Shifting Boundaries between Land and Sea: Sea-Walls and Fishing Nets

• In Event: Opening up Containment: Spaces, Trajectories, and Forms of Life - III

Abstract

In this paper I compare two different technical objects through which the boundaries between land and sea are constructed on the Coromandel Coastline of India: fishing nets and sea-walls. In my larger project, I study how ‘property thinking’ underlies the use of nets, walls, land titles and such. For this paper, I focus specifically on how these technical objects and the practices around them aim to contain the coast--through creating fences to keep the sea at bay, and traps to navigate the flows of water and fish. Simultaneously, these practices also throw up leakages and excesses. Drawing from my current dissertation fieldwork, I show instances where technolegal interventions contain and exceed their limits at once. For instance, fishing nets are culturally constructed by artisanal fishers as tools to trap clever fish through tricks. But such relational engagement with the sea and fish also means that nets are by design open to being outsmarted by fish. Over time, state and international funders have invested in other types of nets which disrupt these indigenous logics of trapping fish, with other logics of blue economy and maximizing fish yield. Similarly, sea-walls contain the sea at one point on the coast but cause erosion or deposition on other parts, thus shifting the boundaries between land and sea. Rather than frame these as failures of containment or markers of resistance per se, I ask what emerges through entanglements between different registers of technicity (indigenous, technolegal), coastal environments, and persons.

Author

• Oviya Govindan