible income, and a no man’s land. Coastal artisanal fishing, limited to groups of two, the absence of a boss or employer, and clandestine building on the shore satisfied and seduced, as I heard many times, those who were in a situation of almost total dependence on a major landowner. Hence, an individual motivational picture was built with conditions of ecological and/or environmental possibility. First of all, however, it is important to outline the underlying geographical, social and historical contexts of Azenha, a place that is made up of a little over 150 inhabitants and around fifty houses, occupied mainly by nuclear families, and where virtually everyone is involved in fishing.3 If we follow a north–south direction, we find the neighbouring town, also by the sea, of Zambujeira do Mar, and after that, about two kilometres from the shore, Brejão, and south of there, Odeceixe, already in the municipality of Aljezur, in the Algarve. Both Zambujeira and Odeceixe, unlike Azenha and Brejão, are nowadays strongly affected by tourism. The easily accessible beaches, the beauty of the surrounding landscape, along with the search for alternative routes by tourists, have favoured the development of an economic activity that, until the mid 1980s, was centred forty kilometres south, on the coast of the Algarve. With the increase in tourism and the consequent new source of income for the local population, the small fishing port in Zambujeira do Mar suffered a decline in activity and is now being used almost exclusively to supply local restaurants. The fishermen, like the majority of the population in these places, have other sources of income connected to tourism, the most common of these being the renting of rooms and apartments. This income allows them to live comfortably during the low season. Odeceixe, being a place of residence for a large number of foreigners, most of them German, has become a place where commerce has acquired a much greater dynamic compared to neighbouring villages. This commerce, along with tourism and real estate business, thus replaces agriculture as the main source of income. In 1992, for the first time, people began looking for summer homes in Brejão. Nevertheless, in this place, located in the parish of S. Teotónio, agriculture

A Monographic Overview ◆ 21

remains the main source of livelihood, both for those who own land and for the majority of employees from the different transnational agricultural companies that exploit a significant part of the croplands surrounding the village. Within the neighbouring area, where tourism or its dependent activities are a constant, Azenha appears to be an exception. Tourism does not cease to be a reality, and it is a determinant of daily life in the summer, but not in a way that is immediately perceptible, having only the two restaurants/cafés as its most visible aspect. However, with fishing and marriage covenants with foreigners reaching distinct levels, the importance of tourism is not to be belittled. In fishing, demand and the consequent increase in prices follow the touristic activity cycle. Marriage covenants or bonding between locals and foreigners are a result of population movements caused by tourism. This coming and going of tourists has also allowed for greater selfawareness, as seen in Chapter 5. In the late 1960s, each of these places – Zambujeira do Mar, Brejão and Odeceixe – had little more than three hundred inhabitants. Zambujeira was a population core, where subsistence agriculture, livestock farming and fishing in summer months ensured survival. In Brejão, work on the land was the only possibility for those living there. Of all these places, Odeceixe4 was the first to suffer the changes brought about by tourism. However, until then, agriculture was also the only source of income in a region of the country where cash movements were frequently replaced by direct exchange, both of goods and labour. Thus, all of these places were made up mainly of rural workers without land. Landowners – addressed as farmers by the workers – gave small portions of terrain to some of the workers, where they would allow them to build or grow their own food. This implied an annual rent and manual labour on the owner’s lands. There was no other income, apart from the products extracted from the land. Even the wages the workers could earn were not fair. Some of the families currently residing in Azenha are witnesses to those times and ways of living, as will be discussed later. Vila Velha, a rural parish studied by José Cutileiro in the 1960s, although far inland from the coast and from Azenha do Mar, represented a social and economic framework similar to those seen in the villages from which the current inhabitants of Azenha migrated. Consequently, it is a good reference that helps us to understand the situation of economic dependency suffered by villagers in the Alentejo:

22 ◆ The Sea Commands

Their employment conditions [those of the rural workers] are inferior to those offered to any other group. They do not earn wages attributable to Sundays, which is a day off, and to rainy days, in which they are unable to work. . . . Their wages are pretty low when compared with industrial wages or even agricultural wages offered in other regions. (Cutileiro 1977: 75–76;5 for a previous time period, see Picão [1903] 1983)

In another knowledge production context, a text by Eugénio Castro Caldas deserves to be quoted. In a single paragraph, he clarifies the state of poverty and dependency suffered by the ‘landless employees’ from the Alentejo and his amazement at a reality described as follows: . . . [the landless employees of Alentejo are at the] zero value of the organogram of the occupation and employment in agriculture in the cereal estates of the Alentejo, our respondent [the individual he wanted to interview, but had no courage to] and his family, wife, and two children of four and six, were lying on the wooden bed with a bucket of water by their side. (Caldas 1991: 552)

This social overview had already been observed by an English traveller in the late nineteenth century in the region that includes Azenha do Mar, the southwest of Portugal. It is worth mentioning. In 1818, George Landmann, lieutenant-colonel in the British Corps of Royal Engineers, published a work entitled Historical, Military and Picturesque Observations on Portugal. In it, the traveller wrote that the roads, almost always ‘simple routes’, were generally bad, that the land had very few inhabitants, that the individuals and their families he found lived, with few exceptions, in the most absolute misery and in poor health and hygiene conditions, that malaria was common, that the crops were rare and the soil was barren, that the sand blown by the north and north-westerly winds would extend ‘several leagues’ into the interior, and that marshes were frequent between Vila do Bispo and Aljezur (cf. Quaresma 1991: 10–21). It should be noted that the roads travelled by Landmann would rarely take him to the coast, which is probably why we do not find any reference to beaches in these records. Consequently, there is also no mention of ‘beach fashion’ or the preference for accommodation near the sea, which was then being instituted throughout Europe (this is, nowadays, the main tourist magnet in southwest Portugal). The only reference made by Landmann concerning the sea and the exploitation of its resources appears in relation to Sagres. The trav-

A Monographic Overview ◆ 23

eller wrote that this place was no more than a ‘simple fishing village, located at the end of a small bay’ (Quaresma 1991: 19). It is also appropriate to add that, curiously, in Baldaque da Silva’s monumental work, O Estado Actual das Pescas em Portugal,6 published in 1891 but dating back to 1886, a fishing village called Sagres is never mapped.7 When Baldaque da Silva collected these data for the southwest coast of Portugal (understood as an imaginary line stretching from Sines/Porto Covo to S. Vicente/Sagres), he referred to the existence of fishermen in Porto Covo (or Porto Covo Bandeira, as it was known then because of the noble landowner); in Vila Nova de Milfontes (the oldest port, with two natural shelters, one being the mouth of the Mira River and the other the oceanic Porto das Barcas); in Calheta do Sardão (near Cabo Sardão); and in Arrifana (between towering cliffs, in the province of the Algarve). One century after the mapping of Baldaque da Silva, Carlos D. Moreira brings together in his book, Populações Marítimas em Portugal (1987), data on the following southwestern fishing ports: Porto Covo, Vila Nova de Milfontes (still with the two natural shelters referenced by Baldaque da Silva), Lapa das Pombas (near Almograve), Entradas das Barcas (in Zambujeira do Mar), Azenha do Mar, Zimbreirinha and Forno (both near the village of Carrapateira) and, contrary to what was mapped by the eighteenth-century scholar, Sagres appears already as having a port central to the fishing flow in the Costa Vicentina and the southwest of the Alentejo. Going back to Azenha do Mar and the socio-economic and fieldwork conditions, and taking into account the interviews I conducted, the rural workers from this moorland8 consider that working conditions on the coastline are better than those found in the inner Alentejo, at least until the building of the Santa Clara dam and the irrigation system it instigated, a period when many migrants arrived from the north of the country and the Algarve and, consequently, daily wages became more frequent. Until then, in the mid 1960s, most plots were leased to a domestic group (generally a nuclear family) for a fee paid in goods corresponding to half of the produce. Apart from that, it was common (as already mentioned) for farmers to give their tenants (as well as those who worked for daily wages) small portions of land for the building of houses, which would not happen with the same frequency on the plains of the inner Alentejo. However, such was the poverty, hunger and economic dependency that the word ‘slavery’ came up many times in the accounts I heard. Thus, migration, whether abroad or to the major cities, presented it-

24 ◆ The Sea Commands

self as the only solution to increase income. This solution then became a necessity for people deprived of any economic power, allied to a high illiteracy rate and the severe pressure exerted by the central political power to restrict emigration, as the text by Eugénio Castro Caldas (1991) concludes. For this author, the policy of the central government then aimed to keep the people in the fields, managing the workforce from the urban industrial belts. Moving to the coast, and fishing, started happening in this context as a plan B, attractive because people could, in this way, avoid emigration and wage employment within industries in the major urban centres. Nevertheless, in order for this activity to become an important or even a primary means of livelihood, people needed the funds to acquire a boat, as well as the know-how and the technology required for the fishing business. These funds and knowledge were not held by those who first came to the place that is nowadays known as Azenha do Mar. With the purpose of understanding the different migratory movements that led to the creation of Azenha, I find it relevant to point out a selection of important moments in the lives of a few current residents. The aim is not to construct life or family stories in a generational perspective, through which we can delineate life journeys that ‘follow’ a generational logic of transmitting cultural, social and economic capital. Instead, the purpose is to understand how these individuals managed to correlate with their surroundings (natural, social and economic) in an intentional and conscious way, as opposed to a perspective that sees lineage as a determinant of life paths. As will be discussed later, the paths of each family and of each adult individual are a result of the relation between two essential vectors: surrounding environment and intention. Simply put, the stories that follow emphasize that the differences and/or the similarities of the paths taken by the individuals throughout their lives are a result of the relationship between the environment in which life unfolds and intents (motivation and choice). Thus, in the framework of this proposal, the family portraits and the life paths that follow are illustrative of the migration process that led to the creation of Azenha do Mar, the contexts of repulsion and attraction, the successful agency of the individuals considered in these contexts, and they reflect the (dis)continuity of a relational process between people who today reside in the village and the natural environment that surrounds them. In the aforementioned context of obvious shortage of resources, a man from Odeceixe, along with his family, here under the pseud-

A Monographic Overview ◆ 25

onym of Ms.,9 has fishing as his main source of income.10 Without any land, renting a small property by the sea and the mouth of the River Seixe, they took advantage of the conditions offered by the mouth of the river to fish with a small boat of forgotten origins and improvised nets. The sea, despite being so close, was not regularly frequented, whether for lack of trust in the safety of the boat, or for the treacherous currents at the mouth of the river.11 The small quantities of fish were sold mostly in the village of Odeceixe. Sometimes, ‘if luck was plentiful’, the ‘woman’, with the help of a donkey, would take small trips to the nearby villages in order to sell every last fish. It was on these occasions that the desire grew to ‘leave the work on shore’ and go out to fish even more. ‘That seemed to work. . .’, said the ‘father’. ‘If I could go out into the sea, I could bring more and better fish. . .’ The lands that surrounded the house were widely known. The work on the farms, the herding of goats and cows, the ‘harvest of algae’12 that they also completed in the summer, the mill where they would go to grind cereal, or simply wandering across the cliffs by the sea, caused Ms. (father, mother and children, for the day-to-day routine almost always included the whole family, since ‘no one could stay with the children. . .’) to become aware of the existence of a little cove just north of their house. This cove was of easy access, whether by land or by sea, and offered good conditions to go out into the sea and to shelter the boat. In addition, the plots that ended at the shore belonged to an unknown absentee landowner,13 which made it easier to occupy part of that terrain. The eldest son, M., remembers, some forty years past: ‘My father came here because he had a place to keep the boat and make a caseta, he could go out to sea every day and store his gear. . . Then the others came, saw this worked and starting hanging around’.14 (09/1992)

Old M., as everyone calls him to distinguish him from his eldest son, started by staying only during the summer. He built a shack made of reeds15 (an endogenous and abundant resource in the region), where he slept, worked and kept his fishing paraphernalia. His wife accompanied him, helping him prepare his gear and harvesting, along with other women from neighbouring montes,16 the algae that washed ashore; afterwards, when it was dried, they would sell it to a processing facility in the Setubal area. About three or four summers later, because ‘that was no way of living’ and because he was ‘working from sunrise to sunset for someone else and never having anything . . . not even money for shoes’, old M. decided to have more children ‘in another life’. Old M. ended up improving the reed shack,

26 ◆ The Sea Commands

adding a few wooden boards and ‘a stronger door’, and using the monte Assenha17 as his permanent residence,18 leaving his children there until this day. A few years later, another couple who, during the summer, were leaving their place of origin, São Miguel, to devote themselves to algae harvesting in the coves surrounding present-day Azenha do Mar, acquired a boat and also stayed on the southern side of the stream of Assenha,19 in order to fish as their main source of income. For two or four years (the information gathered does not exclude one or the other, which is not essential to this fragment20), they were the only ones who remained for the whole twelve months of the year in the place that is today Azenha do Mar. Only during the summer did they have the company of other families who came for the ‘limo harvest’.21 Note that there is no definite or ‘peaceful’ answer as to who arrived first at Azenha, or who would claim the right to be considered the founder of the village. Rivalry between fishermen from Azenha who seek out positions of relative prestige, grounded in seniority, led each of the informers to ‘ensure’ that they were the pioneers of the place, to the detriment of the others. Arriving first also guarantees, to the alleged pioneers, a position of added prestige. Seniority is an instrument that gives them the right to be respected and heard. They are the ones who better know the territory and would better defend it and present it to newcomers. They are the ones with more experience; thus, they are also the masters of the art of fishing. They are also, due to working at sea for a quarter of a century, the ones who say they have never done anything else; hence, they are ‘professional fishermen’. In this way, they become the guardians of the collective memory. There are no doubts, however, that one of the conditions that allowed the establishment of the place was the amount of fish that could be found on the rocky bottom of the sea near the shore. This was because, not so long ago, physical strength was the only available form of energy to move the boats, which forced the fishermen to live in places near good fishing spots. Nevertheless, to know where to find these spots, one needed to know the bottom of the sea; one needed fishing experience in the small coves surrounding the laredo of Azenha.22 Consequently, the story of the Ms. family from the mouth of the Seixe River stands out as the most credible. They were the only ones who were already fishing before migrating to Azenha and, therefore, also the only ones to know the shore. However, more than finding out who arrived first, what I want to reveal here is the process of

A Monographic Overview ◆ 27

migration and the resulting foundation of Azenha and, essentially, following this process, to understand the constitution of individual situational logics that, when crossed, will create a sense of community between the migrants and will be used to delineate the process of relationships between people and the environment to which they belong. Until the late 1970s, the migration process that led to the creation of Azenha do Mar guided itself along the aforementioned lines and with great irregularity. If moving did not force major investments in the first place, independence in the workplace and autonomy in resource management was to be expected. Migration, which started by being seasonal, later lasted for long periods of time, alternating with small periods in the places of origin. This irregularity in permanence at the fishing site indicates how this new way of livelihood was seen as a temporary solution. The stereotype of the emigrant who is ‘out there fighting for his life’23 in order to return to his place of origin as soon as possible would appear in the family strategies used by those who turned to fishing in Azenha. On the one hand, the few belongings they had in their places of origin were never abandoned, despite the almost complete economic unfeasibility of making a profit; on the other hand, only about twenty years after the arrival in the late 1980s (those arriving being children or teenagers) did financial investment in real estate start to take place in Azenha (the first definitive houses were then being built) and, simultaneously, fishing was no longer a ‘trial’, an ‘attempt’, a situational response, but rather became a ‘way of life’ that was adopted as a whole. This activity was, then, the essential characteristic of the identity of the people who inhabited the place. We can even talk of ‘occupational identity’, fancy terminology in the fields of the sociology of work and psychology. However, let us return to the ‘story of the Ms.’, a good case to better understand the reason that led to the migratory process that created Azenha do Mar. It was the incapacity to survive from paid work in the fields alone, along with the growing monetization of the economy, that led the Ms. to dedicate all of their time to fishing and other parallel activities, such as the harvesting of algae and the distribution and sale of fish. Moving north is the result of an adaptation to the ecosystem. The natural cove, where today the small fishing port of Azenha stands, provided, as we have shown, the natural conditions needed for old M.’s secondary activity to become the primary one. The small bay trimmed in the high cliffs and, in the middle, almost closed to the sea by a rock, formed a good shelter. It had easy access, whether by land or sea, and it was near the residence the family had to that date.

28 ◆ The Sea Commands

Nowadays, besides having in common a connection to fishing, all the families from Azenha also share the reasons that led them to leave their place of origin to live on the coast, with fishing as their main activity. All in all, the village of Azenha was the result of a migratory process, of the abandonment of unsurmountable rural poverty situations, and/or the search for better living conditions. Despite the differences we might find, we need not summarize the stories of every family and individual that inhabits Azenha nowadays to illustrate the reoccurrence of the factors of repulsion and attraction that E.G. Ravenstein proposed in the late nineteenth century.24 However, it is useful to divide the residents of Azenha into two groups, to simplify the analysis. The first group saw in fishing (and, consequently, migration to Azenha) an escape from the poverty experienced in the fields. The other group, if not running away from poverty, could at least find, in fishing, a positive solution to the difficulty in finding unskilled work outside agricultural work. The first group encompasses the older individuals who live in Azenha, the first in this migratory process. The second is formed by the younger individuals, who only moved to Azenha after the first inhabited nucleus was created. A fragment of the family story of the Ss. will serve as an illustration for this last group. R., one of the eight sons and daughters of a couple of tenants, was born on a monte located a little more than a kilometre away from Azenha do Mar. Shortly after finishing primary school, at about twelve years of age, he went out to work in the Algarve as a lobby boy in the hotel industry. He also worked at a supermarket and was a fisherman, for a short period of time, on a trawler. These occupations alternated with long periods at the monte M., where he had fun with childhood friends and tourists who came along, until he undertook compulsory military service. Having finished the service, he went back to Brejão and the monte. Soon after he turned twenty, he married a tourist from Lisbon who spent the summer months there. He had two children from this marriage. At that time, because he was married and said he wanted to live there, away from the more urban areas, he opened a café, which he ran successfully for five years. At the same time, he would occasionally go fishing with one of the two brothers who had left the monte and the work there to dedicate himself fully to fishing in Azenha do Mar. In the early 1980s, facing problems with renting the space where the café was, and not having the possibility to establish himself anywhere else, he decided to try his luck fishing. As he states:

A Monographic Overview ◆ 29

‘. . . it was just next door and I didn’t want to work for an employer anymore . . . Maybe we work, but it pays well. Important to know, though . . . I already knew this life. Sea life is a free life, where you don’t have to report to anyone . . . I work whenever I feel like it, as long as there’s fish. . . !’ (01/1993)

The fishing activity and Azenha itself thus appeared as a situation of recourse that caused little change. It was nearby, just next door, and served the urgent purpose of making money. It was a known spot where he could depend on his two brothers, who, as we have seen, had also chosen fishing and that place in particular to make a living. Ultimately he moved into the shack in Azenha built by his younger brother, who had at the time temporarily emigrated to Germany, and used his boat until 1992, when he bought his own. From what we can understand of what R. says, proximity made moving easier, firstly because a new social context not far from the original25 one was guaranteed beforehand, implying an easier process of adaptation. Secondly, access to the technology and knowledge needed to be a fisherman did not require a major investment, either financial or educational.26 Lastly, fishing allowed him to maintain an independent job ‘without employers’, and a life ‘in nature and from nature’, two central and fundamental elements in R.’s speech. R.’s older brother, H., has roamed the sea since he was fourteen years old. He is today around fifty, and only a short period of time abroad, working in the Middle East, took him away from the fisherman’s life he had led since he left the monte. This man’s life path also indicates a choice by proximity, in an area where, besides work on the land, there were no other sources of income. The monte, where all eight siblings were born, is right above the sea. It was usual for trawlers coming from the north and the Algarve to anchor there, in a small bay. ‘They would stay there, sometimes, for whole days. The fishermen would come to our house and sleep there. They would come looking for supplies . . . my father would give them watermelons and other stuff . . . whatever we had around, and they would give us fish. We didn’t need it, because we fished from the top of the rock.’ ‘. . . Until one day master José, whom we had known for years, told my father that, if he wanted to, I could go with them . . . It was all I wanted! All I wanted was to go . . . We fished in the Algarve and around here, on this coast. . . . When I got married, I didn’t come here straight away, only later . . . I bought a boat . . . but I didn’t stick around for long, I went to Libya. . .’. (11/1992)

30 ◆ The Sea Commands

After he returned from Libya, where he worked in an oilfield, H. built a house in Azenha do Mar and went back to fishing. Another brother, F. (the one who lent the shack in Azenha and his boat to R.), the second youngest in a group of four boys and four girls and the last to leave work at the monte, helped his father until he got married. Shortly after he finished military service, he married a German tourist who rented a house ‘by the year’ a few hundred metres south of the Ss.’ monte. Fishing was an answer to him as well, helping him subsist and be financially independent. He built a shack in Azenha, bought a boat and started fishing. Two years later, he emigrated to Germany, where he stayed for almost three years. There, he worked in an industrial machine factory, in order to return to Azenha as soon as he had enough money to build a house and leave the shack. In the discourses of these three brothers regarding life in Azenha and fishing, there is always a common element: what they identify as ‘freedom’ and the ‘natural rhythm’, as opposed to paid work and life in the major cities, and the sea – living in permanent contact with the sea as an imperative (in their words, ‘. . . too long away from the sea and I get sick. . .’, or in the words of F.’s wife, ‘. . . the sea, the sea, if he doesn’t fish, it’s like he’ll die . . . no one can stand him. . .’). In a conversation with the father of these three individuals, the fact that the children left work on the land that he himself had worked on since he was eleven strikes him as something inevitable. ‘Monte M. was a good place to educate my kids. It was isolated and kind of away from everything, but it was good for them. They could roam around freely . . . The only thing that saddens me was that it wasn’t enough for everyone. And that’s how it goes, at the time you didn’t study, you finished primary school and you hit the road of life . . . I helped with everything I could. But, of course, after they left, and two of them went to the Algarve, it was everyone for themselves. The house would always be there for them. I always liked seeing them around, but it wasn’t for everyone . . . There was no shortage of food, we never starved, but, when you needed money for boots, most of the time there was none . . . I think, nowadays, that it was better this way, none of it belonged to me . . . I could’ve bought the monte, but I’m too old for those things . . . I already have this little house . . . I think it’s better this way, they are all doing fine, not that that [fishermen] life is a good life, but they’re fine. . .’. (07/1993)

Consequently, Azenha do Mar and its fishing activity must be seen as an escape from the crisis in the fields, in a context where paid

A Monographic Overview ◆ 31

rural workers could not cope with the growing monetization of the economy and where there were no other sources of income. Essentially, all of those who migrated to Azenha had a goal: to flee from a life and future of poverty and economic dependency. Full dedication to fishing, at least to artisanal fishing, has been presented by several authors as a consequence of inequality in access to property and agriculture work. (Michel Jourdin generalizes this statement to all of Europe – Jourdin [1993] 1995; Carlos D. Moreira states the same premise for different Portuguese fishing spots – Moreira 1987; Francisco O. Nunes narrows down the same idea for the village of Vieira Beach – Nunes 2004). That is to say, we can only explain the existence of some of the fishing villages if we assume the previous existence of groups of farmers devoid of work and sufficient income. The birth of Azenha do Mar obeys this outline. The fishermen of Azenha were farmers who, if not jobless, at least made ends meet, enough to provide them with the conditions for a better future. However, as mentioned, moving into fishing was not seen, at first, as something absolute and final. The families who now live in Azenha started migrating there seasonally. They would stay by the sea for the three or four months of summer, fishing and harvesting algae, just in front of the Assenha monte, above the watermill (azenha, in Portuguese). It is from these two points of reference, the watermill and the Assenha monte, that the name Azenha do Mar arises, apparently from a decision made by the mailman, who did not know where to leave the mail – on the monte or on the watermill – and who ended up distinguishing the two by creating the name that is now used. This designation coincides with the definitive settling of the families who went there seasonally, and with the move from the southern shore of the stream to the northern shore. At that time, in the second half of the 1970s, the wood and cane platforms embedded on the rock that helped elevate the boats above the waves made way for a concrete ramp that, along with the concrete piers uniting the rocks that gave a natural shape to the bay, began serving as a port of refuge. This building corresponds to the ‘inspection’ (to use the local expression) of the fishing activity conducted by the state. Simultaneous with the building of the ramp, giving access to the sea and where the fish are sold at auction, taxes on the fish were introduced – something that is not remembered as being objected to.27 It was at this time that the first children in Azenha were born. However, if escaping poverty and seasonality marks the origins of the settlement, the occupation of, and adaptation to the land manifests and solidifies itself quickly. One of those manifestations is evi-

32 ◆ The Sea Commands

dent in the type of buildings, and, in these, the different materials that were used over time. The layout of the houses itself underwent major changes throughout the first twenty years of the village’s existence. This reflected the different phases of occupation, degrees of stability, the evolution of the economic conditions of the inhabitants, and even the political and economic story of the region and the country, associated with the formal or institutional acknowledgement of Azenha as a village. Conversely, in that same layout are embodied different ways of occupying and living in a space, different times – (dis)continuities – of a becoming that is social, but also, necessarily, ecological. The first houses in Azenha were shacks, fragile buildings that, forming a triangle with the floor, were made from wooden sticks, canes, ropes and dry reeds. They were located on the southern side of the stream of Assenha, which supplied hydraulic energy to the mill. They were temporary shelters for those who initiated seasonal trips to Azenha in the 1960s. Nowadays, there are no buildings of this type in Azenha, but we can still find a few in other places of this coastal region. What is now no more than an ‘exotic’ object, with touristic interest, used on illustrated postcards was, in the past, the stage for the day-to-day rhythm of Azenha’s inhabitants during the summers. Twenty-five years ago, when some of these seasonal migrants fixed more permanently on this isolated place on the coast, the buildings underwent a change in form and location. This is how the first shacks came to life, now built on the northern side of the stream of Assenha. They were simple buildings, with just one room, but now with vertical walls and a simple flat roof. Wooden boards and plywood started appearing, although other materials were still used. We can find shacks of this type in Azenha, although almost all of them have been converted into outhouses, used for the storage of fishing materials or to do simple tasks, namely preparing the gear. A symbol of the poverty and precariousness that marked and marks their lives, these shacks remain a theme in the almost proud remembrance of those (now distant) first lonely winters. Those who went through that experience remember it as proof of their most solid belonging to the village, as opposed to those who came afterwards. There is even mutual acknowledgement among the few who, together, faced such a trial that was both isolating and life changing. Thus, as the buildings gained solidity and comfort, Azenha started growing as a village. Later, the first residents were joined by more families, who also took up fishing as their main activity. By that time, a second type of shack appeared, which distinguishes itself from the others by the materials used and by its orientation and

A Monographic Overview ◆ 33

usage of space. The reed roofs disappeared and made way for flat roofs and gables, built using zinc plates or asbestos cement plates. The dirt floors are now cement. Besides all this, we start to notice a sketch of internal divisions in the shacks, defining spaces with different functionalities using wooden half-walls, or simply curtains. Thus, this process separated the rooms, or sleeping areas, from the place where people cook and eat, which is also a communal space, used by the household members or by visitors. This type of shack we can still find in Azenha nowadays, and it is still used by a considerable number of its inhabitants. In the second half of the 1970s, the first buildings with brick and cement walls started to appear, with the roof and floor using the same materials as the second type of shack. In fact, the adopted blueprint also distinguishes the same spaces previously described, with the difference, in some cases, of the existence of a living room separate from the kitchen. Any of these four types of building (reed; wood and reed roofs; wood with zinc or asbestos cement roofs; brick and cement) amounts to a situation of illegality, since their construction depended only on the residents’ will and capacity, without ownership being acquired or even demanded. However, in 1976–78, the City Hall undertook the expropriation of the land on which Azenha stands, having since then legalized and provided an administrative existence for the village (a bureaucratic process that was concluded in the early 1990s). Meanwhile, since 1978, the City Hall has been endowing the village with basic infrastructures: it subdivided the land, provided the architectural blueprints to those who possessed the financial capacity to build, and supplied the village with drinking water, sewage systems and electricity. Each family had/has the right to an empty lot on which they can build a house, with the construction being supervised by officials from the City Hall, whether regarding the location, the architectural structure or the materials being used. These houses, which appeared in the late 1980s, are generally far bigger than those of the first type, and were organized in blocks, as opposed to the previous orientation that followed the shoreline. Differently from the shacks and the illegal houses, this layout obeys legal and standardized criteria, with clear differentiation in the division of the inner spaces and their assigned uses. The materials used in the construction – the roofs with Portuguese tiles, the block and cement walls painted white, the coloured windows and doors such as in any other place in the Alentejo – are also distinguishing features, suggesting in themselves the solidifying of the village.

34 ◆ The Sea Commands

We might, consequently, say that we have two ways of making: one that corresponds to the first phase of the process to populate Azenha – a ‘co-optive’ way of making; and one that is still ongoing today, which is ‘constructive’. This terminology is proposed by Tim Ingold, and aims to distinguish ways of making, separating them into those in which an existent object is adapted into a conceptual image for an imagined use, and those in which the existent object is remodelled according to a pre-existent image (cf. Ingold 2000: 175). In this way, we can perceive that the use of endogenous materials in the building of the first type of houses corresponds to a future, an imagined life, while the other materials used in the building of houses projected in brick and cement, already acquired outside of the place, correspond to the definitive construction of a way of life, of a place, of a community. In 2005, the municipality started building new houses, similar to those described above, to resettle the residents who were still living in shacks or illegal brick houses.28

Time and Generations: Situational Logics The village of Azenha do Mar appears in the early 1970s as a result of this passage from the southern side to the northern side, from shelters to houses, from seasonality to fishing as an exclusively full-time job. At this time, new people arrive, new families, who are no longer returning seasonally to their places of origin. They bring along all of their belongings and funds, which they use to buy boats and other necessary gear for fishing. It is also at the beginning of this decade that the children of the miller, the only ones living in the place before the new fishermen arrived, abandon their father’s work in order to dedicate themselves to fishing. However, only in the last half of this decade, when the children of this first generation of fishermen take charge of the vessels, when they are no longer only their fathers’ companions, but also competitors, can we talk of fishing as an activity in which to seek profit and not only a means of livelihood. The precursors’ children abandon the motivation that led their parents to dedicate themselves to fishing – to survive and live a better life – and turn their profession into something that can be capitalized upon. They were abandoning an economic and social frame with well-defined borders, favouring another in which anything was possible. A radical example of this change was the trawler with which the Ms. replaced the three-metre

A Monographic Overview ◆ 35

boat that their father used to fish, even though they could not cope with the expenses it incurred for a very long time. In this shift of strategies and rationality applied to the body of knowledge needed for fishing, we can use the proposals of LisónTolosana in his analysis of generations in Belmonte de los Caballeros.29 It is not my intention, however, to establish knowledge transfer/inheritance tables between generations susceptible to obliterating or overlapping the experimental knowledge that each individual gains throughout their life in the environments they inhabit (cf. Ingold 2000: 132–51). In my opinion, however, a reading and an analysis that considers how space has been lived in varied ways, and how different motivations and intentions have crossed, will be well supported by the model proposed by Lisón-Tolosana. After all, it is not about ascribing to knowledge transfer (whether technological or moral) the organization of ways of life and cultural patterns. The aim is rather to establish frames of time and context for different intentions and for their co-existence in time. In other words, by using the generational model (and its division into generations and power, as proposed by Lisón-Tolosana) with the population of Azenha, we can see how tradition can be overlapped by what comes of an intentional relationship with/in a new environment, and even how the relationship between generations, despite possible confrontations and divergences, reveals how memory and interaction with territory is transformed and not lost. For Lisón-Tolosana, following the conceptualization of Ortega and Gasset, a generation corresponds to a certain age group of individuals who share a way of life, a worldview and a group of similar conventions and aspirations (Lisón-Tolosana [1966] 1983: 180). It is in this way, when we perceive a generation as a group of people who live inside the same timeframe and share the same context, and who invest in common interests, that we divide the population of Azenha into three main generations. Thus, in order to assign a person to a certain generation, more relevant than their date of birth is their adherence to a given way of life. Therefore, as we will see, historically positioning the relationship processes with the environment and the simultaneous sociability of the individuals reveals itself as particularly useful to understand the different worldviews and the positioning within them that the different generational groups show. In this way, inside the historical existence of Azenha do Mar, one of the generations is comprised of those who first made the decision to migrate to that territory, ‘the founders of the place’; another, of those who came with the first group as children, ‘the founders’ children’; and,

36 ◆ The Sea Commands

lastly, of those who only started migrating there in the second half of the 1970s, when the village was already a reality, ‘the newcomers’. This division, as will be seen later, corresponds to different positions of relative prestige in the local frame and, therefore, of power. These three generational groups distinguish themselves in their way of existence and in their concept of life, in the significance they assign to what happens in their lives and their conventions and aspirations. In other words, they distinguish themselves in the ways of occupying or residing (in) space and (in) time. It is from this perspective that we differentiate them in the previous paragraph. We can assume, therefore, the existence of different strategies in access to the source of income, fishing, as well as different ideologies and conceptualizations of the world and territory in which they reside for the three generational groups. The ‘founders’ generational group were born outside Azenha and remained there at least until the last gateway into adult life (getting married and having their own family), this in the early 1960s. They were rural workers, living in a social context where farming was not only a necessity, but also something that granted respect because, as Cutileiro says, A reputation of honesty and attachment to their work constituted what would probably be the most important part of a worker . . . since their job depended, for most of the year, on the farmers’ [owners’] will. (Cutileiro 1977: 79)

They were living, then, in a social context in which the fishing profession, the independence and economic autonomy it provided, was not a value shared collectively. The group of the ‘founders’ children’, however, born in the 1950s and/or early 1960s, having grown up near the sea, benefited from the appearance of other jobs and the sharing of a whole social, economic and ecological frame, which differed from the one in which their parents lived. In the same way, the third age group, the ‘newcomers’, born in the 1960s, took advantage of a social, economic and political context in which, more than announcing changes, there was a confirmation of the liberalization of the national social, political and economic system. However, differently from the ‘founders’ children’, this third group of migrants shared, before settling in the fishermen’s place, a frame where agricultural work reigned, hence, closer to the founders’. In other words, while the second group grew up in Azenha do Mar, inside an ‘ecotype’ (a concept from biology appropriated by Eric Wolf to distinguish small cultural variations related to the phys-

A Monographic Overview ◆ 37

ical environment; Wolf 1966) or a ‘taskscape’ (Tim Ingold’s concept to describe the integrated whole composed of work and sociability that processes and manifests itself in the landscape, to which we will return in Chapter 2; cf. Ingold 2000: 189–208) where fishing took precedence, the members of the third group only became part of this ‘taskscape’ after they had reached adulthood. The ‘founders’ migrated in search of a means of livelihood. Their children, similar to the ‘newcomers’, additionally saw in fishing a source of income through which they could also make a profit, despite constant distrust in the future, caused by national and European policies for the fishing sector, bureaucracy and, above all, the destruction of natural fish stocks that is obvious every time they go out to sea. This difference in the economic appropriation of fishing activity is not independent from the various social and ecological frames in which the three generational groups formed. While talking about the different social groups he found in Vila Velha, Cutileiro distinguishes the one from the ‘. . . rural workers of the parish into three major age groups: the ones born before 1920, the ones born between 1920 and 1940, and the ones born after this date’ (1977: 82). The first group, irrelevant to Azenha do Mar since it only appeared almost half a century later, was made up of workers who were not offered any alternative to farm work. The survival of these individuals depended on their physical sturdiness and their commitment to executing tasks they had access to on the estates, according to their age.30 The second group, ‘the ones born between 1920 and 1940’, which can correspond to our ‘founders’, is referred to as being formed by the first individuals taking advantage of the appearance of new types of work, who had spent their childhood in the fields and then suffered the consequences of the mechanization of agriculture, on the one hand having their access to work on the estates hindered and, on the other hand, being conditioned to look for work in other professions and other places. The appearance in the late 1950s and early 1960s, on the outskirts of Lisbon, of the major manufacturing industries, such as metal and chemicals,31 as well as a temporary emigration programme to France in 1964 (a government initiative), served as an escape for these rural workers (cf. Cutileiro 1977: 84– 85). A migratory outbreak was taking place in the Alentejo, which had the aforementioned push factors and also the surplus workforce, a consequence of the mechanization of agriculture, and, as a pull factor in the receiving places, higher and more stable wages. The generational group of the ‘founders’ lived this time of change in the social and economic fabric, and in the landscape itself, of the

38 ◆ The Sea Commands

Alentejo. It is a group formed by former rural workers who suffered the consequences of the reduction of labour in agriculture and who were, thus, forced to search for other means of livelihood, for which schooling was a basic requirement they did not fulfil. In this way, as Cutileiro says, if many of the rural workers looked for other professions, many others stayed in the field and . . . did not abandon that life only because they did not find any other job. [Before,] most of them were illiterates that could not, or did not want, to get a school degree. [They faced] the prospect of being permanently connected to farming as a setback for which they felt forced to find an excuse: lack of schooling, troublesome family commitments, perfidy or ineptitude of the ‘godfathers’. (Cutileiro 1977: 85)

Let us say they were illiterate only because ‘they were not capable or did not want to get a school degree’. The possibilities for access to the education system were, in fact, challenging and scarce. The fact that there were few schools made families see in their children a source of indispensable income, hence the need of ‘having one more who’ll work’. The ‘founders’ are not, however, for the most part, illiterate.32 Most of the men, unlike the women, went to school and knew how to read and write. Nevertheless, they had to turn to fishing to survive, whether due to ‘family commitments’, to ‘perfidy or ineptitude of “godfathers”’ or simply because they did not search hard enough or had no sense of adventure, or even because they preferred the fisherman’s life to a paid job in the city, similar to what one hears from the ‘newcomers’. They brought a ‘worldview’ into their new business activity that allowed them to confine their individual aspirations, or those of their family, to survival and financial independence. This was especially so when, besides this picture of material shortage we have described, they brought along cultural baggage acquired during their school years that indoctrinated the value of morality over material wealth and discouraged any attempt to access economic capital (cf. Almeida 1991). The three different generational groups of Azenha do Mar hold in themselves – and mirror in their day-to-day practices and representations – different moments of Portuguese social and economic history and, simultaneously, various ways in which they relate to the territory. Consequently, we find in the village different perspectives towards life, particularly visible in the strategies and rationalities applied to fishing.

A Monographic Overview ◆ 39

If the ‘founders’ denounce the aforementioned social and economic frame in the way they capitalize on fishing and on their aspirations, their children mirror another ‘worldview’ that, if we choose to follow Cutileiro and his division in the village of Vila Velha, stems from the fact that, ‘. . . instead of starting to work [to be understood as depending on their own job] at the age of seven, as their ancestors did, they are starting their work life at thirteen or fourteen’ (Cutileiro 1977: 85). Furthermore, this last generational group found at the beginning of their adult life, still before the revolution of 25 April 1974, a few streaks of the subsequent liberalization of an authoritarian and closed political regime. They also found a decrease in the weight of the colonial war, whether in the numbers of recruits or the level of violence – a colonial war that is still in fact remembered by some of the fishermen of this generational group with pleasure and pride, in the way that it allowed them, as they say, to travel and to ‘see the world’. This is confirmed by the following words from Cutileiro: The ones that were not yet called to the ranks wait in the parish for the summons and, even if military service was seen as a hindrance in the past, it is today [the 1960s] welcomed with pleasure despite the new liabilities it implies, once it creates an escape from the hardships of rural work. (1977: 86)

This generation of the ‘founders’ children’, born after 1940, have also benefited from the relative liberalization of the economic system, mostly in the years following 25 April. This was a time when they definitively cut the ties of financial dependence they had with their parents, and began to make a profit from fishing, thus taking the lead in the community. They abandoned the paddles and bought motors for their boats, learnt about new fishing techniques, attracted new buyers from nearby towns, acquired the latest technologies such as probes and radios, and participated in local political and administrative activities. In sum, they confined the generational group of their fathers (the ‘founders’) to a place in which one can learn about the sea and the fish, in other words, where one can acquire knowledge but not ‘example’, as one fisherman said. Such a fact is still true when these men, the ‘founders’ and pioneers of fishing activities in Azenha do Mar, and proud of it, are listened to by the younger ones with respect and attention. Despite the criticism from their children’s generation, they were and still are the masters; although they make up the ‘declining’ generational group, their children’s group, which we can consider the ‘controlling’ gener-

40 ◆ The Sea Commands

ation (to follow the terminology proposed by Lisón-Tolosana in the aforementioned work), still assumes a position that reveals not only respect but a proximity of ‘worldviews’. After 25 April, between 1975 and 1985, other individuals came to Azenha do Mar who make up the generational group of the ‘newcomers’. The members of this group grew up in a rural context, but outside the socio-political boundaries imposed by a repressive regime, for they were born in the 1960s, living through the 1974 revolution as teenagers. When this generational group arrived in Azenha do Mar, they found a village with a definitive nature. They could take pleasure, integrating an already existing network of social relations, in the material conditions that the previous generations had built, such as improved access to the sea and a shelter for the boats, a fish auction integrated within a state body, drinking water, electricity, and an empty lot on which to build a house. Almost all of the ‘newcomers’ brought newly formed families. Few of them came alone. As was previously implied, they did not experience the period of the colonial war, or the Estado Novo or the socio-political frame that came from it. They display a worldview in which it is thought that survival depends, essentially, on personal commitment and good use of socio-political freedom. They bring to Azenha a more solid schooling, new social values, most often caused by contact with foreign tourists, and an economic logic where competition and prompt material success definitively replaced an ‘economy of survival’. It is in these ‘newcomers’ that we frequently see an emerging generation, for they are now starting to define new ‘worldviews’. For example, regarding fishing, they adopt balanced management of the resources and instruments needed for the activity (which is illustrated in the care they demonstrate while preparing the gear, choosing the fish they catch, in the accounting of the small companies, or companhias, that each boat constitutes, in the streamlining and capitalization of the technology usage such as the probe, and so on). They correspond to an emerging generation, in the way that they manifest their success in fishing publicly, to the detriment of others, and compete openly for the political positions now controlled by the ‘founders’ children’. For example, they criticize and propose alternatives to the fishing techniques these defend, or to the positions they take facing local government resolutions regarding Azenha. At the same time, they keep a great distance from the ‘founders’ and the pride of being a pioneer, since they share no family ties with them and, consequently, did not participate in that first migratory movement,

A Monographic Overview ◆ 41

which is used by the first two groups as a symbol of prestige and power over the population. However, a few people from this particular ‘generation’ are also the ones who have been abandoning fishing over the last few years. The success they sought appears unreached, or they have found other ways to reach it beyond the exploitation of fishery resources and outside Azenha. But these things – fishing and Azenha – remain in the minds of those individuals and are always thought of as places to return to, as demonstrated in the constant visits to Azenha and the dedication to maintaining fishing licences and all the associated tools (boats and fishing gear). Thus, any of the three generational groups show their importance inside the community through the breakthroughs they have introduced, whether in fishing or in the landscape of the village. Consequently, the ‘newcomers’ assert their best results in fishing as an instrument of power over the ‘founders’ children’ who, in turn, exacerbate the importance of their seniority inside the community (and consequently greater experience), stressing the fact that they are also pioneers, since they arrived with the ‘founders’, their parents. The latter, at the end of their working lives, remember their seniority, making the existence of the community itself depend on their own initiative. They thus occupy a position of prestige that grants them the respect and, most of all, the attention of the younger fishermen. The generational perspective allows us, furthermore, to associate privileged agents to each of the different phases of the collective’s formation, reflecting, in this way, the existence of separate processes of reaction, adaptation and constitution of the ‘taskscape’ of Azenha and of fishing. In this way, each generation of Azenha is as much an age group as a situational period or a temporality. These periods reveal, simultaneously, the integrated relations between the individuals who make up Azenha as a village, and as a whole consisting of a physical environment and social contexts (mainly economic and political). In other words, Azenha do Mar does not arise as a result of historical constraints, but from the combination of these with ecological conditions of possibility and the investment of individual intentions.

