Spawning Modern Fish
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Heather Anne Swanson
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Edited by:
K. Sivaramakrishnan
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Preface by:
K. Sivaramakrishnan
About this book
Winner of the Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize from the Society for East Asian Anthropology
Multispecies ethnography turns its attention to the bodies of fish
Since the mid-nineteenth century, agricultural development and fisheries management in northern Japan have been profoundly shaped by how people within and beyond Japan have compared Hokkaido's landscapes to those of other places, as part of efforts to make the new Japanese nation-state more legibly "modern." In doing so, they engaged in non-conforming modes of thinking that reached out to diverse places, including the American West and southern Chile. Today, the comparisons made by Hokkaido fishing industry professionals, scientists, and Ainu indigenous groups between the island's forests, fields, and waters and those of other places around the world continue to dramatically affect the region's approaches to environmental management and its physical landscapes. In this far-ranging ethnography, Heather Anne Swanson shows how this traffic in ideas shapes the course of Hokkaido's development, its fish, and the lives of people on and beyond the island while structuring trade dynamics, political economy, and multispecies relations in watersheds around the globe.
Author / Editor information
Reviews
"Altogether, Spawning Modern Fish succeeds resoundingly in its intentions. . . . Because it addresses so many audiences effectively, Swanson's study will help us realize one of multispecies ethnography's hopes and promises. We can think with salmon toward how new, better, and more just relations among uneven arrangements of humans and nonhumans might be built."
---"As a transnational history, Spawning Modern Fish is an unqualified success, and its meticulously crafted prose and concise subsections make it highly readable."
---"[C]learly and engagingly written, approachable, thought through, and cleverly argued."
---"Spawning Modern Fish provides a good model for a critical area studies that draws on in-depth place-based knowledge yet has its eye on both transnational connections and domestic diversity. It is a rich, original, and thought-provoking work."
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Foreword
ix -
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Acknowledgments
xiii -
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Note on Romanization
xv -
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Introduction
1 -
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Chapter One Situating Comparisons
22 -
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Chapter Two Landscapes, by Comparison
37 -
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Chapter Three Of Dreams and Comparisons
65 -
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Chapter Four The Success of Failed Comparisons
91 -
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Interlude In the Shadow of Chilean Comparisons
109 -
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Chapter Five Stuck with Salmon
115 -
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Chapter Six When Comparisons Encounter Concrete
141 -
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Chapter Seven Other Comparisons
166 -
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Coda
189 -
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Notes
199 -
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Works Cited
217 -
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Index
245
