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Reading rivers:
everyday practice and
environmental knowledge in
freshwater angling
Chris Bear
Sally Eden
Department of Geography, University of Hull
What is angling?
Taskscapes and the everyday
• Rivers as taskscapes
– ‘Every task takes its meaning from its position within
an ensemble of tasks, performed in series or in
parallel’ (Ingold, 2000)
• Beyond taskscapes
– Understanding anglers as ‘being in the
landscape…moving through it, in all the repeating yet
various circumstances of everyday life’ (Cloke and
Jones, 2000)
– How do anglers piece together, and place themselves
in, their surroundings?
• Questioning the everyday
Methodology
• semi-structured interviews and focus
groups (22 anglers so far)
• all fish on and around the Rivers Swale
and Esk in North Yorkshire
• participant observation
Beyond fish
CRAIG …you go for two hours of enjoyment. It isn’t the
be all and end all to catch a fish, you see. You don’t
come away bitterly disappointed or anything. As I said,
you’re only going to enjoy yourself for 2 hours. That’s
the idea of it
JAMES …I just enjoy, in my case, being on the riverbank
JOE …down here, I like to see trout and salmon and
that, but I like the river more than anything - not
actually catching the fish to eat them, just like being
near the river and watching and taking everything in.
Making meaning
- reading the river
JAMES …he said “there’s one up there” and I couldn’t
see it. I couldn’t see the fish at all. I said “where,
where, where?!” And he said “it’s there, it’s there, it’s
a yard out from the bank and 10 yards ahead of us”
and I still couldn’t see it. He said “watch”! So he cast
and his dry fly floated down and the fish took it and
he brought it in. I was just absolutely gob smacked
by the skill and I wanted to be able to do that.
-
STEVE …you see where the flows are, where the
rocks are, where you could imagine the food being
deposited, where the caterpillars are going to fall off
a tree or whatever, where they're going to sit, where
the sunlight's hitting the water, where they would like
to be in the shade, depending on the temperature…
Making meaning
- being in the landscape
• ‘…hunters cultivate an association with particular
areas because, in hunting, the knowledge of these
particularities becomes greater than the sum of the
parts, and is a tangible factor in the successful hunt’
(Franklin 2001: 73)
MIKE Well, on a fishing basis you’re telling him to look
for slacks in the water, cover on the bank for the fish to
hide under, such as overhanging trees and stuff like
that. … And from there, you just help him progress
slowly. I mean you can see there, I’m in a lot of cover
there, aren’t I? Which is hiding me from the fish, and
there’s cover on the other bank where I was fishing.
Making meaning
- Parallel tasks
INTERVIEWER How do you do it? I know it’s difficult to
explain, but how do you learn to figure it all out?
NORMAN It’s just like life, isn’t it? You just pick these
things up.
INTERVIEWER Just experience?
NORMAN You talk to other people and they’ve done
such and such a thing to catch fish and you think, “ah,
well, I’ll try that next time” and then you try it and for
whatever reason it works. And then you try something
different and you pass your information on.
DEREK you knew when you'd fished a length of river a
long time, you knew what you had to do.
Heterogeneous taskscapes
CRAIG …the one thing you always used to see, as
soon as you were quiet, was water rats, you know,
water voles. And you never see one nowadays at
all, and that’s because of mink. Now the mink clean
everything up. There’s very few ducklings and
there’s no moorhens or coots or whatever you’d call
them. They were really prolific round here at one
time. And it’s mink that’s cleaned all them up. But
they do say that otters clear mink off - chase them
away. So you know, you’re far better having otters
than have mink.
Conclusions -
• Piecing together surroundings through and beyond the
taskscape:
– ‘in contrast to the fragmented nature of modern life, accounts of hunting
describe a complete or whole activity’ (Franklin 2001: 73)
– Meaning produced through an ensemble of tasks, taking place in series
and in parallel
– Relational knowledges
• Multiple tasks over time - repetition
– An everyday practice?
– Fraser: ‘if you see it every day you just appreciate it, don’t you? I take it
for granted in all fairness. Because this is where we live and this is what
we do - just take it all for granted.’
– But this doesn’t limit the everyday to being mundane
– Different everydays