Notes 1. These words are also the title of a small and beautiful book by Peter Metcalf (2002) about ethnographic writing, reflexivity in anthropology and its relationship with ‘truth’ and the ‘informants’ Metcalf talks about. This is not my purpose in this chapter. However, because the story I am

42 ◆ The Sea Commands

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

telling is so grounded in oral testimony, in fact, in what they wanted to tell me, the preamble words from Bilo Kasi (an informant from the Upriver People, north of Borneo) are also appropriate here. This municipality is part of the national imagery due to its size (the largest in Portugal and, or so it is said, in Europe), its minimal number of inhabitants per square metre, and its high suicide rate. For a historical and monographic perspective on this municipality, see Odemira: Subsídios para uma Monografia, by António M. Quaresma (1989). Emigration in Azenha is a constant, and so is return migration. Some individuals and families have been coming and going for the last fifteen years, with frequency but without regularity. This commuting involves around ten people. For people living alone, this ‘coming and going’ is generally associated with the search for temporary work abroad. The other families travel between the houses they have in Azenha and the neighbouring places of Odeceixe and Vale Juncal. There are several texts of a monographic nature written by ‘local historians’ concerning Odeceixe (e.g. Sampaio 2002; Correia 1986, 1988). A work considered to be the ‘founding of modern anthropology’ in Portugal. For a historical framework and its relevance for the history of Portuguese ethnography, see Martins (1997). There is no documented justification for this divergence between the references by Landmann and Baldaque da Silva. However, it can be added that the latter does not consider any fishing port in Sagres by lapse or omission; on the contrary, he states the non-existence of such occupation of the territory: ‘[from the river in Portimão] to Cape St. Vicente, containing the bays of Zavial, Ingrina, Balieira, Sagres and Belixe, there are no fishing ports . . .’ (Baldaque da Silva 1891: 144). Probably, what constitutes a fishing port for the ‘trained’ and ‘scientific’ eye of Baldaque da Silva did not find a match in the more ‘impressive’ observation of the traveller who saw ‘a simple fishing village’ in Sagres. People in the southwestern Alentejo distinguish between ‘mountain’ and ‘moor’ in the morphology of the land they inhabit, as Mariano Feio has noted in his work Le Bas Alentejo et L’Algarve ([1949] 1983). The moor is characterized by its long schistose and sandy plain, always open to the sea, and by its dispersed settlement and poor, almost naked, barren lands. The first major intervention in this natural landscape took place in the 1960s with a nationwide campaign for forestation and the opening of the irrigation system in Mira. The second one, which began in the early 1990s, is a result of the sprouting of intensive farming enterprises that use greenhouses and chemical products as a main mechanism against soil aridity. The use of pseudonyms, an anthropological tradition justified by the intention of maintaining anonymity and protecting the privacy of informants, is here a commitment to the people of Azenha do Mar since my first period of fieldwork. After publishing Se o Mar Deixar (Meneses

A Monographic Overview ◆ 43

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

and Mendes 1996) and during the second period of fieldwork, the request was reiterated, for, in this way, in the words of one of the readers of the book, ‘the only ones who know who is in the book are the ones who live here’. Smuggling would be another source; however, this man always denied having engaged in this activity as the reason for his moving to the lands that are today Azenha do Mar. Smuggling should be seen as an occasional, but not systematic source of income. It happens. For ethical reasons and for loyalty to the people I worked with (my informants), I do not prolong discussion of this activity, an activity that, again, is occasional and not determinant for the domestic economy of the majority of the households in Azenha. Perhaps for one or another family it is more frequent. However, as one fisherman says, ‘in Azenha everyone has smuggled [i.e. has at least participated in the transport of products between a vessel that cruises along the shore and the vehicles that wait on land], but, if you ask, it’s always the others’. Incidentally, at the time, the most wanted smuggled objects were nail cutters of the Trim brand. It was easier for fishermen who only handled transportation to steal one of the small boxes from the ‘smuggler’ (the one who organized the activity, from the initial contact through transportation and distribution, and who was always someone that lived outside Azenha). This was because in the late 1960s and early 1970s this utensil was expensive and each box contained 100 units, which explains the cause for such demand. Still, rare are the cases where people from Brejão participate, or participated, in activities related to smuggling, besides estiva, an activity at sea or in boats, namely the loading/unloading and transport of goods. Baldaque da Silva would say about the mouth of this river: ‘. . . the conditions of the bottom, depth, tide movements and layout of the shores [are] favourable to its exercise [fishing] in every season’ (1891: 12–13). This is contrary to what old M. thought. A seasonal source of income for people living on the shoreline, which I will mention again later. At that time, in the late 1960s, vagueness in the landowner society and the latter’s absenteeism meant the land that is today Azenha do Mar was virtually empty. Nowadays, having solved the problems inside the society, there is a legitimate owner who regularly visits the main house of the property, immediately north of the fishing village. The quotation marks highlight excerpts, quotations or references to expressions collected during the interviews, which were initially semistructured. Later, during the ongoing fieldwork and consequent acquaintance with the people of Azenha, interviews became more informal, and I quote from these, almost always, moments that I recorded from the talks held on a day-to-day basis. The month and year of the respective excerpts are given in parentheses. Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira, Fernando Galhano and Benjamim Pereira indexed this type of house in their work Construções Primitivas em

44 ◆ The Sea Commands

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

Portugal ([1969] 1991). Although the references made to this type of construction position them on the north of the Alentejo coast, namely the Santo André coast, Santiago do Cacém (cf. ibid.: figures 244–49), we can find a few examples on the coast between Azenha do Mar and Odeceixe. Monte: usually imagined as a house or a set of small houses, surrounded by farm lands, far from everything in the middle of the semi-desert plains of Alentejo. Nowadays it refers to a specific kind of farm house of Alentejo, usually small, whitewashed with coloured stripes around the doors and windows, but still isolated. A farming monte near today’s Azenha do Mar. The owner of this monte is also the owner of the land where the village now stands. Old M. ended up returning to Odeceixe in the early 1990s, retiring to ‘a little place of his own’. Today’s Azenha do Mar stands on the north side of this stream. As we will see later, the movement to the north side of the harbor coincides with the full commitment to fishing. The buildings, at the time standing on the south side, had a more temporary character than those that appeared later on the north side. Canes and reed were the materials used on the south side; on the north side, on the other hand, more resistant materials were used, namely wood for the walls and zinc or fibreglass for the roofs. However, the social management of the chronology of Azenha’s foundational times represents a small dispute between two of Azenha’s families over the questions from the anthropologist, to which I will return later. After all, if, for those I studied, my work ‘is to write the story of Azenha’, knowing who arrived first becomes an important question. The paternity of the place also means ancestry over the rights to memory and, as will become clear throughout this text, over knowledge and management of the technologies employed in fishing activity. Limo or erva (literally ‘weed’ in English) are two of the terms used to refer to the algae aghar-aghar, which, after it has turned to dust, through a long and complex process, has as its most common destination major companies that specialize in cosmetics and/or pharmaceutical products. Laredo: localism referring to the stone beach surrounded by cliffs. With this stereotype, I hope to frame in time the migratory movement that originated in Azenha do Mar. For a critical approach to the sociological theories on (e)migration, see Monteiro (1994). E.G. Ravenstein (a member of the Royal Geographic Society) wrote an article entitled ‘The Laws of Migration’ in 1885, a classic text still quoted mostly by economists and demographers (see Corbett n.d.; Tobler n.d.). His model of attraction-repulsion defined for studying the phenomena of human migration, as J. A. Jackson perceives it (Jackson 1991: 19–22), is perfectly applicable to every family and individual that migrated to Azenha do Mar. Thus, at the place of origin of these individuals, we have to assume the existence of ‘push factors’ (which had already been noted –

A Monographic Overview ◆ 45

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

in the case of the farmers originally from Azenha, facing difficulties in surviving), and, at the destination, the existence of ‘pull factors’ (a better standard of living, access to other resources, financial independence), mediated by ‘intervening variables’, such as the desire for individual adventure or, as we have noted, easy access to land or other sources of livelihood. Every family in Azenha, with the exception of one, comes from villages that are no more than forty kilometres away. In the case of R., he had the advantage of having been a fisherman in the past and having his brother’s boat available to him. Regarding this subject, see the work of Francisco Oneto Nunes (2004), which historically locates fish taxes and how they were viewed by the fishermen of Vieira Beach. This is the initial phase of a project of social and scenic intervention carried out by the Municipality of Odemira in Azenha do Mar. Its aim, on the one hand, is to resettle families and other people living by themselves and, on the other hand, to clear the shoreline of illegal houses, with a view to building a pedestrian area in order to attract tourists. In the summer of 2006, none of these goals had yet been achieved. This book by Carmelo Lisón-Tolosana, Belmonte de los Caballeros: Anthropology and History in an Aragonese Community ([1966] 1983), although never translated into Spanish, as Medeiros reminds us in his approach to the history of anthropology in Spain, is a founding text of ‘modern’ anthropology in Spain, similar to what we would say about the work of Cutileiro for Portugal (cf. Medeiros 2006: 200). The work of Silva Picão, Através dos Campos ([1903] 1983), provides an excellent perspective on the life of rural workers in the Alentejo during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and evokes a suggestive comparison with this group born prior to 1920. Nowadays, in Brejão and other neighbouring villages, it is easy to find individuals retired from these industries, almost all of them with family members living in Lisbon since the time in which the companies, in need of manpower, grew in the Lisbon area. We can, however, notice extremely low levels of functional literacy, for reading and writing is not practised beyond ‘the thick letters in the newspapers’ or ‘knowing how to write your own name’, to use the expressions that were commonly used by local residents to describe their own levels of literacy when asked about them.

2 Archaeology of a Thought Maritime Anthropology, Sea and Perception of the Environment

The puzzle is infinite, and each piece of the puzzle is a puzzle in itself. I cannot, therefore, assemble it. However, it exists, it works. Even in incomplete versions, correct or incorrect. For this reason, the intention is not to shape, but merely to create a reference, to partially locate a few junctions of a process that, because it is thought, can hardly be conceived as something linear. Thus, in an archaeological manner, I will try to pinpoint in my stream of thought a few steps, a few authors, a few concepts and crossovers of ideas that have as a main backdrop my experience of fieldwork in Azenha do Mar. I intend, in this way, to expose and enunciate some of what determined and influenced the perspectives and approaches of a social group that lives off the sea. Some of the experiences in the field were more essential than others, which will be clear throughout the text. Some of the authors and conceptualizations are key to the participant post-observation discourse and were sought because the terrain seemed to ask for them. However, my point is not to dig deeper into their proposals. I want merely, as I said, to enunciate them and note their importance, although it is more implicit than explicit in the whole text. Because we are talking of fishermen, because the aim is to write an anthropological work, it will be relevant to start with the so-called ‘maritime anthropology’. In a few lines, following the reading of Galván Tudela (1989), we can summarize and divide the development of ‘maritime anthropology’ into three periods. The first shares its origins with the anthro-

Archaeology of a Thought ◆ 47

pological subject itself. There were, then, references and reflections made about populations who also made a living from fishing activity; however, these were diluted, with emphasis placed on economic frames or on the analytical concerns that defined those studies. Franz Boas, at the time of his first expedition to the Baffin islands (cf. Stocking 1983), studied human groups among whom fishing was an important activity, without, however, making it an object of preferential analysis. Malinowski, in his pioneering study of social anthropology concerning the Kiriwina ([1922] 1983), along with his disciple R. Firth with a study concerning Malay fishermen (1946), carried out a relational analysis of fishing activity, integrating it into production methods and magical and ideological aspects. However, it was Firth who initiated this new field of investigation by considering fishing activity separately. Starting in the 1950s, with the end of colonialism and consequent return to Western social contexts, the development of studies concerning small rural communities from Europe and North America began to take place. It is in this phase of the subject (the second period of the division made by Tudela) that the spotlight turns to the production systems of the peasantry, in which the first studies concerning fishing communities arise. However, there is still no mention of a new epistemological field, for those studies applied to fishing societies the same analytical models used in the studies of farmers. Thus, the contributions to this new field of study would have been more parallel than specific. Nevertheless, they managed to bring to the academic world a field of investigation that had previously been neglected. Blehr (1963), Davenport (1954), Norbeck (1954), Fraser (1960), Kottack (1966) and Orona (1967) are some of the authors of monographs about fishermen that Tudela underlines for this period. In the third period, starting in 1970, due to the multiplication of monographs integrated into a policy for research developed in some universities, academic interest in fishing societies solidified. The University of Laval and the Memorial University of Newfoundland would be the main institutions behind this research effort. From then on, a long series of monographs, articles, conferences, symposia and congresses would be dedicated to specialization in the field of the anthropology of fishing. This period would culminate in 1977, when Estellie Smith compiled a volume in which ethnographic ‘cases’ were compared from all over the world. This work, entitled Those Who Live from the Sea: A Study in Maritime Anthropology (Smith 1977), became a reference in the field of ‘maritime anthropology’.

48 ◆ The Sea Commands

Still following Tudela, the ‘coming of age’ of maritime anthropology happens ‘in 1981 [when] James Acheson presents a synthesis of Fishing Anthropology in the Annual Review of Anthropology, in which he describes the investigative fields: crew organization; access to fishing rights; markets and cooperatives; administration of information; rituals and magic; political processes and individual strategies; innovation and technological change; commitment towards fishing and psychological characteristics of the fisherman; personality, wife and family life; administration and development’ (Galván Tudela 1989: 12). In this synthesis, a first border is delineated between evolutionary orientations – which relegated fishing societies to a secondary status in relation to hunter-gatherers and farmers – and the theoretical frameworks developed in the 1970s and 1980s (ibid.: 15–16). One of these theoretical frameworks was developed by Paul Jorion (1983) and Joseba Zulaika (1981). They proposed a study of fishing societies based on ethnomethodology and symbolical interactionism: ‘One values, thus, the cognitive and the symbolical insistence on the emic aspects . . . Fishing is conceived as a cultural system, as used by Clifford Geertz; in other words, you study the ways of thinking developed by the fishermen during their work . . .’ (Galván Tudela 1989: 16). Another research orientation favours the relationship between the natural environment and the society: ‘The strategy is to show that the cultural practices work as part of systems that also include environmental phenomena’ (Galván Tudela 1989: 16). McCay, in his 1978 article ‘Systems Ecology, People Ecology, and the Anthropology of Fishing Communities’, produced a forceful internal critique of this analytical theory. He defended an approximation to the individual and the social – an ‘ecology of peoples’ – rather than the previous approach that favoured the ecological, thus making the social, in a way, dependent on a balanced relationship with nature. The last investigative perspective that Tudela refers to in maritime studies is a Marxist one. In this, he highlights the works of Y. Breton (1981), J.C. Faris (1972), H. Levine (1984) and B. Orlove (1982), researchers from the University of Laval. The studies by these authors ‘arise from the necessity of inserting fishing societies in the research about the persistence of small-scale market production in developed capitalist societies’ (Galván Tudela 1989: 17). They follow the theories developed by A. Chayanov ([1966] 1986),1 even though they do not apply the same Marxist models developed for farming communities to fishing communities.

Archaeology of a Thought ◆ 49

In international periodicals, MAST magazine (Maritime Anthropological Studies, from MARE, Centre for Maritime Research, in Amsterdam) stood out in the 1980s and 1990s. It was discontinued in 1993 to be taken up again in 2002. In the last issues of this magazine we can foresee new lines of research that relate more classical studies with matters of development and environment (in the sense of ‘environmentalism’). Simultaneously, if fishing activity is still the central subject of analysis, coastal towns, independent of the practice of such activity, assume a significance caused by two factors: on the one hand, the pressure caused by real estate and tourism on the coastline is, by itself, a subject of research; on the other hand, many of the authors published in MAST advocate an anthropology more involved in the defence of the interests of those it studies. Other periodicals from MARE underline this concern and area of research (see, for example, Boissevain and Selwyn 2004). In Portugal, studies of fishing villages made by the anthropologists are few. However, these social groups have been studied by scholars of geography and ethnography. The first, in a research effort by the National Geographic Society and the Institute for High Culture, produced a series of monographs that, although they touch on matters of human geography, are useful references for learning about the fishing villages on the Portuguese coastline (see, for example, Bernardo 1943; Brito 1960; Matos 1969; Lemos 1982; Martinho 1982). Ethnography is represented in these studies mainly by local or regional monographs (Sampaio [1923] 1979; Santos Graça [1932] 1992:2 Lapa 1950, 1956, 1957, 1960;3 Fortes 1971; Isidoro 1973). Jorge Dias’s team (in a nationwide data collection programme), led by Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira, gathered a comprehensive list of information on the material culture and social characteristics of fishing villages in Portugal (Oliveira, Galhano and Pereira 1975), always crucial when the aim is to produce a historical approach to these villages. In the field of anthropology, as mentioned, published works are few and do not sufficiently problematize this research field. Thus, Carlos R. Oliveira, from the former ISCSPU,4 conducted fieldwork in Fuzeta (Algarve) (1969); in 1975 he published an article in which he discusses the ecological approach to fishing societies. Also from the ISCSP came the study by Carlos Diogo Moreira, Populações Marítimas de Portugal (Portuguese Maritime Populations) (1987). Broad and comprehensive in its approach, it includes studies of fishermen as well as the historical background of these villages. In this same work, in fact a pioneering publication in Portuguese anthropology as it was the first to arise from a long and thorough research project that would

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culminate in a PhD, is included a long and complete bibliography regarding the two subjects mentioned above. Besides these works, there are also those by Filgueiras, included in the work of Gunda (1984); by S. Cole (1987, 1990, 1991, 1994); by Brøgger (1987);5 by Twig Johnson (1977); by Pollnac and Carmo (1980); and the texts published from the ‘Santos Graça Colloquium’ (VV AA 1985). More recently, F. Oneto Nunes (2004) and myself (with Inês Meneses, 1996) have published works dedicated to this subject. From this joint common interest, a conference was held (organized by the Centre for Social Anthropological Studies [CEAS]) that culminated in an issue of the journal Etnográfica, entitled ‘Comunidades Piscatórias: Perspectivas Antropológicas’ (‘Fishing Communities: Anthropological Perspectives’) (1999). Nunes, more recently in 2006, concluded his PhD thesis, entitled ‘Hoje por Ti, Amanhã por Mim; A Arte Xávega no Litoral Central Português’ (‘Today for You, Tomorrow for Me; The Xávega Art on the Portuguese Central Coastline’). Carlos D. Moreira also recently published the volumes entitled Património e Identidade Marítima (Heritage and Maritime Identity) (2003) and Comunidades Azuis (Blue Communities) (2004). Elsa Peralta, in 2006, after defending her PhD thesis, ‘Memória Colectiva e (Re)imaginação Identitária em Contextos Locais Portugueses’ (Collective Memory and (Re)Imagination of Identity in Portuguese Local Contexts), about the fishing communities of the municipality of Ílhavo, in the northwest coast of Portugal, has published other works that find in fishing and fishermen a common denominator (2006a, 2006b), as she later further concludes in the book A Memória do Mar: Património, Tradição e (Re)Imaginaçao Identitária na Contemporeinadade (The Sea’s Memory: Heritage, Tradition and (Re)Imagination of Identity in the Contemporaneity) (2008). In 2007, Luís Martins published his PhD thesis, which focuses on the knowledge and strategies of access to resources that he observed among the fishermen of Póvoa de Varzim, entitled Mares Poveiros: Histórias, Ideias, e Estratégias de Pescadores da Póvoa de Varzim (Seas of Poveiros: Stories, Ideas and Strategies of the Fishermen of Póvoa de Varzim). Other social sciences have also studied social groups in which fishing activity prevails. Notable in the field of history are the works of Álvaro Garrido (2001, 2004, 2006a, 2006b) and Inês Amorim (2002; see also Amorim, Polónia and Osswald 2002). From sociology, a volume organized by A. Brandão Moniz et al. stands out: Pescas e Pescadores: Futuros para o Emprego e Recursos (Fishing and Fishermen: Futures for Employment and Resources) (2000). The PhD thesis by Henrique Souto (1998) delineates the National Geographic Society’s

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initiative in the first half of the twentieth century, which puts fishing villages back on the map of interests in (human) geography. For Portugal, there are a few texts produced in the field of fictional literature that reveal themselves as good sources of historical information. If Raul Brandão stands out with his book Os Pescadores (The Fishermen) (1986), other authors such as Raul Faria have published on the people of Póvoa de Varzim (1939), and Bernardo Santareno (pseudonym of the doctor and writer António Martinho do Rosário) about cod fishing (1959); the latter should not be ignored in a possible review of literature on fishermen. The ‘impressionistic’ baggage of these works – especially in Os Pescadores (with a narrative presented as a trip in which the Apollonian aspect of the landscape mixes with the pathetic aspect of the characters) by Raul Brandão (himself the grandson of fishermen from Foz do Douro, Porto6) – does not diminish the ethnographic interest evident within the descriptions found in them and, therefore, they are a good object of comparison for an approach that contemplates a long period of time. From another perspective, and for a historical analysis of certain villages, besides local monographs and geographical studies, works published towards the end of the nineteenth century by Baldaque da Silva (1891) and another anonymous author (1890) constitute an excellent source of information. Baldaque da Silva, in his monumental work O Estado Actual das Pescas em Portugal (The Current State of Fishing in Portugal) (1891), takes us on a trip through all the places where people fished in Portugal throughout the nineteenth century, highlighting the fishing gear, the different kinds of vessels and the various species of fish that were caught, as well as giving small impressionistic descriptions of the villages he observed. For these reasons, this work is an essential backbone for a maritime anthropology of Portugal. Returning to an international angle, from these different moments and currents that we can perceive in maritime anthropology, one line is commonly termed ‘human ecology’, that is, the applying of analytical proposals from ecology to the social and human sciences (also notable in other neighbouring schools of thought, such as ‘cultural ecology’, ‘ecological anthropology’ or ‘ethnoecology’). This current has undergone specific long-term developments. Its relevance seems to be based on attempts to answer a generic equation (but a primordial one in the history of anthropology7) posed by all of those who study fishing villages, namely the importance of natural contexts (as opposed to artificial ones, transformed by human activity) in forms of social organization in fishing villages.

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This ‘school’ is the one that seems to flourish more in texts produced until the beginning of the 2000s (of which the last issues of the journal MAST are a good example; see also Boissevain and Selwyn 2004), even though the enforcement of labels does no justice to the several different studies that have environmental questions and the relationship between humans and their habitats as a general context of investigation. The emphasis placed on these themes is due, essentially, to ‘environmental questions’ (climate change, pollution, over-exploitation of resources, etc.) being at the forefront of the world political agenda – thereby the social sciences’ effort to understand the multiple dimensions of human/nature interaction. If the works of R. Andersen, North Atlantic Maritime Cultures: Anthropological Essays on Changing Adaptations (1979), and of Bonnie McCay, namely The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources (McCay and Acheson 1987), were pioneering in the ecological approach to fishing villages – fitting in the work of authors as diverse as Leslie White,8 Roy Rappaport ([1968] 2000), Harold Conklin (1963) and Emílio Moran ([1979] 2000) – all of them, in a way, related to ‘ecological anthropology’. Their proposals end up focusing more on technologies in the form of exploitation and, above all, resource appropriation (i.e. stock control strategies, whether of the fishermen themselves or resulting from central/state regulation), rather than on the human/nature interrelation of dependence and concomitance, perceived as being liable for conditioning ways of social organization (cf. McCay and Finlayson 1995). Tracing back my own train of thought, I recognize that I gave more importance to the texts that follow this approach than others, despite a few disagreements of interest. In fact, looking back, I understand that the human/nature relationship (as the research project called it) is central to the dispersion of objectives and the analytical guidelines I intended. It was not a result, however, of readings. It derived, rather, from a question (simple and, possibly, innocent) that remained after my first fieldwork experience and after getting to know the story of Azenha do Mar a little better. The question was: if this ‘place’ did not exist forty years ago, if none of these people were fishermen, why am I finding so many similarities with what is described in texts about fishing villages? At the same time, facing this absence of temporal depth and the lack of ‘traditional symbols’9 (for example, a system of beliefs and values manifested in the colours of the boats or in a religious calendar, or in clothing) that may contribute to the social clustering and/or the building of a sense of community, I also

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wondered what the catalyst element(s) for the unity and singularity of the group could be. The ‘sea’ quickly appeared as a possible answer. It was a metaphor that served my search for common denominators and that found a correspondence in local discourse and day-to-day practices. However, despite the metaphor having an important role in, and for, anthropology, I was always dealing with the anguish of not giving this natural and essential element of the local landscape10 (in which I was dwelling) the relevance it seemed to have. It was, and is, obvious that the sea plays a major role in the organization of work, the annual calendar and the day-to-day life of the village. I started, then, by dedicating my time in the field to the accompanying on tasks connected to fishing activity and, consequently, trying to understand how, through them, the contexts for the interrelation between individuals were created. I rapidly concluded that it was not in the accomplishment of common tasks that I would find the answers I was looking for. The fishermen, as we will see, seemed ‘too aware’ of their individual differences and ‘reluctant enough’ towards individual alliances so that labour, per se, answered the aforementioned questions. Nonetheless, I could perceive strong traces of sociability. Competing for a position of prestige revealed itself, at a certain point, as essential to the interpretation of what I was observing. I therefore began to assign importance to the symbolic construction of community. As will be clear in the following chapters, the text by Anthony P. Cohen entitled The Symbolic Construction of Community ([1985] 2000) became essential for my train of thought. However, other works, at the time more classical and less critical of the definitions of community, remained determinant for the analysis included in my first published volume on Azenha do Mar (Meneses and Mendes 1996). With the aim of getting closer to plausible answers to the questions mentioned above and, simultaneously, to integrate in my analysis the selves that appeared evident in Azenha, I tried to highlight in the ethnographic description that I presented the individuals and their discourse about themselves. At that time, in the mid 1990s, in the aftermath of the ‘reflexive turn’ and the famous book by J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and the Politics of Ethnography (1986), particular emphasis was placed on questions of self and individuality in the Anglo-Saxon social sciences.11 Following this, the work by Anthony P. Cohen, Self-Consciousness: An Alternative Anthropology of Identity, first published in 1994, was gaining notoriety in the

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production of anthropological knowledge. In it, Cohen proposes an anthropological view that considers individuals as beings aware of themselves and less determined by the social sphere, as opposed to the more common stance in the social sciences where, generally, structures dominate individuality (despite the differences among major lines of theoretical filiation: Durkheimian, Weberian or Marxist). The aim of this book is, in the words of the author, to show why we must address the question of the self since not to do so is to risk misunderstanding, and therefore misrepresenting, the people who we claim to know and who we represent to others. (Cohen [1994] 2000: 4)

Cohen proposes an epistemological posture in which the anthropologist, by acknowledging his own individuality (as someone aware of himself/herself), would be stimulating his/her sensitivity to the awareness of the self among those being studied ([1994] 2000: 5). From such a posture, still in the author’s view, there is no justification for thinking of people as being all equal (or all different), thereby avoiding the denial of a consciousness of the self in cultural ‘others’ and the reification of the social and/or the cultural (ibid.: 5). With this proposal, Cohen does not intend to attach anthropological importance to the ‘self for its own sake’. Rather, he wants to dispute the fact that the social sciences are built from the top down, meaning that individuals derive from the social structures they share, forgetting that they are the ones who constitute the social and not, exclusively and necessarily, the opposite. Consequently, he suggests an anthropological approach that acknowledges that the relation between individuals and society is complex and infinitely changeable, not to be understood in a unidimensional deductive model ([1994] 2000: 6). This does not mean one has to ignore the social. On the contrary, Cohen’s proposal seeks to answer a primordial question: ‘how are social groups possible?’ This question, however, according to the author, is frequently seen as a given that does not require an answer (ibid.: 6–8, 22). An extensive analysis of Cohen’s work would be inappropriate here,12 as it would be for any other authors who have acquired particular relevance in the study of questions of the self and/or individuality in anthropology (for example Nigel Rapport [1997], or Michael Jackson [1998]). However, it was among these studies that I sought answers for some of the questions that arose during fieldwork. As implied in the aforementioned questions, Cohen’s query (how are social groups possible?) remained valid throughout the fieldwork

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and it is still present throughout this text. Irrespective of whether we agree with Cohen’s proposal, according to which we should look at the ways in which individuals constitute a collective and not exclusively at how collectives gather individuals, the terrain I found provoked a need for this perspective, as I have suggested. Thus, the so-called ‘questions regarding individuality’ (or the self, or the ‘awareness of oneself’) have become an analytical perspective essential to the train of thought I have been, and still am, building. The main objective of research surrounding the awareness of the self is to reclaim a central role for individuality in anthropology. To achieve that goal, besides the various ethnographic examples that illustrate the debate, different theoretical propositions are brought to the table that have in common the intention to reconcile ‘society/ structure’ and ‘individual/agency’ (cf. Cohen and Rapport 1995). Among these, Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of habitus are an essential recurrence. In the same way, other associated concepts include the aforementioned ‘agency’ and ‘embodiment’.13 We will return to habitus and Bourdieu later. The concept of ‘agency’, in which Giddens’ authorship takes on greater relevance, alongside Bourdieu’s, was appropriate to translate actions and behaviours that were observed in the field. However, accepting Cohen’s criticism, Anthony Giddens, in his ‘structuration theory’, sees society as being in a way independent of those that constitute it and, consequently, individuals should constantly adjust to it (in a Durkheimian sense). In Cohen’s words, The ‘agency’ which he [Giddens] allows to individuals gives them the power of reflexivity, but not of motivation: they seem doomed to be perpetrators rather than architects of action. (Cohen [1994] 2000: 21)

To this extent, I ended up appropriating the term more freely; ‘agency’ was now an individual ‘intentionality’ of intervention, of transformation and action over collective movements and/or biographical paths (necessarily reflexive and auto-reflexive). Consequently, in relation to the debate between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, I propose a movement: ‘intentionality’. With this proposal I do not intend to contribute to the discussion surrounding the ontology of the social (concerning this, see Mouzelis 1995; Latour 2005), or even take one side or the other. The arguments are in fact well reflected in the complementarity of perspectives that Amit and Rapport propose in their book The Trouble with Community (2002), in which Amit answers Rapport’s ‘liberal anthropology’ by stating:

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Rapport offers a vision in which it is the dignity and the transcendent distinctiveness of the individual that constitutes the most fundamental and universal truth, the ‘anthropological concrete’. Any notion of community, of society or culture that posits such collectives as prior to or superseding the individual is fundamentally illusory. It is individual human beings who make culture (or not), social groups (or not) and social relationships (or not). Communities and cultures do not determine individuals. Of course, Rapport recognizes that persons render their identities within a social context but he wants us to privilege the agency of individuals acting sceptically upon that environment. And he believes that this capacity for scepticism or irony is universal, ensuring that everywhere individuals ‘have some appreciation of the malleability and the mutability of social rules and realities, and the contingency and ambiguity of cultural truths’ . . . . An anthropology made in this vision would treat cultures or societies ironically rather than literally and would not reduce individuals to their membership in such collectivities. I [Vered Amit] agree, but I think this is also only the beginning of what we can demand of anthropology. The next step is surely to work through the implications of this contingent sociality. If we accept the importance of not confusing classificatory identities with actual flesh-and-blood relationships – the slogans versus the conversations of sociality – if we accept that the construction of social collectivities is never merely a matter of habitual practice, if we accept that social groups are the outcomes of myriad individual choices, interactions, conflicts and agreements, and if we accept that communities are only one of many possible forms and forums for social engagement, then we have set ourselves the challenge of exploring and portraying an extraordinarily complicated range of processes. (Amit and Rapport 2002: 161–62)

Consequently, considering that the more ‘structuralist’ points of view, and others that privilege individuality over the social, should be understood, firstly, as complementary, since they allow a multiple approach to a reality that is also always multiple, I wish only to prioritize what I observed in the field. After all, the life I experienced in Azenha presented (to me) the social as a construct charged with intentions in which the ‘structural’ informs but does not determine; the individuals I found manifested their freedom of choice and action, as I heard many times, ‘against everything and everyone’ (against their neighbours’ or families’ opinion, or against the state’s body of law). In other words, while I sought ‘structures’ for individual action, the experience in the field quickly made me realize that, at least in that collective, the constraints would not be, essentially and/or exclusively, in the social/cultural sphere or in any zeitgeist, which would recall Carl Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’.

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At the same time, the inscription on the body of signs of belonging to a collective and its correspondence in my imagination (informed by reading and by sharing a collective imagination that assigns identity images to the ‘fishermen’) seemed to corroborate this same idea. In other words, the fisherman’s body (what is at once perceptible by sight) seemed to highlight more of a narrow relationship between individuals and forces of nature (as opposed to something man-made) than an interchange of ‘cultural patterns’. The stories that we can ‘see’ inscribed in their bodies are individual, but they are not necessarily isolated and/or empty of similar content. The ones I could observe had in common a relation with the sea or, in other words, they shared a location (cf. Haraway, cited in Csordas [1994] 2001: 2) that I place in an ‘environment’ where the relation with nature (which finds its greatest metaphor in work at sea) is an essential constituent. In this way, the concept of ‘embodiment’ yielded meaning for my analysis inasmuch as the body (from which the mind is, in my opinion, inseparable14) is located in a certain point of ‘relational consequences’ (cf. ibid.: 2). Or, still in the words of Csordas, according to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, ‘culture is grounded in the human body’ (ibid.: 6; cf. Ingold 2000: 170). In this perspective, with these concepts and faced with a terrain that seemed to force understanding of the ways in which individuals embody and therefore express socially the relationship they have with the environment they share and to which they belong, I directed my attention to so-called ‘ecological anthropology’ in its different ‘schools’ and currents. As mentioned, ecological anthropology (with all its ‘avatars’) has as a main point of interest the study of humankind–nature relationships from a double angle: the action and impact of human groups on the balance of the surrounding nature (soils, animals, climate, plants and so on), and the impact that nature, in turn, has on patterns of human social organization. In more general terms, ecological anthropology attempts to explain human societies and cultures as products of an adaptive relationship to (environmental) ecosystems. Nevertheless, it is a subject with vague outlines and has been the object of much criticism and theoretical (re)formulations. Kay Milton, in 1997, in an article published in the International Social Science Journal, dated the beginnings of ecological anthropology to a time in which ‘environmental determinism’ flourished in anthropology. It was a period in which the social sciences followed the paradigm of the natural sciences and, following Darwin’s proposals,

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cultural differences were justified based on the same suppositions of the evolution of the species: the biological mechanisms of adaptation to different environmental contexts. According to this author, Geertz, in one of his first works (in which he intersected ecological anthropology and applied anthropology15), named this current ‘anthropogeography’, a term that reflects a fundamental objective: finding correlations between ‘cultural distribution’ and ‘maps of environmental information’. However, despite having co-existed in time with the dissemination of the studies of anthropologists such as Malinowski and Boas, ‘environmental determinism’ was relativized. Some of the phenomena that grab the attention of the anthropologists, such as the systems of interchange, marriage patterns, degrees of kinship, political institutions, etc., showed marked variations in areas where the topography and the climate were rather uniform. Whichever role the environmental factors played in the creation of human cultures, it was obvious that it was not in a way so linearly deterministic, as the past theorists had imagined. (Milton 1997: 2)

With this relativism, and under the influence of Boas’ studies, in view of the evidence of environmental conditions for certain cultural manifestations (particularly obvious in the distribution of economies based on agriculture and pastoralism, or hunter-gatherer societies), the term ‘possibilism’ appears, which, once again, explained several material cultural phenomena, but not others such as those connected to religion, politics, beliefs or ideologies (cf. Milton 1997: 3–4). Boas’ disciples, Alfred Kroeber and Julian Steward, would be the best representatives of this current, intimately associated with cultural anthropology (which, in turn, is generically related to the anthropological knowledge produced in the USA). After the Second World War, Steward coined the term ‘cultural ecology’ and advocated ‘multilinear evolution’ around what he calls a ‘cultural core’, that is, ‘the constellation of features which are most closely related to subsistence activities and economic arrangements’ (Steward 1955: 37). Consequently, Steward, keeping ‘possibilism’ in the background, looked for adaptive answers to similar environments that would generate similarities between cultures and enable their comparison, as opposed to what Mauss argued with his ‘historical particularism’ (cf. Netting 1996: 267). Kay Milton, in the aforementioned article, focuses on Steward’s work, since she considers it to have had a major influence on the history of ecological anthropology and, simultaneously, because it identifies the limitations of ‘determinism’ (cf. Milton 1997: 3). Nevertheless, it is not my intention

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to prolong the analysis of one work, or of a particular author, for a possible history of ecological anthropology. However, since, as mentioned before, the reading of anthropological texts on the humankind/nature relation is a product of the intellectual need ‘caused by the terrain’ and, subsequently, influenced my discourse on it, I find it appropriate to extend the references to this scientific field of interest. This, despite giving my whole attention, essentially, to more contemporary texts by authors who claim their proximity to (British) social anthropology. Thus, still following Milton, the ‘cultural materialism’ of Marvin Harris pursues, in a way, the proposals put forward by Julian Steward: The purpose of Harris was to show the materialist adaptive rationality of every cultural aspect, not only regarding technology but also to what refers to settlement models, beliefs and rituals, and even the environmental factors. (Milton 1997: 5)

However, it is also with this author that ecological anthropology undergoes its greatest developments, perhaps because, as Milton says, Harris’s cultural materialism is more ‘deterministic’ than Steward’s previous cultural ecology. This since Harris intended to demonstrate that, within the material conditions imposed by the environment, every cultural manifestation has an ecological sense (Milton 1997: 6). Such a ‘determinism’ faced with ‘natural’ factors, at a time when the social sciences affirmed their axiomatic distancing from the natural sciences, ended up decreasing their influence over ecological anthropology. At the same time, in the 1950s and 1960s, empirical studies proved that the adaptive models were no justification for cultural phenomena. They could even mean their own denial. The case of the destruction of Easter Island is a well-known example (cf. ibid.: 7). Despite this academic context, other authors have developed research towards this objective: understanding the relation between culture and environment. Among them, we can point out Roy Rappaport and his ‘neofunctionalism’, whereby ecosystems ascend to the position of an analytical category in which one considers that humans and the remaining beings (living or inanimate) influence each other in a system of material interchange. Andrew Vayda, Rappaport’s teacher, proposes, along with Rappaport himself, a ‘New Ecology’ for the anthropological approach and, in this, the unit of analysis should correspond to the population of an ecosystem and not to cultural distinction. Robert Netting, a supporter of ‘cultural ecology’, studied the relation between the economy of domestic groups and

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the environment. Harold Conklin studied the ‘ethnoecology’ of agricultural ecosystems. Roy Ellen systematized ‘human ecology’ and ‘ethnobiology’, which explains the relation between subsistence economies and ecosystems; this author edits the series ‘Studies in Environmental Anthropology’, published by Routledge, with consultors Tim Ingold and Emilio Moran, among others (cf. Milton 1997; Moran 1990, [1979] 2000; Netting 1977). Contemporarily speaking, Emilio Moran and Kay Milton would, perhaps, be the most frequently cited authors in this field of study. Both have various and different areas of interest. As was implicit in the above-mentioned bibliographic references, these two authors have developed work on what they consider to be their theoretical and epistemological filiation. At the same time, they carry out research in such distinct areas as climate change and environmental preservation (Moran 1990; Moran and Boucek 2004), environmentalist movements and the relation between ecology and emotions (Milton 1993, 2002; Milton and Svasek 2005). As we know, labelling areas of scientific interest is not always fair. Some of the authors mentioned above have developed work in quite distant areas, and with clearly distinct approaches; thus, their inclusion in a certain group is nothing but limiting. Note, for example, the case of the late Marvin Harris. In this regard, Tim Ingold is a particular author who hardly fits into any category at all, despite his intimate relationship with ecological anthropology. He himself mentions the work of a few of the authors just mentioned, and says that he has ecological anthropology as a background (cf. Ingold 2000: 5) and proposes a new future for it: There can . . . be no radical break between social and ecological relations; rather, the former constitutes a subset of the latter. What this suggests is the possibility of a new kind of ecological anthropology, one that would take as its starting point the active, perceptual engagement of human beings with the constituents of their world – for it is only from a position of such engagement that they can launch their imaginative speculations concerning what the world is like. The first step in the establishment of this ecological anthropology would be to recognise that the relations with which it deals, between human beings and their environments, are not confined to a domain of ‘nature’, separate from and given independently of, the domain in which they lead their lives as persons. (Ibid.: 60)

Now, if in the archaeology of my thought in the face of my lived experience in Azenha do Mar I can identify authors, theoretical proposals or concepts that influenced me, Tim Ingold is one of them.

