Shooting a Net at ‘Gilly’s Snag’: the movement of belonging among commercial fishermen at the Gippsland Lakes

This thesis argues that local ‘neighbourhoods’ of shared understanding are not conceived solely through reference to an imaginary ‘other’ but, instead, may inhere in and be rejuvenated by a tension between internally generated and contradictory ways of understanding collectivity. Among commercial fishermen of the Gippsland Lakes in Victoria (Australia), I show that social facts are generated by agents-acting-in-settings, and that aspects of fishermen’s collective practice and representation are informed by such local contingencies as ‘who you are, what you are up to, and with whom’.The neighbourhood, I argue, is realised in performance, during everyday encounters in occupational contexts such as ‘on the lake’ or ‘down at the Co-op’. But fishermen also imagine togetherness, in different contexts, through the construction of conceptual boundaries, by identifying themselves as, for instance, ‘a fourth generation lake fisherman’. These two modes of conceiving how one belongs to a community – through performance or via recourse to structural ideals, produce remarkably different ways of viewing the world, relating to other people, and relating to one’s surrounds. On the onehand, a community constituted by social interaction relies on action in the present and aview towards ongoing future interactions between community members. This mode ofbelonging is dynamic and is characterised by movement, towards others and towards thefuture. On the other hand, a community constituted by discourses of tradition andgenealogy presumes a person’s social identity is fixed at birth so that action in the presenthas no effect on a person’s ability to form, reform, or sever the social ties that implicatethem in one group or another. When these two modes of conceiving community appeartogether, as they do at the Gippsland Lakes, a tension between movement and fixityemerges.That tension, broadly conceived, is an example of ‘systemic flexibility’ – a keycharacteristic of living systems that persist. As I portray fishermen amid the day-to-dayround of fishing concerns, I illustrate how the living system of the neighbourhood persiststhrough the interplay of two modes of expressing togetherness. That interplay continuallyreveals, reiterates and recreates anew, relationships, local stories, names and places, whileconcealing other cosmological terrains. And, thus, in this way, the contours of theneighbourhood are continuously surpassed and redrawn.I show that in fishing contexts, in responding to the burden of moral obligations entailedby kinship relationships, fishermen downplay those relationships to ensure that othermore processual modes of constituting relationships do not become overwhelmed by thefixed structures of family trees. When the apparent immutability of relationships betweenkin are backgrounded fishermen are able to create relationships with each other that aredynamic and responsive, allowing movement through water space, and, thus, theacquisition of new relationships and the implementation of new knowledge. In theiractions, fishermen point out that dwelling on genealogy privileges some relationshipsover others, weakening men’s independence and, ultimately, their interdependence. On the lake, then, belonging is understood as achieved; it is constituted by shared moments,and conversations, with others.These conversational occasions ‘on the lake’ are also pedagogical. In these moments,fishermen attend to, and are orientated by other’s approaches to fishing. Through theseencounters fishermen become ‘enskilled’ by the practice community and learn certainstyles of environmental and inter-personal interpretation. Fishermen are guided in theirfishing practice by the principles of incomplete knowledge, being there and raw fishing,modes of engaging with the environment that sets them apart from other groups such asrecreational fishers who also use the lake. Further, I show that, through an attention to theironic potential of inter-personal moments, in the context of the contingencies ofeveryday life on the lake, fishermen state and restate their style of being together – thatthey are in competition but in competition together. In this way fishermen emphasise thatit is the movement away from family towards fraught, ambiguous encounters thatenlivens the world.The purposeful movements of ‘wandering’ in search of fish and ‘shooting’ a net are bothexpressions of a person’s particular history of enskilment, while at the same time they arepossessive movements. Fishermen recognise that a person’s skill in, and knowledge of, aparticular place gives them entitlement to that place. The performance of ownership isinherently a socially – and an ecologically – embedding institution, because itinterweaves not only the dynamism and idiosyncrasies of memory, self and communitybut also those ecological processes of order and flux that trace out landscapes orlakescapes.Fishermen implicate themselves in the lakescape as they skillfully use their nets and theircharm to catch fish and constitute the neighbourhood. The lakescape emerges, in thisway, as a region of named sites held in place by amiable conversations and fraughtownership negotiations. I show that ‘laconic’ place names conceal big context and indexthe importance placed upon contextualising knowledge. Thus, I argue that place namesare pedagogical in themselves, because they invite fishermen to look beyond the surfaceof events. Place names express the principle of incomplete knowledge.A change in emphasis, from processual to ascriptive practices of formulating the fishingcommunity, place and knowledge, is now perceivable at the lake, however. In response toexternal intrusions from the nation state fishermen began to fix in text, contingent aspectsof neighbourhood relationships, in the hope that this might enable them to continue toreproduce the neighbourhood. Yet, I argue, such a strategy has loosened the tension thatdrives the reconstitution of neighbourhood because such discursive articulations ofperformance are antithetical to the ‘ineffable’ essence of the actual practices they seek torepresent. Thus, at the very moment fishermen meet the intrusions of the state on its ownterms they become authors of a very different kind of neighbourhood.