thethe alicealice kaplankaplan environmentalenvironmental hhumanitiesumanities worworkshopkshop I W 20120177 friday,friday, january 20 I 12:00-2:00pm I kresge 2351 I lunch providedprovided

Same as it Never Was: Enkejje, Haplochromis, or Just Trash Jennifer Johnson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Purdue University

Traversing national boundaries and intercontinental networks of commerce, control, and expertise, eastern Africa’s Lake Victoria is marked by its colonial histories of managerial intervention and concomitant ecological crisis – specifically the introduction of the invasive Nile perch and the subsequent extinction of hundreds of exceptionally diverse species of small, bony, and sometimes brightly colored fish. Despite accounts inthe oral historical and comparative ethnographic records that feature frequent fishing for, trade in, and consumption of these same fish prior to 1900, and accounts from natural scientists declaring the loss of these same small fish to the hungry bellies of Nile perch as catastrophic throughout the early 1990s, most contemporary accounts of Lake Victoria and its fisheries treat the Nile perch as if it has always existed there.

This essay refocuses historical and ethnographic attention onto these small fish to reveal timely histories submerged by the conceptual and actual consumptive dominance of the Nile perch. It examines the emergence of three ontologically distinct versions of these small fish: asenkejje for historical residents of this region’s pre-colonial littorals who associated these fish with bodily and spiritual nourishment, economic activity, and cosmopolitan cultural identity; as Haplochromine cichlids for natural scientists fascinated with the explosive speciation, remarkable adaptability, and overwhelming of complexity of these fish; and as simply trash for Euro-American explorers and fisheries development experts who have long found these to have a nasty acrid taste and abominable stench that make them fit only for manure. This case illustrates the risks associated with overdetermining past valuations of biocultural diversity, and, in so doing, considers what historians, anthropologists, and natural scientists might learn from each other when making a concerted effort to traverse between the objects, practices, and arts of knowing that seemingly separate the dry world of humans from the wet world of fish.

NOTE: Paper will be pre-circulated on Monday, January 16