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Another, as mentioned earlier, is Anthony P. Cohen and his proposals for the construction of a community and the understanding of the conscience of self from an anthropological point of view. Tim Ingold’s work can be placed within the confluence of interests in ecological anthropology; however, the research he conducts respects rigorously, and in a Herculean fashion, several fields in anthropology and interdisciplinarity with other sciences (for example, psychology is essential for his proposals). As he himself says and supports, social or cultural anthropology, biological anthropology and archaeology form a unit, and are part of the same intellectual effort (cf. Ingold 2000: 189). This idea runs throughout Cohen’s work. Psychology appears later in the former’s, in the late 1980s, under the influence of a book by James Gibson, published in 1979, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. This book was, in Ingold’s own words, a ‘revelation’ and the most influential work prior to the publication date of his own book, The Perception of the Environment (cf. ibid.: 2). In this book, Ingold gathers and relates a number of articles he had published previously with other unpublished ones. It would not be far from the truth to say that this book is close to what constitutes the peak of a life’s work. For the first time, his holistic approach, which does not reify the social, the cultural, the ecological or the psychological, let alone the synchronic or diachronic perspectives, appears in a single volume. Hunter-gatherer societies still feature in Ingold’s ethnographic examples; however, the core of the questions he raises is always the environment and, as an integral part of that relational complex, humanity. It is from here that he moves on to social and/or cultural phenomena, which, as we have seen, are nothing but a subset of ecological relationships. It is usual to confuse ‘environment’ with ‘nature’ (in the more shared conceptualization in the ‘West’, in which nature is something non-human). It is also usual to hear in this same ‘West’ that the environment is that whole that surrounds us. For example, we frequently say that a certain individual ‘is not in his environment’. For Ingold, the definition of ‘environment’, as we will see later, is closer to this meaning used in day-to-day life than that of ‘nature’: the environment is a relational whole that has always in its centre the one who perceives it. Regarded in this way, the environment becomes a descriptive category of a relationship that we know to be always individual, but that can be extended to human groups. This in the way that the constitution of social groups allows us to think that senses and perceptions are shared by different individuals. Those groups to

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which we refer via the concept of ‘community’ are a good example of this possibility to share ‘environments’. The ways in which we relate to our environment necessarily go through our body. We have no other way of doing so. Our senses are what allow us to interact with what surrounds us; it is our mind that understands that interaction. We speak, therefore, of a relationship that is only possible in the duration of lived experience, of a perception of a time and space. The act of perceiving implies, inevitably, the combination of the senses and a ‘movement of reflexive reciprocity’ (i.e. what is perceived affects the one who perceives, and this in turn affects what is perceived). Referring to James Gibson’s work, Ingold writes that perception is an act of a mind in a body and that this mind is as much inside the body as it is outside: Perception . . . is not the achievement of a mind in a body, but of the organism as a whole in its environment and is tantamount to the organism’s own exploratory movement through the world. If mind is anywhere, then, it is not ‘inside the head’ rather than ‘out there’ in the world. To the contrary, it is immanent in the network of sensory pathways that are set up by virtue of the perceiver’s immersion in his or her environment. (Ingold 2000: 3)

In this approach, in order to understand the relationship between organisms and environment simultaneously with the constitution of culturally distinct human groups, we should summon to the case other conceptualizations and notions proposed by Ingold: namely, ‘dwelling perspective’, ‘taskscape’ and ‘skill’. These are concepts that, by implying the conscience of self of the individuals and a relational whole that is not confined and, simultaneously, not limited to what is social and/or cultural, have turned out to be essential to my ‘perception’ (during and after the fieldwork) of Azenha do Mar. They will, therefore, appear explicitly and implicitly throughout the whole volume. However, before diving deeper into them, it will be useful to remember another author and his relevance to Ingold’s anthropology and, consequently, to my own thought: Gregory Bateson. Bateson, a ‘notorious maverick of anthropology’ (Ingold 2000: 3), for others a psychologist (he practised psychiatry for a few years), always worked within the disciplinary borders of anthropology, biology and psychology (just as Ingold does) and always assumed the complexity of his work, as the reality he studied was also complex. Paraphrasing Eriksen, who refers to Bateson in one of his texts on

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complexity (cf. Eriksen 2005), he became famous with a title of a chapter: ‘Two Descriptions Are Better than One’.16 Naven ([1936] 1958), Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson and Bateson 2000) and Mind and Nature ([1979] 2002) would be Gregory Bateson’s most disseminated works. Naven, an Iatmul ritual in New Guinea, and the title of a book published in 1936, is a methodological and epistemological critique of the knowledge then produced. It draws on what, fifty years later, would be associated with the more (auto)reflexive ‘post-modern’ current, as it discusses the production of knowledge and the fact that it reveals more about the ways in which it is produced than exactly what it wants to describe. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, initially published in 1972, but with an expanded edition in 2000, is a collection of articles written by Bateson (grouped by themes) that encompasses the period between 1925 and 1980, the year of his death. In this book, the diffusion and originality of Bateson’s interests is apparent (for example, the relationship between the epistemology of cybernetics and the practice of Alcoholics Anonymous). Mind and Nature, his last book, sums up all of his work. It presumes, however, a reading of prior works. How the world works, how mind and nature are a single organism that integrates and relates the ways and processes that make up the universe, are some of the major questions that Bateson raised (cf. Bateson [1936] 1958, [1979] 2002; Bateson and Bateson 2000). Bateson, similarly to Ingold, seems to consider that anthropology is a philosophy. The latter author presents a definition that, as Viveiros de Castro suggests in one of his articles about the production of anthropological knowledge and the relationship of the anthropologist with the ‘other native’, . . . it is better to leave it in the original, [thus], ‘anthropology is philosophy with the people in’. By ‘people’, Ingold means the ‘ordinary people’, the common people . . . ; but he is also playing with the meaning of ‘people’ as a collective noun, and even more, as ‘peoples’. A philosophy with other people inside it, then: the possibility of a philosophical activity that maintains a relation with the non-philosophy – the life – of other peoples on the planet, besides our own.17 (Castro 2002: 127)

‘The people of Ingold’ are mainly those included in hunter-gatherer societies (perhaps because in these groups nature is not separate from the rest of the world; cf. Milton 1997: 17). The recurrence of these ethnographic examples in Ingold’s work may appear to be a hindrance when applying his analytical concep-

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tualizations to other cultural universes. However, we can broaden Ingold’s anthropology to other human groups and/or cultures without warping the comparative method:18 one has simply to understand that ‘perception’ and ‘environment’ are key concepts, and that the latter, as Ingold uses it, does not imply an interpretation of nature in ways thought out by Western ideology. Consequently, although in ‘my’ ethnographic case, Azenha do Mar, the relation with natural elements (namely, those that cannot be ‘domesticated’, such as the sea or weather conditions) is essential, what matters most is perception, the interrelation and interaction with what surrounds us (cf. Milton 1997: 19–21; Ingold 2000: 20). For Ingold, the environment is perceived through the constant and continuous relational movement in space and time that an individual inhabits (cf. Ingold 2000: 227). In order to comprehensively understand this relational movement, Ingold proposes what he calls a ‘dwelling perspective’.19 This is: a perspective that treats the immersion of the organism-person in an environment or lifeworld as an inescapable condition of existence. From this perspective, the world continually comes into being around the inhabitant, and its manifold constituents take on significance through their incorporation into a regular pattern of life activity. (Ibid.: 153)

If we disregard the differences in language, this perspective brings back another concept, also a relational model widely used by the social sciences: Bourdieu’s habitus.20 It would be unnecessary to lengthen the discussion around this vastly disseminated concept, which has in ‘involvement’ (or ‘engagement’) a point in common with Ingold’s ‘dwelling perspective’. As we know, Bourdieu worried more about the interaction between people and their practices, socially and culturally bounded, than with other elements of a certain context. In other words, the notion of habitus grants the individual the power to generate and construct the social (as mentioned); Bourdieu reminds us that this capacity is built and acquired throughout a life experience socially located and dated (cf. Bourdieu [1997] 2000: 136–37), but does not broaden, objectively, involvement with other elements that influence and interact with human forms of organization. Therefore, it will not be wrong to assume that, if we add and/or extend the relation with the environment to Bourdieu’s habitus, we will end up rather close to Ingold’s ‘dwelling perspective’. Therefore, recapitulating the fact that I practise here an archaeology of my own reflection in view of the people I studied, I can

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conclude that I interpret the dwelling perspective as a habitus that considers interaction with the environment. In fact, it is Ingold himself who remembers the validity of this association of concepts by reflecting on Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice’ and embodiment. Ingold writes: the habitus is not expressed in practice, it rather subsists in it. What Bourdieu has in mind is the kind of practical mastery that we associate with skill – a mastery that we carry in our bodies and that is refractory to formulation in terms of any system of mental rules and representations. (Ingold 2000: 162; my emphasis)

As I propose in the following chapters, the set of arrangements, assumptions and expectations that the notion of habitus entails, when thought of in the context of Azenha, implies, in my opinion, the inclusion of the interaction between human beings and the environment. It also requires, consequently, the negation of the ‘culture/ nature’ dichotomy. The game of interrelation between the two terms is continuous and constant. At least in the universe I consider. Manifestations of that game are the bodily arrangements and the acquiring of capacities: Bourdieu’s bodily hexis (for whom, once again, the framework of mutual influences is among individuals and society), and/or the competences, skills, of Ingold (to whom the interaction between individuals – perceived as organisms – and the environment is the extended context we should start to consider). By skills I do not mean techniques of the body, but the capabilities of action and perception of the whole organic being (indissolubly mind and body) situated in a richly structured environment. As properties of human organisms, skills are thus as much biological as cultural. . . . They are . . . properties of the whole system of relations constituted by the presence of the practitioner in his or her environment. . . . [S]killed practice . . . is continually responsive both to changing environmental conditions and to the nuances of the practitioner’s relation to the material as the task unfolds. . . . [S]kills are refractory to codification in the programmatic form of rules and representations. Thus it is not through the transmission of any such programmes that skills are learned, but rather through a mixture of improvisation and imitation in the settings of practice. (Ingold 2000: 5, 401)

We can, in conclusion, understand ‘competences’ as a developing process of the (inter)action of individuals, not with the environment and/or with the world, but in the environment and in the world. Their acquisition is relational and procedural. The development of

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competences – technical but also social – for access to fishery resources in Azenha would be a good example, as we will see. At the same time, we can also see that the acquisition of competences is not, necessarily, a genetically or culturally inherited learning (cf. Ingold 2000: 186–87). It comes, instead, from the relation with the environment and a certain ‘learning by doing’. This notion of competences brings us to the interaction that constitutes the environment and the landscape, which corresponds to a temporality of Azenha – a place populated recently, which we will approach in the next chapters. Simultaneously, because it implies ‘work’ and ‘time’, it allows for the introduction of another central notion in Ingold’s analytical model: ‘taskscape’. Briefly, Ingold enunciates ‘taskscape’ (a landscape of activities, I propose) as a pattern of living activities, intimately related with landscape and, therefore, with environment (cf. Ingold 2000: 154, 193). It happens in a temporality that is essentially social and subject to observation; it is instead made, worked on continuously by its constituents (ibid.: 195–96). For the definition of ‘taskscape’, Ingold summons MerleauPonty’s phenomenology and Alfred Gell’s anthropology of time and a rhetoric that compares the artistic fields of painting and music to, first, distinguish ‘taskscape’ from the notion of landscape and, afterwards, connect them conceptually. ‘Taskscape’ is like music: it only exists when it is played or streamed (which brings us to the comprehension of memory); landscape is like painting: it endures over time, despite being able to be perceived differently, through the involvement of individuals with what is represented. This does not mean that the landscape is a representation frozen in time and/or space. On the contrary, the active involvement of individuals establishes a transformation process that will reconstruct it in a continuous relational movement – in this way, landscape and ‘taskscape’ reconcile and bring us, again, to the experiential perspective and to the relational whole constituted in an environment. If I extend my references to Ingold’s work, and in particular to his book The Perception of the Environment, it is because, firstly, this works as a compendium of this author’s way of thinking; secondly, paraphrasing the words of Otávio Velho in a review that is also a short essay on the philosophy of science and the history of anthropology, Ingold’s anthropology, influenced by phenomenology, changes ‘the focus of analysis from an abstract being that gives sense to the world to a being-in-the-world’ (Velho 2001: 135). Thirdly, Azenha do Mar has revealed itself in my eyes to be a social space where scarcely anything has been inherited or transmitted, and where almost everything

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is permanently built or generated. And in this process, the environment – the ways in which it is perceived and the ways in which the interrelation is established – becomes essential to the understanding of the construction of social and cultural ‘things’. There is a recursive bond between human beings and the environment to which they belong and which they share. The landscape of Azenha is not nature but it is also not culture. It is a manifestation of this recursive connection. To me, evidence. Perhaps because it is a recent population, or perhaps because an element of life on Earth as powerful as the sea is who coordinates the day-to-day life of all these people. Or, even still, because the competences that mediate the relation with the sea are not very ‘technological’ and, in contrast, clearly marked in the bodies of the fishermen and worked on in the constructed landscape of Azenha. In fact, the fishing techniques that are used lead us to an image in which human action in the framework is not even its own image, or its centre, or what determines what happens in it. In other words, the fishing techniques used in Azenha contribute to envisioning a landscape in which human action exists, but that is not the landscape. These are a few of the paths that I can identify in my relation with Azenha do Mar and, as an integral part of this relationship, with discourses that contributed to the movement that constitutes my gaze on my own field experience. If, in this chapter, the ‘field’ is an apparently remote reference, in others I seek to keep slightly more hidden the discourses that have influenced my perspective, always implicit but not always explicit. This brief incursion into my own thoughts surrounding Azenha intends, specifically, to reveal some of the perspectives that I draw on throughout the rest of the text.

Notes 1. For an analytical reading of Chayanov’s work, The Theory of Peasant Economy, see Shanin’s introduction to the 1986 edition, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. 2. For a clarification of the importance of Santos Graça’s work, see Medeiros’s introduction in Santos Graça ([1932] 1992). 3. The work of Albino dos Santos Lapa, historian and prolific linguist (1898–1968), deserves particular mention given the number of volumes, fascicles and reprints about fishing villages that he produced throughout his life. 4. Institute of Social Sciences and Overseas Policies, currently ISCSP.

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5. For a critical analysis of the text Women of the Praia, by Sally Cole, see Pina-Cabral (1992). For Brøgger on the fishermen in Nazaré, see Pina-Cabral (1991b: 174). 6. Information taken from a text by Vítor Viçoso (2003). 7. Worth remembering, for example, are Franz Boas and his interests during his first trip to the Arctic polar circle (cf. Cole 1983: 14). 8. For an approach to the relevance of White’s work for ecological anthropology, see Peace (2004). 9. A ‘lack’ that manifests itself in two different perspectives: one that, ‘from the outside’, builds ‘local knowledge’ and ‘traditions’ (a modern perspective in which I find myself a carrier of scientific and academic knowledge that distinguishes the expert/carrier of the body of knowledge grounded in historical and temporal depth), and the other that, ‘from the inside’, is in effect produced through time through the construction of the ‘place’ (throughout time). I thus resume the proposal of Ingold and Kurttila that suggests, as an alternative to the notion of tradition, the acronyms MKT (‘traditional knowledge as framed in the discourse of modernity’) and LKT (‘traditional knowledge as generated in the practices of locality’). This proposal rehearses the refutation of the dichotomy between what is commonly called ‘traditional’ and a body of knowledge that is experiential/relational – assessed as being deeply rooted in time although it may not be (cf. Ingold and Kurttila 2000: 183–85). 10. A term with particular meaning for the present text, to which I will return later. 11. For example, in 1991 Giddens had published the book Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age; Okely and Callaway published the work of a group of authors, Anthropology and Autobiography, in 1992; Nigel Rapport, in 1993, published Diverse Worldviews in an English Village; in 1995, another collective work, Rhetorics of Self-making, was being edited by Debbora Battaglia. In another perspective, on individualism and ideology, Brian Morris published Western Conceptions of the Individual (1992). Some years earlier, in 1986, the English translation of the book Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective by Louis Dumont appeared, originally published in French three years previously. 12. In 1998, I published a critical review of this book by Anthony P. Cohen (see Mendes 1998). 13. In Portuguese, the translation of the word embodiment is equally correct as incorporação and encorporação, since both are used in social science texts in Portuguese. However, the Houaiss dictionary, which gives the same meaning to both words, states that incorporação is the ‘act or effect of incorporating’, and that incorporar means to ‘give or take a bodily form’; coating (itself) with a material form is the correct way for the ‘non preferential general form’ of encorporar. Given this attribution of meanings, despite acknowledging that the translation of words and concepts does not always obey criteria of linguistic correction, I believe

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14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

that the presented translation would be the most appropriate. At the same time, this spelling leads us to a distinction made by Paul Connerton that assumes special relevance here: the sedimentation of memory in the body is a social practice that can be distinguished between a movement of incorporation and another of inscription (I consulted the original version of Connerton’s volume in English; in the Portuguese version the translation is literal). The first one motivates action and corporeal interaction, while the second does not; what is communicated remains beyond the interlocutors. The following phrase is thus worth citing: ‘The memorisation of culturally specific postures can be considered an example of embodiment practices’ (Connerton [1989] 1993: 87–88). Regarding the indivisibility of the body and the mind, as we will see in the following chapters, I also agree with Tim Ingold. Other authors summarized by Csordas in his introduction to the book Embodiment and Experience consider the theoretical existence of ‘multiple bodies’, either in the difference between body and mind (Mary Douglas) or in its division between ‘self’, ‘social’ and ‘political’ (Scheper-Hughes) (cf. Csordas [1994] 2001: 3–4). I believe this division of the body into theoretical units (possibly objectified) creates interpretative entropies. If we follow, for example, Cohen’s epistemological and methodological proposal ([1994] 2000), which states that we should assign to the ‘other’ capacities that we assign to ourselves, we easily understand that our body is not multiple. The fact that we can emphasize more or less one or another ‘skin’ does not mean that the body is another. It will mean only that the situationality is also embodied. A reference to the little-known Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia, published in 1963 by the University of California Press. This is the title of a chapter in Bateson’s Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, first published in 1979. Viveiros de Castro quotes the editorial of the journal Man 27(1) of 1992, written by Tim Ingold. In fact, what is suggested here is not a comparison, but the application of an analytical model. The translation into Portuguese of ‘dwelling perspective’ is not linear. The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines ‘dwell’ as: ‘to live in a place or in a particular way’. Thus, because this meaning implies, simultaneously, ‘live’, ‘place’ and ‘form’, I believe that a good Portuguese word would be residir (‘reside’), hence, residencial (‘residential’) (a form that Paul Charest chooses for the French version; cf. Charest 2002). However, according to the Houaiss dictionary, there is no reason for this suggested translation. Consequently, I would opt for another pertinent choice: vivencial (‘experiential/existential’), an adjective from vivência (‘experience’), which in this latter dictionary means, for example, ‘the fact of having life’, ‘the process of living’, ‘something that one experiences by living’, ‘knowledge acquired in the process of living or

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living a situation or of doing something’, ‘experience’, ‘practice’, ‘situation’, ‘mode’, ‘living habit’. 20. Habitus, briefly, means a set or a system that is socially acquired from durable and transposable dispositions that integrates every experience and bounds perceptions, appreciations and individual actions (e.g. cf. Bourdieu 1980: 52–60), and that implies for its understanding other notions, such as: ‘field’, the broadest context in which the interrelations that lead to dispositions of the habitus operate, which is also a space of relationships, of dispute and power among groups of different social positions (ibid.: 124–30); ‘agent’, the subject, in which the habitus is incorporated, the practical operator of social action (ibid.: 89–92); ‘practice’, which results from the dialectic between subjects and society and implies a trajectory, a historicity of actions (ibid.: 129–33). According to Löic Wacquant, the concept of habitus, generally attributed to Bourdieu, is a reintroduction (revised and extended) of an Aristotelean notion discussed by Thomas Aquinas that translated the Greek concept hexis into habitus (cf. Wacquant 2004: 391). Before Bourdieu, Mauss (who also attributed the origin to Aristotle) had already used the term in a more restricted sense, which influenced, determinately, Bourdieu’s own usage (cf. Mauss 1934: 7). For a historical reading of the concept of habitus, see the article by F. Héron, ‘La Seconde Nature de l’Habitus’ (1987).

3 Fishing, Everyday Life and Relationships

The two roads that lead to Azenha do Mar go right through the middle of around eight hundred hectares of greenhouses that shelter an intensive and industrialized agricultural project that appeared in the early 1990s. The landscape until then was filled by wild pine trees planted in the 1960s, which occasionally merged with pastures and grain fields. This gave place to a sea of plastic and layers of vegetables of uniform shapes and colours that fill the shelves of supermarkets throughout Europe, along with fruits and ornamental plants. However, despite the hundreds of hectares of industrialized agriculture, when you catch sight of the first house in Azenha and before seeing the port where the boats are anchored, it is impossible not to notice that you are in a fishing village. The fishing gear outside the fronts of houses, the nets and nylon thread spread across the streets, the outboard motors hanging in big water-filled cans, the constant smell of fish and the leftovers scattered on the side of the dirt roads, the oily overalls, the long green rubber boots, and always the sea, in the background, imposing and omnipresent, superimpose the hundreds of hectares of greenhouses that go on through every possible quadrant, or any other element of the landscape that surrounds us. However, the building of this landscape or this environment has been in existence for only a few years. It is not the consequence of an infinite occupation of the space that would serve, even if rhetorically, the justification of its own existence. Instead, it has been built over the last three decades, in a relational game

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between humans and nature, in which access to the sea and the exploitation of its resources appear as conditioning elements of any form of spatial occupation. Consequently, finding out how this landscape has been built – which is also the first tangible image of a collective identity, of homogeneous appearance and distinct from the neighbouring villages – and what is the pertinence of a gaze that considers the construction of the social space within it as a relational and adaptive process, has become a subject of reflection throughout subsequent fieldwork visits. In other words, Azenha do Mar has been building itself before my eyes as a social space in permanent interrelation with the natural environment of which it is an integral part. It would be enough to remind us that one of the reasons for the occupation of the place stems from the existence of a natural cove that facilitates access to the sea, or that the first houses were built with local materials, or, even, that knowledge and mapping of the coastal area has been accumulated over the years through a collecting activity, algae harvesting. A tangible manifestation of this relation between humankind and nature can be found in the technologies used in fishing activity. Fishing gear provides instruments that mediate this relationship. They emphasize ways of adaptation and response of the human group to the natural environment that, in this case, assure survival. Thus, my proposal for this chapter focuses on the technologies that enable access to the sea and the exploitation of its resources, as susceptible to a relational analysis, in which I envision change, transformation and/or adaptation as results of processes of interaction inside a universe in which what is exclusively human is just another element.1 At the same time, I consider that the construction of identity is dependent on this humankind–nature relation, firstly because time in Azenha is spent mostly on activities connected to the sea, and, secondly, because knowledge, information, emotions, bonds, conflicts and so on are not independent of this relationship. In other words, the day-to-day life shared by the people of Azenha is part of, and happens in, this relationship. Therefore, thinking the social as something separate, independent of the natural environment and the ways in which these condition and determine each other in Azenha, would be to deny the greater heuristic validity of the fieldwork with participant observation: the overlapping of an experienced reality (individual, and always ‘felt’ through the senses, the emotions and the conscience of the self) with the theoretical hypotheses taken to the field.

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Construction of the Landscape The first time I saw Azenha do Mar, I retained an image of difference, since I was coming from Zambujeira do Mar, a place by then already deeply marked by tourism. The first difference can be spotted in the occupation of space. I was leaving a village that opened itself upon the beach and the sea, with public spaces (esplanades, cafés, restaurants, stores, hostels and boarding houses, a camping site and several houses converted to tourist rentals) that seduce tourists, to enter, a few kilometres south, a small agglomerate of precarious and uncared-for buildings divided among dusty and dirty roads. However, the location of both villages just above the sea, or perhaps the contrast between the smallness of the villages and the immensity of the sea that borders them, brought them together. In those very first moments, the sea appeared in my distracted gaze as a life central space. In other words, despite the differences, even from a ‘touristic’ viewpoint, it was possible to notice that the sea converged on all the day-to-day activities of virtually every individual from the two places. However, the ways in which it was, and is, appropriated and lived are different. If for some the sea is a recreational space, for others it is a workplace. If the first glimpse of this difference is in the occupation of territory, in the village’s own architecture, other factors weigh in on that distinction. The one that interests me most here has to do with the relationship that people in Azenha maintain with the environment they belong to or, more precisely, with the mechanisms that intermediate the connection between the social/cultural world and the natural world. I am thus starting with a premise that considers that no human beings and, consequently, social and cultural phenomena are independent and/or unrelated to the environment in which they live. For such an approach, I start from Tim Ingold’s proposals that consider the human being as an organism among others and, consequently, draw an ecological anthropology. In other words, I follow the proposal that Ingold has defended since his first works (cf. Ingold 1980), but elaborated particularly in his 1986 book, The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations, that (re)positions human beings and their specificities as social beings as another part of the whole that is the natural environment.2 Ingold even states: Humans, I argue, are brought into existence as organism-persons within a world that is inhabited by beings of manifold kinds, both human and

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non-human. Therefore relations among humans, which we are accustomed to calling ‘social’, are but a sub-set of ecological relations. (Ingold 2000: 5)

Thereby, accepting that the relationships between human beings are an integral part of a relational whole that is not only social or cultural and, as Ingold states, that ‘what we are accustomed to call cultural variation in fact consists of variations of skills’, considering that ‘variations of skills’ are ‘the capabilities of action and perception of the whole organic being (indissolubly mind and body) situated in a richly structured environment’ (2000: 5), I propose introducing in this chapter a relational and ecological reflection on the identity and difference of Azenha do Mar. In fact, it is impossible to assume that Azenha’s identifying characteristics and attributes were passed down from generation to generation. Indeed, two premises should suffice to refute any reading that considers that social behaviours and/or acquired knowledge come from any inherited and shared tradition: namely, that the village has existed for only approximately thirty years (only now can we start talking of a second generation born there), and the fact that virtually no residents were fishermen before moving to Azenha. It would, consequently, be incorrect to exclude from the analysis of identifying characteristics of Azenha a perspective that considers the human– nature interrelation. What is more, their survival depends in such a way on the natural resources they exploit – resources that are so delicately controllable – that not considering this relation would constitute the obliteration of an essential part of the village. This relationship has an interface that is immediately noticeable to the eye of any observer: the utensils, the technologies, the tools that enable access to resources, in this case fishery resources. Through the use of these utensils as tools that facilitate control of those resources, but that also determine and structure day-to-day routines, we can better understand what seems to differentiate Azenha in the eyes of any occasional visitor. By introducing the techniques and technologies of access to resources as a factor susceptible to contributing to the construction of an identity and, simultaneously, by bringing into consideration the occupation of time by certain tasks, I am admitting the possibility of a certain occupational dimension for the definition of identifying characteristics. In other words, an occupational identity that stems from the repetition over time of the ‘capacities/skills of action and perception’.3 All in all, I am thus admitting that the cultural variations that

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we can observe in the day-to-day practices in Azenha (to be understood, for the metonymy I intend to establish, as skills) are as much the product of interaction with the environment (the development of tools, such as fishing gear, is a clear example) as the social relations maintained there (exchange of knowledge and information) and the awareness that the individuals have of themselves in this relational framework (of the capacity of agency, transformation and change). I am thus proposing a notion for anthropological analysis that relates, on a single level, the social dimension, the ecological dimension and the psychological dimension of a certain human community. This means that I make my understanding of life in Azenha depend, simultaneously, on relations with the environment, relations between individuals, and the perception and capacity of agency of those on the two major relational frameworks. For that purpose, I will use the description of technologies used by the fishermen of Azenha, the ways in which they are used and in which they condition day-to-day practices, and the learning process of those same technologies and their development. In other words, I proceed based on the assumption that the fishermen’s identifying dimensions go through processes of adaptation to the environment that are easily recognizable in the techniques and technologies used in fishing. Yet, again, I assume that this process of adaptation is always relational, whether according to a social perspective (between people), or according to an ecological perspective (between people and nature).

Fishing Gear: Competence and Identity The fishing territory of Azenha’s fishermen rarely goes beyond a distance of two miles from the coast of southwest Alentejo (in an east–west direction). The southern incursions are more frequent and longer than the northern ones. To the south, Ponta da Atalaia, a promontory located near Arrifana and about twenty nautical miles from Azenha (in the municipality of Aljezur, within the district of Faro), is rarely crossed. To the north, the Sardão Cape is another landmark that demarcates the fishing area more frequently crossed by the small boats of Azenha do Mar, despite the Entrada das Barcas, a fishing port of Zambujeira do Mar (a parish in the municipality of Odemira), about five miles from Azenha, being a limit rarely crossed (the frequency of use of these territories changes according to the gear that is used: if the aparelho (fishing longline) requires a great distance, the nets or cages are usually left in parts of the sea closer to the village.

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The artisanal character of the fishing activity of Azenha do Mar becomes evident in the kind of vessels we can see anchored in the laredo. The small boats, almost always made of wood but with fibreglass becoming more common, are around four metres in length (a few built more recently are around six metres), with a baseline of around sixty centimetres, and are propelled by one or two outboard motors fixed on the stern that run on gas.4 Three boards solidly attached to the edges of the boat increase the rigidity of the structure, the seats and the limitation of cargo space. The cone formed by the bow is closed on top and on its vertical plane, with a small door in it that allows objects to be kept in the only enclosed space within the boat. These boats were acquired by the fishermen of Azenha from other fishermen from neighbouring ports (mostly from Sagres), until the early 1990s. At that time, a man from Odeceixe, who years before had married a daughter of one of the first fishermen of Azenha, used his former experience in mechanics and the knowledge gathered from fishing activity to dedicate himself, firstly, to the maintenance of the boats in Azenha and later to building new boats. The boats built by this man are slightly larger than those common in Azenha and are coated with marine plywood,5 as opposed to the earlier ones that were coated with long juxtaposed boards. They also have a structure intended to facilitate the use of technologies: the electronic probe and mechanical systems such as the alador (a motorized pulley system that pulls the fishing longline or other gear to the inside of the boat) which, from the mid 1990s, were acquired by some of the fishermen. It is still possible to spot in Azenha another kind of vessel: a boat with the sole purpose of harvesting algae. Only two fishermen have such vessels; however, in summers when algae harvesting takes place, more boats of this kind can be spotted in the cove. They are the property of individuals who carry out the algae harvesting regularly and systematically along the Portuguese coast. These boats distinguish themselves from the others by their bright yellow colour, by their low capacity and the absence of central seats, which facilitates the loading and transport of the algae to shore.

The Gear The fishing techniques most frequently used in Azenha have not undergone substantial change since the village’s foundation. Despite the introduction of new complementary technologies, starting with

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outboard motors (introduced en masse in the first half of the 1970s) and finishing with depth probes and aladores (introduced in the late 1990s), the fishing gear remains the same. Among these, the fishing longline appears as the most valued and, above all, as the one that has the most influence on day-to-day life and, consequently, structures the social space of Azenha, as we will see later. The fishing longline, in other areas along the Portuguese coast known as ‘palangre’, ‘fishhook fishing longline’, ‘trole’, ‘espinel’ (cf., for example, Franca, Martins and Carneiro 1998: 34) or, as Baldaque da Silva referred to it in 1886, ‘espinhel’ (see Baldaque da Silva 1891: 245), is formed by a long nylon thread that can reach up to three kilometres in length, the madre, where from one fathom6 to one and a half fathoms (or from fathom to fathom, depending on the size of the fishing longline) are attached other thinner nylon threads, the estralhos, with about half a fathom of length, in which fishhooks are stuck. These fishhooks, which can amount to more than two thousand units, the madre and the estralhos are placed inside a box, with one open side, an inside rim coated with cork (where the fishhooks are attached, ready to be baited) and an outer platform, placed slightly below the rim and on the four outer sides (which is used to place the hooks after they are baited). The species of fish fishing longline can catch vary widely and are dependent on the size of the hooks and the type of bait. Thus, normally with the larger hooks (thick fishing longline, hooks no. 7–8), the sardine (cut into small pieces) is used as bait and the conger, the sea bass, the snapper and the moray are the species most commonly caught. With a smaller hook (thin fishing longline, hooks no. 11–14), squid is the most common bait and the pout, the sea bass, the conger or the scorpionfish are those most frequently caught.7 Choosing the size of the hooks and the type of bait (each fishing longline has only one hook size and one type of bait) depends on the experiential knowledge of each fisherman and the species of fish they want to catch. However, caught fish species are a matter of luck, as all fishermen know and claim, and not dependent on the type of hook and bait employed, although the fishing longline is particularly selective when compared to others. The fishing longline is used in deeper waters. It is dropped at sea with the boat moving, usually by two fishermen.8 At the stern, one of the men, almost always the most experienced, who is usually also the owner of the boat, manoeuvres the motor. On one side, another fisherman, after casting into the sea one of the ends of the madre attached to a rock that works as an anchor and placing a signalling buoy, grad-

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ually lowers the fishing longline. Other buoys are placed alongside the fishing longline, in order to keep the madre and the estralhos at a more or less constant depth. Finally, another rock and another buoy fix the fishing longline in the intended position. This should form a straight line in the current’s direction, for only in this way will the fishing longline not get tangled. A few hours later, keeping the boat in the place where the fishing longline was dropped, the crew looks for the first buoy to retrieve the fishing longline. Other common gear in Azenha are the covos, or nassas (creels). They are structures with a cylindrical or rectangular shape, with an iron structure coated with a net of thick plastic, with an opening that funnels through to the inside of the structure, allowing the fish to enter but not get out. The creels, with a more resistant structure and used further from the shore, and considered more fragile, are normally used inside the bay formed by the rocks that surround the port of Azenha. They are transported on the boats to distances relatively close to the port and it is common for this task to be executed by a single fisherman, even though, as with the fishing longline, this is not ideal. A crew of two men makes the task easier as it is possible for one of them to manoeuvre the boat while the other places the baits in the creels and casts them into the sea. It is common for the creels to be cast with a rock ballast so they stay more easily at the bottom of the sea. A madre, a thick rope this time, strings the creels together, ending in a signalling buoy that not only lets the fishermen know where their traps are, but also distinguishes them from those of other crews. Similar to the fishing longline, the creels are not guaranteed to catch one particular species of fish. However, they are used to catch, preferentially, shellfish and octopuses. The creels are used more frequently than other gear during the winter, as they can be left at sea for long periods of time if the sea does not allow for safe recollection. Another type of gear still used in Azenha do Mar, even if only by three fishermen, is the alcatruz. These are clay pots held by nylon threads that, in the last few years, have been replaced by plastic versions to make up for the fragility of the original pots. They are generally held together by a thin thread (which in other ports is called alfoque), resulting in a type of web, connected to the surface by a madre that ends in a signalling buoy. With these alcatruzes one can catch octopuses, but, unlike the creels, they do not need bait since the octopus seeks shelter, not food, in alcatruzes. Nets, possibly the most symbolic piece of fishing gear, are not the most common in Azenha, for bureaucratic reasons (the licensing

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system that authorizes this type of equipment has almost stagnated; fishermen must buy licences among themselves in order to use nets). They are, however, used by some fishermen as an easier piece of gear to use, almost always along with other gear. Thus, mostly during the summer and when access to the sea is likely to be easier for a long period of time, some fishermen cast small nets near the port of Azenha hoping to catch more fish, regardless of the species. Two-man crews are the most frequent and desirable with regard to the use of this gear, also in order to make the work at sea easier and to control the risk. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that this type of gear is not used very frequently, a major proportion of the fishermen are opposed to using it. They say that the permanence of nets at sea beyond a few hours ‘only serves the purpose of killing fish’. In the horse-mackerel season, late spring and early summer, and when the retail price justifies it, almost every crew uses this type of gear, as otherwise they would not be able to catch the desired amount of fish. For this type of fishing, occasional groups are formed made up of two crews of two men each. The boats, working together, bring along strong lights to attract the fish to the surface. One of the boats, starting from the other one that stays more or less in place, draws a circle with the net around the school, until it is imprisoned inside the net. This type of fishing does not take place every year. It is, however, appreciated and lived as a season of relative abundance by the whole village of Azenha. It is even pointed out as a ‘beautiful’ art, as from the shore one can see dozens of lights over the waves, and at sea, from the boats, one can see entire silvery schools bubbling up to the surface. For this reason, on several occasions, one of my privileged informers, M., insisted that I should not miss the horse-mackerel fishing, and that it would be a shame if it did not occur during my stay in Azenha. This is a time when ‘Azenha is like a different place . . . everyone seems to be happier, it is probably the only time where everyone gets along fine’. In fact, when conditions are ideal (abundant fish, calm sea, full moon and licensing), every crew takes part in horse-mackerel fishing. The technique that is used obliges at least two crews to work together and, hence, on land, two domestic groups form situational alliances that last for the duration of the season. It is precisely at these moments that the exchange of knowledge intensifies. These alliances find in the preparation of the gear their most obvious manifestation. However, as opposed to the more common practice, these domestic groups can be found gathered at meal times, alternating between the

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houses of the different fishermen. Thus, each of the groups contributes equally to the work and the costs of the two crews. These alliances between fishermen and their respective families are quite rare. When they happen, they are always a result of a certain strategy that aims to maximize success in their access to fishery resources. Horse-mackerel fishing is one of those rare moments, as the technique itself calls for such partnerships. The day-to-day routine of every individual in Azenha is deeply affected by the work of preparing the fishing gear on land, even those who do not take part directly or continuously in these tasks. This is because the preparations are made in public spaces, usually in front of the houses of each fisherman (as is the case with the preparation of the fishing longline) or in the laredo (the creels, the nets), thus allowing for the integration of individuals who do not have an active role in these tasks during these moments of great sociability.

