Braving Troubled Waters 4 ISBN 978 90 8964 087 1 Sea Change in a Dutch Fishing Community

4 MARE PUBLICATION SERIES 4 Rob van Ginkel This ethnographic study is about Dutch fisher folk’s engagements with erratic marine Rob van Ginkel living resources, capricious markets and the vicissitudes of political interventions in the fishing industry from the early 18th century until the present day, with an emphasis on post-war developments. More specifically, it focuses on the owner-operators, deckhands, fishermen’s wives and others involved in the fisheries of Texel, an island in the north- western part of the Netherlands. Braving Troubled Waters Troubled Braving The book attempts to situate their occupational community at the interface of local and (supra)-national processes and aims to show how the latter affect the socio-cultural fabric of the island’s fishing villages and prompt particular responses in the fishermen’s perceptions and modes of action. It elucidates how they have been braving treacherous waters, in both a real and a metaphorically sense, for many decades. Rob van Ginkel is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Braving Troubled Waters 4 ISBN 978 90 8964 087 1 Sea Change in a Dutch Fishing Community www.aup.nl A U P A U P Braving Troubled Waters MARE PUBLICATION SERIES MARE is an interdisciplinary social-science institute studying the use and management of marine resources. It was established in 2000 by the Uni- versity of Amsterdam and Wageningen University in the Netherlands. MARE’s mandate is to generate innovative, policy-relevant research on marine and coastal issues that is applicable to both North and South. Its programme is guided by four core themes: fisheries governance, maritime work worlds, integrated coastal zone management (ICZM), and maritime risk. In addition to the publication series, MARE organises conferences and workshops and publishes a social-science journal called Maritime Studies (MAST). Visit the MARE website at http://www.marecentre.nl. Series Editors Svein Jentoft, University of Tromsø, Norway Maarten Bavinck, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Previously Published Leontine E. Visser (ed.), Challenging Coasts. Transdisciplinary Excursions into Integrated Coastal Zone Development, 2004 (isbn 90 5356 682 1) Jeremy Boissevain and Tom Selwyn (eds.), Contesting the Foreshore. Tour- ism, Society, and Politics on the Coast, 2004 (isbn 90 5356 694 5) Jan Kooiman, Maarten Bavinck, Svein Jentoft, Roger Pullin, (eds.), Fish for Life. Interactive Governance for Fisheries, 2005 (isbn 90 5356 686 4) Braving Troubled Waters Sea Change in a Dutch Fishing Community Rob van Ginkel MARE Publication Series No. 4 Amsterdam University Press Cover illustration: Rob van Ginkel Cover design: Neon, design and communications, Sabine Mannel, Amsterdam Lay-out: japes, Amsterdam isbn 9789089640871 e-isbn 9789048508136 nur 741 © Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2009 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Contents Preface 7 Introduction 11 1. The Golden Knoll: People, Place and History 35 2. Trimming the Sails to the Wind 55 3. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea 105 4. Booming Business: The Rise of Beam Trawling 147 5. Catch Kings and Quota Busters 187 6. Commissioned Cooperation: Plentiful and Lean Years 241 Conclusions: Seas of Trouble 291 Appendices 307 Notes 311 References 317 Index 333 5 Preface ‘How did you become so interested in doing research among fisherfolk?’ This has been a recurring question ever since I began developing an anthropological interest in the occupational world of commercial fishing in the early 1980s. The answer is ‘by sheer coincidence’. Before enrolling as an anthropology student at the University of Amsterdam in 1982, I knew little about ‘fishing cultures’. For one of the courses I took, I hap- pened to read a fascinating study on folk religion in a North Yorkshire fishing village (Clark 1982). It captured my imagination and I started to read more ethnographic literature on fishing and fishing villages. That got me hooked, to use an appropriate metaphor. I decided that I would eventually conduct research in a fishing community somewhere in Europe. Through a series of contingencies, I ended up doing so in 1986, close to home in the Netherlands. An ongoing conflict in an occupational community of shellfish planters attracted my attention and drew me to the village of Yer- seke to conduct fieldwork. While working on my MA thesis, it struck me that maritime anthropologists did not have a journal of their own, which meant that their publications were widely scattered in scholarly journals. Perhaps naïvely, I thought that this void should be filled. With Jojada Ver- rips, I founded and edited the journal Maritime Anthropological Studies (MAST), the first issue of which appeared in 1988. By then, I was firmly committed to the field of fishing