Cultural Ecology of the Maine Fishing Industry &
Cultural Ecology of the Maine Forest Products Industry
Elmer Beal Jr. - Instructor

Course Syllabi

The organizing and theoretical principles for these two courses are the same. They are both alternated each year and have sufficiently different content that students may enroll in both.

While ecologists think of living ecosystems as being made up of components which may exhibit cause-and-effect relationships between them and any change in the state of their existence, the same is not always assumed for cultural systems which make up an extrasomatic, symbolic system which is the human's primary adaptive mechanism, and which order human interaction with other components of the global ecosystem. In this course we explore the relationship between culture and ecosystem through field experience.

Though the culture of the USA has many shared elements, it also contains distinctive elements, some of which are based on the subsistence activities of sub-cultural groups. We hypothesize that particular subsistence activities may make specific demands on other parts of the sub-culture in the realm of values, ideology, social organization, kinship and marriage, language, technology, and so on.

Simultaneously, the assumption is made that most students have not been exposed to the sub-culture of commercial fishermen and so the latter must be contacted in person, a relationship established, questions asked, answers recorded. This entails preparation for field-work - understanding the basic concepts of culture, enculturation, ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, and some elements of interviewing. Outside readings are also used to supplement the lecture material.

Field trips are organized to meet people with whom the instructor has already established a rapport, and who are engaged in many aspects of the Maine fisheries; lobstering, sardine fishing, scallop diving and dragging, seining, clamming, musseling, groundfishing, shrimping, aquaculturing, wholesaling, and others. Each interview entails a full class session of preparation which is followed on alternate class days by a field trip. (Students need to arrange their schedules to allow a half-day minimum for field trips.) Preparatory sessions cover: types of gear, their cost and use, aspects of the target species, special vocabulary, extent of government regulations, markets, consumers and other economic matters. We also prepare to ask for personal information on attitudes, values, family, and so on, to the extent that the interviewee is willing to share these things with the group.

Questions to be asked are discussed along with the types of cultural information it is hoped they will reveal. The instructor leads the interview as this is an introductory field course in which interviews are conducted as a group. The process of taking field notes and transcribing them is also covered, and a neatly transcribed journal of all field trips (covering both interview content and some interpretation of that content on the part of the student) is submitted for final evaluation.

It is also a goal of the course to promote contact and understanding between fishermen and students, the latter being a part of the same ecosystem, but whose principal exposure to marine resources may likely have come from studying the resources and the government regulations rather than the people. With only minor modifications, the same can be said for the course as it focuses on the forest products industry.

College of the Atlantic; 105 Eden St. Bar Harbor, ME, 04609
Phone: 207-288-5015 Fax: 207-288-4126
Admission: 1-800-528-0025

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