‘There is No Fishing at Sea without Working Well on Land’ This sentence is used frequently by fishermen to emphasize the importance of the tasks that precede the fishing itself. The mastery with which the utensils and the gear are handled is essential to the success of the work at sea. The body of knowledge demanded for the manipulation of different fishing techniques and the various technologies it involves is shared almost always during the preparation of the gear before going out to sea and/or by the boats, in the laredo, when the final preparations are being made (when the fishermen fill the gas tanks and check the condition of the boat). At these moments, which are rare, as we will see in the final chapter, the different experiences, attempts and trials that have been carried out over time are discussed. However, the exchange of information between fishermen is, generally, limited to what they cannot hide and does not diminish the competitiveness of a certain fisherman or crew, thus underlining a recurrence in anthropological literature on fishing communities: the secret as a technique of control of fishery resources (cf., for example, Andersen 1980; Martins 1999). At the same time, and given the absence of a body of knowledge passed down from generation to generation or acquired through a process of formal learning, it is also noticeable that the control and knowledge of fishing techniques and technologies is accomplished by ‘trial

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and error’ that the individuals practise throughout their lives. This, once again, in a relationship with the environment that appears to be, or is understood as, unpredictable, and in which the only possibility of controlling uncertainty is the repetition of the experience and ‘working well on land’. It is, then, relevant to introduce here a short description of work on land and its importance for the success of work at sea. Before going out to sea, the fisherman should have the needed paraphernalia already prepared. On land, women prepare the fishing longline, or the nets or creels (some of the men help the women with these tasks, although it is seen as ‘feminine work’). The fishing longline is untangled and when needed repaired with new hooks, then baited, the nets9 are cleaned and rolled, the creels are cleaned and baited, ready to be cast into the sea. The fishing longline, as we saw, is used more frequently than nets, meaning they have more importance for the work itself and, therefore, for our analysis, insomuch as they are clearly conditioners of the day-to-day life of the population. The nets and the creels, as mentioned, even though they are valued by the fishermen for requiring less work and investment than the fishing longline, are almost never accessible due to the difficulty in obtaining the required licences. The first task associated with the fishing longline is safar (a reflexive verb that means to make it out of a situation), which consists of untangling the nylon threads and the fishhooks after use. From this ball of thread ‘without ends but with a lot of hooks’ (as the wife of a fisherman described it), after being placed in a bowl, the women take out the hooks one by one, with their respective pieces of thread (estralho), pinning them in the small cork board placed around the inner brim of the wooden box, in which the thicker thread (madre) is stored, not before having removed every fish and other detritus from the sea. The estralhos, the parts of the madre or hooks that are in bad shape are replaced when they can no longer be fixed. If we note that every fishing longline has between eight hundred and fifteen hundred hooks, and that the madre is a few kilometres in length, it is understandable that this task implies many hours of hard work and patience. The more experienced women and fishermen take about eight hours to untangle an fishing longline. The fishing longline, whenever an outing is envisioned, is baited with sardines and squid. This task consists of taking each of the hooks that are pinned on the cork and attaching a small piece of sardine or squid to each one, and then placing them neatly on the outer

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brim of the box and immediately covering them with a layer of salt to avoid deterioration. As soon as the conditions at sea are favourable for an outing, the fishing longlines are transported to the laredo and placed inside the prepared boats, ready to be cast into the sea early the next morning. Each of these tasks is understood as demanding specific knowledge gathered after several experimentations. Baiting an fishing longline with sardine or squid requires different processes: the way in which the squid or sardines are cut is not irrelevant; the salting of the bait is equally important. Every one of the fishermen has noticed over time that the sardine (which is baited on hooks bigger than those used for squid) attracts certain species more regularly, while the squid attracts others. Similarly, the way in which the bait is cut affects the type of fish that will be caught and, above all, the fishermen say, the amount of fish that stays attached to the hook. Furthermore, the amount of salt used to preserve the freshness of the bait is also considered crucial for overall success. Despite this knowledge being shared by the different fishermen, analysis of the cause/effect relations does not always coincide. Consequently, some fishermen in Azenha say that the sardine is a good bait to catch, for example, congers. Others disagree and say that the best bait to catch congers is squid. Some say that one should use a lot of salt to preserve the freshness of the fish; others say one should not use too much salt, for the fish are attracted by the taste and flavour of the half-rotten bait. These opinions were never actually certain, and I quote from my field diary: [they use] the verb ‘think’ . . . . Z. says that the smaller fishing longline is better for fishing, in general. ‘This is what I think’, he says. ‘My brother disagrees, he says that the bigger fishing longline with sardine works for every situation . . . I don’t know, if I knew, I would always use the right fishing longline [the one that assures good fishing]. But, in my opinion, I think that the smaller one is the best for everything . . . and the squid, if they’re good, every kind of fish likes them . . . ; you just have to know what you’re doing. . . . (08/1997)

Having prepared the fishing paraphernalia and the boat (which is cleaned, filled with gas and a working probe, and with the motor in good condition), the crews gather all the necessary conditions to go out and fish. As long as the sea allows it, they will be there from 2 or 3 a.m. until 10 in the morning, or even later, but always return in time to sell the fish in the morning.10

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Crews The majority of crews consist of the owner of the boat and a comrade. Generally, according to the dominant discourse, women do not go out to sea. Moreover, a woman going out to sea would disrupt the usual equilibrium of the work’s gender division, due to the aforementioned time-consuming activities carried out on land for which she is responsible (not to mention housework, which is entirely her responsibility). Nevertheless, a significant number of the women of Azenha have a seaman’s book (which allows the couple to divide their accounting into two parts when dealing with taxes and thus reduce the charge; it is also an asset that can be sold to other fishermen), and a certain number of these women have gone out fishing at some point in their lives. At this moment, only one woman goes out to sea with her husband, but not regularly (this has been the case since my first period of fieldwork, in 1992). The owner of the book is accompanied, almost always, by a family member (brother, son, brother-in-law or, rarely, wife). Although such a fact is not recognized by the fishermen, the situations I observed indicate that, from two potential comrades, a family member will most likely be chosen. When this is not possible, the owner chooses someone who is available. Apart from the situations in which the alliance could be immediately advantageous for both parties, there was no observable reason for the choices other than the friendship between the owner and the comrade, and the trust placed in the quality of the latter’s work. The ways in which profits are split change according to the work that is done and the investments made by each member of the crew. The two most common ways are fifty-fifty and the quarter part. Fiftyfifty implies that the work done and the investments made were the same from both members. For example, two fishing longlines are brought out to sea. The costs (with gas, bait and other things) are divided equally and each is responsible for the repair of one fishing longline. In that case, the gains from sales are divided equally as well, as are the taxes and all other fiscal contributions. The quarter part division is chosen when the owner of the book invests all the money and prepares the gear, with the comrade only doing the work at sea. Another possible division is the third part, in which the comrade does not bear any costs, but, besides working at sea, helps prepare the gear; in this case, he will get a third of the profit. Consequently, we can conclude that there are no monetary advantages for the owner of the boat. This idea is confirmed by the fact

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that it is possible for the owner to lend his boat (if he for some reason does not need it), without demanding payment of any part of the profit obtained. The fishermen say that it is only worth going out to sea to catch good fish: quality over quantity, people pay a good price for it. Thus, what is fished, or what people want to fish, is the fish that is highly valued on the market. Congers, basses, snappers and morays are the most desirable fish. However, fishermen also catch horse-mackerel, pout and squid, as fishing for these species in great quantities compensates for the low price obtained for them. In times of low demand, it is possible that all the species are sold at a very low price, making it especially hard to make a fair profit.11 The fishing longline is cast into the sea in the direction of the current and in a straight line, so that the sea itself does not make it impossible to remove it from the water. While one fisherman is at the helm, the other guides the fishhooks into the sea with his hands; alongside the fishing longline are placed a few buoys. This task of guiding the hooks from the boat into the sea is one of the hardest, and involves great risk. In an instant, the fisherman may see himself torn apart by the hooks, or may be pulled out of the boat (as I often witnessed). In fact, the violence of the sea alone is enough to make the running of the thread through bare hands and wrists quite painful. This task is always accompanied by words of caution: ‘careful’, ‘more to the right’, ‘not like that’, ‘slow down’, ‘watch the thread’ and so on. With the fishing longline at sea, the fishermen use those hours to rest, hours during which they wait and hope that the fish get trapped in the hooks. With the break of dawn, they start to ‘raise’ the fishing longline in the opposite direction to the ‘dropping’, another painful task that demands much physical effort, involving great anxiety and, if the fish are not plentiful, great frustration. Means of guidance at sea include the compass, the probe, and points of reference on the shore (lights, higher or lower points, etc.). When fog makes it impossible to see land, the fishermen, who never go beyond a distance of two miles, use the compass and the probe. They guide themselves at sea using these two gadgets – the cardinal points, and ‘watching’ the bottom of the sea – which they know from experience and from the sea charts. Until the appearance of more sophisticated technology, such as the probes, fishermen would make use of their senses and memorize points of reference on land. Older fishermen or those with more years of experience claim that they have become ‘things of the sea’, based on the fact that they are the holders of two types of knowledge: firstly, knowing where you are without using any type of technology

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or instrument; secondly, a more demanding formalized and objectified knowledge, such as the ability to read the graphics shown by the probes.

Labour and Impermanence In the case of fishermen as a socio-professional group, seasonality acquires particular relevance and is marked by uncertainty and impermanence. First and foremost, for it is thus dictated by natural constraints, the sea does not offer the same possibilities throughout the whole year, and in the summer season, when one expects that ‘good weather’ will allow for more outings, this does not always happen. Furthermore, the market equation of supply and demand, on which the income of the fishermen is directly dependent, also varies widely. In the case of Azenha, where there is only local artisanal fishing, the seasonal variations are very clear and occur at every level of the lives of the population. In the summer months, it is usually possible to fish almost every day, which allows for relative financial respite and even an accumulation of savings, as long as the quantity and quality of the fish and its value are reasonable. As the autumn progresses, fewer and fewer days are suitable for outings. Bad weather makes going in and out of the small natural port excessively dangerous. If, in a year with good weather, it is possible to fish every day, in other years there may be many days when it is simply not possible. The village conserves the memory of very rough years, referring frequently to a year in which no boat went out to sea for seven months.12 At such times, it becomes necessary to adopt survival strategies, namely through activities alternative or complementary to fishing. Besides climate, the globalization of the economy also works as a constraint on variations, and fishermen have a very clear awareness of this.13 It may be because they have access to information regarding the origin of the fish on the market, or due to the fact that foreign buyers (mostly Spanish) appear at the auctions in some seasons looking for a particular species (octopus is the most popular), or because the usual buyers justify the values they propose by pointing out reasons of supply and demand. The summer, however, is the season of algae harvesting, which, as mentioned, is an important source of resources for the village. This activity, intimately connected to the origin of Azenha, has been losing relevance. The price offered for this ‘grass’ has diminished as the algae harvested from the China Sea have penetrated European

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markets. However, this season is always awaited with eagerness and its announcement comes with the arrival of the ‘northern men’ who bring promises of ‘great amounts of money’. A man who dedicates himself to submarine algae harvesting can accumulate about ten to fifteen thousand euros in only one summer (a sum rarely reached in the first five years of the twenty-first century) if he gets ten to fifteen bags of eighty kilograms each per day (weighed while still wet). He rents a boat prepared for the submarine harvesting (with an air compressor), paying for transport in a tractor from the port to the village, the transportation of the bags from the boat to the tractor, and the drying of the algae. This last task includes laying the algae in the sun and changing their position throughout the day, so they can dry evenly. It is from these two final tasks that the people of Azenha gain another source of income. The harvesters cannot do it themselves, as they spend the day at sea. (The lodging of the visiting harvesters is another source of income for some families.) The day-to-day rhythm of the village changes in these seasons. Visiting harvesters fill every place that can be rented as temporary housing; the unoccupied land in the vicinity of the houses is used for drying and subsequent accumulation of the algae; the movement at the port and on the road that leads to it is continuous with tractors and small trucks; the cafés fill up; ‘parties’ and ‘barbecues’ in the late afternoon are organized daily with hosts and guests, and work seems endless, particularly for the women. The latter, besides their housework, continue to prepare the gear so that their husbands can ‘try their luck’ for one more night, but, furthermore, they have now – many of them under the scorching sun – to work on drying the algae. This is a task that is both desired and feared by the women as each summer approaches. While it is a unique opportunity to gain a significant profit (absolutely necessary for greater investments, for example for their houses), it is also a monotonous and harsh task, implying painful and prolonged exposure to the strong summer sun of the Alentejo. The great majority of the harvesters come from outside the village and often from outside the region. Those from Azenha or from the nearby villages, such as Brejão, are few. However, if only a few practise this activity, almost all of the population dedicate a few hours of their day to catching the algae that wash ashore towards the end of July. This activity can extend up to October or November, a time of year at which the sea has pushed more algae to the top of the rocks, thus it is possible to observe men, women and children going along the beach and through the coves with big bags of thick net, often im-

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provised, in which they store the algae. The task is particularly fruitful, as it does not involve any kind of investment. It requires only going up and down the beach and the laredo, gathering as many algae as possible. This is partly down to chance, but also, essentially, to the knowledge and observation of the locations on the shore where it is more likely that algae will accumulate.14 In a good season, buyers will only appear in late October or early November. Loading the trucks is another job that some people in the village take on, seizing this supplementary occasional source of income to compensate for the many days without outings that are foreseeable with the arrival of winter. Another seasonal source of income for Azenha families was the construction industry. It was common until the mid 1990s to find fishermen from the village working in the major tourism projects under construction. However, up until 2002/2003, work in the agricultural companies that surround the village emerged as the closest and preferred opportunity to add more income to the scarcity that always characterizes the winter months. If only a few worked in these companies throughout the whole year, many would join them in autumn and winter. These jobs were obtained, almost always, through so-called ‘subcontractors’ (minor businessmen in charge of gathering cheap labour to execute short-duration services: ‘the works’, under contract of the landowner multinationals) and were divided into ‘shifts’, which allowed some of the fishermen to keep that position and simultaneously fish whenever the sea allowed. If, since the settling of major agricultural companies in the southwest of the Alentejo, the presence of immigrants is a constant, from 2002/2003 the arrival of great contingents of men and women from the ‘Eastern countries’ (which in popular local language are referred to under the generic name of ‘the Ukrainians’), willing to work for lower wages and offering total availability, meant the people from Azenha, ‘the fishermen’, had their access to this occasional source of income hindered. However, there were many years in which the day-to-day life of the population was changed during the autumn and winter, when, without going out to sea, the families had access to this other source of income. I wrote on the subject in 1996: the impossibility to fish transforms quite sensibly the outer aspect of Azenha and the relational life of its inhabitants. Besides the paid activities starting outside, the inactivity is felt heavily and it is one of the constant complaints of the fishermen regarding their profession. As they sometimes jest, ‘one never knows if the boss (the sea) will let them work’. For the women, it is simultaneously reason to complain and to make fun of

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the fact that the men spend a great deal of their time in the cafés, drinking and playing. But not even this complaining or joking hide an understanding of such an attitude. Moreover, the day-to-day routine of the women is affected too. The absence of tasks associated with fishing, such as the untangling and the baiting of the fishing longline, associated with climate change, diminishes significantly the time spent outside the house. On the other hand, work in the agricultural company, even though it is in many cases irregular, increases relations with the world outside the village and even the region. (Meneses and Mendes 1996: 59)

Besides the tasks connected to fishing, another event that is a highlight in the annual calendar of the village and the surrounding region are the dances,15 which, as opposed to other parts of the country, take place in the winter. In the summer, in the words of a woman from Brejão, ‘young people would rather go to discos’, the functioning of which is comprehensively activated by the presence of tourists. Come autumn, however, with the departure of the tourists, this changes. It is as if the population reunites itself in the dances, with these being a kind of timestamp that ends a hot and frenetic season. If in Azenha there are no dances, in Brejão there is one every two weeks, and many others take place in the surrounding areas. These dances are attended by people of all ages and by the townsfolk of the neighbouring villages. They tend, however, to constitute groups among themselves that emphasize the bonds of neighbourliness and proximity. At least among the people of Azenha and Brejão, this has been changing over the last few years as a result of the friendship ties between the teenagers of both villages. Nowadays, as opposed to the situation in the 1990s, boys and girls from the two villages frequently go out together in their leisure time. Despite preferring local bars and discos, during the winter the dances are still a place of bonding. These are moments of great sociability and (re)ordinance of the social. As one boy said, ‘at the dance we automatically know who’s the guy or the girl, where they’re from and what they want’. They are also moments of affirmation of the bonds of solidarity, friendship and camaraderie demonstrated, frequently, by violence, to which drinking is not unrelated. These are also moments to be remembered throughout the year, whether because one met a date at a certain dance, or whether something funny happened and remained a topic of conversation. If among women what is most remembered are dates and flirting, among men it is the drinking (or the porradões, a term commonly used to refer to the drunken state), or the fighting and the ‘conquests’ (not necessarily the same as dating and flirting)

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that are the stories most often commented on, always in a jesting tone. I myself cannot forget an inadvertent pat on my back, which turned into a generalized fight to defend me, because a few boys from Azenha thought that ‘the guy was messing with me’. It is not unusual to spot ‘residential tourists’ at these dances. They take part out of curiosity or because a neighbour or a local friend has invited them. The presence of these tourists on the southwest coast of the Alentejo is another highlight in the calendar of Azenha and, particularly, of other neighbouring villages. They are a recent element and in constant growth on the landscape since the late 1980s. Their appearance has heavily influenced the day-to-day life of the villages on the coastline, as we will see in Chapter 5, and it has particularly influenced the notions of time and, within it, the seasons. The end of winter and the beginning of summer is no longer limited by the arrival of the heat and the longer days, but is now marked by the arrival of the first tourists, who wear light and fresh clothes while ‘the people from here still think it will be cold’. The first caravans stopping at the beaches mark the arrival of the heat; phone calls to book a ‘house’ in Brejão remind people that another season is close at hand or has already arrived. Summer is eagerly awaited by all, ‘old and young, single and married, fishermen and café owners and even my mother’, as one of my informants jested with a friend during a conversation about the apparent joy that streams in as the number of tourists increases. ‘Everything changes, everyone’s jumping around . . . it is joy all over . . . some because this is the time to make money, others because this is the time to flirt with the foreigners . . . even the old-timers come out into the streets’. It is, in fact, a time filled with joy and ‘a time of plenty’. Friends come along to spend a few days at the beach, the fish is worth more because of the increased demand of the nearby restaurants and, above all, it is the end of the months ‘when nothing happens’, ‘without novelty’. However, lest we forget that holidaymakers go to the beaches surrounding Azenha, the presence of tourists is limited to ‘L.’s restaurant’ and, despite being in the thousands, they usually do not interact with the local population, with whom they only spend a few hours. After all, what attracts them is the fish stew and the seafood rice. However, we can say that tourism has been responsible for the arrival of the first foreigners in the village, and their consequent confrontation with other worldviews, as we will also see in Chapter 5. From another perspective, day-to-day life in Azenha has been changed by what I call the institutionalization of the place, in other

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words, the process of the integration of the village into the national civil service. At the same time that the fishermen and their families were settling in and consequently improving their living conditions and maximizing the exploitation of fishery resources, the state intervened and began to administer the village and its population and their economic activity. If the buildings were changed into houses for permanent residence, the auction changed along with it. In fact, it moved from a time when there was no auction to one in which an improvised warehouse gave place to a brick building constructed with the sole purpose of providing better working conditions for the control and assessment of fish. This process of state intervention in the exploitation of maritime resources is handled by the fishermen in two different ways. On the one hand, they say that the ‘new auction’ (built in 1997, but fully working only from 2001, with the conclusion of the ‘ice machine’) facilitates the outflow of fish and attracts more buyers; on the other hand, they mention that it is not possible (or easy) ‘to escape it’ and that, consequently, the taxes one pays are now inevitable and ‘ever increasing’, along with the bureaucracy involved with invoices and other legal documents (such as the descriptive charts of the fish and second-hand gear). Despite of all these factors contributing to the calendar and the notion of time among Azenha’s inhabitants, the sea is the most decisive element for any analysis of how ‘time’ is lived in the village. When asking someone what they are going to do, what is more frequently heard is ‘the sea is in charge’, ‘only the sea knows’, or, faced with the same question but in the past tense, ‘the sea didn’t let it’, ‘the sea didn’t want it’. We should not, therefore, belittle the anthropomorphization of the sea. However, what matters here is to emphasize the omnipotence of the sea in the outline of individual day-to-day lives. Men and women organize their time according to an uncertain, unstable and uncontrollable activity, even in the cases of those who do not fish but still inhabit the village (because, for example, their moments of fraternizing with the fishermen are constrained by the latter’s free time). The sea (or the possibility of accessing it, or even the uncertainty of the act of fishing that, after all, stems from the inability to control it) acts as a constant. It is permanently observed from a particular spot, ‘the wailing wall’, as some fishermen refer to a small area in the shape of a little balcony from where they can watch, in the background, the laredo with their boats and the conditions of the sea in the cove, looking for irregularities that help them decide: to stay or

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go out to sea. From this imposed decision and this conditioned intentionality of the state of the sea arises, after all, the order of their days and, consequently, their perception of time. We are, in this way, faced with a ‘middle’ without a defined centre. If the will and intention of men is essential to understand the day-to-day lives of Azenha, the sea and its ‘whims’ are no less so. We are therefore faced with a reality built on relationships and connections without clear hierarchies between nature and men. A dichotomy that shows in its own deep incorrectness how relational day-to-day rhythms in Azenha do Mar really are. A dichotomy to which we resort frequently because, in the end, it is hard for us to think of ourselves as being just another element of nature and, therefore, of this natural/ecological relationship.

Notes 1. Deleuze and Guattari inspired this perspective, although indirectly. Tim Ingold refers to the second and last volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Mille Plateaux (Deleuze and Guattari 1980), to say that, ‘from a relational perspective, persons should be understood . . . as centres of progenerative activity variously positioned within an all-encompassing field of relationships. . . . It is from their emplacement in the world that people draw not just their perceptual orientations but the very substance of their being. Conversely, through their actions, they contribute to the substantive make-up of others. Such contributions are given and received throughout life, in the context of a person’s ongoing relationships with human and nonhuman components of the environment’ (2000: 144). It is the rhizome of Deleuze, a tuber, that serves his analogy and permits him to say that, as Fernando Teófilo writes, ‘There is no centre nor centres, it is like a body without organs, nothing is predefined, the connections are made through lines that can interconnect any point with any other point, without respecting any particular hierarchy. In the Rhizome there is no central unit, an axis that drives the growth in a dichotomous and genealogical way. Its lines are not branches from a tree, they are just lines that at any moment can cease to exist and make way for others of a different nature’ (Teófilo 1998). They are, after all, connections marked by the diversity in which they appear in an environment, the ‘plateau’, much like Gregory Bateson’s notion that Deleuze coined in the title of the book to which we refer (cf. Teófilo 1998). It is in this sense that I propose a relational perspective on the day-to-day life of Azenha do Mar, without assigning greater importance to one or another element of it, admitting, however, that there are gestures that are more structuring than others. The tasks associated with the exploitation of fishery resources are one of them.

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2. Tim Ingold uses the term ‘environment’. I believe that the literal translation into Portuguese, ambiente, does not wholly match the meaning(s) Ingold proposes. Ambiente, in Portuguese, has too many distinct meanings (for example, ‘quality of the environment’, ‘family environment’), which could generate some confusion. I could use the term ecossistema; however, this presupposes a relation of interdependence and equilibrium between human and non-human beings, on which, evidently, social relations are not determinately dependent. Thus, I believe that translating environment as meio-ambiente would constitute the best option, since this will not cause any confusion between meanings as might the term ambiente, and avoids confusing it with the determinacy of ecossistema. 3. I have chosen to translate competências as skills. 4. Although diesel motors are substantially more expensive than gas motors, acquiring them would be advantageous to fishermen in Azenha. However, since the latter have no access to diesel at prices reimbursed by the state, the choice tends to be gas motors. The non-reimbursement of fuel is due to the fact that there is no fuelling station licensed by the IFADAP (Financing and Development Aid Institute for Agriculture and Fishing) in the port of Azenha; in order to obtain ‘subsidised diesel’, fishermen would have to go to Sines, which would be economically disadvantageous. 5. At the time (2003), this builder of wooden boats was experimenting with fibreglass for the first time. 6. A fathom is a varying measure based on the amplitude of the openness of a human’s arms; i.e. a fathom is the length that goes from one hand to the other with open arms. Half a fathom is the length that goes from one hand to the middle of the chest. 7. The fishing longline, independent of its size, allows for catching fish mostly from the Sparidae family and cartilaginous fish. 8. It is rare for the fishing longline to be used by a single fisherman. Manoeuvring the boat and dropping the fishing longline simultaneously is a hard and dangerous task that few fishermen dare to try alone. It is not, however, impossible. To accomplish it, the fisherman steers the boat in the intended direction and leaves the motor running at a very low speed. He then stands and drops the fishing longline slowly, always staying close to the boat’s motor controls, should he need to correct the boat’s course or even stop it altogether. 9. In the case of the nets, the tasks involved in their preparation consist of cleaning and untangling. Every bit of fish, algae or other objects caught in the previous outing are removed and the nets are then placed in such a way that it is easy to cast them again. Note that nowadays the nets are no longer mended, which was a time-consuming and unnecessary activity, whether because the nylon nets are much more resistant than the previous ones made of cotton, or because the cost of having them mended would be only slightly less than acquiring a new one. 10. In the last few years, some fishermen have decided to sell their fish at other auctions, normally at Arrifana or Sagres, because they can usually

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11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

get higher prices in those places. For this to work out, cars have been paramount, and have been acquired by the majority of fishermen. The fishermen are aware that their product is part of a globalized market. They know that the major international buyers (especially companies/ brands of major supermarket chains) and the major fishing companies (especially Galician companies) determine the value of the fish. However, while they recognize these influences, they say that for the type of fishing they practise and the species and quantities they catch, the variation in the value offered for the fish comes mostly from the commercial strategies used by the buyers present at the auction and the ‘ability’ of the seller who directs the auction. They say that the difference in prices between auctions of neighbouring ports stems from the ‘wisdom’ and the ‘wanting to help’ of the auctioneer. It is not unusual to perceive the existence of tacit agreements between buyers that come close to cartel strategies, though informally. The buyers distribute among themselves the species that each seeks out the most and, with that aim, they do not bid on the fish that they know their colleagues will want. This determines the sale of the fish at considerably lower prices than those that the final consumer will find in the market. It is usual to see the fishermen selling their fish at the auction for prices hundreds of times lower than the price in any supermarket, only a few hours later. From 1992 until 2005, the number of consecutive days in which the boats did not go out to sea diminished. The reasons for this reside more in factors of technology and safety than in the climate; boats are now equipped with more sophisticated and reliable engines and guidance instruments (probes and GPS), while the port has been going through some improvements to facilitate going out to sea. We speak of the capacity of risk and adversity management. However, on the other hand, the price offered for the fish has wobbled constantly, which increases the degree of uncertainty and the economic viability of every outing. Therefore, more frequent are the days on which ‘the sea allows it’ but the fishermen do not fish. Not wanting to extend the discussion here, it is interesting to note that concerning the phenomena of globalization – or as Sahlins has put it, ‘why culture is not disappearing’ (cf. Sahlins 1997) – anthropology has produced several texts. Mentionable are Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization by A. Appadurai (1997) and Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places by U. Hannerz (1996). Such a task, as is the case with other activities of collection (molluscs, mushrooms, snails etc.), also constitutes a context suitable to the dynamic of forming groups of friendship and solidarity, which are usually found in respect to domestic groups and friendship bonds of longer duration. For a description of these social spaces in the southwest of the Alentejo, see Hill (1994).

4 Personal Experience and Fieldwork

Let us imagine an equilibrist, preferably a tightrope-walker. Let us imagine that the rope he moves along inch by inch is not a taut straight line between two fixed points. On the contrary, it is crowded with other equilibrists, full of curves, slow climbs and vertiginous descents, here and there interspersed with short flat lengths where they regain balance and serenity, similar to a rollercoaster. Let us further imagine that the point of arrival is the tightrope-walker’s house, and so is the point of departure. Sometime later, we find out that the walker acknowledges having arrived home, but this home does not feel as familiar as he had always imagined. In an exercise of introspection, he tells us that the house is the same, but that the uneven path has changed his view of things and changed the place from which he forms that view. At the same time, he adds that, while going slowly along the line, his fear was not of falling or becoming paralysed, but of never reaching the end. And that now, when he thinks about what he did, he understands that the return was only possible because he was able to find a point of equilibrium between his travelling companions, their emotions and cogitations, and the movement of their own bodies that pushed them forwards, towards home. It is in this allegoric way that I imagine fieldwork with participant observation: a game of permanent balance between going, staying and returning filled with emotional and intellectual senses. A game in which you have to leave the balcony (as Malinowski would say) and walk a path laden with experiences, people and sensations that brings you back to the balcony, the other balcony.

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On this path, the most important factors are ‘the travelling companions’ and one’s will; however, the ‘house’, the academy, is the body that pushes us and reminds us that the game is, desirably and inevitably, dialogic.1 Therefore, the (self-)reflection, perceived as a way of envisioning the process of crossing worldviews (during and after the field experience), is inevitable for the description, interpretation and analysis of the path. As Amanda Coffey writes: In considering and exploring the intimate relations between the field, significant others and the private self we are able to understand the processes of fieldwork as practical, intellectual and emotional accomplishments. (1999: 1)

Nevertheless, what interests me most here is to explore how reflection on the unicity of the personal field experience (or the identities of the field researcher, whether they are felt, imagined or conferred) is, after all, a starting point for ethnographic description and anthropological analysis. Although we can rarely talk of moments of epiphany in ethnographic research, those that come close are more a result of the analysis of the relation between the self and the other than specifically of applying objective (or objectifying) methods and techniques such as those suggested by ethnography manuals. And if those moments – and the possible ethnographies that result from them – are managed with parsimony, I also believe that the production of anthropological knowledge will be better served by the search for a certain balance between a posture that considers the conscience of self, the emotions and the identifying dimensions constructed during the fieldwork, and another that the final purpose of anthropology is to produce and transmit knowledge about an ‘other’ and not about an ‘I’. Consequently, (self-)reflexive texts are appropriate in anthropology, insomuch as they enable us to emphasize an unavoidable fact of field experience: access to information is always personal and between individuals aware of themselves, and therefore it constitutes a place where social and cultural phenomena can reclaim reflection and analysis. If, in our ethnographic production, we forget this negotiating process of construction/insertion of the self in the field,2 we run the risk of ‘reducing’ the analysed group to a minimal common denominator that reveals little more than a capacity (not always well applied) of the social sciences. In other words, not taking into account the complexity of the human relations established in the field and their scientific validity could mean the obliteration of the main instrument

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used to gather information. It is this relational whole, in face-to-face negotiating processes, that we confront and get to know. For example, values, categories or worldviews are transmitted to us by individuals aware of themselves and of their standing. These standings are not always hegemonic, or susceptible to being understood through means unrelated to a hermeneutic of the relation between researcher and researched. It is here, in the analysis of the position(s) of the anthropologist in the field, that the post-reflexive turn exhibits one of its most relevant valences. Consequently, in this chapter, to quote Vale de Almeida, I intend to: find a balance point: acknowledging the epistemological importance of the anthropologist’s personal experience; but also grant a relative objectivity to the studied social reality. (Almeida 1995: 13)

Azenha do Mar, as we have seen, can be understood in the light of the professional activity of its inhabitants and their relationship with the ecosystem. If the first marks quite clearly its constitution, the options and the life paths of the individuals that constitute it, the second was a condition for the possibility of its formation and is a condition for its permanence.3 If these factors are inherent in Azenha’s identity, other factors are decisive for its day-to-day life and the way its inhabitants conceive themselves. Shared socio-economic origins, as we have seen, are one of these factors. In fact, they serve social cohesion, as the sense of sharing a common or similar past is a constant generator of dialogue that recreates the collective symbolically. Another factor is the presence of residential tourists and the occasional passing-by of others (especially during the summer); this factor generates relevant consequences that we will approach later, in Chapter 5, dedicated to the relation between tourists and the region’s hosts. In a more direct and immediate way, and since the early 1990s, the establishment of agricultural companies in the lands surrounding Azenha (and which occupy more than one thousand hectares) constitutes a frame of influence over the day-to-day routines of Azenha, to which we will also return. Before dealing with this process, however, I intend to introduce the closest neighbouring village to Azenha – Brejão – as one of the factors that affects its day-to-day rhythms and informs the discourses that construct its projected identities, real or imagined. Brejão, like Azenha, is a village pertaining to the parish of S. Teotónio that has its main council around ten kilometres away. Its

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main residential conglomerate4 is located about two kilometres from the sea and is crossed by a road that, until the early 1990s, was the only connection to Azenha capable of being used by motor vehicles. It was in Brejão that the closest ‘commerce’ was located (grocery stores, taverns and cafés), a frequent meeting place between people from both villages and where all correspondence was deposited. It was in Brejão that major dance festivals were held (until the mid 1990s), often remembered as moments of intense sociability between the two groups of people. To this day, the primary school attended by the children of Azenha is located in Brejão and, immediately behind it, the soccer field used regularly by teams of men from both Azenha and Brejão. However, the most popular social spaces for people from both villages are the cafés (an ethnographic recurrence, one might add), an alternative to the two cafés in Azenha, frequented regularly by the fishermen.5 Some of the fishermen from Azenha were originally from Brejão, and almost all have family and friends there. Thus, in Brejão they find a place of sociability where the differences between a maritime daily life and another one closely related to rural settlements is magnified. It is here that these forms of identity and feelings of belonging are produced, therefore I am using Azenha do Mar and Brejão as a dichotomy to illustrate my analysis.

The House and the Fieldwork Months before the date on which I was due to start my first period of fieldwork, I went to Azenha to find lodging. I soon discovered that it would be impossible to find a house, or any other kind of residence, to rent there. However, I found a fisherman who owned a house in Brejão, slightly removed from the main nucleus of the place.6 It was in Brejão again that I found another house during the second period of fieldwork, this time just next to the main road and only a few steps from the cafés and the grocery store of the central agglomerate. This spatial situation allowed me to spend long hours with people from Brejão and make them a kind of counterpoint to both my work and my reflections, and to Azenha. As time passed, I started listening (almost always passively) to the people from Brejão talking about Azenha and about the fishermen. Other times, I confronted them with what I observed, thought and experienced in Azenha. However, I never turned that village into an object of study per se, even though I found a few occasional informants there.

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I seldom looked for informants; instead it just ‘happened’. The conversations naturally went in that direction, whether in the café around the ‘minis’ (20 cl. bottle of beer), on the street while we observed the lack of cars driving by, in the grocery store killing time while waiting to pay, or in the scorching sun at the door of my house with the landlady, the so-called ‘Brejão’s newscast’, since she knew everything about everyone and, if she did not, she would ‘make it up’, so people said. I do not mean by this that I did not have privileged informants; whether in Brejão or Azenha, they existed during both fieldwork situations. In the first there was a family and, within it, three brothers in particular. One of them was even my host/landlord, himself also, just like his brothers, a fisherman in Azenha. The three of them were the gatekeepers of Azenha during my first period of fieldwork, even though the owner of the house I inhabited fulfilled this role more frequently. About this and concerning these men, in Se o Mar Deixar, we wrote: It is important to know, therefore, that both this fisherman and one of his brothers, also a resident [in Azenha], are married to foreign women and have been in Azenha for only a few years, having had different occupations in various contexts. We can, thus, state that our first informants, who would become important during this earlier fieldwork, although natives to the region, are in a way apart from the context studied (a circumstance that is not, in fact, unusual, believing what the ethnographic literature tells us). This fact has its advantages, since the discourse produced by those who feel partially exterior to the object is many times more structured, more conscious and reflexive in the face of a multiplicity of aspects. (Meneses and Mendes 1996: 50)

Nevertheless, I never found, in Brejão or Azenha, my Muchona7 (cf. Turner [1967] 1970; Metcalf 2002), an informant of magnitude who could share with the anthropologist moments of reflection and analysis in the field. Here and there, at certain moments, outlines of this type of relation appeared, only to disappear right away, and I was not sure whether I did not know how to ‘care for them and stimulate them’, or whether these moments demanded special circumstances for the distrust to vanish. Brejão came into the picture, then, due to the unforeseen circumstances of looking for a house in the field. Although it was unforeseen, it nonetheless became crucial, if not always conscious, for my research, because it worked as a mirror of reference to understand how some of the discourses about Azenha were constructed. It functioned as a space of comparison always close at hand,

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where metaphors and anecdotes about Azenha were revealed that expanded it in my view and, consequently, claimed new perspectives. Now, in this subsequent phase of fieldwork, reflecting on the standpoint from which I conducted participant observation, I discovered that the daily retreat to the houses on the (geographical and social) margins of the group I was studying did not place me in a perspective identical to that of the balcony of the administrator satirized by Malinowski, but instead in the place of an ‘other’ who was closer to Azenha. An ‘other’ who conveys identity and alterity construction discourses that inform and determine the forms of relationship between the two villages and the ways in which they think of themselves in relation to each other. Finding a house in Brejão, as I want to make clear, had a crucial importance in the relation with the field and, consequently, in the view I constructed of it. The place where I resided quickly constituted itself as the other in relation to Azenha, with a clarity that would not exist in other circumstances. If, as I say, Brejão plays, in reality, an important role in the day-to-day life and the construction of identity of the people of Azenha do Mar, it is also true that awareness of that fact would not have come as quickly and clearly if the time I spent on the coast of the Alentejo had been confined to the place I elected as my object of study. Also assuming that Brejão, as a predominantly rural village, is similar to other places with identical characteristics in this region, the knowledge I acquired daily about its inhabitants was useful for it suggested routes of analysis for the life paths and the construction of identity of the fishermen. These originated from this type of context, where paid work in the fields is still the main source of income for many families and individuals. Obviously, the offset was a slower placement in the day-to-day routines of Azenha. However, on the other hand, it also allowed for access to the discourses produced about our presence (during our first period of fieldwork) and image in Azenha, and the way these same discourses affected the information to which we did or did not gain access. For example, it was in Brejão that we first heard that there were those in Azenha who doubted the purpose of our presence and our questions (were we auditors? were we from the police?); it was also there that I found out that there were those who suspected that I had denounced a fisherman who had killed a dolphin. As I have mentioned, the first house, rented in Brejão, belonged to one of the fishermen then residing in Azenha. Understandably, it was through him and his family that my co-researcher and I established our first contact in either of the two villages. If we add to this the ties

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of friendship built throughout two periods of fieldwork and constant exchange of impressions regarding life in Azenha and my work, it is not hard to understand the importance of this family for my entire research, presented here. They were not only essential informants, but also confidants and friends. However, the relationships I kept with these and other individuals from Azenha and Brejão were substantially different on the two occasions. This was partly because the twenty-six months I stayed in the field were divided into two periods (1992/93 and 1996/97), but essentially because only the first period of fieldwork was carried out in cooperation with, and in the company of, my colleague Inês Meneses. To note, it was not that the closer relations I kept were different, but that the attributes of those relations changed, because various aspects of my projected image had altered. It was not just my day-to-day life in the field that changed with the absence of Inês, it was my own ‘marital status’ that seemed to have changed, because, in the eyes of those we studied, our teamwork seemed to amount to a matrimonial relationship (which, in fact, it was not). In contrast, my return to Azenha for the second period of fieldwork, this time alone, made me a ‘single man’, and therefore simultaneously authorized me for, as well as prohibited me from, doing different things compared with the first period of fieldwork, as if my gender role had suffered a qualitative change and my masculinity could, or should, be represented in other ways, in other places and with other people. A good example of this ‘difference’ was the fact that I was never invited to the ‘girls’ houses’ during the time I spent in Azenha with Inês. These houses (four of them a few kilometres from Azenha) are visited quite regularly, mostly by the single men of Azenha, Brejão and other neighbouring villages. It is not unusual for them to be sought out as simply a social sphere and another place to have a few beers. The sex trade does not always come into play. Nevertheless, only during the second period of fieldwork was I invited to a few ‘incursions’8 into these houses. When I asked one of the individuals who had invited me to go to ‘the brown one’9 why he had never asked me before, he first answered that ‘it never happened!’ and then he added, ‘before you were with Inês . . . I know you weren’t with her . . . but tell me the truth, were you or weren’t you?!’ For this reason, the following image will not be inappropriate: if, during the first period of fieldwork, I appeared to be part of a married team, during the second I was playing with the bachelors.

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In conclusion, these two different periods in the field exist as two experiences sufficiently different and heuristic for a more detailed analysis to be justified here.

