Perícia e moral: um estudo sobre tecnologia cultural a partir de coletivos de pesca artesanal e industrial do RN

Abstract

The sea is the stage for one of the most complex relationships in human experience; the meeting possible through fishing between men and marine beings. Unlike the opposition established between society and nature by the knowledge instituted in our intellectual tradition, the sea is a space where men, technical artifacts and animals form a collective. From the empirical experience with artisanal fishing collectives, it was noticed the existence of the native game metaphor, whose content expresses a system of relations that comprises the human-technical-animal triad, operationalized through the mastery of a set of fishing techniques and respect for the rule for predation (the use of techniques that do not totally eliminate the possibilities of “victory” of marine beings). In this way, Playing with the fish expresses the recognition of the capacity of agency and perception of marine animals, representing a break with the opposition between subject-object. Knowing how to play for the artisanal fishermen studied means concomitantly operationalizing what I ethnographically called technical and moral-technical expertise, something that gives fishermen social prestige in their group. However, the experience shared with the interlocutors and the analysis of this experience showed that the technical processes raise and engender specific relationships with the environment and other beings; for example, the belief of artisanal fishermen in Caiçara do Norte (municipality located on the north coast of Rio Grande do Norte) that industrial fishermen do not play with fish, confirm the validity of this argument. In this sense, an ethnographic study of the industrial fishing collective of Natal-RN was also undertaken, with special attention to its labor processes, with the purpose of understanding the way in which expertise and morals are also used in this social segment. From the above, the objective of this study was to describe and analyze, from an anthropological perspective, the technical processes used in the two fishing modalities in order to understand the more general aspects of the relationship between humans, things and animals in the segment. In order to achieve the objective, investment was made in the engagement in the technical processes of both segments as a research method, and in an ethnographic approach that takes into account the coexistence and cooperation between human and non-human animals. It was concluded in this study that the forms of ecological association between humans and marine beings are mediated and transformed by the technical choices in each one of the fisheries, generating perceptual configurations about the environment specific in each case.