Fishers and Scientists in Modern Turkey Studies in Environmental and General Editor: Roy Ellen, FBA Professor of Anthropology, University of Kent at Canterbury Interest in environmental anthropology has grown steadily in recent years, reflecting national and international concern about the environment and developing research priorities. This major new international series, which continues a series first published by Harwood and Routledge, is a vehicle for publishing up-to-date monographs and edited works on particular issues, themes, places or peoples which focus on the interrelationship between society, culture and environment. Relevant areas include , the perception and representation of the environment, ethno- ecological knowledge, the human dimension of biodiversity conservation and the ethnography of environmental problems. While the underlying ethos of the series will be anthropological, the approach is interdisciplinary. Volume 1 Volume 7 The Logic of Environmentalism: Travelling Cultures and Plants: The Anthropology, Ecology and Ethnobiology and Ethnophamacy of Postcoloniality Migrations Vassos Argyrou Andrea Pieroni and Ina Vandebroek Volume 2 Conversations on the Beach: Volume 8 Local Knowledge and Environmental Fishers and Scientists in Modern Change in South India Turkey: The Management of Natural Götz Hoeppe Resources, Knowledge and Identity on the Eastern Black Sea Coast Volume 3 Ståle Knudsen Green Encounters: Shaping to Indigenous Knowledge in Volume 9 International Development Landscape Ethoecology: Concepts of Luis A. Vivanco Biotic and Physical Space Leslie Main Johnson and Eugene Volume 4 S. Hunn Local Science vs. Global Science: Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge Volume 10 in International Development Landscape, Power and Process: Edited by Paul Sillitoe Re-Evaluating Traditional Environmental Knowledge Volume 5 Serena Heckler Sustainability and Communities of Place Volume 11 Carl A. Maida Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia: Contemporary Volume 6 Ethnoecological Perspectives Modern Crises and Traditional Miguel N. Alexiades Strategies: Local Ecological Knowledge in Island Southeast Asia Roy Ellen Fishers and Scientists in Modern Turkey

The Management of Natural Resources, Knowledge and Identity on the Eastern Black Sea Coast

Ståle Knudsen

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford 54401_Knudsen_pp304-cmh4.qxd:ellen.qxd 12/5/08 9:53 AM Page iv

First published in 2009 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

©2009 Ståle Knudsen

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Knudsen, Ståle, 1963- Fishers and scientists in modern Turkey : the management of natural resources, knowledge, and identity on the eastern Black Sea coast / Ståle Knudsen. p. cm. -- (Environmental anthropology and ethnobiology) ISBN 978-1-84545-440-1 1. Fisheries--Turkey--Black Sea Coast. 2. Fishery management--Turkey--Black Sea Coast. 3. Fishers--Turkey--Black Sea Coast. 4. Black Sea Coast (Turkey)-- Social life and customs. I. Title.

SH291.K56 2008 333.95'609561--dc22 2008026636

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN: 978-1-84545-440-1 (hardback) Contents

List of Figures vi List of Tables vii Preface and Acknowledgements viii List of Abbreviations xi

1. Introduction 1 2. Seafood Consumption and Turkish Identities 19 3. Fisheries and the State 42 4. Fisher’s Knowledges 76 5. Informal Regulations in Small-boat Fishing 98 6. Fishing Careers, Family and Friendships 124 7. State Representatives: Elite Lifestyles and Knowledges 144 8. The Controversy over the Sonar: Does it Harm Fish? 170 9. Water Produce Cooperatives and the Cultivation of Ignorance 193 10. Articulation of Knowledges through Moralities and Politics 215

Notes 240 Bibliography 247 Glossary 267 Index 271 List of Figures

2.1 Football champions: wine, women and fish. 22 2.2 Characteristics of and contrasts between the Istanbul and 24 Trabzon culinary cultures of seafood. 2.3 Contrasting images of the seafood cultures. 25 2.4 ‘Meat and fish’ restaurant. 36 3.1 Map of privileged fishing spots along the Bosporus. 45 3.2 Bureaucratic structure. 56 3.3 ‘Water produce’ production Turkey 1960–2004. 68 3.4 Hamsi catches and amount processed by factories. 69 4.1 Map of coastal region and sea bottom topography Çars¸ıbas¸ı. 85 4.2 Setting a whiting net around a kuyu. 86 4.3 Small-boat fisher’s classification of ‘sea animals’. 95 5.1 Map of Turkey and the Black Sea. 99 5.2 Overview of Çars¸ıbas¸ı. 100 5.3 Positioning of molozma net for catching red mullet. 103 5.4 Map of eastern Black Sea region of Turkey. 111 5.5 Casting a net for ‘Russian’ mullet. 113 5.6 Typical net set for grey mullet. 114 5.7 Alternative ways to set nets for ‘Russian’ mullet. 114 6.1 Purse-seine fishing boat. 131 7.1 Scientist interviewing fishers in Toplu köyü, Samsun. 159 8.1 Knowing the sonar. 178 10.1 ‘Seventh of May’ sea festival. 231