Fieldwork: Framing and First Experience In the last twenty years, much has been written on the experiential and living aspects of the anthropologist’s work in the field. An example is Paul Rabinow’s text, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1988), a pioneering work in which there is reflection on the subjectivity of the anthropologist in the field and its ethnographic relevance.10 However, if, for many anthropologists, interest in knowledge of the consequences that such an experience can have on the researcher is arguable, the importance of the description of the researcher’s personal conditions, as well as the relationships developed with those we get to know in the field, is already commonly accepted for a better understanding of an ethnographic text. Such revolutionary and radical proposals were already enunciated in the volume edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus and published under the title Writing Culture (1986),11 and have since been continued and even surpassed. Accepting, rhetorically, Writing Culture as a rupture and/or turning point from which the personal field experience becomes an object of reflection, we can consider that, until then, fieldwork was lived as the rite of passage12 of the anthropologist, and that, similarly to rituals that anthropology itself (still) studies, the flow of information during that initiatory experience has almost always been confined to only a few individuals. The text by Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years, is an excellent example of this. Mead tells us that she went into her first period of fieldwork without knowing what it meant, despite having mentors such as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict (by then, both already with extensive field experience) (cf. Mead [1972] 1994: 133–48). Earlier, Evans-Pritchard had reflected with humour and some irony13 on the lack of (in)formation among anthropologists regarding fieldwork, despite considering that this preparation should be achieved, firstly, through a strong theoretical component of social anthropology (cf. [1937] 1976: 240–41). The first violations of the secret appear, many times, under the cloak of the scientist who is also a romantic Western adventurer, and who, in a confessional tone, tells us of experiences in exotic worlds (cf. Marcus 1992: 114).14 However, these texts are already exercises in

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(self-)reflection that reveal the positions of the field researcher and, as a consequence, paths of access to the desired information. It is only with the end of colonialism and the consequent turn of attention towards the West that texts began to appear in which the main concern was to describe the anthropologist’s experiences in the field, even if in the form of autobiographies by well-known anthropologists at the end of their careers (in this regard, cf. Descola in MacClancy and McDonaugh 1996: 209–12). The intention was in fact also to rectify a lacuna in anthropology courses, felt by the authors of the texts at the time of their academic qualification, as Margaret Mead and Evans-Pritchard point out in the aforementioned texts and that Rosalie Wax reiterated in her 1971 book dedicated specifically to fieldwork, Doing Fieldwork: Warnings and Advice. In fact, Wax’s volume had the assumed aim of helping to rectify the inexperience of young researchers, a fact that the author had felt at the time of her first fieldwork in 1943. This lacuna, judging by the negative reactions to the publication of a report written by Wax in 1946 (cf. Wax 1971: ix), was not considered relevant by academia. There was clearly still an attempt to build anthropological knowledge based on empiricism and with logic close to the natural sciences, in which the introduction of personal factors such as (self-)reflection would be nothing more than noise. In the last two decades, as mentioned earlier, particularly from the second half of the 1980s, after ‘the crisis of representation/new ethnography’ (Marcus and Fisher 1986) and consequent defence of the need for (self-)reflexivity in the social sciences, several texts began to appear concerning the personal experiences of the anthropologist in the field, mainly in the USA.15 Thus, beyond the books that take this as their main subject, many authors began to include a chapter in their theses, or wrote autonomous articles, on their subjective impressions in the field, with the principal aim of identifying the game of inter-subjectivities (cf. Rabinow 1988: 39) inherent within the main argument, but also of clarifying and supporting the relevance of their role as authors in the production of scientific knowledge. In this way, we find thorough and enlightening descriptions of the life and thoughts of the anthropologist in the field, almost always explanatory of the complementary, conflictual and, sometimes, paradoxical dialogic that stems from the confrontation between the theory brought into the field and the practices lived there. These descriptions are, above all, telling of the hermeneutic effort required by the fieldwork and its consequent interpretation/representation/ translation. Consequently, at least since then, we are led to acknowl-

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edge that anthropologists in the field (and their narratives) lie on a border between two worlds that needs to be thought and explained. I believe that this border is built more between academia (the rules for the production of knowledge) and the inevitably subjective (and subjectivized) means of access to information in the field, than exactly between worlds of diverse cultures.16 Therefore, I consider relevant and essential for the production of anthropological knowledge the description of the conditions (which will always be personal) of access to the data collected in the field. This is not the same as valuing a posture in which ‘self-reflexivity’ is self-sufficient. I do not intend here, though, to grant excessive preference to fieldwork with participant observation. This is only one of the phases of the production of anthropological knowledge. I believe, however, that it is an essential phase for anthropology, if nothing else because it is still an element of distinction of anthropology within the array of the social sciences, whether because sociology has no participant observation as an essential method or technique (although there are those who advocate it17), or whether because cultural studies usually forget the importance of personal field experience in their interpretative proposals.18 However, what is more important to show here in favour of participant observation are the heuristic capabilities of the inter-subjective contacts and/or how ‘being there’ and ‘being inside’ are essential for the production of anthropological knowledge, even in the case of cultural contexts that are close or familiar to the researcher, that is, when one does anthropology ‘at home’ (a term coined by Anthony Jackson in 1987). On the other hand, according to Tim Ingold,19 and since we spend a great part of our time with readings,20 we should not belittle the phase that takes place before fieldwork and its importance for the contextualization and explanation of our experience. Therefore, the field appears as an object of study long before it is sighted. All the preparatory work that takes place before the trip to a chosen place, from the readings considered relevant, to what clothes to bring along, is, from the start, a negotiation between acquired knowledge and knowledge that is seen as a clear contributor to the analysis/interpretation of the future field, when the latter, for the researcher, is no more than, in the words of Vale de Almeida, [one] single community . . . understandable as a collective identity, structure, a set of statistical and qualitative data, comparable by the anthropologist with the dozens of compiled monographs, embeddable within the sociological typologies with which they deal in academia. (1995: 21)

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It was, in fact, during this period of time filled with readings that Inês and I first framed and imagined what would become the object of our research. Between readings concerning the most diverse fields of knowledge that our first degree required and the excitement with which we attended António Medeiros’ lectures on fishing communities (we were then third-year students of Social Anthropology at Instituto Superior do Trabalho e da Empresa (ISCTE), we decided (at first with another colleague) to develop a research project to submit to Junta Nacional de Investigação Científica e Tecnológica (JNICT, now Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, FCT).21 Because, as tourists, we enjoyed the southwest coast of the Alentejo, we decided to search there for ‘our’ field – a field that should ‘have’ fishermen, since we had learned that the latter were an as yet unexplored theme in Portuguese anthropology. By mere coincidence, a few months earlier, I had walked along quite an extension of the southwest coast and ‘found’, somewhat surprised and perplexed, a village that I did not know had existed. I took some notes, at the time, in a small journal, written days after the walk: . . . Today we found a new land! . . . after Zambujeira we should only find a village [by the coast] in Odeceixe. Right next to the beach of Carvalhal, we found a beautiful beach with a watermill in ruins where a little creek flows by going into the beach through a waterfall. On the right side, seen from the beach, there seems to be a new house lost in the middle of acacias and reeds . . . [which, I found out later, belonged to Amália Rodrigues and was not that recent]. A few dozen metres ahead, we found two or three men fishing on a few rocks impossible to reach. They seemed shocked to see two backpackers in that place. One of them shouted something . . . We walked on a little more and, to our surprise, a few blonde half-naked children were playing among the rockroses. They were most likely the children of some ‘German’ camping in the surrounding area, we thought. Before we went closer, they ran further ahead and we could hear them better now. Meanwhile, a pig appeared guarded by a few dogs . . . Immediately after, around three hundred metres further on, behind the acacias, we spotted the kids again. This time, there were two women with them, by a wooden house with a zinc roof . . . There were actually more houses, all similar, like well cared-for shacks . . . and in the background there was a large house, where we took a break. It was a café. . . . We asked one of the women who were with the children what land this was, and she answered with a funny accent, ‘It’s Azenha, but it’s not quite a land. . .’ [this woman, who at the time we thought to be foreigner, I later found out was from Madeira]. . . .

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We were, thus, halfway to deciding where to conduct our participant observation. A few more exploratory trips to all the ports of the southwest coast of the Alentejo, and many hours spent in the National Library, were enough to attribute relevance to our choice.22 During this first period of fieldwork, to recap, we structured Azenha as a small fishing village of the southwest coast of the Alentejo, with around one hundred and fifty inhabitants originating from montes and neighbouring villages, who, during the 1960s and 1970s, were forced to migrate in order to find work that was scarce in the fields where, until then, they had been working. These data were collected after we had carried out a census of the population during the first weeks in the field, the purpose of which was to gather demographic data that the Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE) did not possess, in order to establish frames of reference for bonds of kinship, proximity and professional occupations. Above all, however, we were looking for an opportunity to get to know each of the inhabitants of the village. Our ‘insertion’ in the village began, precisely, at this point. Pencil and paper, a short questionnaire, a chart for biographical data and kinship graphics always drew the attention of our interviewees, and distinguished us from the many ‘enquirers’ in the field, whether hired by the INE, by the City Council or any other survey entity. Every day we would walk the path from our house in Brejão all the way to Azenha. Every day we would apply the same enquiries to different domestic groups and, also daily, we would explain, with some difficulty, what we were doing there. Always very unsuccessfully. If the census allowed us to meet every inhabitant, few were those who genuinely understood what we were doing there. They knew who we were and where we came from, but the purpose of our presence was barely understood and/or subject to divinatory projections and, at times, not very flattering. We were seen as tourists, family members of some resident of the village (for most of the duration of the first summer in the field we fluctuated between tourists and cousins of our host/landlord), Jehovah’s Witnesses, inspectors, police agents, potential thieves, ‘scouts’ for smugglers, drug dealers, runaways and so on. On one occasion, after hours interviewing a woman, at her invitation and sitting in a room she used only for special occasions, she asked us if we were not going to talk about God and offer her ‘little books’. We had just done a disservice to the Church of the Jehovah’s Witnesses that, at the time, had an extensive presence in the south of Portugal. From that moment on, we tried to get to know ‘who we were’ in the field, not before apologising to the woman, at

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the time recently widowed and vulnerable. We realized that the interjections and the many affirmative nods after our dedicated attempts to explain what we were doing there rarely represented more than ‘we have time to understand’, as a fisherman told me after the second period of fieldwork, also revealing that there were those who seriously doubted what I was doing there, and that, for some, a hypothetical connection to the police was a strong possibility, which he refuted, along with others, in my defence. In this way, with these ambiguities and these constant ‘truth games’, immersion in the field was accomplished with advances and retreats, alternating positions of greater visibility with others of relative inconspicuousness, as if on a stage where I had to say who I was and what I was doing, using discourses and props with which I intended to craft a habit. In the café, with my back to the counter, I often explained in a loud voice what I did, or what we did, using an occasional correspondent as an intermediary. My books and notebooks also served this need to justify and explain myself. I would sit at the tables on the esplanade of the café, by the soccer table, with a book or a notebook open and pencil in hand, as if saying, ‘This is my work, I am working’, although I rarely read or added anything to the field journal on those occasions. As time went on, through constant presence in the field, the interviews and, above all, participation in day-to-day activities of the different domestic groups, namely those related to work at sea, despite the ambiguities, we finally stopped being viewed as tourists or Jehovah’s Witnesses. We were now ‘two students from Lisbon who are writing a book on Azenha’, as they said. Nonetheless, during our first period of fieldwork, for some of the people of Azenha, we were never more than potential representatives of some bureaucratic entity, two delegates from a world only seen on television and always associated with authority and power. This condition extended until, at least, my last visit to the village. There were always those who seemed to be suspicious of my motivations, as there were always others who used my uncertain identity as a joke and a reason to tease me. On the other hand, this condition of being ‘students’ far from our origins made us migrants, albeit temporary and privileged, bringing us closer to a common condition in Azenha. In other words, because life in Azenha did not seem to be a plausible choice for two ‘students from Lisbon’, only the ‘need’ could justify the migration. This was precisely one of the reasons for the existence of Azenha. As one woman told us, foreseeing a better future and, therefore, remembering our circumstantial presence in Azenha:

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Each of us has to make a life for ourselves. You had to come here, to the end of the world. This is where you found a job; later on you can find something better . . . maybe teaching over there in Lisbon. We also had to come here. I’m used to it even, but I’d still like to come back to my hometown.

Second Experience When in 1996/97 I returned to the field, for a second period of fieldwork, I encountered the village with few changes. Azenha was still a place of fishermen, with more or less the same number of inhabitants, where the visible changes were another brick and concrete house on one of the lots projected by Odemira’s City Council, the migration of a fisherman to a village immediately south of Azenha, and renovation of the port by the Ministry of Environment (the new auction and the pavement that leads to the laredo). Exactly three years had passed between the end of the first period of fieldwork and the start of the second. During the first months in the field, I noticed a few qualitative and substantial changes in my relations with the people of Azenha. I would like to focus my analysis on two main points, which gave way to differentiated access to the field and the information collected there. As mentioned, one of the changes in my day-to-day activity in the field derived from the fact that I was now alone, without the company of my colleague and partner from the first period of fieldwork. Another is directly dependent on the relationship of trust built with some of the people of Azenha during the first period of fieldwork. From the first arises the fact that my days were spent almost exclusively among men and away from the feminine universe. I had, therefore, on the one hand, facilitated access to performances of masculinity that I had not witnessed during the first period with Inês and, on the other hand, more difficult access to the women’s dayto-day routine. With the second, which is no more than a mutual acknowledgement of a common past, I believe to have found a sphere of trust in which I could negotiate my position and objectives with the people of the village with fewer misunderstandings. In other words, my presence in the field no longer needed frequent justification; I was instead part of a routine in which I seemed already to have obtained an acknowledged place recognized by all. Nonetheless, I never ceased to be the ‘exotic one’ or the ‘funny tourist’, as was

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commonly heard in Brejão, the one who was always around with no clear tasks. In fact, my position in the field – ‘a friend to everything and everyone’, as they also referred to me – was liable to evoke some perplexity and, above all, curiosity and benevolence, perhaps similar to what the classic ‘village fool’ would evoke. Obviously, this positioning as a ‘neutral’ observer (or so it appeared) was what I aimed for. However, my return to the field allowed me to reach and/or solidify ties of trust based on a process of a day-to-day interchange of interests, emotions and affections, different from those experienced during my first period of fieldwork, despite my quest for objectivity. I was discovering, thus, that there are substantial differences between ‘being there’ and ‘being inside’. The sharing of time and space was no longer driven, exclusively or mainly, by the research project I brought to the field. Instead, the latter was adjusted and enhanced during a continuous period of time more influenced by the fluidity and working out of the relations I kept with the people of Azenha. In other words, at one point, a few weeks after returning to the field, I was writing: ‘the more traditional terms of anthropological research with participant observation seem to be inverted. More than “participant observation”, it appears I am instead doing “observant participation”’. When I wrote these words, I was living a series of events that seemed to endanger my stance as a field researcher. Not as much as my last weeks during the first period of fieldwork, in which I seriously considered whether I wanted to ‘leave’ Azenha and return to academic life and urbanity, but instead in a way that made me foresee a borderline beyond which it would be impossible to reach any objectivity. In my journal I wrote: . . . something is different . . . I feel like I should be careful or, soon, I will hardly be able to turn back . . . It seems I am starting to be more from here than from anywhere else . . . . (03/1997)

None of this feeling is unusual during field experiences lived by other anthropologists. However, and perhaps because they are normally lived in solitude and not discussed immediately inter pares, they place the epistemological problem of translation/cultural description on a level that is beyond immediate perception. My question (posed at the time) was, rather, if any day would be emotionally capable of ‘converting’ my life (in the field), because that is what it is all about, into information conducive to being shared in academic contexts.

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This dilemma was not a problem during the first period of fieldwork. I believe that teamwork exorcises some of these doubts. At least, the daily moments of discussion among colleagues, about what has been done and what remains to be done, gradually negate a ‘total immersion with no return’ in the field. For example, the simple fact of being able to share my work doubts with Inês on a daily basis, or even my personal doubts, allowed, on the one hand, for an emotional detachment from the information collected and, on the other hand, for ‘hiding me’ from the other. In other words, teamwork not only facilitates a more ‘professional’ personal stance in the field – therefore ‘colder’, immediately analytical and more emotionally detached from those we observe – but it also allows researchers to find a place of refuge during the moments in which they are not (because, eventually, they do not want to be) collecting information. It will not be hard to understand that this ‘refuge’ can be detrimental to the research. But so can ‘excessive exposure’ to the field. The answer will always be experimental, therefore, always dependent on situational contexts, for which a reaction (more than an answer) can only be found in the lived experience of the field. The aforementioned epistemological problem appeared, in its essence, when I realized that I was no longer looking to the people of Azenha to collect information; I was also looking to them for company. At the same time, I realized that they were not only looking to me to tell me what they thought to be of interest, or to have short circumstantial conversations. On the contrary, those who sought me out would discuss their love lives, their desires, their frustrations, or they would seek my help regarding personal or collective matters. In fact, it was during one of these moments that, for the first time, I wrote in my journal, ‘something changed [between the first period of fieldwork and the second]’.23 The case was simple. A woman found me and told me she was pregnant, that her husband did not want any more children and that I, because he was my friend, could talk to him before she told him about the pregnancy. To this day, I am not sure what to say, or even what to think. In fact, I felt, and feel, that I am a friend of theirs. I did not know, however, that we shared that feeling or, perhaps more relevant to our analysis, that such a bond of trust had existed. In the first few weeks of this second period of fieldwork, some of the fishermen also asked me to be the middleman between them and the (at the time) Ministry of Environment. A ramp was being built on the laredo to facilitate the boats’ access to the sea, and some of the fishermen doubted its efficiency. Their empirical knowledge

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of the water’s movements inside the small bay told them that this work would be detrimental, as opposed to the ‘optimization’ promised on a sprawling billboard placed near the auction. To aggravate the situation even more, the building of the ramp had caused the disappearance of the sand at the laredo. It was in this context that they asked for my help. They wanted me to talk to the engineers from the Ministry and make them see sense, on their behalf. In the end this was not necessary, for two or three weeks after the ramp was completed, it was destroyed by the strength of the sea, as the fishermen had predicted. When this happened, I thought that such a request was a sign of a new positioning in the field. In a way, it meant just that. However, I believe that, as opposed to what I thought at the time, this particular case did not mean a stronger or weaker inclusion. It is certainly telling of a certain degree of inter-knowledge and trust. But more than ‘making me a native’, it ‘excluded me’, as it placed me in a world with different languages and codes from those used in Azenha, in a world of bureaucrats and decision-makers, with whom most fishermen felt incapable of dialoguing. Nevertheless, I lived that moment as a manifestation of a new personal condition in the field – a condition that, I believed, could make my job harder, for the demanded ‘neutrality’ was apparently harder to reach. This was perhaps not so much because I was getting involved in a determinant matter for life in Azenha, but above all because the request had been made based on ties of friendship established between myself and some of the fishermen, and also because not all the fishermen were opposed to the works and the building of the ramp on that spot. I knew, consequently, that any attitude of mine would not be well accepted, and such a fact demanded attention and care. During the first period of fieldwork, Inês and I had already realized that ties of friendship with one or another person made other relations more difficult. Management strategies for the potential points of conflict or distrust stemming from this – and which we used at that time – were not much different from those I adopted during the second period of fieldwork, and can be summed up in two principles: management/split of the time spent with each person; and clarifying my personal stance in the face of a particular matter.24 More than once, consciously and deliberately, I avoided meeting some people so that I could talk to others. As mentioned, throughout the two fieldwork periods, I established a relationship of privileged proximity with a few individuals. This fact led other individuals to avoid spending time with me, as they feared that I would pass on

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information that they did not want to share, whether it concerned which gear they had prepared for fishing that night, or the motives for which they had severed ties among themselves. Management of these relations of proximity revealed to me, for example, how the building of positions of relative prestige was effected, essentially, for the search of symbolic values and, above all, for the prevalence of positions (at times, no more than emitting opinions, which could easily be confused with looking for positions of leadership) regarding matters that concerned Azenha as a whole. It allowed me, still, to understand the different generational groups and the fact that their interrelations were not as peaceful as I had first believed. Even so, despite trying to manage the periods of time I spent with the people with whom I related, to the point of having people ask me if I was ‘angry’, I still went through other ‘critical experiences’, directly dependent on perceptions regarding my friendship ties inside Azenha. One of them, particularly violent, caused me to ‘leave’ the field for a whole week, pondering whether I should put an end to the fieldwork. However, this was the one experience that contributed most to understanding the importance of secrets and lies in the dayto-day life of Azenha. All in all, the place and the roles I occupied in the field are, in themselves, a relevant object of analysis. The contextualization of the field and the inclusion of the anthropologist in it are periods of time within anthropological research that extend themselves beyond the fieldwork and even the objectives of the production of anthropological knowledge. Utterly, as Cris Shore says, we can give in to ‘solipsisms’, or to ‘narcissisms’ that end up becoming inadvertent ‘ethnocides’25 (cf. Shore 1999 29). Nonetheless, the confrontation, the game of building/reading identities between individuals in the field, is an unavoidable process of the fieldwork experience, which reveals to us possibly more about those we observe than any questionnaire could do. And it is on this process of knowing and analysing the other, the self and the relation between the two that the ‘world of the field’ is built, for it is also from here that personal experiences derive, experiences that supply the information that can be worked on and, consequently, end up serving our representation and constitution of knowledge. And this, mainly, when we admit that the dynamics of the field experience itself are the first common thread of the research, that is, when the field is not subordinated to methodologies or analytical grids, and when we favour a deductive approach over an inductive one (therefore, it is the field who poses the questions, as opposed to a field ‘predicted’ a priori).

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From 1997 until 2005, I returned to Azenha do Mar and Brejão frequently and regularly. These short visits lasted no more than a few days, while more recently, in 2003 and 2005, I stayed for one month and two months, respectively; these stints had no delimited scientific aim. However, if it were the friendship ties that brought me there, it was impossible not to notice the continuities and discontinuities that I had observed during the two fieldwork periods. The changes (few, as we have seen) that the village underwent as a result of the council’s interventions, a few new boats and the more common use of the probe with GPS are a few examples of what I could observe in a few hours. Nevertheless, these visits allowed me, first and foremost, to observe the life path of the majority of the village residents: their children, ‘luck in fishing’, illnesses, choices, desires, love lives and heart-breaks, and whatever is commonly part of a conversation between people who only meet each other occasionally over the years. With these conversations concerning the fishing longline, during which there was never a lack of beer (sadly, I was offered many more than I was able to drink), I caught up with the latest news. I could not help but notice that, as the years went by, the number of times people would tell me ‘this could interest you’ decreased significantly, placing me less and less in the position of the anthropologist who wants to know things. Over this period, I also came to know that there were a considerable number of people who had read the book Se o Mar Deixar. Immediately after its publication, I offered a few copies to residents. Two or three women read it. Among the men, only one read it in its entirety. Nonetheless, I had the clear impression that I was, for those who read the book but also for those who had only heard of it, one of the keepers of the memory of that place. It is not common to be asked about the past of the village. At a certain point, someone asked me to tell the story behind the name Azenha do Mar. It was the same man who had told me the story in the first place. I thought at first that it was some kind of test or a joke. But it was not; the story was remembered, and he knew he was the one who had told it to me. However, because it was written, ‘it was truer’, and I, as the scribe, was the right person to confirm it in front of the other people in the café on that day.26 It goes without saying that, if during these trips to Azenha do Mar I could not avoid an interested gaze, in contrast to the knowledge assigned to me, I always confirmed that I knew very little of the lives of those who were now my friends. That is the reason I always go back.

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Notes 1. One recalls here Bakhtin and the epistemological (but also ethical) imperative of intertextuality in anthropology. 2. Which, in itself, is also information. Tim May’s text, ‘Feelings Matter: Inverting the Hidden Equation’, is particularly objective and clear on this subject (in Hobbs and May 1994). 3. As we have seen, it was the wandering of men and women along the coastline where the village is nowadays located – and the consequent constitution of a relational intricacy that generates relations of mutual dependence between those same men and women and the local environment – that enabled and enables the permanence of the place. 4. We could say that the place of Brejão, although it amounts to only around three hundred people, has a geographic ‘centre’, ‘periphery’ and ‘ultra-peripheries’. The ‘centre’ is no more than a small collection of some ten houses, by the main road, but where one can find four of the six cafés and the oldest grocery store where the mail was deposited. The ‘peripheries’, larger than the ‘centre’, are located a few hundred metres from the latter. The oldest one, the Bairro Novo, reached its current state in the late 1960s. It is constituted by around thirty houses that occupy the land of a single owner who leases them (via payment of an annual rent) to the houses’ residents. The most recent ‘periphery’, closer to the ‘centre’, named the Bairro Social, is the result of an allotment made by the City Council of Odemira in the late 1990s, sold, at a symbolic price, for construction. The ‘ultra-peripheries’ are places relatively removed from the main agglomerates, but that find in these their point of confluence. Commonly, they include one or more isolated montes – the Samoqueiro, the Asseiceira, the Taliscas, the Choeiro, etc. – where some nuclear families and isolated individuals live. 5. There are very few women from Azenha who go to these cafés, also because there are only a few women from Azenha who leave the place frequently. 6. This fisherman had chosen to live, along with his wife, in one of the many shacks in Azenha do Mar, in order to be closer to the sea and to make his work easier. 7. With this reference I wish to evoke the ‘educational’ role of an informant in the field, as Metcalf perceives it in Turner’s relation with Muchona: ‘Perhaps the most famous educative relationship in all of anthropology was that between Victor Turner and his Ndembu informant, Muchona. Turner repeatedly refers to Muchona as his “colleague”, and speaks of the sessions that he had with him as “seminars”’ (Metcalf 2002: 18). 8. Going to the ‘girls’ houses’ seems, firstly, to be a group activity (rarely does a man go alone); secondly, it is normally a previously scheduled activity. Thirdly, it almost always seems to take place on weekend nights and after those involved have had a few drinks.

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9. The name by which the house is known, and the one closest to Azenha do Mar. 10. This book by Paul Rabinow is probably one of the most interesting and seductive narratives published about this phase of anthropological research. Anthropological fieldwork is undoubtedly a personal experience that comprises all idiosyncrasies of each researcher. 11. ‘Revolutionary’ because, in fact, the consequences of the text forced a (re)evaluation of the anthropological production of a structural-functional tradition. Or even still, because George Marcus, in a private conversation held in Lisbon (I do not recall the exact date, in 2001 or 2002), stated that one of his intentions was to ‘dismiss a generation of old anthropologists from their places in academia’. ‘Radical’ because it proposed a regressive reflection on anthropology and, simultaneously, a permanent return to the clarification and sharing of the possible conditions for the production of anthropological texts. ‘Surpassed’ because, also in that conversation, Marcus stated that they did not expect the consequences that derived from Writing Culture and that he, personally, did not know how to deal with some of them. 12. Epstein makes this idea quite clear in his ethnography manual: ‘The tradition of conducting fieldwork, usually in more or less isolated and “exotic” communities, and the theoretical perspectives that stem from it, would probably count for many people as one of the major contributions of social anthropology to social science. Against this tradition, it is not surprising that preparation for fieldwork has come to be seen as an essential part of the training of students in the subject, and fieldwork itself as a unique and necessary experience, amounting to a kind of rite de passage by which the novice is transformed into the rounded anthropologist and initiated into the ranks of the profession’ (Epstein 1978: vii). 13. ‘The charming and intelligent Austrian-American anthropologist Paul Radin said that no one quite knows how one goes about fieldwork. Perhaps we should leave the question with that sort of answer. But when I was a serious young student in London I thought I would try to get a few tips from experienced fieldworkers before setting out for Central Africa. I first sought advice from Westermarck. All I got from him was “don’t converse with an informant for more than twenty minutes because if you aren’t bored by that time he will be”. Very good advice, even if somewhat inadequate. . . . The famous Egyptologist just told me not to bother about drinking dirty water as one soon became immune to it. Finally, I asked Malinowski and was told not to be a bloody fool’ (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976: 240). 14. The famous first chapter by Evans-Pritchard in his book, The Nuer, constitutes a clear example of the literature that was produced. For a critical reading of that text, cf. Rosaldo in Clifford and Marcus 1986: 77–97, or MacClancy in MacClancy and McDonaugh 1996: 14–15.

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15. In this regard, see Watson 1999b. Previously, there had been other texts focusing primarily on the ‘subjectivity of the field’. See, for example, besides the aforementioned text by Rabinow, Stranger and Friend by Hortense Powdermaker ([1966] 1967), or Return to Laughter by Laura Bohannan under the pseudonym Eleonore Bowen (1956). The latter is an almost fictional text, in which the author narrates her ‘social inabilities’ in the field, somewhat similar to what Nigel Barley would do around thirty years later with The Innocent Anthropologist (1988). 16. For a better framing of the ‘border’ concept, cf. Meneses and Mendes 1996: chapter V; and Fortier 1996. Telmo Caria also writes: ‘intending to interrogate ethnography as a research methodology supposes acting on a border between the established and instituted science (the scientific products) and their contextual uses in different subjects, convening the scientific culture and identity to an area of common transaction, sometime “impure” and heterogeneous’ (Caria 2003: 11). 17. Pierre Lantz, regarding the methodologies used by sociology and the need to reinstate the individual within sociological analysis, writes: ‘so singular individuals may exist, first the individuals must meet; the first condition is that the researchers are themselves singular individuals; what is incompatible with a division of labour in which one researcher establishes the meeting, another applies the inquiry or the interview, a third one interprets it, and a fourth reassembles it and writes; we may add further partitions to this division of tasks’. 18. For a critical analysis of the relations between anthropology (and the social sciences in general) and cultural studies, and their consequences, see Reynoso 2000. 19. In what concerns Ingold’s article, being myself a teacher I have learned the intrinsic difficulties of ‘teaching’ fieldwork but also some virtues (e.g. training students for the particularities of personal relationships, mainly between individuals from different cultures), whereas Tim Ingold clearly opposes the introduction of short fieldwork experiences during the initial formation of future anthropologists (cf. Ingold 1989). 20. Also for Eickelman, in his preface to Cardeira da Silva’s Um Islão Prático, ‘Writing is only half of the anthropologist’s task. The other half is to read anthropology’ (Silva 1999: xv). I believe Eickelman forgets the ‘third half’ – fieldwork, for rhetorical reasons and for the purpose of this text. 21. Not without some innocence. After having planned the project, we found out that, in fact, we were not eligible to enter the competition, which was only for doctorates. Once again, I seize this opportunity to thank João Pina Cabral, who did us the enormous favour of coordinating the project, and Antónia Pedroso de Lima who co-oriented us and monitored the research. 22. During those trips, I compiled the number of boats in each of the ports and their effective crews. I inquired about the economic importance of

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23.

24.

25. 26.

fishing activities in the village. Azenha do Mar stood out as the one with more effective crews and where income from fishing was essential to the survival of practically all domestic groups. Relevant to our choice was, nevertheless, the fact that Azenha is still a relatively recent village. This experience is not unusual. As early as 1965, Read, quoted in Watson, wrote: ‘gradually I began to respond to the villagers as individuals. It is not possible to say when this first occurred (perhaps when I found myself sitting with a man in the evening and realized that I had sought him simply for companionship and not because I wanted information), but the discovery has remained one of the most rewarding in my life. I realize now that it is one of the benefits of my profession to experience this response to persons whose outlook and background could hardly be more dissimilar from my own’ (Watson 1999b: 9). Cris Shore (1999) describes for us, precisely, how the creation of ties of friendship can be problematic during fieldwork. The access to information one seeks ‘about everything and everyone’ can quickly be compromised when we get closer to someone who, in turn, has a problematic relationship with one of their neighbours. However, if the triangulation of information is hindered, other data are revealed in these moments of discomfort in the field. Shore, regarding this more common criticism of reflexive anthropology, quotes the work of Ioan Lewis (1985). The mailman who decided to give a name to the fishermen’s place was from S. Teotónio.

5 ‘Camones’ and ‘Natives’ Tourists and Self-Consciousness

Brejão and Azenha do Mar are located in a region where tourism is an ever-growing activity. If Azenha do Mar is a recent village, Brejão, say the locals, is a place as old as the agriculture that is practised on the surrounding lands. A large section of Brejão’s housing extends through a section of the municipal road that, having stemmed from the National Road 120, ends in Azenha do Mar or the beach of Carvalhal. The main public space is near the small bridge over the canal, one of branches of the complex irrigation system built in the 1960s.1 There, around a square where people park their cars or bikes and meet each other, can be found four cafés and a grocery store that, all together, make up what we can call the ‘centre’ of the village. In the late 1980s, around the square, new developments added new materials and an extra floor to the previously single-storey white houses, among them a new café/restaurant and a hostel. Next to these, an old tavern was renovated and turned into a café/restaurant that remains one of the most frequented places. A few hundred metres to the east of this square, towards the national road, during the late 1960s, houses started being built (to rent) on the lands of the major local landowners. A great number of the families who used to work and live in the surrounding montes now inhabit these houses. It is known as the Bairro Novo (lit. ‘New Neighbourhood’), in which approximately a third of the population of Brejão resides. In the early 1990s, a restaurant and a grocery store also appeared there.

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In the second half of the decade, the City Council of Odemira plotted a public section of land located between the ‘centre’ and the Bairro Novo to build houses under a so-called ‘self-building’ regime. This is the current Bairro Social (lit. ‘Social Neighbourhood’), in which a great number of the more recently arrived families in Brejão live. A grocery store that opened recently also belongs to this agglomerate. This store, similar to the others in the village, is a popular public space where, mostly, women spend long hours and ‘where they meet their neighbours’, as they say. The rest of the cafés and restaurants function in a similar way, as meeting points for the local population and visitors alike. For the present objectives, we can divide Azenha into two different (although contiguous) areas. A primordial one, along the cliff overlooking the sea, with precarious shacks (suffering an urbanistic intervention since 2005), and a posterior one, resulting from the aforementioned council plotting (see Chapter 1). There, the cafés and grocery store delimitate what we can call the ‘centre’ of the place, for it is in the square where these are housed that the people meet, hang out and spend most of their free time. The road from Brejão leads to the square, and goes on to access the small natural port where the boats are anchored. On the eastern extremity, there are two major buildings: the fishing gear store and the building in which the grocery store (to which we can add the ‘workshop’ of the boat builder), the café and the restaurant are located. On the western side, right on the top of the cliff, we can find the oldest of the two cafés still standing. Next to it, there is a simple viewpoint, the aforementioned muro das lamentações (‘the wailing wall’), where the fishermen gather to check on the boats and the state of the sea. This place, with a privileged view over the small natural port and an esplanade, has contributed to the minor renovations that its owner has been making over the last few years in Azenha.

Tourism and Tourists: Tourism Azenha do Mar and Brejão are located between two villages of the southwest of the Alentejo strongly dependent on tourism. About ten kilometres north of them is Zambujeira do Mar, a place that attracts thousands of tourists from the north of Europe and Lisbon, mainly during the summer months. Five kilometres to the south is Odeceixe, already in the Algarve. There resides a small German community of a few dozen, increasing in size to a few hundred in the summer, with

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the arrival of holidaymakers also coming from the major European cities (the number of Portuguese tourists has increased exponentially since the late 1990s). Despite this proximity, Azenha and Brejão still receive comparatively few tourists, even during the month of August, when the tourism facilities and beaches of the two neighbouring villages are overcrowded. This happens for a variety of reasons, from the preferences of tourists to the territorial development policy imposed by the creation of the Natural Park,2 not forgetting the significant absence of nightlife and lodging on offer in the two villages. It is impossible to envision recent tourism archaeology in the southwest of the Alentejo without considering its proximity to the Algarve. What is more, Odeceixe is the first and last town when travelling on the National Road 120 and it is located, as we have seen, a few kilometres from the other places mentioned. It is also not possible to regard the presence of tourists on the southwest coast of the Alentejo without relating it to road access and means of transportation. It was precisely in the first half of the 1980s, when the roads connecting the municipalities of Lagos and Odemira were improved, that tourists started to come from the south. These would almost always travel in motorhomes that would grant them autonomy and, simultaneously, allow them to visit places without touristic lodging on offer. Many of these tourists would come back every year; some would return more than once a year. They would stay for months with their caravans and tents on improvised campsites near the beaches. Their number justified, then, the first economic investments of the residents in the field of tourism for the towns of Odeceixe and Zambujeira do Mar in particular. These are the first tourists that the people from Brejão and Azenha remember. Those who stayed closer would spend the night on the beach of Carvalhal or in the pine forest, and they were different from the other tourists, who would spend the summer and then be forgotten. They were foreign, tall, with extravagant clothes and long hair, at times ‘even painted in various colours’, as they would remember in Brejão. They would travel in vehicles decorated with various colours and symbols, and they would bring small drums, guitars, circus instruments, dogs and cats, and ‘they would even walk around naked with the babies, lying in the sun’. However, they would never stay near Brejão and Azenha for long. Only in the year 1982 would some of the tourists begin staying for longer periods. The appearance of a café and the fact that a German family had rented a house for a number of years influenced this shift.

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In that same year, a man from Brejão – the son of tenants who would work the lands of a major absentee landowner – married a woman from Lisbon’s upper bourgeoisie. The two rented one of the houses by the square in Brejão and turned it into a café, similar in every aspect to those that could be found in the major cities of northern Europe or in Lisbon. They decorated it with murals that resembled the cover art of one of the most listened-to records of the pop/rock genre, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, released in 1979. They had a good set of records that they would play constantly, and they started serving small meals to go with the drinks. The wife spoke English and French, while the husband, in his own words, ‘would get along with English’ (which he learned while working in hotels in the Algarve). They built up a few faithful customers who no longer needed to go to the Algarve to find some nightlife. At the same time, as mentioned, a German couple with two daughters leased a house near the beach of Carvalhal. This family then received friends who travelled from Germany, some of whom would not go back to their country before renting or buying a house in the surrounding area. The café mentioned above was their meeting place, and there they got to know some of the people from Brejão and Azenha. From the late 1980s, Odeceixe and, particularly, Zambujeira do Mar saw the number of tourists increase year after year. They were tourists who seemed to want to avoid the crowds of the Algarve, with their ‘package’ holidays and the high prices. They would look for spots where they could find sand, sea, sun and quiet or, as they say, ‘wild nature’. Because of this demand, these two places, in less than half a decade, saw their main streets being occupied by hostels, cafés, restaurants and supermarkets that would mostly open only during the summer months. Thus, in the first half of the 1990s, the southwest of the Alentejo was already ‘trendy’, and consequently tourists would arrive in other periods besides the summer, with the number rising to tens of thousands during the month of August. Brejão and Azenha did not witness this quick increase in the number of tourists. The cafés and restaurants have been the same since the late 1980s; there is only one hostel and only in 2005/2006 did new lodging places start to open: two ‘rural tourism’ houses and a camping site near the beach of Carvalhal.3 The private houses that are rented during the summer are also no more than the half a dozen encountered by the first tourists. Only the influx of tourists to restaurants has increased, for which it was necessary to widen the forest road connecting Zambujeira do Mar to the beach of Carvalhal, with a consequent growth in the number of visitors to the latter.

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The news appearing on media concerning an agricultural company that belonged to the so-called ‘international jet-set’4 also contributed to the increased number of tourists seen during the late 1990s. This changed the landscape of the moor, the day-to-day life of the population and put them, quite frequently, in the national newspapers and on radio and television stations. It also contributed to the creation of new worldviews, for it opened residents up to ‘new’ foreigners, new working conditions and a different position on the national and European economic and political frame. It is worth mentioning that the agricultural company had up to fifteen hundred workers (who would return to their homes daily, even though they were usually more than a hundred and fifty kilometres away), and that its senior officials were recruited from groups of foreign specialists from countries as far away as Israel, Italy, France, Holland, Denmark and Norway. If almost all of these chose Zambujeira do Mar or Vila Nova de Milfontes (another place deeply influenced by tourism, located fifty kilometres to the north) as a place of residence, all of them frequented the local cafés and restaurants. In this way, the necessary conditions were generated to create discourses that would reconsider the centre– periphery relationship between the two places, discourses that would place Brejão and, albeit to a lesser extent, the village of Azenha at the ‘centre of the world’, due to the fact that the world – that is, people from the richest countries in Europe – had chosen to live in these places.

Tourists? While, obviously, we cannot conceive the group of workers just mentioned as a homogeneous whole, we also cannot envision the tourists who have visited Brejão and Azenha as an undifferentiated totality whole neither. And in fact, it is not. For those who welcome them, and even among the tourists themselves, there are those who do not want to be confused with what they believe to be an anonymous mass, saying, for example, that they do not visit places specifically planned and designed for ‘tourists’. The group I consider here, those with whom the people from Brejão and Azenha have a relation of affective proximity, on a regular and day-to-day basis, refuse to be mistaken for ‘tourists’. In fact, when we consider their way of life and the way they see themselves in the relation they maintain with the populations who welcome them, we are forced to redefine the classifications that ethnography

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has already produced. Can the individuals who choose to live in Brejão and Azenha do Mar for most of the year, or even the whole year – places where they start to build ties of neighbourliness and friendship – really be considered tourists?5 Valene Smith writes in her pivotal book on tourism, Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, that a tourist is ‘a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change’ (Smith 1978: 2). It is undeniable that the guests of Brejão and Azenha do Mar are exactly that voluntarily: they are removed from their places of origin, and they experiment with a different way of living. However, their permanence or their long-term residence in the villages does not seem to link with the temporality that the definition above implies. Similarly, their day-to-day life is not harboured by the different types of tourism that Smith believes to exist (cf. ibid.: 2–3). To find a match with any of the types proposed by Smith, we would have to link ethical, environmental and recreational tourism, as we will see throughout this chapter. In the last few years, the ‘tourism industry’ has invested in a market niche called ‘residential or second home tourism’. The temporal aspect that distinguishes the ‘tourists’ considered here seems obvious; however: (a) they do not correspond to a real ‘second home’, and (b) the ‘residential tourists’ seem mainly to be retired people looking to experience, also temporarily, some type of change. For the people from the two mentioned places, the distinction between who is or is not a tourist is established, firstly, based on the bonds between guests and hosts (for example, guests seen as friends are not considered tourists) and, secondly, on the categorization of the main day-to-day occupation (if this is considered work or not). To illustrate this last distinction, I will now transcribe a dialogue between a fisherman from Azenha and a German individual coming back from a short stay in Germany (the latter has frequently resided since 1996 in a monte near Brejão). ‘So, are you already on vacation again?’ ‘Why do you ask that?’ ‘Well, you just went and you’re already here again. You spend more time here than on your land.’ ‘But my land is here now . . . well . . . I’m not Portuguese. . .’ ‘You wanna be from the Alentejo!’ ‘No, that’s also not true. I’m German and I’m from Brejão. Now I’m here, my wife is also here and I like to be here building my home . . . watching the sea . . . my friends . . . in the quietness like the natives.’

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‘Yeah, right, and what I wanted was to be a camone as well. . .’ ‘Oh no! Being a native from Brejão is much better . . . here everything is much more beautiful. . .’ ‘Right, it’s beautiful for camones who don’t need to work and come here to drink beer and spend their time on the beach or wandering about.’ ‘I’m not like that . . . I work at my home. . .’ ‘But do you drink?!’ ‘Well, of course, when it’s hot . . . Yeah! I learned it from you, from the natives.’6

Consequently, according to how we read this dialogue, for the host, tourists are individuals who are on vacation and/or do not work and/or are ‘camones’ (foreigners/strangers). In other words, they are those who are not native to the region and who have free time for leisure and self-recreation, whether they reside in the region or not. This definition, however, does not serve other differentiations that we will analyse later; in addition, it is not accepted by the long-term guests, for, in the words of another German individual who has lived near Brejão since 1995, tourists are those who choose Albufeira or Benidorm to spend their holidays and carry out a life [in Germany] always working to buy this, and this and that, and then they’ll forget everything and will clear their head with vacations somewhere far away; except they go all together to do the exact same things, they go to a hotel or a house near the stores and they buy this and that for the house, for their mom and to tell the others and the boss where they’ve been . . . and they arrive at the places and they do not talk to anyone and they want to boss everyone around because they’re German and they have a lot of money in German marks. . . .7

These tourists, those who go to places like ‘Albufeira or Benidorm’ temporarily to enjoy a change, match the definition given by Smith (1978). Who, then, are these long-term guests of Brejão and Azenha do Mar? They are almost always people from the major cities of the wealthiest and most developed countries of Western Europe. They are people who say they want to reject a society that forces them to follow ways and rhythms of life that they do not desire for themselves. They are people who look for places where they can live permanently (or for long periods) away from urban environments that they consider polluted, too industrialized, and where they believe that the competition for symbolic values of relative prestige is something they do not want to encourage. Overall, they are people who

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say they are looking for a way of life near to nature and away from (social) environments with, in their opinion, too many conventions and obligations. They are a group constituted by a few dozen individuals, with ages ranging from thirty to sixty.8 They share the common trait of having no defined occupation (i.e. a job) and of living in montes relatively isolated from the ‘centres’ of the villages, although they spend a great deal of time in their public spaces. These are the ‘camones’. This is one of the categories into which the people from Brejão and Azenha commonly divide9 their guests/ tourists, and it is the one that, in fact, is most relevant to this discussion. In order to better define it, we could say that camone merely means ‘foreigner’; however, its use is quite specific, almost exclusive to the foreigners who do not have a known profession or job (as opposed to those who work, for example, for any of the agricultural companies) and, simultaneously, reside, or spend most of their time, in the villages. The other category – ‘tourist’ – can be divided into two subgroups, ‘camone tourist’ and ‘tourist’ (of Portuguese heritage). With this subdivision I wish to show the difference based on nationality, and also the distinction between resident and non-resident foreigners. There are, therefore, ‘camones’ (foreigners who reside in the villages but do not work) and ‘camone tourists’ (foreigners who are only passing by). This distinction between ‘camones’ and ‘camone tourists’ denotes, on the one hand, the relevance of the levels of personal inter-knowledge in the attribution of identifying characteristics to the ‘tourists’, and on the other hand, that the two groups play different roles in their welcoming communities. This distinction of roles is based on the different apports to questions of self-consciousness and identity of each individual from both villages. In other words, ‘camones’ and ‘camone tourists’ both contribute to the (self-)reflexive processes of the individuals who welcome them (the ways in which individuals see themselves and consider themselves in a relationship with an ‘other’, the ways in which they integrate their different roles and personal experiences into their own self-image) in different ways.

