Wild Dreams: Refashioning Production in Bristol Bay

Abstract

This dissertation examines changing conditions of contemporary capitalism through an analysis of the production of a wild commodity. The Bristol Bay region of rural southwest Alaska is home to the world's largest sockeye salmon populations. Yet its wild salmon industry has struggled since the early 1990s in a global seafood market altered by the rise of cheaper farmed salmon produced overseas. Amid throes of economic crisis, producers have undertaken efforts to "reinvent" the local fishing industry--to draw upon the language they themselves often use--and their own participation in it. The study explores these attempts to restore fishery profitability along with the aspirations that infuse them and become inflected by them. An ethnography that tacks between historical and contemporary sites of salmon fishing, processing, and policymaking, the dissertation focuses on producers' ambitions to reconfigure the salmon commodity to more closely correspond with perceived consumer preferences.

The Bristol Bay salmon industry is peculiar in certain respects: It depends not only on the capture of living labor by and for capital, to use Marx's terminology, but also on an even more literal capture of living nature in the form of an organism whose control is often elusive. On one level, the dissertation shows how efforts to refashion production spur transformations in labor practices, social relations, forms of personhood, and modes of collective action alike. On another, it reveals the ways in which the heterogeneous materialities and activities that are pursued for capture repeatedly slip from their objectification as factors of production, both with and as salmon itself wriggles from grasp. In identifying these slippages at the heart of production, the study adds to analyses across disciplines that demonstrate how capitalism is reproduced anew in ever-shifting forms at the same time it remains internally fissured and always incomplete. In delving into the predicaments of rural natural resource producers for changing markets, it reveals the contradictory impulses gathered in the so-called new economy. And in exploring the dreams of wildness that link producers and consumers, it shows the production of contemporary natures to be fraught with visions of both peril and promise.