All photographs are reproduced with permission of Ståle Knudsen. List of Tables

6.1 Big boat ownership Çars¸ıbas¸ı 1990 – 2002. 132

9.1 Number of water produce cooperatives. 194

10.1 Level of formal education among fishers. 216 Preface and Acknowledgements

This book has been long in the making. I have been engaged in Turkish Black Sea fisheries since I started my first fieldwork in 1990. From the very beginning I had an interest in studying how fishers managed the fishery resources. During that first winter in 1990–91 the Turkish Black Sea fisheries experienced the most dramatic crisis it has ever seen. That brought home to me, as it did to the fishers, how vulnerable both this enclosed sea and the fishers are. Those initial experiences also told me that knowledge was contested, and that the social distance between fishers on the one hand, and marine scientists and managers on the other, was huge. I subsequently set out to get a better understanding of the relationships between fishers, marine scientists and bureaucrats, and increasingly positioned the study of the fisheries within the Turkish modernization process. This brought me to survey the history of fisheries and fishery policies and to explore issues such as identity negotiations through seafood consumption, claims about fishers being ignorant and scientists being corrupt. While this expansion in space, time and thematic certainly is called for to understand complex issues such as the management of modern sea fisheries embedded within a large developing nation state, it becomes a challenge to integrate the diverse topics and materials into one coherent text. This is not a study of a village, of one fishery, not even of fishers and scientists in one region of Turkey. It is about fisheries and fishery management in modernizing Turkey. It is my hope that the analytical focus on knowledge should give some coherence to the discussions through the chapters in the book. Because of the wide scope of the study, data gathering has been composite. Participant observation has formed the groundwork, with longer ethnographic fieldworks in 1990–91 and 1997–98 and frequent briefer visits in between 1991 and 1997 and after 2002. In all I have conducted approximately one and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork among fishers and, to a lesser extent, marine scientists. During these years I have studied closely events in one particular fieldwork site, the small Preface and Acknowledgements | ix town Çars¸ıbas¸ı near the city of Trabzon in the eastern Black Sea region. I have also spent considerable time studying fishers in Samsun and Sinop, and have frequently visited and sometimes stayed for longer spells in Ankara and Istanbul. For the historical narrative I draw upon a range of sources, most of it in the original Turkish, ranging from ministerial reports, laws and marine science textbooks to travel accounts, newspaper articles, encyclopaedic entries and a few published books. Public statistics, my own questionnaire surveys, interviews, cookbooks, and a range of other public expressions of culture and ideology contribute to the mix of data and methodologies applied. No work like this is possible without a lot of people being forthcoming and many actively assisting or encouraging the effort. The fishers in Çars¸ıbas¸ı, too many to name, showed an impressive willingness to share their lives with me, and – once they understood I could endure life at sea – brought me fishing with mutual pleasure. A few individuals in Çars¸ıbas¸ı should be mentioned: Osman Keles¸ for providing me with places to stay, Cemil Kurt for help and assistance, and S¸aban Çag˘lar for unbiased introductions into the social landscape of the township and enthusiastic introduction into marine life of the Black Sea. I also want to thank the following individuals in Turkey for their generousness, hospitality and help: Ahmet Mutlu – the head of the eastern Black Sea association of fishery cooperatives; researcher Dr Mustafa Zengin at the Trabzon Fishery research Institute; Professor Ertu˘g˘ Düzgünes¸ at the Sürmene Faculty of Marine Sciences, Karadeniz University, Emin Özdamar – previously researcher at Sinop Faculty of Marine Sciences, later local expert with Japan International Cooperation Agency. Over the years I have come to know a range of individuals responsible for fisheries within the Ministry for Agriculture and Rural Affairs. Their willingness to attend to me in between their manifold tasks has been impressive. Last, but not least, Hakan Koçak in Istanbul has through two short periods as assistant become a close personal friend who shares his knowledge and ideas about Turkish society as well as love for Turkish food with me. Thanks to Hakan also for providing me with relevant articles that he has come across during his owns survey of 1920s to 1960s newspapers and other archival material. I thank Jenny White for repeatedly encouraging me to write this book and for providing very helpful advice. Other readers of larger or smaller parts of the material include Edvard Hviding, Kjetil Fosshagen, Kari Telle, Olaf Smedal, Tim Bayliss-Smith, Maria Mangahas, Yael Navaro-Yashin and Bruce Kapferer. They have all provided helpful advice, if not to the final book manuscript, then to earlier versions of the text. Thanks also to series editor Roy Ellen for perceptive advice, especially as concerns the introduction to the book. Thanks to Graziella Van Den Bergh and Vemund Årbakke for helping me in interpreting French and Greek texts, and to Kjell Helge Sjøstrøm for production of many of the figures in this book. x | Fishers and Scientists in Modern Turkey