Self-Consciousness The German family, along with the aforementioned café, attracted other German people who started visiting the two villages frequently and for long periods. Other factors contributed locally to attracting

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tourists, most of them German. The union of two men from Brejão with two foreign women deserves particular attention. The wife of the couple who settled near Carvalhal beach, after having lived there for a few years, fell in love with a neighbour who was born in the monte near the lands of the house she had rented. Shortly after, when her husband returned to Germany with the two daughters, she went to live with that neighbour, first at his parents’ house, and later in a shack that they built in Azenha do Mar. A few months after moving, she returned to Germany with her new companion from Brejão, and stayed there until 1993. When they came back, they went to live in the shack they had built in Azenha and dedicated themselves to fishing. A short time earlier, her brother, who in fact ran the aforementioned café, was getting divorced, leaving the café to live with a Swiss woman (who came from a German canton) whom he had met in Aljezur through German tourists. He had also decided to dedicate himself to full-time fishing in Azenha, where he went to live with his new companion. These two couples, given their social networks (built in the countries of origin of the women, in the region where the men were from and, especially, at the café), were mediators between the visitors/ tourists and the people from Brejão and Azenha. In other words, it was due to the relations these two couples established with visitors and residents from both villages that the bonds of familiarity and proximity were created among hosts and guests and, consequently, that the exchange of information and worldviews was possible. From this interrelation and sharing arise new voices, new views, new categories, new discourses regarding the places and the lives carried out in them. A manifestation of this process is the inversion of discourses about the landscape (natural and social) that took place between my two periods of fieldwork. In 1992 and 1993, during the first period of fieldwork, we frequently heard ‘Why are you coming to this place? This is the end of the world . . . there’s nothing here, there’s nothing to do here’. We even inspired feelings of pity from those who were our hosts, for they did not understand what could attract us to the place for such a long period of time. The older people, as well as not understanding our work, would grieve over our misfortune. The younger ones would not comprehend why we had left Lisbon to live ‘at the end of the world, where nothing happens and there’s nothing to do’. In other words, they did not comprehend what could attract us to that place when we came from such a major city. Even confronted with our answer, ‘But this is our work’, we would hear such replies as,

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‘Poor things, they didn’t find anything better . . . it’s a teacher’s life [other times, a student’s life], it’s not easy. . .’. Only the aforementioned couples and the German people who already resided, or spent most of their time, in the southwest of the Alentejo would contradict this discourse. Their signature sentence was, ‘This here is paradise’, as opposed to the phrase more commonly uttered by the region’s natives: ‘This here is the end of the world’. When I returned in June 1996 for the second period of fieldwork, this discourse had inverted. Few were those who did not comment on my return with such sentences as: ‘Well, you must really like this! It’s much better than Lisbon, isn’t it? This is paradise. . .’. And every time I went back to Lisbon, an individual from Azenha do Mar, who during the first fieldwork never ceased to manifest his dismay at living in that place at the ‘end of the world’, would say to me, ‘. . . this is the place to be . . . I could go with you; actually, I would stay at my sister’s, in Amadora . . . but what for? This is much better, it’s just peace and quiet . . . It’s like the camones say, this is paradise. . .’.10 Although these examples only qualify as metonymies that exemplify the attribution of new values and the awareness that people have of them and, therefore, of themselves, we cannot help but conclude that the presence of tourists has contributed, decidedly, to a new discourse that values local characteristics.11 In fact, as we have seen, the rhetoric of the current discourse (which values local characteristics and specificities positively) is mimetic of the guests’ discourse, and frequently evokes, for the argument of the urban life experiences of the visitors, experiences never lived by the individuals who now reproduce that same discourse. The cases that follow are examples of the relevance of the tourists’ role in the creation of new discourses regarding the local landscape, as well as, within them, different individual stances concerning commonly lived events. These stances, however, share one common value: the defence of a way of living and of the natural landscape.

The Dolphin and Nature; the Rock Festival and the Landscape During the late spring of 1997, an individual from Azenha do Mar killed a dolphin near the port of refuge and shared its meat with some of his friends at a restaurant. That same day, guards from the Natural Park and from the Republican National Guard appeared in Azenha saying that they had received a phone call from someone in the re-

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gion reporting the death of a dolphin. However, because there was no evidence and no one confirmed such a crime, the guards left the village, and as far as the authorities were concerned, the matter was resolved. However, among the people of Azenha, ‘the death of the dolphin’ was a topic of conversation and discussion for a few weeks, not only because ‘it had been reported by someone from the place’, but also because dolphins, or the possibility of their death, were a motive to discuss the local natural patrimony, the ways in which the population could intervene in its preservation and, simultaneously, a moment of construction and sharing of a new gaze towards a common good. In the words of a fisherman from Azenha, from which I have selected the comments regarding the individual who allegedly killed the dolphin: . . . whether he killed [the dolphin] is not even a concern of mine . . . ; the problem is that these people ruin everything. There is nothing else here . . . ; it’s already bad enough with ‘the firm’ [the major agricultural company, by then bankrupt, but which is still remembered when the lands occupied by it are concerned] that destroyed all of this . . . . Now we’re the ones that have to look out for what’s ours, because, if this here is good, it’s because of nature and that’s the only reason why the camones always come here . . . ; they only come here because of the natural element and because people let them be . . . .

The owner of the restaurant of Azenha, who had leased it at the time, also said: I don’t know if he killed the dolphin or not! What I know is that people are going around saying he ate it at my restaurant, and that is a lie . . . I’m not there all the time now [she had, at the time, leased the restaurant] but that is a lie . . . . Can you believe it?! People go there [to the restaurant] because they know the fish is always fresh and the best you can get . . . it’s caught with the fishing longline in our sea, which is the cleanest in Portugal . . . my clients know how it goes, but the others who come during the summer, if people start saying that there’s dolphin meat there, they’ll stop coming . . . my restaurant is popular because of its location and the fresh fish . . . Have you thought about it?! Eating dolphin meat in a protected area?! This is good because we haven’t ruined it. . . .

A few weeks later, a rock festival was confirmed in the area between Brejão and Azenha, until then occupied by the agricultural company. The owners of the cafés/restaurants organized a meeting, which would take place in the square of Brejão, to which they invited

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the ‘populations of Brejão and Azenha do Mar’ in posters displayed in the villages’ public places. The meeting’s organizers had the objective of stopping the festival from happening or, at least, as they would say, ‘to be heard and respected by those organizing the concert’. The contestation,12 in the words of one of the owners, was based on the following premises: . . . if they want to bring so many people13 . . . to this place, why hasn’t anyone told us a thing? . . . After all, this is ours . . . and the problems [of receiving such a great number of people] are ours . . . and we [owners of the cafés/restaurants] don’t have the facilities to receive so many people . . . . They never let us do anything, because this a protected area . . . we want to extend the esplanade and they won’t let us; we want to remove rockrose or anything to start a barbecue and they won’t let us . . . but they don’t mind letting a concert for fifty thousand people ruin all of this and give it a bad name . . . if this starts being known as the place of rock, with rock people and drugs and people sleeping on the corners and ruining everything, then no one will come here again . . . we don’t want those people here and if the Greens [the workers from the Natural Park] let them, we won’t . . . .

During the meeting, besides the owner of one of the cafés/restaurants and the owner of a camping site located around three kilometres to the south,14 few individuals intervened. Those who did seemed to agree with the presented motion, even if for different reasons and motives. The group consisting of the café owners, the president of the neighbourhood committee and the owner of the camping site (who would claim he represented the whole population of Brejão and Azenha do Mar) affirmed being opposed to the festival because, briefly, (a) they did not believe that the people the festival would attract would be desirable; (b) they believed that the president of the Natural Park should have consulted them first; (c) they did not understand all of the rules and prohibitions that the park would impose on the population if it authorized an event that would cause major damage to nature; (d) they believed that the money should instead be invested in the villages’ infrastructure; and (e) they believed they did not possess the necessary facilities in their commercial spaces to welcome such a high number of visitors. Other individuals, despite agreeing generically with the stance of the meeting’s organizers, were against them, for, as a fisherman said: They want everything for themselves . . . what they don’t want is extra work in August, they already earn enough and, now that the people can go and sell a few little things, they don’t want it [the fishermen of Azenha

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believed they could sell more of the fish they caught at a higher price; other people would consider selling ‘drinks and sandwiches’ by the road, on the beach, or even inside the festival’s venue] . . . they are the kings of Brejão, everything’s theirs and they come along saying they speak for everyone . . . only in their heads . . . . The people just don’t want chaos and noise, everything else is fine . . . if there were fewer people it would be even better . . . this is why I don’t get the Greens. If it’s a small thing . . . the lands [of the agricultural company] are all crammed up there, the guys even clean them, but all that doesn’t seem right to me . . . but what do I know, there are those who say that up there in the north there were never any problems [reference to the Vilar de Mouros festival], we just have to let them come . . . only then will we know . . . but it’ll be good for the folks here . . . I don’t really agree with it, but I’ll go there if I have to . . . maybe I’ll even watch it from Azenha . . . .

In fact, only the owners of the cafés/restaurants and the president of the neighbourhood committee seemed to be openly against the festival (the owner of the camping site stopped appearing in Brejão and Azenha after the meeting; later, at the time of the official presentation of the festival, he said he agreed with it). Other people stated that they were not fond of the idea of having such a large crowd in such a small village ‘where there is no water or sewage system’ and where ‘what is good is the peace and quiet’. However, a number of people mentioned that it would be a good opportunity ‘to make some money’ from the festival fans. A few days after the meeting in the square, the festival’s presentation took place on the beach of Carvalhal. The owners of the cafés/ restaurants, the president of the neighbourhood committee and two fishermen from Azenha repeatedly asked the president of the Natural Park for an answer to why they were never consulted about the festival when they, the residents, ‘could not even ride a motorbike on the rocks’. Another fisherman from Azenha took advantage of the presence of a national television network to say: This here is a protected area where everyone can do whatever they want, except for us. A big shot loaded with money arrives here and builds a palace, I wanna build a little house for my dog and they won’t let me . . . they won’t let me rip out a weed from the ground, but those guys can chop trees to make a concert and come to the beach in their jeeps . . . .

The festival never took place on the terrain between Brejão and Azenha do Mar. Three weeks before the date of the festival, the organizers announced it would take place in Aldeia Branca, around fifteen kilometres north of Brejão and near the neighbouring village of

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Zambujeira do Mar that welcomes more tourists to the region. The rumour was that the organizers had not been able to reach an agreement with the owners of the terrain intended to host the festival. We thus have different individuals manifesting different opinions, although they share the common goal of defending and preserving their patrimony. The presence of tourists (those who only stay for a few days of vacation, and especially those who choose to live in the region) was, as we have seen, essential for this view that requalifies nature as a socio-economic value. Contributing, for that same reason but essentially due to the juxtaposition of different worldviews, to an increased consciousness of themselves. In other words, the presence of tourists creates conditions of possibility for a game of mirrors, in which the reflection of the host is more valued and, simultaneously, enables a gaze that, when confronted with what is strange and far from its reality, ends up attributing other values to what is familiar and closer to its reality. To put it yet another way, contact with tourists and the knowledge of what attracts them creates a context for ‘intersubjective reflections’ that, at least in the present case, think/imagine the territory (the space where one lives), the landscape (the space of which one is part) and the way of living one has (the day-to-day occupation of space and time) in comparative terms. Such terms that, when compared, transform the worldviews and the values invested by the hosts in themselves and ‘their world’ (or their environment, as Ingold sees it15). I believe that, in fact, tourists have changed the values that the people from Azenha and Brejão attach to their environment. However, the tourists and their discourses on the factors that attract them are not interpreted in the same way by everyone. On the one hand, most people from the group I highlight here (the ‘camones’) try to integrate into the day-to-day life of the villages through strategies such as learning the language, going to public spaces (avoiding places with a greater influx of temporary tourists), going to dances and creating bonds of friendship and neighbourliness. On the other hand, the majority of hosts do not facilitate these bonds beyond the public spaces or, to use MacCannell’s terminology borrowed from Goffman, the ‘front regions’.16 ‘Camones’ (similar to tourists in general) do not therefore have access to the ‘back regions’, which I here extend to the private domestic space of the house. The latter is used exclusively by close family members and, occasionally, by neighbours. The other regions, associated with spaces such as cafés, restaurants or grocery stores, besides

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being safe from the eyes of strangers, are also a space for the secrecy we can perceive in the economic relations between tourists and the hosts who have ‘businesses’ associated with tourism. The cafés and restaurants are, therefore, also the spaces where ‘camones’ most commonly feel like outsiders. If this is where they engage the most in the day-to-day life of the villages, it is also where they more often acknowledge their condition as strangers. Not only because the price of the goods generally increases,17 but also because rarely do the personal relations between ‘camones’ and ‘merchants’ go beyond mere cordiality, as if bonds of friendship would make it impossible (or at least harder) for ‘good business’ to be carried out with a common practice: inflation of prices ‘for tourists’. This practice generates feelings of mutual distrust between ‘merchants’ and ‘camones’, because, if the first inflates the prices, the latter ‘always wants to buy cheap’, say the owners of the commercial establishments. These feelings and relations of distrust, however, do not minimize18 the influence of ‘camones’ on the modification and (re)valuing of the awareness that the people of Brejão and Azenha have of themselves and the images they project and that are projected about them as a coherent collective. One of these images is, in a way, related to an imaginary connected to the ways/models of economic production. In the ethnographies of tourism, analyses are repeated over and over regarding the hosts’ economic strategies and the ways in which they maximize the production of wealth. For example, Matt Hodges presents a case study about how an individual stimulates and involves, strategically and with a capitalist economic rationality, a whole village in the production of the so-called ‘produits du terroir’ (and others, also related to the imagined patrimony) in French Languedoc, products that he knew would be sought by tourists and could be the target of economic exploitation and, consequently, of their own financial success (cf. Hodges 2000). When we consider these cases and their relation to the production of wealth, there is no strategy such as that presented by Hodges. Even the practice of price inflation seems more a manifestation of a way of living than a rationality applied to wealth accumulation. Obviously, the production of wealth is not unrelated to life in Azenha or Brejão. However, I believe that the most common way of living does not include wealth production as a strong enough value to overlap other values. We can say, at least, that one of the factors that allows for its production, work, is not morally valued to the point of being susceptible to generating wealth. Consequently, it is relevant to consider an old discussion in anthropology, philosophy and in the

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social sciences in general, the equivalence between moral and habit/ practice, then it looks like that it was not a habit to identify work as wealth accumulation. According to the history of property and labour in the Alentejo and the imaginary the Portuguese have of it, not only does it infer to but it finds a correspondence in many of the discourses I heard about what it meant to work in the fields until the revolution of 25 April 1974. This does not mean, however, that work (the opposite of leisure) is not also a value or considered a personal virtue. It means, in fact, that the accumulation of wealth is not seen as an objective likely to bring satisfaction. Or, at least, a good that, in order to be attained, requires the limitation or coercion of values that are considered more important. To put it another way, in the words of a fisherman from Azenha: I know I can live without money. I can live without money . . . why would I need a lot of it? Not that I would mind . . . but to have a lot, I would have to do a lot of stuff I don’t want to . . . I mean, maybe I couldn’t even be here with you . . . I wouldn’t have the time.

Or in the words of a woman from Brejão who had leased her house to construction workers during the summer months: I could lease my house to tourists. I would earn a lot more money . . . but I would have to change the sheets every week, do the laundry, clean the house . . . like this, with these men who stay for many months in a row, they’re the ones who clean everything . . . I earn a lot less, but at least I don’t have to bother getting tired. . . .

According to this logic, we can also infer that the owners of the cafés and restaurants were against the festival happening near Brejão and Azenha because ‘there are lots of people coming, but the money earned does not justify the amount of work. . .’. Or, even, that these same owners usually close their establishments after lunch and only reopen at dinner time, because ‘the people coming in the afternoon do not justify the work and we also need to rest’. It is also common to see single individuals working ‘until they can save some money’, at which point they can quit their jobs and only work again when they need more money.19 As they would say, in order to justify this attitude and behaviour, ‘One doesn’t need a lot of money. Time is what is needed. Now that’s quality of life. Always running around, that’s no way to live. . .’. In Azenha, I often heard an anecdote that, while certainly universal, was always told as something that took place in the village.

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‘A tourist arrives in Azenha from Lisbon and asks a fisherman: “Is that boat yours?” “It is”, answered the fisherman. “It’s kinda small, wouldn’t you like to have a bigger one?”, proceeded the tourist. “What for?” “So you can fish more.” “What for?” “So you can earn more.” “What for?”, insisted the fisherman. “So you can build a house in a beautiful place”, answered the tourist. “That house up there is mine and you’re not here because this is ugly, are you?” “True, but if you fished more you could earn more money and then you could fish whenever you felt like it.” “But that is what I do. . .”’

It could be said that idleness is no way to live life. It is a value, a desired value, which leads to its demand in active ways, such as those mentioned above, but which is also ‘found’ passively, for example when the weather does not allow outings or fieldwork. Thus, idleness is not something opposed to work; it is instead an (in)activity, one that does not generate wealth. In this way, we can say that idleness, ‘having the time’, to use an emic20 expression (in fact, frequently used), is an activity that has its antonym in the generation of wealth and not in work. Work and idleness are, therefore, two activities that are not opposed. They are, however, deeply marked by a relation of (ethical) value subordination, which appears embodied in the anecdote above. Obviously, the fishermen do not fish only when they want to. They also fish when they need wealth/money. The national list of anecdotes is loaded with jokes about people from the Alentejo and their so-called displeasure towards work. During my first period of fieldwork, these ‘jokes’ were heard and felt as an insult, or at least a provocation. They seemed, almost always, to demand a counter-answer that was usually no more than another anecdote: ‘And you know why the Alentejo is flat? Because all the rocks/boulders (i.e. the people as rocks) are in the north’. Over the following years, this counter-answer underwent some changes. Firstly, people began distinguishing themselves from the people of the Alentejo, saying that they were the ones living on the plains, beyond the mountains that confine the moor area to a strip of land by the sea (‘the people of the Alentejo from there [the inland] are different from the ones here’). Secondly, because they know that

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they reside in the geographical and administrative unit encompassed in the list of anecdotes, they exchange the most common analogy in anecdotes – that the people of the Alentejo do not enjoy work – for another that is, they think, praised by all – that the people of the Alentejo know how to live/how to live well. Returning to the anecdote regarding the tourist and the fisherman (we could say the same concerning the answers given to the appointed list of anecdotes), it works as a metaphor that connects individuals to the invisible and the intangible that echoes in their own consciousness (regarding their own worldviews). It is a symbolic manifestation of their own values and the ways in which they practise them throughout their lives (inside that particular environment). Like every metaphor, and every symbol, this one is also polysemic and susceptible to divergent interpretations. It is a way for people to deal with their own situation and the ways in which they face it, thus paraphrasing the text from James Fernandez that affirms: ‘Some metaphors work better than others in enabling men (and women) to confront given situations, according as they face problems of shape or feeling’ (Fernandez [1974] 1986: 29). The anecdote works, then, as a means of allowing the private to transpire in public and, consequently, giving sense to social interaction and the sharing of worldviews. It seems, thus, that in it is revealed, as James Fernandez would say, an elementary form of social life (cf. ibid.: 58). Through this, we are confronted with an ethos (a disposition that is also, or can be, ethics) and an awareness of self that values idleness (free time) to the detriment of work and the accumulation of wealth. We can assume for this ethos the influence of disseminating life models associated to phenomena and movements such as altermundialisation21 or so-called ‘alternative lifestyles’ (especially those that are non-consumerist and closer to ‘nature’). However, once again, and specifically for the younger individuals of Azenha and Brejão, I believe that the images of values projected by the ‘camones’ about their hosts and those they ultimately project about their visitors play an essential role, particularly those that perceive idleness and/or a way of living built in contrast to economic success and work as a virtue. Simultaneously, attributing an aesthetic and ecological value to the landscape/nature, as mentioned above, solidifies the conditions for sharing a sense of pride over the place in which they live and who they are. Due to the processes of communication always taking place among individuals, we admit that, along with the sharing of feelings of pride, new frames of possibility are created for the ways in which

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individuals think of themselves in their environment and, therefore, also think of their identity (i.e. the ways in which individuals try to integrate their experiences and their stances into a coherent image of themselves – cf. Epstein 1978, in Cohen 2000: 11). The external images and influences behind these new reflexive frames are not, as we have seen, passively welcomed. Instead, they are the object of reflection and operated actively by the people of Azenha and Brejão, in such a way that, in my opinion, tourists (the ‘camones’ in particular) are, for these people, a social resource (more than an economic one) prone to changing the environment, or even cultural references.

Notes 1. During the 1960s, the national government built an extensive irrigation system starting at the Sta. Clara dam (around fifty kilometres from Brejão, towards the interior), divided into different canals between Vila Nova de Milfontes (also around fifty kilometres distant, but northward) and Aljezur (twenty kilometres southward). 2. In fact, unlike Zambujeira do Mar, Brejão is not located near the sea, and it is also not an architectural whole as homogeneous and appealing as Odeceixe. Azenha, besides not offering any kind of hotel or a beach with easy access, still has many of the initial characteristics of a provisional and clandestine village, which makes it less attractive to tourists looking for ‘sand, sea, sun and quiet’. 3. The first to appear was owned by former tourists who saw a good business opportunity in the hotel industry; the second was built by the owner of the hostel who, until it opened to the public, also ran one of the restaurants. The building of the camping site started ten years earlier, and the owner is connected to the hotel industry of inland Alentejo. 4. This individual, Thierry Roussel, was married to the daughter of one of the world’s most famous ‘magnates’ connected to maritime transportation, Aristotle Onassis. The fact that he is the owner of the agricultural company has attracted journalists from around the globe to the places of Azenha do Mar and Brejão. This same company was one of the first investments in Portuguese agriculture following Portugal’s entry to the European Union. It was also pointed out as a model to follow within the fields of technology, management and administration, and it was additionally generously subsidized by the national government. The prime minister, as well as those ministers whose ministries intervened in the process, visited and officially inaugurated the company. The company worked an area of around eight hundred hectares, five hundred of which were covered in greenhouses. In order to do this, it tore down the majority of the Nordic pine trees planted during the 1960s, tore out the

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5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

original undergrowth and built a few small reservoirs and irrigation and drainage systems. It went bankrupt during the mid 1990s. Part of the land that it had occupied is now being cultivated by other agricultural companies. As Pedregal writes in his article on the presence of tourists in an Andalusian village (cf. Pedregal 1996: 79–80), and also following Anthony P. Cohen’s epistemological proposal mentioned earlier, by ethical and methodological principle, I also prefer to search for answers among those with whom I worked in the field. In fact, only the two involved elements in the host/guest relation can answer the question, albeit differently. Only the eventual tourist knows if they are or are not practising tourism, and only their host can recognize them as a tourist or not. It was from this dialogue that I composed the title for the present chapter. If the use of ‘camone’ is common (a corruption of the English expression ‘come on!’, commonly heard along the whole coast of the Algarve; according to the Houaiss dictionary, a camone is an individual who uses the English language), the use of the term ‘native’, used for the original residents, is not. Only the individual quoted above used it frequently. It is noteworthy to say that I myself, every time I went back to the field after a few days in Lisbon, was confronted with the question, ‘So, on vacation again?’ If during the last few times it was no more than a provocation, on earlier occasions it indicated the sense of oddness that residents felt in relation to my work, as well as the fact that the presence of strangers (not workers) is generally associated with vacations and tourism. On the other hand, this question brings up the matter of the identity of anthropologists in the field and the fact that they are frequently mistaken for tourists. Regarding this matter, see the article ‘The Anthropologist as Tourist: An Identity in Question’ by Malcolm Crick (1995). This conversation, from which I choose an excerpt, was held in Portuguese. The individual with whom I talked learned Portuguese during his long stays in Brejão, and was thus able to communicate readily in that language. I have tried to be faithful to the peculiarities of his Portuguese; however, the gestures that always go hand in hand with his discourse are virtually impossible to describe. In the case of this particular excerpt, besides hand gestures, we would smile every time he knew he was not using the proper Portuguese; furthermore, he would make gestures of disdain (namely with his mouth) every time he talked about ‘the others’, German tourists who go to famous places such as ‘Albufeira or Benidorm’. We can add to this group some other individuals who are no longer living in the region, but who return frequently and maintain ties of friendship with people from Azenha and Brejão. This division of the guests is effected in other places where the tourism phenomenon repeats itself. See, for example, the article by Rita Jerónimo regarding Ericeira (Jerónimo 2003).

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10. This same individual, then thirty-two years old and the son of one of the first inhabitants of Azenha do Mar, would still say that he had the option to emigrate to Germany, but ‘if they are the ones coming here. . . it’s because this is what’s good. . .’. 11. A fact to which the influx of tourists to other neighbouring villages, the creation of the Natural Park of the Southwest Alentejo and the Vicentine Coast, and agricultural multinationals or even national environmentalist discourses are not irrelevant. Jeremy Boissevain says that the simple presence of tourists gives the hosts a sense of pride in their land (cf. Boissevain 1996: 6–7). 12. On the organization of resistance and protest movements regarding the exploitation of resources that are considered a place’s patrimony, see Kousis (2004). The data it presents, although in part about Portugal, do not serve the analysis I propose. However, it is noteworthy that ‘environmental protests’ do not usually occur in relation to the agricultural overexploitation of resources. This conclusion, mutatis mutandis, is evident in the case of Azenha and Brejão. 13. The people organizing the festival estimated an audience of around thirty thousand. 14. The presence and intervention of this individual was challenged during the days following the meeting, for not only was he not a native of the villages (or even of the region) but also because few people knew him. In that same year, this individual would run for office in the local council as a member of the opposition party at the time. 15. ‘. . . my environment is the world as it exists and takes on meaning in relation to me. And in that sense it came into existence and undergoes development with me and around me. . . . If environments are forged through the activities of living beings, then so long as life goes on, they are continually under construction’ (Ingold 2000: 20). 16. MacCannell proposes a division of touristic spots into back and front regions (an adaptation of the ‘Goffmanian’ notions of back- and frontstage; Goffman [1959] 1990): ‘The front region is the meeting place of hosts and guests or customers and service persons, and the back is the place where members of the home team retire between performances to relax and to prepare’ (MacCannell 1976: 92). 17. Until 1995, the cafés and restaurants would raise the prices of their products during the summer, lowering them again in the last days of September. Since that time, prices have been increased with the beginning of summer, but without being lowered at the end of the season. The owner of one of the cafés/restaurants said: ‘The people from here don’t eat here and the tourist still pays. . .’. 18. They contribute, however, to feelings of frustration perceptible among the resident foreign tourists when they say, for example, that ‘before [when they arrived around twenty years ago] everything was cheaper and there were not so many people thirsty for money. . .’.

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19. The agricultural companies and their need for cheap and temporary labour facilitate this behaviour. 20. Similarly to Kenneth Pike, and in contrast with Marvin Harris’s view, I believe that emic and etic interpretations are equally valid. For this discussion, see Headland et al. (1990). 21. An analysis of the use given to the terms ‘globalization’ and ‘mondialisation’ would be inappropriate here. With ‘alter-mundialisation’ I intend to point out counter-hegemonic social or individual movements, such as those almost always associated with the World Social Forum. For an approach to these concepts, see, for example, Bauman 1999, or Santos 2001.

6 Community Residence, Identity and Environment

In Se o Mar Deixar (Meneses and Mendes 1996), I began a process of reflection on what makes Azenha do Mar a community. Or, to be more correct, I intended with that text to show I had collected data that could be juxtaposed to such an (etic) definition of community. The discussion commenced by referring to a fact mentioned many times throughout this text: the residents of Azenha do Mar do not have a common past based on the long duration of their residence and/or on the sharing of strong collective experiences prior to the moment they joined the community. However, all of them shared, as we have seen, historical frames (social and economic) in which the role of the state (of policies stemming from the ‘centre’) was determinant. They shared, still further, an ecological context and an investment of intentions prone to generate new ways of social life. I quoted Craig Calhoun from his article ‘Community: Toward a Variable Conceptualization for Comparative Research’, in which he says: The communal may be regarded as a specialized sub-set of the social. In the connotations of everyday usage, community suggests a greater ‘closeness’ of relations than does society. This closeness seems to imply, though not rigidly, face to face contact, commonalty of purpose, familiarity and dependability. . . . Collective goods and collective responsibility are closely related in community organization. Many, and especially long-term, collective goods are only likely to be provided by communities, that is, by collectivities whose members are strongly tied into rela-

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tionships which constrain them to act in the interests of the whole. Such members also bear a responsibility to and for the whole. The manner in which they are accountable is an indication of the extent to which the collectivity is communal. (Calhoun 1980: 111–12)

Craig Calhoun is a social scientist (sociologist and historian, with initial training in anthropology), who has in social history and social theory his main object of analysis. The article quoted appears as an answer to a suggestion that the concept of community should not be used or situated by those few historians who consider the concept to be too anchored in past historical time. In fact, as Calhoun says: It was in reflection on the dramatic changes wrought in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the concept of community took the shape we receive today. It bears, as a result, a number of connotations specific to its historical context, which have led at least one social historian1 to suggest recently that it ought to be abandoned. (1980: 105)

However, such a fact is not sufficient reason for abandoning the concept. Instead, suggests Calhoun, a historiography of social and sociological thought should be conducted regarding the concept. Thus, in what concerns the social history of the notion of community (or of a ‘language of community’; cf. Calhoun 1980: 105), it seemed to be, says Calhoun, essentially connected to a moral categorization of human groups. It was, for example, deeply related to the social thinking of the Puritans and the advent of the industrial revolution and consequent urban growth. It distinguished, morally and socially, ways of social organization. It differentiated social life in cities from social life in villages. The latter were receptacles of virtues and levels of aggregation and proximity between people, which could not be found in industrialized cities. In Calhoun’s words, the language of community was: [a] way of life held inviolable from the immemorial past, but always just on the point of vanishing. The language of community grew up as a demand for more personal and more moral relations among people as well as a descriptive category. Community was a moral in that people were not expected to be, in this view, perfect in and of themselves, but rather more perfect as they were better integrated into webs of social commitments, rules and relations. Community was far more than a mere place or population. It was the destruction of this social morality which alarmed the early defenders (and idealizers) of community about ‘urban’ or ‘modern’ life. (1980: 106)

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In the history of scientific social thinking, particularized in the founders of the social sciences, the notion of community suffers a process of abstraction that, in the work of authors such as Ferdinand Tönnies or Max Weber, acquires a particular conceptual sophistication. However, Calhoun says that the separation between morality and science has not yet been achieved. For such, he refers to the dichotomous concepts of Tönnies, Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, to say that the concept, despite being secularized, is still ambiguous and that the attention given to the experiential aspects versus the structural aspects remained unbalanced. Thus, Tönnies’ own terminology, by distinguishing between ‘community’ and ‘society’, would end up reproducing the Puritan way of thinking, which saw in small rural human groups (non-industrialized) ‘communities’ and, in big cities, ‘societies’. As if the imposition of aggregation in the villages and the freedom of association in the cities constituted the fundamental difference underlying the use of the concept of community. Calhoun proceeds, pointing out Max Weber’s work as another example of this non-separation between moral categorization and scientific interpretation. Weber took up the same view, defining the communal relationship as based on a subjective feeling, as opposed to the rationality of the associative relationship. Such an emphasis on the inner qualities of community life tends to discount the importance of the social bonds and political mechanisms which hold communities together and make them work. (1980: 108)

This proposal by Calhoun, which suggests a historical reading of the notion and concept of community, repeats the text Community Studies: An Introduction to the Sociology of the Local Community, by Colin Bell and Howard Newby, published in 1971. These authors, similarly to Calhoun, say that the notion was intimately related to the American and French industrial revolutions and that it symbolized the end of an era or of a way of living. Once again, cities are ‘societies’ and bucolic villages ‘communities’. Once again, Tönnies and his concepts appear as the example of a way of thinking still deeply rooted in a Victorian moral, despite being deeply influenced by the work of Karl Marx. ‘Community’ is a place of solidarity, intimacy, proximity and stability. ‘Society’ is a space of distancing and tension between individuals, where every aspect of social life is devoted to obtaining something, an individual and singular objective (cf. Bell and Newby [1971] 1981: 25). These ‘societies’ (Gesellschaft), where

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means of production and capitalist organization ruled, would end up destroying the ‘communities’ (Gemeinschaft).2 Still according to these authors, Durkheim’s definitions of ‘mechanical societies’ and ‘organic societies’ have, in themselves, this same idea, this same value, since, based on the former, one presupposes the existence of small human groups, isolated and homogeneous, incapable of living with the differences of specialization that take place in organic societies. With the Chicago School’s structural determinism and, especially, Robert Redfield, the tradition of sociological thinking that distinguishes between urban and rural human groups (or ‘fold’, to return to Redfield’s terminology) endures. Rural societies, as they evolve into urban societies, would ‘lose (a sense of) community’ and their ‘egalitarian’ tendencies. ‘Community’, consequently, would also mean, in a way, ‘egalitarianism’. However, we should distinguish two phases in the history of the Chicago School. In the first, influenced by American pragmatic philosophy, the city was considered the greatest manifestation of Western civilization (as Weber thought). In the other, subsequently, the city, if it could still be a place fit for constituting a ‘community’, was also a threat to the constitution of small units. The first period finds its representation in the works of, for example, Robert Park. The second finds its representative in Redfield. However, in both periods the notion remains that communities, even urban communities, preserve traits of a certain rurality and, therefore, of a lost (or almost lost) time (see Delanty 2003: 50–56). Returning to Calhoun, he shows some perplexity (my term) in the face of the lasting repetition of arguments that distinguish between what is and is not a community. He writes: The conceptualization and language never became well defined . . . . Although the notion of community came into widespread usage as a result of concrete change and variation, it rapidly lost its comparative dimension and became for many authors a static category, referring, rather loosely, to a geographically or administratively bounded population, not to a set or variety of social relations. Curiously, as social history has rediscovered the community in recent years, it has remained stuck in this static and invariant conceptualization. (Calhoun 1980: 106)

A few years after Calhoun published this article, and showing his perplexity regarding the inertia of the social sciences, Anthony P. Cohen would publish his book, The Symbolic Construction of Community ([1985] 2000), a work that acquired prevalence in anthropology in particular, and in the social sciences in general.3

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In a similar fashion to Calhoun, Cohen considers that the use of the concept and its distinction cannot take root in the opposition between characteristics of ‘modernity’ and their absence. However, unlike Calhoun, he does not seek a new (re)definition and focuses his criticism on the production of knowledge regarding the notion and the concept in its qualification, and not, as he says, around what could easily be understood as part of the controversy surrounding the Durkheimian versus Weberian visions (cf. Cohen [1985] 2000: 23). With that purpose in mind, he recalls the analytic concept of Louis Dumont, ‘complementary opposition’, an expression that, briefly, means that the whole is founded in the co-existence of its juxtaposed parts. With this reference and an ethnographic argument based, essentially, on the work Other Tribes, Other Scribes by James Boon (1983), in which the latter author affirms that Durkheim’s terms (mechanical societies and organic societies) are two sides of the same coin, Cohen ‘(re)integrates’ the definitions of the founders of the social sciences (including Tönnies) and criticizes the way(s) in which they were appropriated by the social sciences in general, and by the Chicago School in particular (cf. Cohen [1985] 2000: 21–38; 115–18). In this critical analysis, Cohen reminds us that the notion of egalitarianism coined by Redfield stems from an error of observation and not from an ethnographic fact. It would have been, for example, the absence of a formal structure of classes and the incapacity of researchers to distinguish informal levels of relative prestige that led them to draw up frameworks of difference in which ‘community’ would amount to the same as ‘egalitarianism’. He adds, further, that the fact that the communities communicate with the outside as a whole is a result of a simplification and generalization of the messages, not of ‘egalitarianism’ (cf. Cohen [1985] 2000: 33–36).4 Cohen, in the work we consider here, as mentioned above, has reached uncommon levels of academic recognition, perhaps because what he proposes is not a new definition, or an interpretation of the meaning(s) of the word community. What he proposes is, in fact, a view regarding the emic attributes and uses of the notion and, simultaneously, their possible etic correspondents. In other words, he proposes, in a way, a methodological inversion or an inversion of the place where the researcher produces abstractions. To be understood as: do not seek in the studied reality correspondences (or absences) for concepts; seek in the studied reality elements that ‘construct’ the concept (or notion) or its use (Cohen says he follows Wittgenstein’s advice: do not seek the lexical meaning – cf. Cohen [1985] 2000: 12).