cultures. After graduation, I conducted research for my PhD thesis in the fishing villages of the Dutch island of Texel from late 1989 until early 1991, obtaining my degree with a disserta- tion that was published in 1993. It focuses on the local fishermen’s long- term adaptive strategies in view of ongoing debates concerning common pool resource use. Although I subsequently ended up doing mostly non- fisheries-related scholarly work, I also continued to occupy myself with maritime studies and taught undergraduate courses in maritime anthropology. When the occasion arose, I returned to Texel in August 2005 for a second stint of prolonged fieldwork in the local community of fishermen with the aim of examining their occupational culture and practice or what the French dub ‘métier’. This notion refers to much more than just a job or an occupation. It conjures up an image of an activity at which one excels, a vocation, an encompassing and existential way of life and making a living. This ethnography details Texel fisherfolk’s engagements with erratic marine living resources, capricious markets and the vicissitudes of political interventions in the fishing industry from the early 18th century until 7 the present day, with an emphasis on post-war developments. The book is empirically grounded, historically specific and theoretically informed. It attempts to situate the occupational community at the interface of local and (supra-)national processes and shows how the latter affect the socio- cultural fabric of the island’s fishing villages and prompt particular responses in the fishermen’s perceptions and modes of action. Thus, although this is a community study, I will occasionally wander off to events occurring at other levels of integration that impinged upon the local fishing industry. Nevertheless, the book’s proponents are Texel’s owner-operators, deckhands and others involved in the island’s fishing arena past and present. Even though women often play important roles in family firms, fishing per se is a male world. I do devote attention to fishermen’s wives, but I am aware that there is a gender bias in this book. In my defence, I can only say that women are conspicuously absent from the official meet- ings in which fishing and fishing politics are discussed and that they tend to strongly underplay their own contributions to the firms and to the run- ning of households. Despite this lacuna, I am confident that the present book illuminates the building blocks of fishing as an occupation. Many people have supported my work and helped me in various ways. To the fisherfolk of Texel, I owe much gratitude. They generously shared their knowledge with me and made me feel welcome in their midst. I felt at ease, which made it easy to empathize with them. Many of them sup- plied me with published and unpublished documents, photographs, video- tapes and other materials. Special thanks are due to the skipper-owners who were kind enough to take me aboard their beam trawlers for four fishing trips. These occasions provided invaluable information on work, fishing tactics and relations and the atmosphere on board ship. I was per- mitted unrestricted access to the archives of the local fishermen’s association, the Fishery Cooperative, the local Producer Organization and the Texel co-management group. This is indicative of their leadership’s open-mindedness. Additional support came from a number of local insti- tutions, including the municipal archive in Den Burg and the Maritime and Beachcombers Museum in Oudeschild, which gave freely of their information, facilities and coffee. Librarians, archivists and museum staff elsewhere were also helpful. The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) enabled the conducting of research on Texel (project numbers 500-276-202 and 400-04-702), and the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research co-sponsored my fieldwork. NWO also provided a publication grant. I gratefully acknowledge their generous financial support. Two anonymous peer reviewers, and the series editors Maarten Ba- vinck and Svein Jentoft, made it very clear that I needed to reduce the length of the original manuscript considerably to dispose of excess detail. Although this involved the loss of many a darling paragraph, I must admit that they were right. I am also indebted to Harriet Impey, who cheerfully fashioned my English. 8 Braving Troubled Waters Zeewijk, our residence during my second stint of research, provided a sti- mulating environment for writing and simultaneously conducting fieldwork. My partner Margreeth and I, and our daughters Emma and Mette, thoroughly enjoyed living on the island and making new friends. We truly felt at home. Owing to a stroke of good luck, we were able to extend our stay on Texel for another year, and, subsequently, we decided to ‘go native’ completely.

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