Some of the material contained in this book has, in different form and partly addressing other agendas, been published before as journal articles: Chapter 2 in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Chapter 3 in Middle East Studies, Chapter 5 in Human Ecology, and Chapter 8 in Perspectives on Global Development and Technology. I have used pseudonyms for the names of most fishers. Scientists are more public figures and their identities are more difficult to disguise. In a few cases I have extracted permissions from individuals to write about them under their full name, and a couple of scientists have read and commented upon text about them. Except for obviously public figures or when explicitly mentioned, all names are pseudonyms. During the 1980s and 1990s and well into the 2000s inflation was very high in Turkey. In 2004 the Turkish Lira was substituted by the New Turkish Lira, in one stroke slating six zeros. Since the material in this book spans so many years and since local currency in different years is difficult to compare, I have chosen to present monetary figures in U.S. dollars, at current rates calculated on the basis of Central Bank of Turkey exchange rates. Fieldwork and writing for this book has primarily been financed by the Research Council of Norway. University of Bergen, Black Sea Environmental Programme and EU FP6 (through the project European Lifestyles and Marine Ecosystems) have funded some research activities resulting in material used in this book. Production of this book has been supported by the Research Council of Norway. List of Abbreviations

AKP Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) EBK Et ve Balık Kurumu (Meat and Fish Foundation) GDEP General Directorate of Environmental Protection, Turkish Republic Ministry of Environment GDPC General Directorate for Protection and Control, Turkish Republic Ministry for Agriculture and Rural Affairs GDWP General Directorate for Water Produce, Turkish Republic Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Stockbreeding GNAT Grand National Assembly of Turkey ICC Istanbul Chamber of Commerce IK Indigenous knowledge MARA Turkish Republic Ministry for Agriculture and Rural Affairs MOF Turkish Republic Ministry of Forestry MSY Maximum sustainable yield NIE New institutional economics STS Science and technology studies SSK Sociology of scientific knowledge TEK Traditional ecological knowledge TFRI Trabzon Fishery Research Institute

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

This book tells the story of fish and fishing in Turkey. Through the ethnography and history of fish production, seafood consumption, state modernizing policies and marine science Fishers and Scientists in Modern Turkey narrates and analyses the role of knowledges in the management of marine resources on the eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey. Why does there seem to be such a long distance between fishers’ and scientists’ knowledge, and what are the implications for management of the marine resources? What are the characteristics of the knowledges? Whose knowledge counts and why? Which theoretical tools are best fitted to analyse these knowledges? Knowledges are not regarded here as separate systems or beliefs. Knowledges are discussed as diverging or converging practices and models within a specific historical context: the modernizing secular Turkish state as it developed out of the passage from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic. After fisheries had for several decades been on the development agenda of the Turkish State, the 1970s and 1980s saw the advance and expansion of technologically advanced industrial fishing. In the Black Sea, Turkish fisheries surpassed in catch volume neighbouring nations’ fisheries and emerged as one of the largest in the Middle East. The successful increase in production was, however, followed in the early 1990s by a severe resource crisis. This brought attention to the challenge of sustainable management of marine resources, access to which had come to be regarded widely as free and largely unrestricted. The challenge was compounded by the fact that fishers, scientists, bureaucrats and others involved in the sector had very different opinions as to the reasons for the disappearance of fish and the solutions that should be sought. There was conflict over who was knowledgeable and what knowledge counted in fishery management. This project started out as a fairly classical human ecology or study of fishing in a small Black Sea township. As work progressed, I found it difficult to understand what I was observing and get 2 | Fishers and Scientists in Modern Turkey answers to my questions without including new dimensions and expanding the scope in both time and space. I came to realize that there was no single body of authoritative theory which could guide analysis of my increasingly complex material, and I have sought inspiration in diverse quarters. In this chapter I introduce some of the substantive issues as well as theoretical positions to which this book relates. I first briefly survey conventional ecological anthropology, especially how knowledge has been studied. This leads into a discussion of the expanded agenda advanced by environmental anthropology and , touching on issues such as common pool resources, the role of states and science, fisheries studies, consumption and indigenous/traditional ecological knowledge. This is followed by an exploration of epistemological concerns before I introduce the ethnography. More extensive theoretical discussions are embedded within the chapters, especially in Chapter 4.

