Linking Land and Sea: The Cultural Landscape of Caribbean Fishers

My work of the past twenty years has been with indigenous communities whose way of life draws from the forest as much as or more than what is cultivated in the field. For communities in the Bolivian Amazon and in the boreal forest of northwestern Ontario, fishing is an important part of that way of life. However, my interests have largely involved plant harvesters. This changed recently when a student of mine wanted to undertake a project in the Caribbean where she had previously worked. One of the things that I pleasantly learned, it is hard to learn unpleasantly in the Caribbean, is that going to look at a cultural landscape that is completely new can bring out new insights.

 

Much European thinking about cultural landscapes finds it roots in landscape art of the 16th and 17th Centuries largely focused on agricultural pastoralism and the sense of its loss through the processes of industrialization - the work, for example, of Pieter Bruegel. In policies like the World Heritage Convention and the recent European Landscape Convention this expresses itself in two ways. The first is that the scale of a cultural landscape is that which can be bounded within a view and as such is a composite of elements within that view. The second is that the role of cultural landscape policy is to conserve the elements and composite forms of vernacular cultural landscapes (landscape as a way of life) rather than the way of life itself. Much as Bruegel’s paintings captured both landscape form and elements of 16th Century European peasants. By thinking about cultural landscapes as a problem of conserving composites and elements we lose sight of what makes such a way of life possible and what leads to its demise.

The cultural landscape of a Caribbean fisher can not be captured in one view. It is not possible to place the fishing grounds in the foreground with the fishing village in the background as their locations are too disparate in space. Yet, what makes a fisher’s way of life viable is the linkage between the fishing grounds and the places that link sea and land and periodic travel between the two. In the Caribbean, as one would assume in many coastal areas, the critical places at which land meets sea is often a beach which provides for landing of the catch, processing the catch, exchange between fishers and vendors of the catch, pulling up boats for repair, socializing and exchange between vendors and consumers of the catch. Of course, these are often the same locations that make a nice setting for a hotel or private beach residences.

If we begin to consider cultural landscapes not just as heritage but as a way of life then policies would need to begin to consider what places within a cultural landscape make the way of life possible. Small scale fishers utilize small boats which only have a limited range between the land places and the fishing grounds. By forgetting how travel links the land place within the view with the fishing ground outside the view it is easy to assume that one land place can be replaced by another. The result may be that the fishers who lost their land place to a hotel may migrate to another such site but also have to fish the same grounds as the fishers who were already located there. Over harvest of the fishing ground within range can occur and the land places no longer become viable if the catch collapses.

If cultural landscapes are produced by a way of life then it would seem that if we want to “conserve” living cultural landscapes one place to start is to begin thinking about what makes such ways of life possible. Maybe we do not want just to conserve the view but the processes that generate cultural landscapes over time. Maybe we need to begin thinking about heritage not just as views and forms but also processes that generate such views in an ongoing fashion.