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Consequently, the use of the term community implies (a) that the people from a certain group have something in common among themselves, which (b) distinguishes them from other people from other putative groups (cf. Cohen [1985] 2000: 12). And, thus, ‘Community’ . . . seems to imply simultaneously both similarity and difference. The word thus expresses a relational [author’s emphasis] idea: the opposition of one community to others or to other social entities. Indeed, it will be argued that the use of the word is only occasioned by the desire or need to express such a distinction. (Ibid.: 12)

This relational idea and this idea of distinction justify introducing the notion of a social/cultural boundary5 and, simultaneously, of the symbolic as key elements for the construction of community. It is around these boundaries and symbols, Cohen suggests, that we should focus the analysis of the phenomena susceptible to constructing community, although despite the occasional physical manifestations, the boundary spaces are as symbolic as the symbols that constitute them. The symbols are perceived as vague, inaccurate and complex mental images, subject to disparate individual interpretations. They share, however, common elements that enable communication and, simultaneously, produce sense for (and among) different individuals. Cohen comments on the conciliation between community and individuality, the constitution of boundaries and the effectiveness of symbols, resorting to a simple and powerful image. It is worth the following long quote: A courting couple may exchange an expression of sentiment: ‘I love you!’ ‘I love you!’ without feeling the need to engage in a lengthy and complicated disquisition on the meaning of the word ‘love’. Yet it is, of course, a word which masks an extremely complex idea. So complex is it that were our two lovers to attempt to explain their meanings precisely they might well find themselves engaged in fierce arguments. Symbols are effective because they are imprecise. Though obviously not contentless, part of their meaning is ‘subjective’. They are, therefore, ideal media through which people can speak a ‘common’ language, behave in apparently similar ways, participate in the ‘same’ rituals, pray to the ‘same’ gods, wear similar clothes, and so forth, without subordinating themselves to a tyranny of orthodoxy. Individuality and commonality are thus reconcilable. Just as the ‘common form’ of the symbol aggregates the various meanings assigned to it, so the symbolic repertoire of a com-

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munity aggregates the individualities and other differences found within the community and provides the means for their expression, interpretation and containment. It provides the range within which individuality is recognizable . . . . It continuously transforms the reality of difference into the appearance of similarity with such efficacy that people can still invest the ‘community’ with ideological integrity. It unites them in their opposition, both to each other, and to those ‘outside’. It thereby constitutes, and gives reality to, the community’s boundaries. (Cohen [1985] 2000: 21)

Years later, in 2002, Cohen returns to the text we analyse here, this time in the epilogue to the book Realizing Community: Concepts, Social Relationships and Sentiments, edited by Vered Amit. We get the clear idea that he is tired of the discussion surrounding the concept of community. However, despite saying he does not want to return to this subject, Cohen does not fail to do so, on the one hand commenting on what he considers to be less correct in The Symbolic Construction of Community, and on the other hand pointing out new social uses of the word community (new uses that, in fact, appear mirrored in the work edited by Amit referred to here; one can find its best expressions in the chapter by Howell, ‘Community Beyond Place: Adoptive Families in Norway’ [Howell 2002]). What is of interest here is the (self-)criticism that Cohen attributes to his work, a criticism that, as he presents it, can be summed up with the following quote: My reaction against this position [which he attributes to the identity characteristics of relativity and an ephemeral nature; and, simultaneously, denies constancy (individual or communal) to identity] was motivated less by a critique of the literature on community as such than it was against the idea of boundary and identity expounded in Barth’s classic 1969 essay, and reiterated subsequently by countless authors in innumerable publications. I later went on to argue emphatically and excessively against (a) the relativism of the boundary focused thesis . . . ; and (b) against the neglect of the community’s self-identity which, like the individual’s, is likely, in part, to be non-relativistic and non-contingent, the same argument . . . was the subject of my 1994 book, Self Consciousness. (Cohen, in Amit 2002: 166–67)

Cohen also says that, even before The Symbolic Construction of Community was published, he already disagreed with some of the ideas he presented there. And, despite assuming that the text and the errors are his, he does fail to remind us that what is written, once published, gains autonomy, readings and interpretations that are beyond the intentions and objectives of the writer (cf. Amit 2002:

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166–67). Evidence that allows one to conclude that the possible ‘excesses committed’ surrounding the notion/concept of ‘boundary’ and, by opposition, the decreased attribution of importance to forms of self-identity (communal or individual) results more from the combination of several factors (from the obvious framing in a historical period and the crossing of texts in that same period) than from massive dissemination of the book The Symbolic Construction of Community, as Cohen’s epilogue seems to suggest. In my reading of this text, I can find no imbalance between ‘boundaries’ and ‘awareness of the self’. This same text is seminal to all of Anthony P. Cohen’s work, and the individual capacities in the construction of identity (communal and/or individual) were already clearly present. Therefore, I still believe that this is a work of reference and profoundly heuristic. We cannot avoid noting one other book that also reached unusual levels of notoriety: Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson. Here is not the place to develop a reflection concerning this work; we should, however, reflect on its importance, even the possible consequences of a best-seller for the production of knowledge. Vered Amit suggests that one of the reasons for the success of Imagined Communities could be directly dependent on the ‘interpretative turn’, a current that has its greatest representative in Geertz.6 As she says: Within this melange of auto-critique and interpretation, the concept of imagined community seems to have provided a particularly useful hermeneutic alternative since, by definition, it was concerned with interpretations and ideologies of solidarity rather than contentious social description or, for that matter, social relations. (Amit 2002: 9)

But even admitting that this relevance is (con)textual, we cannot avoid emphasizing that the idea that every community is imagined, regardless of its proximity to being ‘virtual’, was coined by Anderson, and it is with his work that the idea of community is disconnected from (until then, imperative) face-to-face interaction (cf. Amit 2002: 6–10). Which does not imply their inexistence. As Cohen writes: Anderson’s suggestion in 1983 that communities should be thought of as imagined entities, and mine in 1985 that they are symbolic constructs, did not deny the reality of communities. They were just attempts to capture what it is that people use the word to signify. (Cohen, in Amit 2002: 170)

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Consequently, the concept of community is an(other) evocative instrument/symbol, and not an analytical tool.7 It is an instrument that is also a rhetoric and a poetry of the social sciences applied to some of its objects. This is how I perceive the use of the concept of community in the social sciences: a means to denote, on the one hand, a certain ‘open social/cultural entity’ that is, simultaneously, singular and distinct and, on the other hand, a way to communicate that same ‘open entity’ to a third party in the certainty that it will produce some meaning. The notion of community is, in itself, after all, symbolic. If, to untangle it, we use other notions such as ‘boundaries’, ‘identity’ or ‘exchange’, it is because, firstly, we attempt to translate their uses through the analysis of other meanings that we deduct from them; and secondly, because, possibly, we do not possess a vocabulary and/ or grammar capable of letting the applications of those uses transpire in reality. Anthropology’s own history brings us, in a way, to the role of the researcher in the delimitation/definition of ‘communities’ and in its abstraction. As Amit writes, ‘returning home’ after colonialism placed the anthropologists in fields until then thought to belong to sociology, and in contexts where tribe, people or culture were not valid units for delimiting the object. Therefore, they would have tried to indicate smaller social units inside larger universes, for which the concept of community made sense. However, it seems to me that the term ‘community’ is a good equivalent to the ‘we’ and the, for example, ‘here in Azenha’, which I heard repeatedly in the field. In this regard, ‘community’ becomes a concept as inaccurate as culture, and becomes closer to the latter (even in its undifferentiated and undisciplined uses). Community is, then, in other words, and going back to Cohen, ‘the exchange of meanings’. And, as the word sentidos implies, in Portuguese, meanings can be multiple: meanings; feelings; meanings and feelings. At the same time, ‘exchange’ does not amount to common meanings and/or feelings (among individuals). It amounts to their communication, regardless of how it is carried out. I never heard the word ‘community’8 being spoken by the people of Azenha do Mar. I found, instead, similar notions in use/ application to terms such as aldeia (village), sítio (site), povo (a term that simultaneous refers to the village and its population) and, more commonly, the expressions à da (‘at the’) and os da (‘the ones from’) [name of the place, house, monte, residents, etc.]. These are terms that suggest, above anything else, a geographical division of territory.

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Aldeia (village), for the people of Azenha (or Brejão), refers to the head of the parish of S. Teotónio, where the parish is located, the church, the graveyard, medical facilities and other services, as well as stores and the market. It is also there, in the ‘village’, that a major fair is held, ‘the market’, attended by a great part of the population of the municipality of Odemira and other neighbouring towns. The terms sítio (site) and the povo (population/village) usually designate smaller administrative divisions of the parish. Almost always, sítio (site) corresponds to the place where one dwells and povo (population/village) to a place of residence of somebody else. For example, ‘à da F.’ (‘at F.’s’), or ‘à do C.’ (‘at C.’s’) means that these spaces (commonly a house or monte) belong to different individuals/ domestic groups, or that F. or C. live ‘nearby’ (in the area). These are expressions that denote a scarcely inhabited territory (still, and despite the tourists) and a way to map it in which the social referents are stronger than the geographical ones. ‘Os da’, ‘os do’, ‘os de’ (‘the ones from’), as the very enunciation of the expressions suggests, differentiates groups of people according to their place of residence. In this regard, the expressions appear as an element of singularity and distinction; they are references to boundaries. They are, in a way, expressions parallel to the notion of village and, simultaneously, community. They are, therefore, signifiers with denser meanings than the mere referencing of the closest territory. Thus, aldeia, sítio and povo are not (only) geographical places, they are also particular social spaces characterized by the projection of images and feelings. Their borderlines are ill-defined and always ambiguous; they come closer and/or move further apart as often as do the individuals who consider them. They are, on the one hand, objectifiable in geographic space, and on the other hand, subjective via the images that each individual projects upon them. They are, in other words, expressions that share the same signifiers, but not necessarily the same signifieds. They share, however, something in common besides words: experiential/relational knowledge and the fact that they are dialogical individual phenomena of perception. In other words, the design of borderlines is always a result of the confrontation between mutually imposed images. These expressions are, consequently, equivalent to the notion of place as proposed by the founder (Rodaway 2004: 306) of ‘Cultural Geography’, Yi-Fu Tuan, when he juxtaposes it to the notion of space in his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience:

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‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place’. What begins as an undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value. . . . From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place. . . . [Thus, ‘place’] is an object in which one can dwell. (Tuan 1977: 6, 12)9

When I decided to ask people if Azenha was a community, the answer was always something akin to, ‘Azenha is a land . . . it is a place different from the others’. ‘Why?’, I insisted. ‘Because of the folks from here . . . because here we are fishermen’, they would answer. ‘And why are fishermen different?’, ‘Because this life at sea is different. . .’. ‘Why?’, ‘Because people here don’t live the way they want; they live as the sea allows them . . . It’s not like in agriculture: when there is no corn, there are potatoes; if there are no potatoes, there’s something else . . . Here, when there’s nothing, there’s nothing we can do . . . we can only wait . . . or we have to go and find a job somewhere else’. In other words, we can add to the perception of territory an element of distinction, which substantiates itself in a way of living thought of as particular and distinct. Before proceeding with the analysis of the data collected in the field, let us briefly revisit how the fishing communities have been acknowledged by those who, from the ‘outside’, care about them.

Identifying Images and Community Since maritime anthropologist Estellie Smith’s pioneering work, Those Who Live from the Sea: A Study in Maritime Anthropology (1977), until today, the instability of social groups made up of fishermen, associated with their total dependence on political decisions and macroeconomic interests, as well as the difficulty in managing resources, seems to guarantee, on the one hand, enough arguments for their distinction and, on the other hand, the impossibility of using the concept of ‘community’. Instead of this, a few authors (Estellie Smith included) propose the application of other analytical concepts such as ‘village’ or ‘population units’. In other words, ‘the fishermen’ do not seem to make up social units that are cohesive and stable enough throughout time to enable the use of the concept of community.

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However, as we have seen, this understanding of ‘community’ makes no more sense (it is worth recalling the aforementioned text by Howell10). This proposal is (was) based on ethnographic examples not too similar to those from Azenha do Mar and artisanal fishing. It entailed industrial fishing in which major companies/enterprises and a great number of workers were involved, and where the macroeconomic frame of the supply and demand of fish at a global level, along with the political decisions of national and international governments, define the conditions of possibility for being a fisherman. This same perspective was maintained in the studies led by the Canadian universities of Laval and Newfoundland, that happen to have played a key role in the history of maritime anthropology (see, for example, Rubio-Ardanaz 1994). It was common for the researchers at these universities to study maritime villages where, more than a ‘community’, they would find several communities that mutually excluded each other (see, for example, Andersen 1979). However, once again, it was the industrial characteristics coating the main research fields of these Canadian universities, the major seasonal movements of the villages and the concept of ‘community’ shared by the researchers that caused them to abandon its use. Common sense is loaded with an imaginary that attributes specificities and distinguishing elements to ‘fishermen’. In Portugal, ‘the poveiros’ (from Póvoa de Varzim), ‘the nazarenos’ (or ‘the barefoot ones’ from Nazaré11), ‘the caxineiros’ (from Caxinas), ‘the avieiros’ (from Vieira de Leiria), to list just a few examples, seem to correspond, simultaneously, to an imaginary that (re)creates ways of living perceived as singular and susceptible to moral categorization. Fiction literature itself, by exacerbating what seems to be specific to fishermen and seamen, is a good example of this. Worth noting, for example, is Raul Brandão’s book, Os Pescadores (1986), or the more fantastic and internationally acknowledged Moby Dick, by Herman Melville ([n.d.] 1851). In this regard, it is commonplace to imagine fishing (or life at sea) as an exotic and mysterious activity, in which there is a combination of physical and economic risks and forms of sociability and socalled, nowadays, ‘dysfunctional’ personalities (to use language from the field of psychology). Consequently, fishermen and seamen are, simultaneously, adventurers, fearless, unattached, unstable, unpredictable, dangerous and so on. There are, thus, strong stereotypes attached to the life of a fisherman (and those who live ‘off the sea’) that are only relativized by the introduction of sophisticated technology and the industrialization of fishing (inasmuch as the work and

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the physical strength it entails overlap adventure). In industrial fishing, and with the consequent capacity for better managing resources, fishing becomes a great industry and the fishermen its workers. The fishermen of Azenha do Mar, however, with their small boats, with relatively rudimentary technology and with the small natural port, correspond to an imaginary in which exoticism, adventure and the unpredictable are still strong points of reference. Consequently, at a symbolic, imaginary and therefore deeply malleable level, Azenha do Mar and its inhabitants form a relatively homogeneous and distinct whole. On the other hand, once in Azenha, our senses bring us sensations that complement and validate that imaginary, which has the sea as its greatest common denominator. Seeing a small isolated housing agglomerate by the sea, where fishing-related objects are spread throughout the streets and outside the houses, smelling the ocean and the fish, feeling the salt on our skin and listening to the everlasting sound of the sea: all of this allows the beholder to imagine that those residing there have and share a particular and distinct way of living that unites and identifies them. However, it is not in the projection of images regarding a certain social group that we can find a justification for good use of the term community and, as was implicit, physical proximity also does not guarantee interaction between individuals. This is visible in phenomena such as bonds of friendship, personal inter-knowledge and, above all else, in the sharing of the same relational frame and in the investment of feelings in a certain referential object. As we have seen, Azenha do Mar is a result of the combination of several factors. Among them, socio-historical framing, the discovery of an economic opportunity, and the ecological context acquire particular relevance in order for the fishing, in the village, to be the main and almost the only activity (see Chapter 1). This, in turn, forges a common body of knowledge, at least in what concerns the manipulation of technologies. Thus, accepting that the sharing of discourses (a body of knowledge and know-how) is a condition for the construction of communal experiences, we have, presumably, a basis for the use of the concept of community in its most classical sense: professional activity as a distinguishing element. In fact, fishing activity would be the distinguishing element that is most obvious in Azenha; however, I believe that what produces communal meanings is neither the activity in itself, nor a common body of knowledge. Previous to these elements we should consider the investment of intentions (necessarily individual) that share a similar goal: finding in the activity of fishing and in that specific place a source of livelihood. This is, after

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all, the first investment that individuals share and that is at the root of Azenha. In this way, having opened up reflection on the application of the concept of community with what is immediately perceptible to us through the senses, taking us to a certain imaginary and to an investment of primordial intentions, Azenha do Mar forms a community. This is in spite of the term not being used by the members of that same community. If we accept the reading we have suggested of the expressions ‘à da’ and ‘os da’, Azenha is a community when seen from the outside, for ‘à da Azenha’ and ‘os da Azenha’ are expressions that refer to the place of Azenha do Mar, but they also grant the place an individual identity as the fishermen’s (the place where the fishermen reside, remain and feel safe, to return to Tuan’s proposal for the idea of place; Tuan 1977). Thus, we establish boundaries that distinguish groups of belonging or collective identities. Similar to what we were saying about the ways in which literature and common sense refer to the ‘fishermen’, the residents of Azenha also project images about it and the individuals who form it. ‘The people from Azenha are really something else’, they say, while conjuring up two images essential to this classification: the precariousness of housing facilities and a few stories of violence and promiscuity (factual and/or imagined). The place of Azenha – ‘there, the place of fishermen’ – is seen as a degraded space, socially and morally, from which are only excluded the individuals with whom one maintains a tie of friendship. As someone said in Brejão, ‘I’m even friends with A. and B., but you have to very careful with those people. . .’. Regarding the romanticism we can perceive in the images produced by literature, something else overlaps it: exoticism is replaced by the idea of dirtiness, risk and adventure by the need for survival, detachment and independence by libertinage and anarchy. The very appropriation of the land where nowadays Azenha stands is reason enough for the production of meaning that differentiates it. A few months before the first period of fieldwork, during a brief trip I took to Azenha, I made a stop at Zambujeira do Mar and found someone who lived there and whom I already knew. When I said I would be living for a few months in Azenha, the expression on the face of my correspondent was one of surprise and confusion, followed by the exclamation ‘What?! In Azenha? With the fishermen?! . . . People are really capable of anything!’ Another person, from the academic community, would speak of Azenha as ‘a land of cowboys’ (to be understood as a place where personal conflicts are solved with violence and guns).

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Generically, the fishermen of Azenha are seen by their neighbours as people who behave in a morally reprehensible manner: they are noisy, bad-tempered and violent; excessive drinkers; individuals who do not inspire any feeling of trust. On the other hand, they are also seen as people who accept ‘unworthy’ conditions of physical and moral life. Obviously, these same neighbours establish gradations in these evaluating classifications. As mentioned, ties of friendship often overlap these judgements. At the same time, we can also understand that the stories about the behaviour of some individuals and/or of some families are, in fact, the repository of an imaginary that extends itself to the whole community. However, the way in which, for example, the father M. (see Chapter 1) always ended conversations concerning his children makes it clear that ‘being a fisherman and living in Azenha’ is a condition loaded with negative values: he would say, then, ‘They’re out there leading that kind of life . . . it’s not a good life!’ A neighbour of the house in which I was living in Brejão during the first period of fieldwork would talk about the fishermen with an expression somewhere between pity and disdain, always hinting at the idea that those who live in Azenha only do so because ‘they are no good for anything else’. This is, in a way, an ethnographic recurrence: fishermen are individuals devoid of land (or of access to work on it), but also of ways of sociability (see, for example, Nunes 2004). Fishing activity appears, thus, as a symbol that carries in itself meanings that take us back to a historical period in which an individual who did not have access to work on the land was thought of as something close to a ‘pariah’ (see, for example, Jourdin [1993] 1995). This does not mean, obviously, that the fishermen of Azenha are ostracized. Quite the contrary. We cannot view the images that are projected about them without recognizing this constant and systematic interrelationship. They mean only that images of alterity are projected about ‘the fishermen’, images that simultaneously inform the attributes of the ‘other’ and the ‘us’ and therefore establish boundaries for interrelationship and the construction of identities. A good metaphor for these boundaries and the ways in which the individuals from the two villages relate to each other is the road that connects them. People from both villages use this road; however, if the residents of Azenha frequently use it to drive to Brejão, the people of the latter rarely drive the opposite way. In the same fashion, it is easier to find a fisherman working on the land than a farmer from Brejão working at sea. And it is common to see boys from Azenha dating girls from Brejão, but it is quite unusual to see girls from Azenha dating boys from Brejão. (It is worth noting, as we do for re-

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lations of friendship, that in these love affairs the ‘good family name’ overlaps the identifying image that is invested in Azenha.) However, and in conclusion, despite the mobility and ambivalence that we perceive in the boundaries, an image is projected about the people of Azenha that constructs a symbolic ‘ethos’ that distinguishes and categorizes it as collective. To these ideas, the images projected on Azenha from the outside, the fishermen answer with the affirmation and corroboration of those same ideas, demystifying only those that, in some way, do not grant them power (for example, poverty and poor living conditions). The borders that the fishermen themselves draw around themselves, as individuals or as a collective, are based on the same categories that the outside grants them. There is a sort of mirror game between the image that the outside grants the fishermen and the self-image they attribute to themselves, a fact that is almost commonplace in anthropology and that takes us back to authors and texts as disparate as Oscar Lewis and his interpretative proposals for the ‘culture of poverty’ and its reproduction, and Sylvia Novaes and her book The Play of Mirrors (1997), regarding the construction of identity among the Bororo. The latter author writes: Whenever a society focuses on another population segment, it simultaneously forms a self-image based on the way it perceives itself in the eyes of this other segment. It is as if the viewer (the original population) transforms the other (the other population) into a mirror in which it can see itself. Each other is a different mirror that reflects a different image of the original viewer. (Novaes 1997: 45)

Regarding this social phenomenon, it is not worth asking whether the chicken or the egg came first, because, as Novaes says, the creation of images and self-images is simultaneous. However, given the recent constitution of Azenha do Mar, it is possible to understand that the construction of these images finds a correspondence in concrete facts and not, necessarily and exclusively, in stereotypes devoid of any possibility of objectification. For example, the image of violence associated with Azenha is the result of events in which fishermen of the village were indeed involved. The acts of violence, whether inside the place or in neighbouring villages, were frequent and therefore, as mentioned, there were those who called the village of Azenha a ‘land of cowboys’ and feared the presence of ‘the fishermen’, or at least some of them. As they say in Brejão, ‘When they were all together, at dances or in the cafés, a brawl was inevitable’. There is no need to relate these moments, which, counted alongside

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those that I witnessed myself and about which people told me, were countless. However, it is appropriate to mention that the frequency of such moments has decreased over the last few years, although the people from Brejão do not cease to reproduce this identifying image, and the people of Azenha, even though they question it and relativize it, do not deny it, because, ultimately, it ends up being a ‘weapon’ they can use to exert some power over the outside. On the other hand, simultaneously, the image of fishing and life at sea as an exotic and romantic activity is systematically reproduced by the fishermen, particularly in the discourse of those I have labelled the emerging generation (see Chapter 1). Courage, adventure and audacity oppose violence and, therefore, even physical confrontation is sometimes synonymous with a certain distinctive virility. ‘Let them come here to the sea with me and we’ll see who’s a man. . .’ is a statement heard frequently among the men, as if comparing their masculinity and at the same time defending what they consider to be a bad idea that has been formed about them. In these identifying representations, whether they are exogenous or formed by the individuals who constitute the community, fishing and the sea (the life of living) always appear as essential elements for the attribution of distinction. However, it is in the establishing of communicational processes based on relations of proximity and neighbourliness that the representations of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ are formed. If there remain no doubts regarding the projection of identifying images, we still have not approached how, in Azenha, individuals create these same images, independently of the relation with the ‘other’. Consequently, we must consider the interrelationship between the members of Azenha do Mar, so that, as Cohen proposes, the concept of community is not confined to a game of mirrors and the drawing of borderlines. What matters here is the personal investment in a shared feeling of belonging. As Amit states, communities are of a visceral nature and incorporated, loaded with emotions and meanings and, at the same time, experienced as something highly personal and collective (cf. Amit 2002: 16). It is precisely in this sense, in which communities result from long-term complex personal relationships, deeply rooted in ties of intimacy and familiarity, that I perceive life in Azenha and the feelings that are invested in it and about it. Shortly after starting the first period of fieldwork, the image I had created of Azenha as a relatively homogeneous community of fishermen became less and less clear. If, on the one hand, I regarded fishing as an ‘occupational identity’, on the other hand, I had hoped to find

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personal relations based on the sharing of knowledge and that the particularities and idiosyncrasies of each individual would fade in the face of the questions that were directly related to fishing activity and/ or the time spent at sea, despite the ethnographies of fishermen regarding conflict and envy as central elements for their analyses (see, for example, Fernández 1992; Nunes 200412). The interrelationship appeared strongly marked by a distancing among individuals. To the identifying image that fishing granted the fishermen, the latter, as individuals, seemed to contrast a cult of personality and autonomy. In other words, the assuming of different selves seemed to me so strongly exhibited that, when faced with it, any idea of community would be an impossibility. For this image, the first interviews we conducted were decisive. The interviewees, with whom we talked separately, did not suppress their mutual criticism, even though most of the time we barely knew the addressees. When we questioned them, for example, about the techniques they used for fishing, they would surprise us by enumerating small differences, insisting that ‘I do it like this’ and ‘he [the neighbour] does it like that’ – despite all of them using the same fishing gear and the method varying ever so slightly (at least to the eyes of a layman).13 Azenha appeared, thus, as a situational population core, in which different individuals and/or families looking for a source of income converged. However, it also meant that, throughout the thirty-odd years of the village’s existence, its constituents had established a network of personal relations that were cohesive and immediately perceptible. Nevertheless, even the proverbial solidarity in the face of risky situations at sea would not appear so linearly, as we will see below. This incompatibility between the confrontation of extreme individual positioning and the shared investment in collective goods is misleading. The people of Azenha in fact move collectively in search of common goods. They do not do this, however, with a single voice or, if you will, obliterating individual differences, which might understandably make the pursuit of common goals more difficult, but does not deny the participation and the individual investment in communal processes. On the other hand, we should note the establishment of feelings of sharing and belonging in a continuous time period. In other words, ‘community’ is not something prior to the individual, but instead something that is created with the individual and throughout one’s entire life. This means that what is shared is in permanent movement and not made up of acquired facts. It is a myriad of processes subject

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to advances and retreats that, nonetheless, have in common the emotional involvement of different individuals, independently of their motivations or intentions. It is the same to say that matters of consciousness of the self and freedom of choice do not render impossible the construction of a community. On the contrary: Community arises out of an interaction between the imagination of solidarity and its realization through social relations and is invested both with powerful affect as well as contingency, and therefore with both consciousness and choice. (Amit 2002: 18)

Simultaneous with these levels of interaction among people, we can still perceive the construction of a community as an ecological relational process or as the constitution of an ‘environment’ and a particular ‘landscape’. As we have seen, the ecological context was essential to populate the village of Azenha. At the same time, the dayto-day life of the village is deeply influenced by the relation between humans and nature, a fact that is particularly evident in the perception of time and the day-to-day tasks related to fishing, as we have also seen, and that is commonly shared by all individuals throughout their life. In this perspective, which is a result of the interpretative and analytical models proposed by Tim Ingold, we perceive the construction of community in Azenha do Mar as a process that is simultaneously symbolic and objectifiable in the relational whole (in permanent development) between human beings and their ‘environment’. This means, in Ingold’s words, ‘that the perception of the social world is grounded in the direct, mutually attentive involvement of self and other in shared contexts of experience, prior to its representation in terms of received conceptual schemata’ (Ingold 2000: 47) and, therefore, for the implementation of the inter-subjectivity indispensable for the construction of a community, it is necessary to assume an environment and a landscape that are commonly shared and constituted. Even though we should not confuse the concepts of environment and landscape with the concept of nature (as opposed to human and/ or artificial construction; and because nature is part of the landscape), I believe that the latter is essential in the communal environment and landscape of Azenha, despite different individual perceptions. This is because: (a) initial individual investment in something communal was (and still is) in relation to space (for which, in the case of Azenha, nature is essential); (b) the production of self-images has in nature, and in particular in the sea, a fundamental distinguishing element; (c) a great part of day-to-day activities are ruled by nature; and (d) the

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relationship with the natural elements generates individual feelings and emotions that condition the interrelationship. I am, thus, starting from the principle that forms of sociability, and therefore of community, are not independent of the place and space where they happen. Regarding the ideas of ‘space’ and ‘place’, Yi-Fu Tuan, as mentioned, has produced an extensive work that has remained a reference (Hubbard et al. 2004; Cresswell 2004). For him, place and space do not oppose each other; instead, they constitute phenomena of perception that co-exist, or not, inasmuch as the one who perceives understands them as equal or distinct. In other words, place and space, in Tuan’s humanist perspective, are ideas that stem from the perception that, in turn, necessarily implies experience. It is worth noting that Tuan, both in Topophilia (1974) and in his subsequent work, Space and Place (1977), defines place by comparison with space (see also Cresswell 2004: 20), with place(s) happening in space(s). That is to say, for Tuan, place is the ‘sedimentation’ of experience (of feeling and emotions) in a space (which is always forecast by the agent of that experience, or by the ‘activist’ or ‘maker’, to use Tuan’s expressions; Tuan 1977: 6). From this perspective, the sense of community is intimately dependent on the relation with place and/or space, or, if we like, with the notion of landscape,14 as proposed by Tim Ingold. Ingold writes that the landscape is the domain of our dwelling, it is with us, not against us [author’s emphasis], but it is no less real for that. And through living in it, the landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are part of it. . . . [I]n a landscape, each component enfolds within its essence the totality of its relations with each and every other. In short, whereas the order of Nature is explicate, the order of the landscape is implicate. (2000: 191)

At the same time, the means for developing this relational process between landscape and social organization are intimately connected15 with different perceptions of the environment. It should be understood that the latter, also for Ingold, is: a relative term – relative, that is, to the being whose environment it is. . . . Thus, my environment is the world as it exists and takes on meaning in relation to me, and in that sense it came into existence and undergoes development with me and around me. Secondly, the environment is never complete. If environments are forged through the activities of living beings, then so long as life goes on, they are continually under construction. (2000: 20)

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Consequently, I understand that the senses of community are, on the one hand, deeply implied in a broader context than the one we perceive in the ‘societal’ mould and, on the other hand, they are a consequence of the awareness that each individual has of herself or himself (and of their places when faced with their environment). That is to say that the social dimensions of Azenha are intrinsically (in)formed by the context in which they are developed (and where they are lived), and by the ways of relation and action operative in that same context. To this extent, in a professional activity where uncertainty as well as economic and physical risk are a constant, the collective maintains ways of relationship strongly influenced by the emotion and tension lived at work. Therefore, the manifestation of adversity among individuals, ways of ‘agonism’ or of apparent anomie, are, or can be perceived as, a ‘tool’ to better manage the exploitation of fishery resources, which, as we know, are scarce and uncertain and over which the fishermen have no control, given the indeterminacy of factors such as weather conditions, the state of the sea or the presence of fish in the spots where the gear is cast. This fact determines strategies and behaviours that have as a primary objective a decrease of risk, randomness and loss (and/or the absence of profit) and are, simultaneously, ‘social oxymora’, that is to say, individual or collective expressions that seem to include in themselves their own denial, as we will see later.

The Missing Propeller A propeller once vanished from a boat anchored on the laredo. It appeared the next day, but another motor from another boat had then lost its propeller. On the third day, a third boat also lost its propeller, the previous boat having gained its own one back. On the fourth day, another boat lost its propeller, the previous one having been reequipped. On the fifth day, the same thing happened, and again on the sixth day. For as many days as there are boats on the laredo, minus one, a propeller disappeared, but only from one boat at a time, until eventually the first boat lost its propeller again, and then the second one, and so on. If it were not for one of the fishermen, T., buying a new propeller from the fishing gear store, each boat would probably have lost its propeller for a third time. No one ever wanted to know why T. had bought a new propeller. In fact, no one ever said they knew he had bought a new propeller.

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No one ever reported their missing propeller either. Even the man who told us this story only did so because the propeller on his boat was the only one that did not disappear. It had a breach that would make it easily identifiable. No one ever mentioned the subject, because, a few days after someone had stolen the first propeller, everyone else had done the same. Resorting, systematically, to taking the propellers of others revealed itself as the most ‘economical’ solution to a missing propeller. We could present additional cases in which behaviours apparently disruptive to the sense of community are common predicates of the community’s day-to-day life. However, this short story brings into focus the main details we wish to discuss. As we have seen, work at sea does not only characterize the community’s whole life; it is also a condition of possibility sine qua non for its own existence. Therefore, isolating, forgetting the relation of total dependence between the social behaviours of the individuals and work conditions at sea, would give rise to misconceptions in the interpretation of cases such as that of the missing propeller. If, in the first instance, some of the fishermen’s social practices, such as lying, secrecy and above all the ‘almost misanthropic autonomy’ that we perceive from the case of the propeller, would lead us to suspect the internal cohesion of the group, in the second instance, those same practices, understood as constituent elements of a landscape and environment where the sea (nature) and fishing activity (work) are determinant, they reveal themselves not as disruptive behaviours of a social order, but instead as factors that produce deep social cohesion. This cohesion is based on the sharing of symbolic values intimately related to the ways of living that the ‘maritime landscape’ enables. It is in this way, in which fishing territories constitute a particular ecological and technical reality, and above all a social organization of resources, that we should perceive apparently misanthropic social behaviours. Therefore, behaviours such as those detected in the propeller story (lies, secrecy, theft, aggressiveness, individualism and rivalry) should be understood in consonance with three basic assumptions: (1) conditions of material scarcity, along with the particularity of it being impossible to manage or reproduce resources; (2) a strong tension within the relations of dependence and cooperation; and (3) the mitigation of competition and conflict. Consequently, in the case of the stolen propeller, we should assume a group of people dependent on an unstable and uncertain source of

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income, where the accumulation of economic capital is difficult and ruled by insecurity and instability. It is this same material scarcity and the need to avoid unnecessary costs that, if it does not justify or make allowable stealing (along with lying and secrecy), at least explains it (and, in a way, legitimates it) and, from the moment when it is practised by all the members of the group, validates it for the sake of the collectivity, for, with the mimicry of behaviours, one avoids violence and possibly social disaggregation. At the same time, and although it is an exaggerated metaphor, the propeller theft denounces the existence of relations of dependence that individuals want to conceal and/or avoid, as well as the strong presence of competition and conflict among the fishermen, mitigated by the use of secrecy and lying, as we will see below. We are, thus, in the face of a framework of social behaviours that is, in part, a result of the conditions that artisanal fishing imposes on the social collectivities that make a living from it. Ultimately, it is the antagonism between the logics of survival that imply, simultaneously, dependence and competition, which forces the fishermen to reach for practices of which their own moral discourse disapproves. Thus, both the theft that every fisherman in Azenha (apart from one) carried out, and the secrecy and lies that all of them used to conceal that same theft, appear to be anti-social behaviours, or at least to reveal the non-existence of an essence necessary to allow us to talk about social cohesion. In fact, however, by being understood within the conditions of possibility that fishing allows for social organization, these behaviours become proof of the sharing of a mutual symbolic framework and a mutual framework of references of personal conduct, and show an extreme experiential complicity that integrates, moreover, the ‘deviation’. All of them used the same ‘tools’ and the same codes of behaviour and understanding of the world. The fact that everyone concealed a fact that all of them knew clearly shows the levels of complicity among the individuals of Azenha and the ‘attention’ they give to communal living. To conclude, the practices of opposition or adversity that we can observe among the fishermen should be understood as instruments for survival, whether individual or collective, in a context where life is controlled by material scarcity, insecurity, uncertainty and discontinuity in the access to resources, or, in a single word, by adversity. Specifically, the marked individualism among fishermen should be understood within that same ecological context in which the ways of accessing resources (it is worth remembering that artisanal fishing is

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carried out with small boats and a crew of two; preparing the gear is almost always the task of the domestic group) do not entail strategies of cooperation, but instead their success depends on individual effort and not on the sharing of income. Individualism should be understood here in the same perspective as secrecy or lying, and not as an ideology.16 Thus, similarly to lies and secrets, it is a practice and/or a behaviour shared by all the village’s individuals, which finds correspondence in the images that the outside produces about their collectivity and in their self-image. We are, in this way, faced with a framework of symbolic references shared by all the members of Azenha that, along with interpersonal knowledge, caused by the daily contact that everyone maintains with the rest of the population, allows us to look at this group of people as a social unit. The propeller story, besides being an example of how potentially conflicting behaviours can be analysed as manifestations of social cohesion, also allows us to think about other dimensions of the social relationships we can observe in Azenha do Mar, for example ways of accessing symbolic capital and individual prestige, the process of group formation, rivalry and competition. In a community with no significant distinction between socio-economic classes, conflict and competition are a result, on the one hand, of the difficulties inherent in access to resources and, on the other hand, of rivalry in searching for brands of prestige and individual distinction. It is also from this perspective that we should perceive the secrecy and lies present in the story of the missing propeller. As was told to us: T. was the one who fixed the whole thing. He was the one who had more money and he hates this kind of mess . . . I [the one who told us the story] just didn’t buy it because mine [the propeller] never disappeared. Or else [if his had been stolen as well] I would’ve bought one right away.

This tells us that the fisherman who bought a propeller and thus ended the cycle of theft managed to attract all of the attention from his neighbours. He was able, by manifesting his economic power and taking the initiative to end the cycle, to increase his symbolic capital and his relative position of prestige. Simultaneously, by buying the propeller, T. conditions the other fishermen to defend their own social prestige. At the same time, if the social prestige of the person who bought the propeller increased, or at least had been consolidated, the prestige of the one who stole it decreased, as we have seen, not so much because of the possible moral judgement of the act, but because

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of the fact that the theft denounces an incapacity: a lack of autonomy and relative independence. Although there is no certainty in regard to who stole the first propeller, there is speculation concerning those who might have done it, and suspicion falls upon so-called ‘incapable’ individuals, in other words individuals seen as not having the skills (technical and individual, therefore also social) to survive without the use of practices morally reproached by the collectivity. However, because the liability has known suspects, ‘it’s almost always the same ones’, and because ‘I don’t have to pay for the mistakes of others’ (they say), the deed is iterated by the majority of the fishermen, if not all. For example, in contrast to the ‘propeller story’, it is usual for oilcloths (waterproof suits) to ‘disappear’ or for boots to stay in the boats while the fishermen are on land. However, when a fisherman loses his oilcloth, instead of buying a new one, he discreetly goes to another boat and grabs the one that is ‘within closest reach’. A few days later, there will be no secrecy about it, for ‘they also stole mine’, he will say. With this trivialization of the act, the collectivity protects this type of behaviour and, simultaneously, protects itself from it. As we have seen, however, conflicting practices and behaviours do not preclude or deny social cohesion; the pronounced individualism that fishermen exhibit does not imply the inexistence of forms of cooperation and solidarity. They exist and they are present in various circumstances: different crews help each other to take the boats in and out of the water; goods and information are exchanged; it is common for fishermen to offer fish to retired fishermen or to others who, for whatever reason, cannot go out to sea. However, these forms of cooperation and solidarity are not common to all members of the community, but are instead carried out within small agglomerates of domestic groups, with their relations being based on kinship, immediate neighbourliness or a situational or temporary alliance, such as those established between the owner of a boat and his partner. All of these alliances, whether they are between individuals or domestic groups of the same extended family, or even between neighbours, once again have the ecological context as a condition of possibility. Difficulties in access to resources and the impossibility of managing and reproducing them, due to their mobility and discontinuity, can lead to scenarios of situational and general pressure among fishermen. These pressures, at times, lead to the constitution of occasional alliances and, consequently, to the creation of ‘action groups’, also circumstantial (for example, to fish for mackerel, a certain fisherman will prefer a partner other than his usual one).

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In these occasional alliances, the result of a need to gather conditions for better management of resources, we can observe differences among individuals, whether in the relative position each one occupies on the scale of relative prestige that the collectivity establishes, or in the ways in which techniques and strategies are rationalized and appropriated to try and dominate resources. These strategies, as was implicit, are a necessity that ends up allowing for alliances that ‘forget’ the conflicts between the individuals who form these groups. The movement of individuals between different alliance groups is a fundamental knowledge/discourse for the constitution of a community. This movement, on the one hand, generates feelings of belonging and familiarity and, on the other hand, is a way of managing conflict and work in relation to a common property, the sea, where personal strategies are essential for individual success. Despite this fluctuation between alliance groups, we can delineate a scheme in which these constitute a network of dyadic relations that, ultimately, extends to the entire community, for, at one moment or another, all individuals will end up participating in one of the groups. This happens even though the alliances between domestic groups in the same family or between immediate neighbours will prevail, as opposed to others. As P., a retired fisherman, would say, ‘We have to get along with everyone. But even more so with neighbours . . . you never know when we’ll need help and it’s better to approach a friend next door than a family member in another village’. And, as if substantiating the situational character of the groups, ‘if the need should arise then all’s good; if not, each to his own home’. This ‘each to his own home’ shows us that, despite being a necessity, alliances and cooperation are avoided and, at the same time, are also almost exclusively adaptive answers that aim to maximize the levels of efficiency in the exploitation of fishery resources. For example, during the summer, a very active season, a fisherman was taken ill, leaving his partner alone. The latter, despite being able to ‘go out’ to sea by himself, established an alliance with another fisherman, who had no boat at the time, to try and catch at least the same amount of fish he would get with his usual partner. However, he did not maintain a good relationship with the individual he chose to be his temporary partner. Nevertheless, faced with a choice between losing part of his possible income and working in a situation of emotional tension, he chose the latter, and so did his new partner. They both knew that the alliance was temporary and that it implied yielding and leniency towards one another and a relation of mere cordiality, otherwise they would not be able to avoid conflict or situations of open confronta-

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tion. Because we monitored this case in both houses (the employer’s and the employee’s), we could listen to both the comments uttered in private and the conversations held by the two fishermen and their respective wives. In these conversations, where cordiality prevailed, they always manifested good will and interest in sticking to the agreement. In private, they would both say they wanted to split up, because ‘I don’t like the guy’, they would both affirm. Similarly, the wives did not hide their dislike of one another. The relations of mutual assistance that are established (whether they are a result of the need to work together, to help with the lending of gas or a certain tool, or an errand that needs to be carried out in the village or in the captaincy of Sines), despite being situational, are common and frequent during the seasons when one ‘goes out’ to sea the most often. However, it is also during these same seasons that the fishermen are more competitive, and are quick to offer a ‘countergift’ in order to avoid situations of dependence or debt, which would hinder the freedom of individual action and also the use of strategies such as lying and secrecy that, as we have noted, are not of negligible importance for good performance in fishing. However, if fishermen avoid cooperation and alliances to better exploit marine resources, they also mitigate competition in order to gain access, whenever necessary, to those same alliances they seek to avoid. It is in this permanent confrontation of intentions and interests that we can understand the construction of the communal landscape of Azenha do Mar, where, more than investment in common goals, there are individuals who are aware that the conflict is shared by all, as the resource they exploit is common, scarce and uncertain. In other words, in Azenha, the community is built upon the sharing of conflict and competition. The following ethnographic illustration will show how competition, perceived as a symbolic value, is particularly important in the creation of feelings of belonging and sharing in Azenha do Mar. Competition appears in this analysis as a ‘symbolic consequence/ correspondence’ of the ways in which the environment is perceived and, simultaneously, an individual skill (shared by all, although we can possibly detect different degrees) necessary for the exploitation of (fishery) resources where randomness is constant. At some point, a boat was in the water loaded with fish and, from up on the viewpoint overlooking the laredo, a woman married to the fisherman of the arriving vessel was manifesting all of her satisfaction and contentment at the result of her husband’s journey: ‘Would you look at that! My man’s boat is filled to the brim . . . That is so dan-

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gerous . . . How they’re not afraid is beyond me . . . And it doesn’t bring all the nets . . . what a shame it isn’t always like this . . . but he’s a good fisherman . . . it’s rare for him to sell for less than five or six hundred euros’.17 Next to her were two other women. One of them, a much-talkedabout character in the village due to her elegant figure, married to a fisherman who was a deputy in the municipal assembly, made no comment. The other one, married to a fisherman of the ‘founders’ group (see Chapter 1), recollected that when her husband first started fishing, in the late 1960s, everything was different: ‘it was only paddles, it was for real men . . . everything’s easier nowadays’, and concluded that, ‘it doesn’t matter anymore . . . that life is behind us . . . now we don’t need to fish . . . only this and that to eat . . . if we can manage [if the amount of fish allows it], we sell it’, she would say. Nearby, her husband would say that, if there was anyone in Azenha who knew how to fish and knew the sea, it was he, while other fishermen around him would argue that they also knew, and that if, for example, he did not use the alador it was because he did not use a large fishing longline either, because ‘back in your day there were a lot more fish . . . you didn’t even have to know a thing about the sea . . . you would just drop the hook and the fish would bite even without bait’. Down below, at the auction, the husband of the first woman was already active. The amount of fish he brought to sell was, in fact, larger than usual. Another fisherman, having already seen the amount caught by his neighbour, asked him, ‘So, it went well today?’, followed by this answer: ‘Eh, not really . . . it could’ve been better!’ and right away they were told to shut up by the ‘seller’ of the auction, who had started to auction a box of fish. Outside, in front of the auction, on the ramp that leads to the boats, other fishermen discussed the excessively low price of fish, even though, on that particular day, the amount of fish caught by all the fishermen was relatively large. By the boats, other fishermen would separate the fish they brought on the bottom of the boats, and fill boxes that they would later take to the auction. Meanwhile, the woman we first mentioned arrived to help wash the inside of her husband’s boat and, without a word from her, a fisherman looks at her and says, ‘This is what women like . . . when men fish, Azenha turns into a different place . . . the women even start “glowing”!’ During the afternoon of that day, the couple could be found celebrating at the café. People had more to drink than usual because there was no going out to sea tomorrow. There was no need – the

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profits would cover a few days. The children ate an extra ice-cream, and everybody drank, because C. insisted on buying drinks for everyone who entered the café. Because C. was paying, however, everyone wanted to return the favour, paying for more drinks. Everyone had to drink more so that everyone had a chance to pay, because even though some were less fortunate on that day of fishing, that was something that was never shown, unless everyone was in the same situation.18 Competition appears as a key element in this case. The conversations are noticeably ritualized. The sites where they take place, the ways in which ideas are verbalized, the gestures accompanying discourses, and the conflict of positions emphasize the competition for symbolic values: in this case, positions of relative prestige that depend, essentially, on success in fishing and/or the fact that one is considered a ‘good fisherman’. This competition for positions of prestige does not necessarily find a match in the feeling of ‘envy’ mentioned in a number of texts about fishing communities (see, for example, Cole 1991; Fernández 1992),19 even though we can admit its motivational relevance. It is, instead, a symbolic manifestation of an individual skill valued by the community that ends up creating feelings of sharing and belonging, since what one competes for is, on the one hand, known by all and, on the other, equal to all, regardless of the strategies and the individual motivational frameworks. The competition thus arises as a symbolic code, frequently ritualized within the day-to-day routine, that is communicative and grants information regarding positions of individual relative prestige and, simultaneously, establishes bonds of inter-understanding and familiarity. In a context where it is impossible to manage resources, reproduce them or predict their existence, any day of success or failure in fishing has immediate repercussions on day-to-day life and the social order. Therefore, fishermen always try to hide any evidence of what could be seen as incompetence and, in contrast, exacerbate anything that could be interpreted as prestigious for their image. Consequently, individual difficulties are only shared with close family and/or friends, or when the whole community is going through similar situations (for example during the winter, when every fisherman can go weeks without fishing even once, and economic difficulties spread throughout the community). For the distinction of positions of relative prestige, economic capital and its manifestation in the accumulation of goods, such as cars and houses, is important. However, as we have highlighted, achieved symbolic capital (sometimes gained in a short episode that neverthe-

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less remains in the collective memory and overlaps other moments in the history of a certain individual) takes on an outline of greater relevance, not necessarily for what is considered inside symbolic capital, but mostly for what it allows the individual to whom it is granted. The respect that is attributed to certain individuals according to their moral qualities, the skills shown during the activities being carried out, the solidarity and fellowship and, also, in the male realm, masculinity (which we should perceive not only as sexual virility, but essentially as physical strength and ability in accessing the sexual market), and in the female realm, ‘honesty’ (i.e. sexual allegiance towards their husband) are, in fact, conditions for individual freedom and the affirmation of the ‘self’ within the community. In other words, individuals with greater symbolic capital20 have, in effect, more freedom for the affirmation of their individuality in the face of the collectivity. With this, I do not mean that individuals with less relative prestige inside the community are ‘more vulnerable to sociocultural ways and forces or that their resilience is minimised’ (cf. Rapport 2002: 159). Possibly, we can even claim the opposite. However, the forms in which that affirmation processes itself will be even more ‘marginal’, that is, if consciousness and freedom of agency are not diminished, the forms in which they are ‘received’ by the other members of the community can vary. With this in mind, the ‘place of the fishermen’ appears as a whole where individual subtleties, greater or lesser, are ‘integrated’ in a feeling of belonging and (self-)identification shared by all individuals. This sharing has a special ‘locus’, essential to its own establishment, which, however, does not necessarily correspond to a geographical place; instead, it is found in what Tim Ingold refers to as dwelling perspective, that is, a perspective that places individuals and their skills (capacities of agency and perception) within a context of active involvement with their environment’s constituents (cf. Ingold 2000: 5). In other words, the construction of a community is a set of feelings and ideas shared collectively, differently ‘appropriated’ by each individual, which takes place in the space in which the individuals move and perform their daily activities. In Azenha, the ‘locus’ of the community is clearly delimited by the geographical space within the physical borders of the village; however, as we have seen, it goes beyond this. The sea, or the ways in which the sea is ‘worked’ and perceived, is fundamental to the sense of community. At the same time, the relations maintained with other individuals – in other places and other contexts that do not include those directly connected to fishing and to the day-to-day routine of

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the population – are also essential to the processes of (self-)perception and identity. The presence of tourists is a clear example of this. In other words, I believe that the creation of feelings of community in Azenha do Mar stems, essentially, from the coming together (of meanings and their exchange) between different ways of perceiving life and/or the environment. In the final analysis, this approximation between ways of perception and environment generates feelings of belonging to the place of residence that comprise a greater reason for the resilience of the fishermen at a time when fishing activity barely guarantees economic survival. Simultaneously, the construction of community in Azenha, as we have proposed throughout this text, is embedded in a fundamentally continuous movement between (the skills21 of) the human body (therefore, also, mind/consciousness22) and the landscape, reminiscent of what Tim Ingold refers to as taskscape, a pattern of activities that implies, necessarily, residence, temporality and inter-activity – in other words, the (inter)relational action of human capacities (and knowledge) in a particular place throughout time. In this way, the sense of community in Azenha is intimately related to the sharing of a taskscape, that is, with the sharing of patterns of residence and interaction in the world. In this regard, Azenha appears as a localized process (which, in this case, finds correspondence in physical space and not only in a sentimental or imagined one) where different individual projects cross. We can say the same for community, bearing in mind that the construction of something social is always a phenomenon of interlacing, where we can scrutinize a myriad of parts in permanent interaction. The latter remain beyond those parts that, out of habit and specialization, we delegate to the social and/or the cultural, often forgetting that culture is socially constructed23 and that the social24 is culturally informed, both of these therefore being environmentally conditioned.

