Research Seminar in Cultural Anthropology with Ziegler Remme

Every year, fishers in the Gulf of Maine, US, put out more than 3 million traps for capturing lobsters in what is currently the most valuable single-species fisheries in the US. While heavily fished over several centuries, the lobster stock is as abundant as ever. In fact, the stock seems to thrive due to the forms of capture that is done in the state. Well-known conservation practices such as releasing specimens below and above minimum and maximum sizes as well as marking and releasing egg-bearing female lobsters contribute to this, but what is less known is that the trapping itself significantly contributes to the stock’s abundance as bait has become a most significant food source for lobsters. What does this mean for how we conceptualize capture? In this paper I use this counter-intuitive understanding of capture as a life-producing practice to discuss how capture may include both extractive and productive relational connectivities at one and the same time. However, while lobster trapping in itself might be understood through this conceptual apparatus, I will show how this particular form of capture must also be related to other forms of capture with other relational connectivities between those who capture and those who are captured, including trawling for cod and the entanglement of endangered North Atlantic Right whales in fishing gear. Engaging with recent rethinking of traps and ecologies of capture, the
paper draws on recent fieldwork in Maine and looks at various forms of modalities of relationality that these intersecting forms of entrapment and capture instantiate. Looking at the different forms of trapping as conductors and insulators of connectivity, the paper fundamentally asks what lobster trapping actually entails in terms of connecting and disconnecting human and nonhuman entities, and how various forms of these connectivities are interrelated.

Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen. He has done research on more-than-human forms of sociality, with a particular focus on relations between humans, animals and spirits in the Philippine highlands and is now extending that interest into relations between humans and marine creatures. Remme is currently leading the research project SEATIMES: How Climate Change Transforms Human-Marine Temporalities where he investigates the temporal dynamics of human-lobster relations in Maine (US).