In this compelling case study of artisanal fisheries in Lima, Peru, Maximilian Viatori and Héctor Bombiella draw on historical archives and over ten years of ethnographic research to document how lives, actions and interactions among artisanal fishers have been shaped by centuries of global forces beyond their control. In particular, the authors draw attention to neoliberalised fisheries policy over the past several decades, which has catalysed the reduction of complex social-environmental systems into single, commodifiable, manageable resource units. The authors argue these transformations extend an ongoing process of dispossession that has been unravelling the fishery commons throughout Peru's colonial history to present. The book is ethnographically centred on the fishing wharf in the Chorrillos district of Lima, Peru. Viatori and Bombiella describe the local debates around the development and ‘modernisation’ of the waterfront to illuminate tensions between working classes and affluent residents, and the rhetoric that reinforces these forms of social differentiation. The authors interrogate the pervasiveness of dominant discourses in fishery policy that depict artisanal fishers as uncivilised ‘coastal others’ in need of regulation and education about ‘individual responsibility’.
In Chapters 1 and 2, the authors convincingly argue that the contemporary crisis in Peru's fisheries should not be interpreted as a classic ‘tragedy of the commons’. The classic tragedy of the commons thesis suggests that the aggregation of individual self-interest results in the inevitable destruction of a common pool resource (see Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, 162: 3859 (1968), pp. 1243–8), and that such tragedies can be overcome through collective action and cooperation among rational individuals (see Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990); ‘A Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action’, American Political Science Review, 92: 1 (1998), pp. 1–22). Instead, the authors join other theoretical perspectives of the commons (e.g. Stefano Longo, Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark, The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture (Rutgers University Press, 2015); Patrick Bresnihan, Transforming the Fisheries (University of Nebraska Press, 2016)) to expound structural explanations for environmental degradation by highlighting the role of pollution, global capitalist markets, poor governance and the over-capacitation of industrial anchoveta fishing fleets. Synthesising multiple theoretical perspectives with archival and historical data, the authors advance the concept of ‘ocean natures’ and demonstrate how the root of the crisis in Peru's fishery commons has resulted from a culmination of previous management schemes, enclosure, and reductionist rhetoric in policy that has oversimplified a complex system. This eventually led to a concentration of wealth and power while further marginalising artisanal fishers who are supposedly responsible for their own poverty and environmental degradation.
The authors further challenge the narrative of individual responsibility in Chapter 3 by situating the study area in its larger regional context. Their comparative analysis elucidates how geographical differentiation is socially and politically produced. In Chapter 4, an analysis of fisher interviews corroborates the historical and archival data to demonstrate how government projects continue to implicitly blame fishers for their own tragedies through policies and interventions that ‘promote individual responsibility among artisanal fishers and vendors’ and further ‘advance enclosure by reducing complex social and ecological relationships and class relations to a narrow range of individualised economic practices that are easily made visible to state regulation’ (p. 113). Chapters 4 and 5 discuss how these neoliberalised discourses of ‘personal responsibility’ have entered everyday conversations, ultimately pitting fishers against one another while obscuring the influence of structural forces that have stacked the odds against them.
One strength of the book is that it does an excellent job at defining its terms and grounding theoretical concepts in the historical account. The book draws carefully on ethnographic notes and analysis to capture multiple dimensions of the challenges in small-scale fisheries, painting an ethnographic picture of coastal lives in the context of urbanisation, gentrification, globalisation and its related conflicts with industrial fisheries and tourism. It offers an interpretation that emerged from the two different disciplinary lenses of each author. However, it is not always clear how interviewees themselves contributed to the co-analysis of results by ‘theorizing the production of coastal lives’, as the authors suggest (p. 30). This is particularly evident in Chapters 4 and 5, which contain some jargon-heavy language that is sprinkled throughout the book. On the other hand, the book offers a rich, contextualised case study with a nuanced view, thereby making the book relevant to scholars with interests beyond the application of critical theoretical perspectives to understand struggles over nature and capital in artisanal fisheries.
Coastal Lives would be of interest to scholars of anthropology, sociology, geography and Latin American studies who are engaged with theories of globalisation, capitalism, neoliberalism, inequality and commons theory. While debates around the commons are not necessarily central to the book's purpose, it makes an important contribution to scholarship on the commons. It advances novel theoretical insights into asymmetrical power relations that underlie claims and contests over modernisation, symbolic dispossession, and its implications for social justice and equity. The authors draw attention to disparities in wealth, privilege, power, political participation, and disenfranchisement with careful analysis of its implications. Such processes illuminated by a focus on coastal lives are not necessarily unique to Peru.
