Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places, and Power

“Rationalized Out”: Discourses and Realities of Fisheries Privatization in Kodiak, Alaska

Courtney Carothers

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781934874059.ch4

Abstract.—This chapter explores the relationship between state discourses and policies of marine enclosure and fishing livelihoods in remote coastal villages in the Kodiak Archipelago. The framing of fisheries access privatization as “rationalization,” the natural commonsense ideology of neoclassical economics, prioritizes goals of economic efficiency and aggregate profit maximization. These economic theories of disconnection (Taylor 2006) miss the important social and cultural attachments to place, identity, and lifestyle that characterize many fishing livelihoods. Based on ethnographic research in three Alutiiq fishing villages, I explore how privatization policies have constrained flexible, kinbased fishing economies and have caused disproportionate reductions in fisheries participation. Related social changes, including the emergence of a lost generation that has few social, cultural, or economic ties to commercial fishing, pose challenges for community sustainability. The discourses and realities of rationalization are remaking the relationship between fishing communities and the resources on which they depend. Place-based, collective fishing lifestyles are being replaced by individual private fishing rights for the elite. With the continued enclosure of fisheries access comes both a normative reframing of just outcomes and a material permanency of resource access and ownership, both of which are becoming increasingly difficult to dislodge.