From Ecological Anthropology to the Anthropology of Environment

The old concerns of ecological anthropology1 – evolutionism, to what extent culture is an adaptive tool, how to develop a grand theory for ‘nature with humans’ (or ‘humans in nature’) – became to a large extent marginalized with the interpretive, reflexive and critical turns in anthropology during the 1980s and 1990s. The categories, assumptions and practices of the field itself were questioned. It became, for example, difficult to sustain the idea of ‘culture as an adaptive tool’. Building on and incorporating these new criticisms, and with anthropologists increasingly confronting pressing environmental concerns during ethnographic practice, ecological anthropology was gradually reborn as engaged ethnography trying to understand environmental issues. Thus, the agenda of environmental anthropology differs from classical ecological anthropology. Environmental anthropology is, to put it simply, anthropology that focuses on environmental issues (Ellen 2002; McCay 2001). New tools and concerns developed. And new theoretical programs manifested themselves, most notably the interdisciplinary approach of political ecology. Environmental anthropology now intersects with many other ‘’ and some interdisciplinary approaches to environment, resource management and knowledge. While Biersack (1999) identifies three new ecologies (symbolic ecology, and political ecology) in the wake of Rappaport, Tsing (2001) finds four currents in contemporary environmental anthropology (environmental history, science studies, political ecology and ). Aletta Biersack, in her introductory essay in Reimagining Political Ecology (2006), moves this field of inquiry from the structuralism of neo-marxist Introduction | 3 dependency/world systems-inspired political ecology, to a political ecology sensitive to the challenges of constructivism and moderated by practice theory, giving more space for agency. In my understanding, political ecology does not constitute a grand theory. Rather, it designates an agenda or a field of study. It is a broad, comparative and interdisciplinary effort to study the complex interrelationships between ecological processes, natural resource management, environmental problems, socioeconomic marginalization and politics. The agenda is closely related to the emergence of politically potent environmental issues, and studies primarily aim at unravelling dynamics in individual cases while attending to larger cultural, social and economic contexts. In his article ‘Anthropology in the Middle’, Bruce M. Knauft argues that anthropologists are increasingly ‘braiding together different approaches or perspectives’ and cultural anthropology ‘augurs to be post-paradigmatic’. ‘[T]opics, analytical frameworks and epistemological perspectives are cross-mapped in creative new ways’ (Knauft 2006: 408, 410). Observing that anthropologists are less concerned to develop and contest master narratives and theory, Knauft explicitly draws on Herzfeld’s concept ‘militant middle ground’ (2001) to explain such middle positions. It is not an ‘anything goes’ approach, but a discipline where theory, field experience and practice are more closely interwoven so that ‘anthropologists increasingly connect historical specifics, political economic analysis, and insights from lived experience’ (Knauft 2006: 421). This book can be read as an attempt to make such connections in an environmental anthropological study of fishers’ and scientists’ knowledges in modern Turkey. The political ecology and anthropological research agendas as articulated by Biersack, Herzfeld and Knauft give legitimacy to integrating different approaches, theory and observation in new and creative ways. Environmental ecology, political ecology, as well as cultural anthropology absorb new impulses and expand into new fields of inquiry. This is exemplified in this study by the attention given to, for instance, history, state, power, discourse analysis, science studies, practice studies as well as theorization related to substantive fields such as common property studies, fisheries, technology and consumption. Therefore, the kind of inquiry that this book exemplifies incorporates a multitude of data material spanning many years and different locations, themes and social situations.

Issues

Common Pool Resources Many of the major environmental issues facing us today can be characterized as comprising a common action dilemma: the environment may be ruined if we do not cooperate, but in the short term individuals