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Episode 9: “Squid Lives: (Un)Making Ocean Ecologies in Peru” with Maximilian Viatori

How are human and non-human lives brought together, made possible, and simultaneously imperilled in the blue Anthropocene? Peru’s jumbo squid fishery provides key insights into this question. Industrial reorganisations of Pacific Ocean ecologies have entwined the lives of often impoverished and radicalised| artisanal fishers with jumbo squid populations in ways that currently enable their (re)production while simultaneously devaluing them for the creation of cheap seafood. However, the tenuous conditions that have made the fishery possible are threatened by pressure from industrial producers to remove legal protections on the fishery, multinational fleets targeting squid outside Peru’s jurisdiction, and the squids’ rapid adaptations to shifting ocean conditions that can cause dramatic fluctuations in their populations. The story of jumbo squid fishing reveals the importance of studying multispecies displacements for understanding how the extraction of certain species for the purpose of capital accumulation re-orders entire ecological assemblages. Such reconfigurations imperil the precarious multispecies networks that make more-than-human life possible in the Anthropocene.
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Maximilian Viatori is Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He has conducted ethnographic and archival research on inequality, neoliberalism, and political ecology in Ecuador, Canada, and Peru since 2001. He is the author of One State, Many Nations: Indigenous Rights Struggles in Ecuador, which was published by the School for Advanced Research Press in 2010, and lead author of Coastal Lives: Nature, Capital, and the Struggle for Artisanal Fisheries in Peru, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2019. His newest book, The Unequal Ocean: Living with Environmental Change along the Peruvian Coast, was published by the University of Arizona Press in April 2023.

Transcript

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Learning points

  • This podcast episode uses squid fisheries to query how adaptable fishing can be to climate change- in what other areas of life might climate change affect fishing communities, and how might they adapt?
  • What Anthropocene impacts does industrial fishing have on the lives of small scale fisheries, and what could be done to make these relationships more harmonious?

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