Hidden dimensions of clandestine fishery: A misfortune topology based on scenarios of failures

P. 393–404.

Lidia Rakhmanova

An integral part of hunting and fshing is “luck”: an elusive element among the strict regulations, proven scenarios, interrelated actions, signs, and omens. Luck is a condition and, at the same time, a reason for the abundance of the caught prey or fsh. Remarkable ethnographic cases (see, among others, the notion of “hunting luck” in Brandišauskas, 2017; Hamayon, 2010; Hamayon, 2012) have been analyzed to show how to attract luck and achieve success in hunting and/or fshing, revealing the intentionality of hunters’ actions and those of the community as a whole, targeted at a future time. Stakes are made by hunters to attract luck and enter into a “partnership” with it in order to achieve good results in catching prey, thus ensuring the success and survival of the community or hunter himself.
In this chapter, I attempt to turn the logic of “hunting luck” (which is directed forward, to the future) upside-down; here, I show how reverse temporality operates in an example of river fshing. The ethnographic material in which I am grounding this analysis reveals the hidden practices of a fsherman, which are aimed not at attracting luck and success in fshing but rather at preventing possible failures, breakdowns, and misfortunes. “Fishing failure” turns out to be an alternative core around which practices, actions, fears, and hopes concentrate. It is crucial to show how different the desire for success is from the pursuit of eliminating failures or surviving “despite” them.

Keywords: failure, fisheries, Western Siberia, landscape ecology, misfortune, stash

In book

The Siberian World

Routledge, 2023.