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Reviews
| Fishing for Heritage: Modernity and Loss along the Scottish Coast. By Jane Nadel-Klein. New York: Berg, 2003. viii+253 pp., map, bibl., index. $70 hb (ISBN 1859735622), $23 pb (ISBN 1859735673).
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Fishing for Heritage is both an ethnographic study and a social and economic history of Scottish fishing communities targeted to a broad audience interested in industrial heritage tourism. For an American, Jane Nadel-Klein is well versed in British social anthropology. She is not the granddaughter of expatriate Scots gone in search of her roots, but she admits that a romantic fascination with Celtic culture drew her younger self to the area. This book is the culmination of one-quarter century of work along the northeastern Scottish coast. It recognizes many competing conceptions of community. Locals and museum professionals each seek to preserve Scottish fishing heritage, but their values and preferences may be at extreme odds. Rather than dismissing local opinion, Nadel-Klein asserts that deference to local customs and values should be a part of the goal of heritage management. It may be more than an issue of heritage making; it may be one of the survival of cultural practices, akin to those of internally colonized indigenous peoples.
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The introductory chapter addresses the author's background and her misgivings about the important concepts of "folk" and "village," whose meanings are quite variable. Communities of Scottish fisher-folk are problematic to identify and classify and are not uniformly depicted on tourism maps. Some are abandoned and of purely archaeological interest; some are subsumed within larger communities and have escaped attention; some are industrial heritage tourism sites; some are now home to the oil industry; others manage to maintain a fishing industry. The author's work began in the 1970s, investigating the impact of the North Sea oil industry on the fishing village of Ferryden.
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The second chapter presents us with the social and economic history of the Scottish fishing industry since medieval times, highlighting the exoticization of fisher-folk as Lowland equivalents of the "wild" Highlanders. The growth of many fishing villages in the 18th century came as a direct result of the Highland Clearances. After that time, the development of close-knit communities filled with highly specialized laborers of both genders caused the Scottish fisher-folk to be considered unclean pariahs, especially in the east and northeast. Some inland Scottish people still stigmatize and marginalize the fisher-folk.
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Chapter 3 continues this exploration, focusing specifically on gender issues related to stigmatization and stereotyping. The public role of women in Scotland's fishing industry branded their families as peculiar, especially during the Victorian era when British fashion was so physically restrictive as to prevent middle-class women from working at all. Fishwives had reputations as shrewd and assertive fish merchants. They also worked in crews to bait thousands of fishhooks with mussels and helped launch boats. With the arrival of the big fish-curing firms, new technologies, fleets of big steam trawlers, and the herring boom, the industry changed greatly in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, peaking in the 1880s. Then the women worked in crowded industrial conditions on "gutting-crews," cleaning and packing the fish. The proletarianization of the industry came as a result of the high profits of the fish curers at the expense of the fishers.
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Chapter 4 begins the ethnographic portion of the work, specifically in Ferryden where the author's fieldwork began. Her subjects here and elsewhere provided her with innumerable local history sources; the memories of folks were so intertwined with these sources that "chicken or egg" questions were raised. Nonetheless, the traditional practices were not so remote as to have been forgotten. Multiple, competing traditions exist concerning the oppressive role of the curing industry upon the fisher-folk. Also, the neighboring affluent royal burgh of Montrose is symbolically divided from Ferryden and a source of competing conceptions of historical identity. Ferryden's fishing heritage was irrevocably altered in the 1970s with the entrance of the Sea Oil Services Company (SOS). A dredger opened up the harbor for larger vessels and created a landfill on the waterfront, eliminating the picturesque view and reducing tourism value.
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The last two chapters address modern issues: the new heritage tourism industry in fishing communities of the Scottish coast and the identity crises associated with modernity. In two locations, Aberdeen and Peterhead, the three industries (fishing, offshore oil, and tourism) cohabit, but other fishing ports up and down the coast have not been so lucky. Many now are of purely historical and archaeological interest. Although the desire to preserve the heritage of the fishing villages is widely held by those within the fishing industry and the communities, the means of accomplishing this is not agreed upon, even within the industry. Nadel-Klien is aware that only experienced fisher-folk themselves understand the subtle aspects of their heritage, such as the functional difference between two similar pieces of trawling technology. They desire to preserve such information, not for the benefit of outsiders (though they do not object to tourism revenues) but, rather, for themselves and their kin. The "look but don't touch" attitude of museum professionals is anathema to the fisher-folk who preserve knowledge of the properties of different fishing nets as much or more according to tactile qualities as by appearances. The devastating faux pas of the curator who dressed a mannequin of a fish curer in what seemed an appropriate period costume is not evident to a tourist or expert historian; it is only the community members who were mortified to see a petticoat once owned by an ancestral fisherman now gracing the waxen shoulders of the despised fish curer. The heritage industry may be thrilled at the prospect of a restored cobblestone street, but the fishermen who still use the street for loading and unloading are most disturbed at the prospect of losing their smooth pavement. Many such instances occur when outsiders manage the heritage of a closely knit community. Even the academic views of the origins of certain families may be at odds with traditional genealogies.
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| Industrial archaeologists and heritage professionals should take note of Fishing for Heritage as a valuable study of dogged cultural survival in industrial communities and the role of sites and artifacts in the local consciousness and sense of identity. Industrial heritage has broad, cross-cultural significance; scholars must at least acknowledge the opinions of human subjects, especially when they vary from their own. Without doing so, scholars become like art historians, obsessed with particular artwork but defiantly ignorant of the artists and their schools. |
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