The Community of Bricolage Practice : Appropriation of Global Flows among Vezo Fishermen in Madagascar(<Special Theme>Beyond "Globalization")

<p>Faced with the neoliberalist discourse that ignores social bonds other than individuals' link to the market, some anthropologists appreciate the role of face-to-face communities as a facility for social insertion. However, as GIDDENS (1990) argues, the globalizing modernity tends to "disembed" local relations. This paper discusses, based on the case of Vezo fishing communities in southwestern Madagascar, how a rural community can open out to exterior and global influences that might be violent. It also conceptualizes the community of bricolage practice (CBP) as a rather promising model of face-to-face community today. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Vezo fishermen kept on improving their household economies by inventing various gears and techniques: handmade wooden spearguns with curved car tires and umbrella ribs as parts; dragnets made of metal wires from car tires; extraordinarily large gillnets to fish sharks; handmade wooden lures for squids; a combination of a condom and a light-emitting diode torch to enable night diving. Those inventions, triggered by a national and international increase in seafood demand, owe to the bricolage process in two phases: the phase of the initial trial, where the fishermen improvise the techniques out of their professional experience and new materials conveyed along the global distribution currents; and the phase of spreading, where imitators improve the new gears and techniques by modifying the model to their own circumstances and availability, e.g., "moyens du bord' (LEVI-STRAUSS 1962). The imitation of the latter spreading phase happens frequently soon after the initial trial, because the fishermen share, to a significant degree, the basic know-how of fishing through legitimate peripheral participation (LPP; LAVE and WENGER 1991). In actuality, the Vezo fishing village is regarded as a community of practice (CP; ibid.), for the people learn fishing from co-villagers through everyday conversations, as well as from their families through fishing trips. The village cannot be a typical CP because the fishermen, through practices, achieve their Vezo identity but not a village identity. Nonetheless, because the theory explains sufficiently why the degree of learning relates to social estimation, the paper regards the village as a CP. The Vezo fishing village is distinct from many other CPs in that the learner masters not only knowledge and body techniques but also how to get through unexpected incidents. That means that fishing is not such a simple practice as sharpening knives, for example, where the practitioner tries not to deviate from the regular routine by adjusting his own slight motions; but it is rather a complex practice, or a bundle of routines, where the practitioner has to control the unpredictable developments by intentional calculation. In actuality, the fisherman never repeats any fishing trip in a strict sense; but he always experiences an unprecedented trip each time under a unique combination of weather, current, tide, fish behavior and trip members. Thus, he has to make a unique decision if he harvests nothing after a while: to make a move for better water; to adjust the length of line for a better depth; or to change gears for other targets. That unique decision cannot be learned through LPP, which instead gives lessons regarding how to judge conditions quickly based on conditional experiences. After the judgment, he selects items from his repertoire of know-how and available materials, and combines them according to the unique conditions. In other words, he practices bricolage on every fishing trip. That ability turned out to be the source of creativity in the 1990s and 2000s, when the fishermen were confronted with new materials and opportunities, resulting in a bricolage invention of gears and techniques. It was just an exercise of fishermen's normal abilities under new conditions. We</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>