This award supports dissertation research on the salmon industry in Bristol Bay, Alaska. An ethnographic study of fishing practice and policymaking, the project examines how large-scale processes of contemporary economic restructuring both effect and are potentially renegotiated by workers' lived experience and locally specific modes of valuation. Like many other resource industries worldwide, the Alaskan salmon industry has witnessed volatile economic shifts in recent years as a result of the broad market transformations associated with globalization. Yet unlike other sites of global industrial restructuring, Bristol Bay fishing is both heavily regulated by the state and subject to at least nominal control by industry participants themselves. For this reason, Bristol Bay provides an ideal context to explore how heterogeneous groups of stakeholders negotiate the often contradictory demands and ideals forged by new global economic orders, local industry cultures, and tight-knit communities alike.
This research will contribute to analyses of current economic globalization and restructuring as well as more general theoretical considerations of value, property, labor, and capitalism. At the same time, it will add to the anthropology of work and the anthropology of fishing, and Northern, rural, and Alaska Native studies. By assessing the historical, cultural, and social bases for and implications of salmon industry restructuring, this research aims to directly contribute to the construction of more effective and appropriate resource policy in Bristol Bay and beyond.