Notes 1. Calhoun was referring to Alan MacFarlane’s text, ‘History, Anthropology and the Study of Communities’, published in 1977, in the journal Social History. In this article, MacFarlane produces strong and harsh criticism regarding the ways in which sociology and anthropology have used the concept(s) of ‘community’. Among other arguments, all of them noteworthy, MacFarlane invoked anthropology, as a science spe-

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2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

cializing in the study of small social groups and a full-fledged user of the concept, to ‘give a hand’ to reflection regarding what constitutes ‘community studies’ and what is meant by the concept of community (cf. MacFarlane 1977: 631–52). This analytical proposal and the terminology used by Tönnies are fundamental to the interpretation/understanding that Jan Brøgger develops with regard to the fishermen of Nazaré and, consequently, to the concept of community (cf. Brøgger 1992). A work that owes greatly to Victor Turner, particularly The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure, despite obvious divergences (cf., for example, Cohen [1985] 2000: 53–55; Delanty 2003: 44–48). This discussion finds correspondence in the ethnography produced about Portugal, especially in the pivotal work by Brian J. O’Neill, Proprietários, Lavradores e Jornaleiras, published in 1984, and the revisiting (by juxtaposition to Jorge Dias) that Pais de Brito conducted in Rio de Onor in his monograph Retrato de Aldeia com Espelho, published in 1996. The English word ‘boundary’ raises a few problems for translation. Commonly, it is translated as fronteira. However, the latter term finds a better English correspondent in ‘border’. On the other hand – and herein resides the main cause of this translation dilemma – a boundary is something that divides/separates, but also connects, while the most common meaning in Portuguese, fronteira, only separates/distinguishes. I believe, thus, that a fairer translation would be espaço de fronteira. This expression would mean something like couto misto – a kind of no-man’s land and everyman’s-land – where worldviews cross without a privileged transmitter or receiver. Pertinent here is a reference to Fredrik Barth and his 1969 work, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (mentioned later, quoting Amit), in which this author formed a relational theory of ethnicity that emphasized the importance of the analysis of boundaries (coining this term in anthropology) in the study of ethnic groups by juxtaposition to a ‘closed’ approach about/in the group itself. Barth’s proposals and those that followed were reviewed at a conference that took place in Amsterdam in 1993. The results of this conference are published in Portuguese in the volume Antropologia da Etnicidade: para Além de ‘Ethnic Groups and Boundaries’, organized by Vermeulen and Govers (2004). Regarding this subject, see, for example, Carlos Reynoso’s work, Apogeo y Decadência de los Estúdios Culturales: Una Visión Antropológica, published in 2000. A fact that Calhoun criticized in his quest for a definition and analytical categories (cf. Calhoun 1980: 108). A term that Smith affirms was coined in the social sciences by C. J. Galpin, during a study in the field of rural sociology, which, with its application, had the aim of distinguishing small social groups that provided services to neighbouring towns (cf. Smith 2001). Vered Amit states that the journal Rural Sociology published an article in 1955 by G. A. Hillery,

Community: Residence, Identity and Environment ◆ 171

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

containing a list of (almost one hundred) definitions of the term community (cf. Amit 2002: 1). In this book, Tuan revisits what he had started and proposed in Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (1974), to rehearse ‘a more coherent statement . . . [on the importance of the human experience in the] closely related “space” and “place” components of environment’ (Tuan 1977: 3). Signe Howell (2002) applies the concept of community to foster parents in Norway. She counters location and permanence with ‘shared experiences’ for the ‘constitution of a community’. Its opposite, pés-calçados (not barefoot; those who are not fishermen or do not live on the beach), served as the title for the Portuguese version of Jan Brøgger’s book (1992). Regarding the ‘language of envy’, Francisco Oneto Nunes presents us with a vigorous synthesis, ethnographically located in the arte xávega (and, within this ethnographic space, in the ‘saints’ coercion’). In this text, the author proposes a nexus between the randomness of fishing activity and envy. The latter appears as a means of domestication and expression of the former. Despite barely varying, small differences in the way the gear was used might mean a different outcome after a whole night out at sea. Yi-Fu Tuan does not approach the notion of landscape with the same acuity as the ideas of place or space. Landscape, for Tuan, comes in more classic moulds – as a background where moments and/or perceptions of individual or collective history are represented: ‘Landscape is personal and tribal history made visible’ (Tuan 1977: 157). Still regarding Tuan and Ingold, it would be worth noting that these two authors, a geographer and an anthropologist, have very similar objects of interest (specifically, phenomena of perception and relation with the environment) and they find their inspiration, clearly, in a traditional humanist form of thinking that is based, for both authors, in Heidegger’s phenomenology. A term that I borrow from Stephen Reyna and his book Connections: Brain, Mind, and Culture in Social Anthropology (2002), in which this author crosses hermeneutics with neuroscience, social anthropology with cultural anthropology (i.e. the British anthropological ‘tradition’ with the Boasian American anthropological ‘tradition’). The loaning of the term is not without cost. With it, I intend to signify, as Reyna writes, that ‘antecedent social events get strung to subsequent ones’ (Reyna 2002: viii). In other words, social phenomena such as ‘communities’ are part of a continuous whole in permanent movement, in which the parts affect the whole and the whole affects the parts. This happens, even though we ‘separate them’, almost always to facilitate the production of knowledge and the economy of discourses. Such as the one Louis Dumont attributes to the ‘west’, not distinguishing between ‘individuality’ and ‘individualism’ (cf. Cohen [1985] 2000: 14–15). Brian Morris, in Western Conceptions of the Individual (1992),

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17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

presents a critical and comprehensive reading of the construction of the concepts and ideologies of ‘individualism’. It is unusual for a fisherman to sell fish for more than four or five hundred euros after a night at sea, regardless of the gear used, the amount of fish caught (not exceeding a couple of dozen kilos, because the gear and the boat do not allow it) and the species captured. This description should not be considered unusual. Every time the results achieved from fishing are seen as satisfactory by the fishermen, we are ‘forced’ to remember the ritual moments within the potlatch. An exceptional day of fishing is frequently followed by a few days without fishing, especially during the summer, a season in which one knows there will not be a lack of opportunities to go out to sea. In our book Se o Mar Deixar (1996), we relativized the importance of envy in Azenha’s social relations, in contrast with competition as a symbolic mechanism. Regarding the women of Azenha, we wrote: ‘The relation of women with this symbolic mechanism [competition] is largely mediated, once this logic is deeply dependent on the direct exercise of fishing activity and because women are not the ones that generally carry out this work. There is, however, some ‘self’ [women’s] prestige not due to their marital situation . . . . The status of “professionals of this life” is granted them, as well as a greater acknowledgement of that which concerns the care of animals and vegetable gardens. On the other hand, because frequently husbands are no longer actively fishing, they find themselves out of the regular circuit of competition. This aspect facilitates their relationship with other women, allowing for the adoption of a tone of respect, sometimes summarised by the use of the term “aunt”’ (Meneses and Mendes 1996: 47). Which can be represented in one word: trust (in the sense of ‘someone trusts in someone’), for the acts of the one in whom you trust are expectable and the acts towards the one in which you cast the trust are in agreement with what that someone also expects. Trust is, therefore, a peculiar combination of autonomy and dependence (cf. Ingold 2000: 69–70). I apply Bourdieu’s notion of ‘symbolic capital’, certain that few expressions could synthetize better what possibly distinguishes individuals inside a population. Distinction in Azenha (among individuals and not among groups/classes) is not based on elements such as economic capital (money), tradition (genealogy) or cultural capital (formal education). Instead, it is a result of a personal idiosyncrasy, of a moment of luck in fishing, of physical courage or other elements that emphasize a certain individual/fisherman among his peers. To be understood as the capacities of perception, construction and transformation of what surrounds each individual and groups of individuals. Considering that ‘mind/consciousness’ is merely a more tangible manifestation of the body itself, and the ways in which it relates to the world, as Gregory Bateson would say ([1979] 2002), and to remember phenomenology as proposed by Michael Jackson (1989, 1998). The separation

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I propose here has to do with the need to produce immediate meaning, because I believe that Cartesian dualism that separates mind and body is still the most commonly shared. The same may be said about culture/ nature dichotomy; obviously, human beings and their forms of sociability are no less considered as nature than the rest of the living beings surrounding us. 23. We can recall the famous text by Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) and the dozens of definitions of ‘culture’ therein, to emphasize the relevance of social temporalities in the construction of cultural patterns. But it will suffice to recall the multitude of paths and meanings the term has gone through since Kant, up until contemporary ‘misconceptions’ surrounding the enormous umbrella that ‘culture’ allows. (Regarding the evolution of the term ‘culture’ in German philosophy [commonly accepted as foundational with ‘kultur’], see, for example, the article ‘Concepts of Culture and Technology in Germany: 1916–1933’, by Dina Gusejnova [2006].) Anthropology itself, always a daughter of its time, has been a social agent in the construction of ‘cultures’. Note, for example, the connections between the production of anthropological knowledge and the essays for hegemonic cultures associated with nationalist movements. A good example of this exchange of abilities is discussed accurately by António Medeiros in his book Dois Lados de um Rio (2006), dealing with nationalist movements and the production of ethnographies in Galicia and Portugal. 24. The relations and the results of the relations between individuals aware of themselves.

Conclusion

‘Prosaste?’, they asked me when I got to land with Z. and L., after a night out at sea. ‘More or less’, I answered, amazed at the sight of so many people on the laredo. There is always hustle and bustle when fishermen arrive back from the ocean, but not like this, with the whole of Azenha present on the stones of the cove. Even less frequent, are the anxious faces that do not seem to believe what they see, but Z. and L. congratulate themselves with a pleased smile. ‘Nothing happened. . . he was half asleep!’ In fact, only hours, if not days later did I realize what had happened. The sea was extremely rough. ‘I was so sleepy and tired that, when I tightened the hood around my face, it was as if I was getting ready for bed . . . I think I started dreaming . . . but . . . I must have realized somehow, because I remember feeling protected, like as a child when I covered myself with the blankets to feel untouchable by the bogeymen. . .’. ‘That’s right’, says Z., ‘when things look ugly at sea, we get kind of sleepy and, at the same time, we feel like a sort of superman. We’re the strongest in the world; the sea is bigger and there’s nothing I respect more, but you can’t show fear, or else we start to get sort of hampered and we only mess things up. . .’. ‘Prosar’1 (in some places, such as the Serra de Monchique, the pronunciation is ‘pruzar’) is a local and/or regional expression that means not to get sick. It is used in Azenha by the fishermen, as a synonym for physical strength, bravery, and a man ‘built’ for the sea. Therefore, it is also the verbalization of the capacity of living from and on the sea. The act of ‘prosar’ is, consequently, a manifestation

Conclusion ◆ 175

of a relation of forces between the sea and those who face it. But it is rare for someone to ‘prosar’ until they are ‘experienced’ at sea, to use another common expression among fishermen. ‘Prosar’ is, in this way, something one achieves through the repetition of the experience, in this case the experience of a movement in an environment unfavourable to men (‘we don’t float or have gills’, as one fisherman said). ‘Prosar’ is also a skill that is gained (possibly) through adaptation and getting the body used to a knowledge of the world that, in turn, is established as the fishermen move through it: ‘You should’ve eaten’, said Z. to me on the boat. It was too late now. I had not learnt for I had not yet experienced. If I kept going, similarly to the fishermen of Azenha, I would gain experience and develop a strictly individual relationship with the sea (through my body, through my senses). At the same time, I would be accompanied by people far more experienced who would recall their own relation with the sea. I would most likely be ‘left to myself’, to see if I dava feito (another local expression, a synonym for achieving, reaching), if I ‘prosava’, so that I can later repeat the experience until I learn what to do to ‘prosar’, this time not only to not get sick, but also to ‘be capable’ in a fisherman’s life. In the same way, I could also develop capacities and skills that require more time to achieve. For example, the capacity to distinguish slight colour variations on the water, to ‘understand’ the winds and ‘read’ the movement of the waves, to remember which species of fish appear more often according to the seasons, to know how to translate the graphics of the probes and recognize the sand successions, the ‘rocky crowns’ and the ups and downs that make up the bottom of the sea. I could, after all, acquire the skills and the capacities of perception that fishermen develop throughout their lives that allow them to decrease/fight the constant randomness of the exploitation of fishery resources. In this regard, ‘prosar’ is the result of a relational process that happens between man, the fishermen, and nature, the sea. ‘Prosar’ is, then, the incorporation of a skill that is developed in a relationship between man and the environment. Furthermore, ‘prosar’ is a metonymy for Tim Ingold’s dwelling perspective: people construct skills that develop themselves ‘within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings’ (Ingold 2000: 186). This perspective places human activities within the environmental context in which they happen. In other words, it does not contemplate the separation or the distinction between humans and nature, which is especially pertinent when we consider an activity (fishing) that happens in a space (it is worth remembering that

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Tuan says that the space is freedom, but also a threat [Tuan 1977: 6]; there is nothing better than the sea to objectify this idea) that is, undoubtedly, natural (i.e. not built, not domesticated, unpredictable and uncontrollable). However, this perspective, although immediately producing meaning and seeming to constitute evidence, does not meet the distinction that Western ideology establishes between man and nature. Such a distinction remains within the tradition of Western thinking and rests in a Cartesian duality that separates what is human (that which has a soul and is made in the likeness of the Judaeo-Christian God) from all the other organisms that inhabit the planet Earth and has led, ultimately, to the destruction of the planet. This is a contemporary concern that will not have a positive outcome if we do not overcome that same dualist thinking (and which is, after all, the root cause of the destruction of the planet; I assume that, if we understood our own existence as something intimately connected to and dependent on the survival of the organisms that inhabit the planet, we would not contribute as drastically to its destruction).2 Thinking about the relational process that led to the creation of Azenha do Mar allows us to understand how the social and/or the cultural is intricately interwoven with what is ‘natural’, which, in turn, is also dependent on worldviews, on socially and culturally built ways of inhabiting. However, because we believe that culture only needs culture in order to exist, we forget that it needs sustainable ecological contexts to last, because we forget that we are also nature. As we have seen, Azenha do Mar arose from a relationship between individual motivations/intentions, a national socio-economic context (essentially determined from the ‘centre’, i.e. the state) and an ecological context. Establishing orders of priority in this relationship would be an exercise, firstly, devoid of meaning, and secondly, one that downplays reality. In fact, reducing it to these three vectors is already, in itself, a gaze that excludes more than it includes. However, I believe that these three vectors contemplate the multitude of other elements we might consider when we look at the village discussed in this volume: (a) state policies were determinant for the patterns of migration movement experienced in the 1960s in Portugal; (b) some individuals were motivated to search for a source of income near the sea (and not, in contrast, in any other industrial area, national or foreign); (c) ecological conditions were the condition of possibility for the conjugation of the effects of state policies and individual motivations.

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The interpretation of the social coalescence phenomenon in the village, past and present, is intimately dependent on the three vectors above mentioned. It is plausible, however, to think that the motivations and the intentions of individuals are particularly conditioned by the capacity of resilience towards the state’s intervention in their lives and the change in the ecological balance in which they live. Therefore, it is fair to imagine that such a capacity of resilience would manifest itself, firstly, in the emotions and feelings that people invest in their landscape and their environment, in their lifeworld (to use Husserl’s concept), and, secondly, within changes in their day-to-day life that may become visible in transformations of the main economic activity. Anthropology is not responsible for conducting exercises in futurology; however, it will be useful for the argument I develop here, thinking about the (re)construction of the ‘edified’ landscape that is taking course in Azenha do Mar. In the summer of 2006, the City Council of Odemira started a project for the ‘requalification of the maritime front’ of Azenha do Mar. The first phase of this project envisioned the relocation of some families to housing being built by the municipality in the village (these families lived in edified shacks over the cliff); the second phase predicted the paving of the streets and their ‘urbanistic arrangement’, particularly the street over the cliff that faces the sea. Such works could signify an increase in the number of tourists and, consequently, an increase in their economic importance for the village. At the same time, access to the water seems to be more uncertain due to instability and sudden changes in climate; furthermore, the stocks of fish are diminishing and, somehow, paradoxically, the retail price has not increased in recent years, unlike the costs associated with fishing (gas, gear, taxes and fees). The strategies used by the fishermen to mitigate these risk factors have been: abandoning fishing activity; attempting to control the retail price of fish (through the creation of companies for the distribution and sale of fish); using other ports and/or auctions to sell their fish where the retail prices are higher; having more than one job, permanently or occasionally. If this latter strategy, as we saw, is frequent and practised by the majority of domestic groups in Azenha, the others mentioned above are not. However, the people’s dissatisfaction has increased over the years, because personal expectations that would almost always constitute an improvement in living conditions and material goods are never reached. This dissatisfaction, or the

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(in)capacity to fulfil expectations for a day-to-day routine imagined as better, deserves a specific ethnography that would fit here, although it brings us to another issue that is transversal to this whole text and that I have pointed out above: the emotional relation of the people with the landscape that surrounds them (and of which they are an integral part) and, in this one specifically, with the ‘nature’ that has its cumulation in the sea. As I have stated, the sea was, and remains, an element of attraction for many of the individuals who migrated to Azenha. It constitutes a link in a strong emotional connection with a landscape and, necessarily, a way of living. Exploring this emotional connection is, in fact, the ethnography that I would like to pursue. Obviously, there are contexts surrounding the emotional life of individuals, and nothing can be explained exclusively by the feelings people invest in a certain relationship along their life path, whether it is imagined or ‘concrete’. However, it is also not factors exogenous to the will and individual motivations that justify, per se, the choices that each individual makes for his or her own life. For example, the mechanization of fieldwork introduced in the 1960s, the industrialization that took place at the same time, the context of poverty lived throughout the whole country, among others, are factors that help explain the migratory movement that led to the creation of the village. However, if these elements help draw a framework of ‘need’, to use a common expression, they are not enough to justify the appearance of the population. If that were the case, we would have to exclude from our equation individual intention, and ask, not without innocence, why Azenha is only home to around 150 individuals. I believe that the answer to this question can be found in emotions (and the intentions that result from these emotions) that people feel and invest throughout their lives. As we have seen, this is verbalized in the reports regarding life and family that I have presented, in which the landscape (in its wider context, surrounding the people and their ways of living within it) appears, constantly, as the key factor that explains this choice. Thus, the question that deserves to be asked is: why do some individuals choose places to live where ‘nature’ predominates? Or, why do some individuals invest their emotions in the ‘nature’ that surrounds them? Some potential answers will have been present throughout the text; however, I believe an anthropology of the emotions would be justified here, that is, a study that favours emotions as a way of understanding who we are. Consequently, I am posing the same question that Kay Milton brings up in her book Loving Nature: Towards

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an Ecology of Emotion (2002). In this work, Milton follows Tim Ingold’s proposals and links them to the work of António Damásio, who affirms that emotions are initially operated starting from ecological relations (not exclusively, and not to the detriment of social relations). In this regard, Milton states that emotions are induced when the ‘individual organism’ interacts with the objects of its environment (cf. Milton 2002: 1–4), which allows us to believe that emotions that are operated by each individual are, necessarily, dependent on the environment in which they arise. However, it does not explain why certain individuals search for places to reside and work where nature is predominant, and where, consequently, there is a constant interaction with that same nature.3 Some of the answers to this question have appeared throughout this text. The expressions ‘work without a boss’ and ‘the “natural” rhythm’ can summarize these justifications. However, they do not provide a reason for the statement: ‘he cannot be away from the sea for too long. . . ; if a few days go by without the sea, he’ll even get sick’, as one woman said about her husband, an expression of a feeling I heard repeated many times, either by a third party or by the subjects themselves. The expression ‘I have to go look at the sea every day . . . ; if I don’t, it seems like I’m not myself . . . ; the day won’t go well otherwise . . . ; it is how I feel better’, makes for a better answer to the question. It is common to hear these words from the fishermen when talking about their relationship with the sea and the fact that, in their day-to-day routine, the sea is always present, whether through fishing with a rod, which they do recreationally, from the top of the rocks, or when they ‘just go out to see it’. It makes sense to remember that the need for the sea’s presence, or ‘going to watch the sea’, can be a result of a habit that, because it is repeated over many years, becomes a structuring factor in the day-to-day routine of certain individuals. But, once again, such a justification does not explain why the need to repeat that act seems to be stronger (and/or more structuring) than the repetition of other acts (such as going to the café). Certainly, the sea, or interaction with the sea, is an essential part of the myriad of emotions constituting what it means to ‘feel at home’. This feeling seems to comfort human beings in that it allows them a coherent sense of self-identity and self-perception and, simultaneously, provides a feeling of (ontological) safety. This is probably the most relevant reason that the majority of inhabitants of Azenha (males, mainly) point to the sea as that which most seduces and attracts them in the landscape and the environment that surrounds them. I believe, consequently, that

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it would be useful to conduct research that considers the interaction between man and nature as a phenomenon that is based on emotional and ecological relations, thus allowing for readings that include us in the relational whole that makes up the world and, in that way, (re)place human beings as another species on this planet. And this, despite their specificities (among which we can emphasize their capacity for transforming that which surrounds them), does not cease to be a product of an ecological relationship. It will be clear that my suggestion is intimately connected to particular interests, namely, a certain concern for the preservation of the environment and the right balance between a ‘consumerist’ life form and the exploitation of natural resources. However, it also concerns the defence of an anthropology more implied in the contemporary world and the urgency of some of the questions that preoccupy the world in its totality. Anthropology does not have the aim of presenting conclusive thoughts on any reality. It has, instead, the goal of providing readings, understandings of the world (of the ‘other’ and of ‘ours’) that allow us to think about ways of organizing human life. Therefore, it is important for anthropology to be involved in so-called ‘environmental matters’, because, if culture appears to need only culture to be/exist, nature (as it ‘really’ is) also needs culture. In other words, nature, in order to survive, needs to be culturally understood in ways alternative to those that still prevail. Therefore, anthropology, as a science that studies, quintessentially, what is cultural, should take part in discussions, and possibly even in the positive resolution of environmental problems. After all, those problems only exist inasmuch as culture (specifically its manifestations that appeared ‘exponentially evident’ following the industrial revolution and along with postWWII models of economic development/growth) perceives ‘itself’ as independent/separate from the ecological contexts in which it arises. Fieldwork in Azenha do Mar has allowed me, among other things, to look at the ways in which the territory is occupied over time and, simultaneously, to understand how feelings of community are created, which are closely connected to the environment and to the ways in which that environment is perceived by different individuals. Consequently, it has provided an opportunity to reflect on the ways we think about what surrounds us and the ways we view our relation and interaction with that same environment. If there is something I can appropriate from this experience, it is knowledge that the reality which we reflect upon is no more than what we can isolate – immobilize – within the kaleidoscope in which we are involved (which,

Conclusion ◆ 181

we can add, in turn, interacts with other kaleidoscopes). Therefore, the exercise of observation/participation that fieldwork implies is, in itself, a kaleidoscope, since we are, simultaneously, one of the objects of the kaleidoscope and the one who observes it. Also, for that same reason, the observation exercise that anthropology entails is always partial, and often difficult to imagine (at least for those not familiar with the methods and ‘background’ of anthropology). However, anthropology, not being the only science dwelling on human beings as social beings, has the virtue of doing so by looking, envisioning, translating other angles, other cultures and, in that way, contributing towards the fight against hegemonic forms of conceiving the world. This fact is particularly precious at a time when human beings and what is most unique about them – their capacity to produce several meanings – seem to be less important than their capacity to produce things and accumulate wealth (which finds an immediate correspondence in so-called ‘neo-liberal’ production logic and spreads itself in the most unsuspicious of places; see, for example, artistic production or the production of scientific knowledge). Perhaps because of that, it is worth remembering how these people from Azenha and Brejão ‘stand up’ to their routine to the detriment of what would be, in their own words, ‘only more money, but not a better life’. Kay Milton writes: Conclusions are notoriously difficult to write, but a colleague once gave me some advice that I have followed ever since. A conclusion, he suggested, should answer the question, ‘What has changed, now that this book has been written?’ Of course I cannot know what, if anything, will change for potential readers. I can only say what has changed for me, what I have learned as a result of writing this book. (2002: 147)

Making her words mine, I would like to say that, if something has changed after the fieldwork and after reflection that finds in it its main motive, it has been a certain ‘reification’ of the social and the cultural to the detriment of other relational processes. Now, I shall say: social and cultural phenomena are culturally perceived movements of nature.

Notes 1. The word prosar is used in Azenha do Mar in the situations described. However, it is also used, although less frequently, on other occasions in which the capacity, or incapacity, of someone in the face of something is

182 ◆ The Sea Commands

assessed, for example aptitude for military service or the physical trials that some fishermen are subject to in order to acquire their diving licence. Nonetheless, it is common in these situations to hear expressions such as ‘não ser capaz’ (unable to do it, or can’t do it) and ‘não dar feito’ (deliver undone or not being able to). 2. Tim Ingold proposes an approach to the meanings and the history of the notion of ‘globe’ with a purpose similar to the one I have mentioned. In his words: ‘the image of the earth as a globe, implied in such phrases as “global environmental change”, is one that actually expels humanity from the lifeworld, such that rather than the environment surrounding us, it is we who have surrounded it’ (Ingold 2000: 154; italics in the original). For a more complete approach to this proposal, see Chapter XII of the mentioned work. 3. Milton’s study is based, mainly, on the analysis of ‘environmentalist’ behaviours, that is, on data collected from individuals who defend preservation of the environment, as opposed to the overexploitation of resources and destruction of sustainable ecosystems.

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Index

25th of April, 27 A agency, 24, 55–56, 75, 168 alador, 76, 166 alcatruz, 78 algae harvesting, 26, 72, 76, 85–86 Amit and Rapport, 55–56 Amit, V., 55–56, 145–147, 155, 157, 170–171 Amorim, Inês, 50 Andersen, R., 52 Anderson, Benedict, 146 anthropogeography, 58 Appadurai, A., 93 Aquinas, Thomas, 70 Aristotle, 70, 135 auction, 6, 15, 31, 40, 90, 93, 107, 110, 166 B bait, 1, 5, 77–78, 82–83, 166 Bakhtin, 113 Barley, Nigel, 115 Barth, F., 145, 170 Bateson, G., 62–63, 69, 91, 172 Bauman, Z., 138 Bell, Colin, 141 Benedict, Ruth, 101 Bernardo, 49, 51 Blehr, O., 47 Boas, Franz, 47, 68, 101

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 126 Bohannan, 115 Boissevain and Selwyn, 49, 52 Boon, James, 143 borders, 34, 62, 73, 154, 168 boundaries, 40, 144–148, 152–154, 170 Bourdieu, P., 55, 57, 64–65, 70, 172 bow, 2–5, 76 Brandão Moniz, A., 38 Brandão, Raul, 51, 150 Breton, Y., 48 Brito, J.P., 49, 170 Brøgger, J., 50, 68, 170–171 C cages, 75 Calhoun, Craig, 139–143, 169–170 Calvino, Italo, 15 camones, 117–119, 121, 123–127, 129–131, 133–135, 137 Castro Caldas, Eugénio, 22, 24 Centre for Maritime Research, 49 Chayanov, 48, 67 Clifford and Marcus, 115 Coffey, Amanda, 83 Cohen and Rapport, 55 Cohen, Anthony P., 10, 53, 61, 68, 136, 142, 146 Cole, S., 50, 68, 167 colonial war, 39–40 community, 7–11, 13–14, 16, 27, 34, 39, 41, 45, 52–53, 55–56, 61–62,

Index ◆ 199

75, 103, 118, 139–147, 149–153, 155–165, 167–171, 173, 180 compass, 5–6, 84 competences, 65–67 competition, 14, 40, 115, 123, 160–162, 165, 167, 172 conger, 77 Conklin, Harold, 52 Connerton, Paul, 69 Correia, Emmanuel, 30 cove, 6, 25, 27, 72, 76, 90, 174 Covo, 23 Cresswell, Tim, 158 crews, 78–80, 82–83, 116, 163 Crick, Malcolm, 136 Csordas, T.J., 57, 69 cultural ecology, 51, 58–59 Cutileiro, José, 21 D da Silva, Baldaque, 23, 42–43, 51, 77 Damásio, António, 179 Davenport, W.H., 47 de Oliveira, Veiga, 43, 49 Deleuze and Guattari, 91 Dias, Jorge, 49, 170 Douglas, Mary, 69 Dumont, Louis, 68, 143, 171 Durkheim, E., 142–143 dwelling perspective, 62, 64–65, 69, 168, 175 E ecological anthropology, 10, 51–52, 57–61, 68, 73 ecosystem, 27, 59, 96 ecotype, 36 Ellen, Roy, 60 embodiment, 55, 57, 65, 68–69 emic, 14, 48, 138, 143 environmental determinism, 57–58 Epstein, A.L., 114 Eriksen, T.H., viii, 62–63 espinel, 77 estralhos, 77–78, 81

ethnography, 9, 11, 16–17, 42, 49, 53, 95, 102, 114–115, 121, 170, 178 ethos, 134, 154, 197 Evans-Pritchard, E., 101–102, 114 F Faria, Raul, 51 Faris, J.C., 36 fathom, 77, 92 Feio, Mariano, 42 Fernandez, J., 10, 134 Filgueiras, 50 Firth, R., 47 fishing gear, 72, 75 Fortes, 49 founders, 35–41, 141, 143, 166 founders, the, 23–29, 154 Fraser, T.M., 47 G Galpin, C.J., 170 Garrido, Álvaro, 50, 194 Geertz, C., 48, 58, 146 Gell, Alfred, 66 Gibson, James, 61–62 Giddens, A., 55, 68 Goffman, E., 130, 137 Gunda, A., 38 Gusejnova, Dina, 173 H habitus, 55, 64–65, 70 Hannerz, U., 93 Haraway, 57 Harris, Marvin, 59–60, 138 Headland et al., 138 Héron, F., 70 Hillery, G.A., 170 Hobbs and May, 101 Hodges, Matt, 131 horse-mackerel, 79–80, 84 Howell, S., 145, 171 Hubbard, P., 158 human ecology, 14, 51, 60, 73

200 ◆ Index

I identities, 56, 95–96, 111, 152–153 identity, 8, 27, 50, 53, 57, 68, 72, 74–75, 96–97, 99, 103, 106, 115, 135–136, 139, 141, 143, 145–147, 149, 151–155, 157, 159, 161, 163, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173, 179 idleness, 133–134 individualism, 68, 160–163, 171–172 Ingold and Kurttila, 15, 68 Ingold, Tim, 10, 14–15, 34, 37, 60–61, 69, 73, 91–92, 103, 115, 157–158, 168–169, 175, 179, 182 Isidoro, A., 49 J Jackson, Anthony, 91 Jackson, J.A., 44 Jackson, Michael, 54, 172 Jerónimo, Rita, 136 Johnson, Twig, 50 Jorion, Paul, 48 Jourdin, M., 31 Jung, Carl, 44 K Kasi, Bilo, 19, 42 Kottack, C., 47 Kousis, M., 137 Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 173 Kroeber, Alfred, 58 L Landmann, George, 22 landscape, 11, 17, 20, 37, 41–42, 51, 66–67, 71–73, 89, 121, 125–126, 130, 134, 157–158, 160, 165, 169, 171, 177–179 Lapa, Albino dos Santos, 23, 49, 67 laredo, 1–3, 6, 26, 44, 76, 80, 82, 87, 90, 107, 109–110, 159, 165, 174 Latour, B., 55 Lemos, L., 49 Levine, H., 48 Lewis, Oscar, 142

life path, 29, 112, 178 limo harvest, 26 Lisón-Tolosana, C., 35, 40, 45 M MacCannell, D., 130, 137 MacClancy and McDonaugh, 102, 115 MacFarlane, A., 169–170 madre, 3–5, 77–78, 81 Malinowski, B., 17, 47, 58, 94, 99, 114 Marcus, George E., 101 maritime anthropological studies, 49 maritime anthropology, 10–11, 46–48, 51, 149–150 Martinho, A., 49, 51 Martins, Luís, 50 masculinity, 100, 107, 155, 168 Matos, M., 49 Mauss, M., 58, 70 McCay and Acheson, 40 McCay and Finlayson, 52 McCay, B., 48, 52 Mead, Margaret, 102 Medeiros, António, 104, 173 Memorial University of Newfoundland, 47 Meneses and Mendes, 9, 53, 88, 98, 115, 139, 172 Meneses, Inês, 8, 11, 16, 50, 100 Merleau-Ponty, 57 Metcalf, Peter, 41 metonymy, 75, 175 Milton and Svasek, 48 Milton, Kay, 15, 58, 60, 178, 181 misanthropic, 160 Monteiro, Paulo F., 32 moor, 42, 121, 133 Moran, Emílio, 52 moray, 5, 77 Moreira, Carlos D., 12, 23, 31, 50 Morris, Brian, 9, 68, 171 Mouzelis, N. 55 Muchona, 113 Munro, Rolland, 7

Index ◆ 201

N nassas, 66 nets, 2, 25, 71, 75, 78–81, 92, 166 netting, 58–60 Newby, Howard, 141 newcomers, 26, 36–38, 40–41 Norbeck, E., 47 Novaes, S., 154 Nunes, F.O., 31, 45, 50, 153, 156, 171 O O’Neill, B.J., 158 Oliveira, R., 49 Orlove, B., 48 Orona, A., 47 Ortega and Gasset, 23 P ‘palangre’, 77 Park, Robert, 142 Pedregal, A., 136 Peralta, Elsa, 50 perception of the environment, 3–4, 16, 61, 66 Picão, J., 22, 45 Pike, Kenneth, 138 Pollnac and Carmo, 38 pout, 77, 84 Powdermaker, H., 115 probes, 77, 84–85, 93, 175 Q Quaresma, A.M., 22–23, 42 R Rabinow, P., 101–102, 114–115 Rappaport, Roy, 52, 59 Rapport, Nigel, 54, 68 Ravenstein, E.G., 28, 44 resources, 7, 11, 15, 22, 24, 40–41, 45, 50, 52, 66, 72, 74, 80, 85, 90–91, 137, 149, 151, 159–165, 167, 175, 180, 182 Reyna, S., 171 Reynoso, C., 115, 170

Rodaway, P., 148 Rosa Sampaio, José, 30, 37 S safar, 81 Sahlins, M., 93 Sampaio, A., 42, 49 Santareno, B., 51 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, 126 Santos Graça, A., 49–50, 67 sardine, 1, 77, 81–82 Scheper-Hughes, 69 scorpionfish, 65 sea bass, 5, 77 seaman’s book, 8, 83 self-consciousness, 53 shacks, 32–34, 104, 113, 118, 177 Shore, Cris, 99, 104 skills, 65, 74–75, 92, 163, 168, 175 Smith, Estellie, 47, 149 Smith, Valene, 122 smuggling, 7, 17, 43 snapper, 77 squid, 1, 77, 81–82, 84 Souto, Henrique, 50 stern, 2, 4–6, 76–77 Steward, Julian, 58–59 T taskscape, 37, 41, 62, 66, 169 territory, 8, 16, 26, 35–36, 38, 42, 73, 75, 130, 147–149, 180 Tönnies, F., 141, 143, 170 tourism, 13, 20–21, 49, 73, 87, 89, 117–122, 131, 136 tourists, 13, 20–21, 28, 30, 40, 45, 73, 88–89, 96, 104–106, 117–126, 130–132, 135–137, 148, 169, 177 traps, 78 trawler, 28, 34 trole, 77 Tuan, Y.-F., 148–149, 152, 158, 171, 176 Tudela, Galván, 46, 48 Turner, V., 98, 113, 170

202 ◆ Index

U uncertainty, 7, 11, 81, 85, 90, 93, 159, 161 University of Laval, 47–48 V Vale de Almeida, 96, 103 Vayda, Andrew, 59 Velho, Otávio, 54

W Wacquant, L., 70 Watson, C.W., 115–116 Wax, Rosalie, 102 Weber, Max, 141–142 Wolf, Eric, 36 Z Zulaika, Joseba, 48