Fish Culture and Human Culture: Historic Contexts of Modern Research and Management

The intellectual and social foundations of three overlapping enterprises—fisheries science, fisheries management, and sport fishing—are incredibly complex. Practitioners of each of the three confront vexing, yet stimulating, instances of this complexity as they attempt to interact with practitioners of the other two. Historically, comparatively little scholarly attention has been paid to coming to terms with the character of these essential interactions. This paper reinforces the urgency of advancing such scholarly attention. The paper will invoke C.P. Snow’s provocative “two cultures” lecture (1959) on the persistence and power of such “incomprehensibility gaps” as now often exist among the “three cultures” of science, management, and sport fishers. The paper will also critique H. Jones’ contemporaneous and controversial Maxim on Field Research (1957) as a way of proposing at least some means for a better understanding among the three cultures—and countless subcultures—of human/fish endeavors. Results will include a fast-and-loose overview of random but helpful if not inspiring cases that indicate possible directions for improvement of this difficult situation. The talk’s tone will not be anything like this abstract.