Interviews
Interviews with fishers and other stakeholders like wholesalers, fisher organizations, governmental managers, marine scientists, NGOs and other concerned citizens will provide valuable insights into the different experiences and imaginations of changing human-marinetemporalities. These interviews will be semi-structured interviews where we rely on questionnaires that we will prepare collectively before we commence fieldwork,but also on themes that occur throughout the fieldwork. The different field sites will vary with regards to relevant informants, but to ensure comparability of data, we will make sure that each of the project members approach the same set of key-informants. We will also conduct focus-group discussions where several stakeholders are present together in order to get insight into how these different informants experience and view the changes taking placein their area.
Participant observation
Participant observation is a method where we take part in the everyday lives of our informants, follow them through their working days and live in their communities. Many aspects of human-marine temporalitiesare integrated as parts of the rhythms and affects of everyday life and are thereby not easily articulated and thus only partly reachable through interview data. To reveal the dynamics and complexity of human-marine ecologies requires thus a particular attentiveness of a trained observer. By participating in activities such as fishing, selling, distribution, conservation and restoration efforts along with those involved such practices and by observing how human-marine relations unfold, participant observation will enable the production of data on the relevant multispecies rhythms and temporal practices.
Challenges and Collaboration
While these methods will give us access to data related to humans’ temporal imaginations, their involvement in multispecies rhythms and temporal practices, they may also risk reproducing an anthropocentric approach to these issues. To avoid this, SEATIMES will on the one hand work closely with marine biologists working in each of the field zones. These will provide us with crucial insights from marine sciences. However, we know that in order to develop a strong new anthropology of fishing and human-marine relations, we cannot resort to an interdisciplinary distribution of methods where the anthropologists talk to people and biologists study the animals as this will only reproduce the distinctions the project aims to challenge in the first place. We will therefore try out Swanson’s (2017; see also Hodgetts and Lorimer 2014) quite radical methodological suggestion to have anthropologists learn from scientists’ observational tools and practices. While collaborating with marine scientists, anthropologists should also learn, she argues, to read and understand scientific materials, because anthropologists tend to ask different questions from these materials and are curious about the animals in question and their relations to humans in different ways than scientists. Hence, the truly methodological novelty of the projectis thus that we will approach results from marine biology in an anthropological manner that is particularly attentive to human-marine relations. This will not only give SEATIMES a unique entrance-point into understanding multispecies temporalities but will also represent a groundbreaking expansion of anthropology’s methodological toolbox.