'Thinking like a fish': adaptive strategies for coping with vulnerability and variability emerging from a relational engagement with kob

Based on ethnographic fieldwork amongst a group of commercial handline fishers in the town of Stilbaai in South Africa's southern Cape region, this paper presents a range of flexible, adaptive and evolving strategies through which fishers negotiate constantly shifting variability in weather patterns, fish stocks, fisheries policies, and economic conditions. These variabilities constitute a diverse set of vulnerabilities to which fishers must respond in order to sustain their livelihoods. In this context, the act of 'thinking like a fish' on the part of the fishers provides them with an effective means of adapting to variability and uncertainty. Findings of ethnographic research in 2010-11 suggest that a number of the fishers who participated in the research actively work towards achieving a balance between profit and sustainability. 'Thinking like a fish' is an embodied, interactive way of knowing that emerges from interactions between fishers and fish, offering an ethical and ecological outlook which is a valuable resource for fisheries and conservation management in the region. We suggest that the deeply embodied interactional component of 'thinking like a fish' results from a desire to understand the life world of fish and to think from their perspective in order to more effectively target them while sustaining the species and ecosystem

Varieties of Non-ordinary Experiences in Brazil—a Critical Review of the Contribution of Studies of ‘Religious Experience’ to the Study of Religion

According to the latest national census, 64.6% of Brazilians identified themselves as Roman Catholic. However, the census has little or nothing to do with actual practice or belief. Professing to be a Christian (within any confessional specification) is still part of being Brazilian. But the self-identification does not take into account that religiosity is expressed in very diverse ways nor does it prevent people from believing and practising one of the many Brazilian traditions though identifying themselves as Christian in the census. This perception represents the framework of the following discussion of non-ordinary experiences in Brazil, whether they are perceived as religious, spiritual or ‘just’ extraordinary. This article presents an overview of studies about non-ordinary experiences in Brazil. The aim is to show the importance of these experiences for the understanding of the religious landscape of Brazil

The moral work of subversion

This article critically reconsiders dominant understandings of morality and subversion within organizations. Existing organizational literature does not adequately address the important productive role of morality for producing and justifying everyday subversive practices as well as the use of subversion to legitimate power relations and dominant values. Drawing upon interactionist insights, we develop a practice-based account of morality, highlighting the means through which subversion retroactively legitimates the diverse range of actions performed by organizational subjects. This form of retrospective reasoning, which we term ‘moralization’, serves as an important resource for subjects to actively negotiate the often competing moral and practical demands placed on them as organizational subjects. Consequently, we position subversion as an important means of accomplishing, legitimating and preserving a given organizational order, rather than a ‘common sense’ view that subversion necessarily subverts organizational values. In doing so, we make explicit the ‘positive’ function of rule-bending for processes of organizational control

Cultural Phylogenetics of the Tupi Language Family in Lowland South America

Background: Recent advances in automated assessment of basic vocabulary lists allow the construction of linguistic phylogenies useful for tracing dynamics of human population expansions, reconstructing ancestral cultures, and modeling transition rates of cultural traits over time. Methods: Here we investigate the Tupi expansion, a widely-dispersed language family in lowland South America, with a distance-based phylogeny based on 40-word vocabulary lists from 48 languages. We coded 11 cultural traits across the diverse Tupi family including traditional warfare patterns, post-marital residence, corporate structure, community size, paternity beliefs, sibling terminology, presence of canoes, tattooing, shamanism, men’s houses, and lip plugs. Results/Discussion: The linguistic phylogeny supports a Tupi homeland in west-central Brazil with subsequent major expansions across much of lowland South America. Consistently, ancestral reconstructions of cultural traits over the linguistic phylogeny suggest that social complexity has tended to decline through time, most notably in the independent emergence of several nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. Estimated rates of cultural change across the Tupi expansion are on the order of only a few changes per 10,000 years, in accord with previous cultural phylogenetic results in other languag