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Too Much of a Good Thing: Crises of Glut in the Faroe Islands and Dominica

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Jonathan Wylie
Jonathan Wylie
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Extract

The question to which this essay is addressed struck me when, having done ethnographic field work in the Faroe Islands, I undertook another stint on Dominica, at the opposite corner of the North Atlantic.1 In the Faroes, I took part in a couple of slaughters of herds of pilot whales. The grindadráp is dramatic, but apart from the inevitable tumult of the slaughter itself, in which romantically inclined observers have been pleased (or horrified) to find Faroese acting like their Viking ancestors, it is a remarkably orderly business. In a Dominican village called Casse, I took part in another great sea hunt, in which shoals of skipjack tuna were caught inshore. Seining bonik, as these fish are called in the French Creole vernacular, is no less dramatic than the grindadráp, if considerably less difficult and dangerous. But particularly in the division of the spoils, bonik seining is disorderly, even chaotic.

Type
Environmental Planning
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , April 1993 , pp. 352 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1993

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