The Ethnographic Institute values and works to enhance appreciation of the essential unity of socio-cultural and biological diversity co-evolving on tropical coasts. Institute programs are dedicated to improving living conditions, health and education, and poverty alleviation in fishing communities as the key to a better future for coastal populations and coastal marine environments: healthy fishing communities and healthy fisheries go together.
As the world’s last tropical sea frontiers vanish once remote, indigenous, and traditional fishing societies are becoming increasingly marginalized or disappearing altogether, along with many highly productive,potentially sustainable, small-scale fishing economies. Many local fishing communities possess coastal-marine biodiversity knowledge systems that have endured for centuries.
To stem cultural loss, EI works to empower communities to record, protect, in some cases to repossess, and find new applications for their culturally-based envrionmental,resource management, and natural history knowledge by:
- establishing local culture and heritage centers
- securing rights to marine and coastal aquatic territories,
resources, and settlement sites
- harmonizing cultural and scientific management of marine areas
and fisheries
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| 'saveiro' fishing craft Bahia Brazil |
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| lunar-tide fishing cycle Bahia Brazil |
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The lunar-tide cycle diagram shown above,
is a calendrical device artisanal fishers use
in N.E. Brazil to mentally map their fishing
domains, locate species, decide where to fish,
what capture techniques to use each day, and
as a memory guide to the history and
distribution of catches.
A tribute to the adaptive stability and
utility of this system is that it persists
today as the basic system of orientation
in artisanal fishing in many villages as well as
peri-urban coastal areas.
More information about this traditional
knowledge system can be found in: Cordell,
"The Lunar-Tide Fishing Cycle in N.E Brazil"
Ethnology, vol XIII, No.4, pp. 379-392;
also see Begossi [online] Temporal Stability
in Fishing Spots in Brazilian Coastal Fisheries.
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art5/.
EI is currently engaged in a number of projects
in Brazil to develop sustainable small-scale
fisheries and multi-use marine protected areas,
in the framework of local cultural and heritage
centers.To learn more about this work,
click on the 'projects' button.
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