Synopsis

This case study explores how conflicting global pressures to exploit and to conserve the fish and other resources of coastal Southeast Asia play out in a series of communities in the coastal zone of Palawan Island in the Philippines, where the residents' livelihoods depend on fishing. The account considers a government program to relieve fishing pressures by establishing marine protected areas and creating "alternative livelihoods," and shows how ethnicity, gender, and evangelical religious conversion each figure in changing household economic strategies and other local efforts to cope with relentless global forces.

Biography

James Eder received his PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and is currently Professor of Anthropology in the School of Human Evolution & Social Change at Arizona State University. His interests in the Philippines trace to three years he spent there as a Peace Corps Volunteer, teaching high school biology and adult literacy on Palawan Island. Since then, Jim has returned to Palawam numerous times for a total of six years of anthropological fieldwork. His research interests include the subsistence activities of the Batak, a foraging people of the island's forested interior, and the interplay of economic change and social inequality in frontier farming communities. Jim's previous books include Who Shall Succeed? Agricultural Development and Social Inequality on a Philippine Frontier, On the Road to Tribal Extinction: Depopulation, Deculturation, and Adaptive Well-being among the Batak of the Philippines, and A Generation Later: Household Strategies and Economic Change in the Rural Philippines. He first became interested in fishing communities during his travels by fishing boat to some of the many small islands of the Palawan region.