Description
Book SynopsisBeing Ethical among Vezo People analyzes environmental change in reef ecosystems of southwest Madagascar and the impacts of global fishery markets on Vezo people's material well-being. The ethnography describes fishers' changing perceptions of the physical environment in the context of livelihood and ritual practices and discusses their shared understandings of how Vezo persons should live.
Community marine protected areas now restrict access to the unenclosed reef commons. Each village is responsible for managing its octopus fishery with a temporal closure. Frank Muttenzer argues that the participants' apparent willingness to improve livelihoods does not commit them to a conservationist ethos. Vezo people know that fish, octopus and sea cucumbers became scarce after they started selling these products to seafood processing and exporting companies. To cope with resource depletion they migrate to distant resource rich marine frontiers, target fast growing species
Table of ContentsIllustrations
Preface
Introduction: Ecological Psychology and the Anthropology of Well-Being
Part I – Fishing Livelihoods
Chapter 1 – Luck with Marriage: Being Ethical among Ritually Constituted Persons
Chapter 2 – The Group Ethos: Human Affordances of the Sea Cucumber Fishery
Chapter 3 – Knowing How to Fish: Scarcity, Markets and Wishful Thinking
Chapter 4 – The Unenclosed Commons: What Goes Without Saying among Octopus Gleaners
Part II- Moral Luck
Chapter 5 – The Blue Growth Narrative: Assigning Blame for Resource Depletion
Chapter 6 – Geopolitics of the Marine Frontier: Taboo and Sacrifice in the Barren Isles
Chapter 7 – Fishing Magic and Shared Doubt: Seasonal Migrants’ Ritual Cycle
Chapter 8 – The Reliability of Oracles: A Pledge to Confirm What the Spirits Say
Conclusion: Well-Being, Ecology, and Moral Disagreement
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
