Coastal Heritage and Cultural Resilience

This book explores the knowledge, work and life of Pacific coastal populations from the Pacific Northwest to Panama. Center stage in this volume is the knowledge people acquire on coastal and marine ecosystems. Material and aesthetic benefits from interacting with the environment contribute to the ongoing building of coastal cultures. The contributors are particularly interested in how local knowledge -either recently generated or transmitted along generations- interfaces with science, conservation, policy and artistic expression. Their observations exhibit a wide array of outcomes ranging from resource and human exploitation to the magnification of cultural resilience and coastal heritage. The interdisciplinary nature of ethnobiology allows the chapter authors to have a broad range of freedom when examining their subject matter. They build a multifaceted understanding of coastal heritage through the different lenses offered by the humanities, social sciences, oceanography, fisheries and conservation science and, not surprisingly, the arts. Coastal Heritage and Cultural Resilience establishes an intimate bond between coastal communities and the audience in a time when resilience of coastal life needs to be celebrated and fortified.

Auteur

Lisa L. Price is a Professor of Anthropology at Oregon State University. She specializes in ethnobiology and ethnoecology. Her research interests are primarily at the interface of human culture, specifically gender, and the food environment, food ways and food security. She has conducted research throughout Asia and Africa and acted as a consultant for numerous international scientific and philanthropic organizations.

Nemer E. Narchi is an Assistant Research Professor in the Center for Human Geography Research at El Colegio de Michoacán, A.C. Initially trained as an oceanographer, he is now an anthropologist who has been working in ethnobiology and biocultural conservation for 18 years. Nemer Narchi is vice-president of the Mexican Ethnobiological Association (2018-2020) and co-founder of the Laboratories of Social Oceanography in El Colegio de Michoacán. He is also head of the Marine Research Group for Biocultural Heritage, part of the Mexican Network for Biocultural Heritage (Red Temática sobre Patrimonio Biocultural, CONACyT).

Dr. L.M.L. Price

Professor of Anthropology &

Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts

Oregon State University

Corvallis, Oregon, 97331

U.S.A.

Dr. Nemer E. Narchi
Profesor-Investigador
Centro de Estudios en Geografía Humana
El Colegio de Michoacán
Cerro de Nahuatzen 85
La Piedad, Michoacán, México. 59370
Tel (352) 5256107 ext. 2416

Contenu
Preface Introduction Lisa Price, Oregon State Univeristy, and Nemer Narchi, El Colegio de Michoacán

1. The discovery of the Mar del Sur to unlikely connections between Panama and the United States Anna Spalding of Oregon State University and M. Eugenia MelladoThis chapter is historic in nature and looks at the waters of the Pacific Ocean as they link to Panama, the southernmost country of Central America, with the entire west coast of the united states through a variety of ecosystem-level and oceanographic processes that range from currents to biological exchanges that help us better understand our marine environment and biodiversity. It starts around 1530 and looks at the use of marine space and the cementing of this importance transit route, with the pearl industry being one example of this.
2. Where Shore meets sea: The eroticized landscape in literary tradition of the Pacific Northwest and CaliforniaPeter Betjemann, Oregon State UniversityThis contribution is an essay that examines the literary traditions of the PNW and California where writers think about the environment in eroticized terms. Consider John Steinbeck's depiction of the exposed rocks of coastal tide pool: when the tide goes out the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals the smell of powerful protean, smell of sperm and ova fill the air. The most familiar instance of this pattern, of course is afforded by spawning runs of salmon and steelhead, from Carl Safina's tender account of watching salmon spawn in an Oregon river to the wild intermingling of human and piscine desire in a host of Pacific coast works centered on anadromous fish (from Robinson Jeffers' narrative poem Steelhead, Wild Pig, The Fungus to the novels of Don Berry).
3. Invisible landscapes: perception, heritage, and coastal change in Southern CaliforniaDonald Burnette, Jenifer Dugan (UCSB) and Anita Guerrini of Oregon State University To the public, the Coal Oil Point Reserve, north of Santa Barbara, is an example of a natural environment. Restoration efforts have brought it back to a state sometimes called pristine; even the snowy plovers, long thought vanished for good, have returned to its beaches. In fact, Coal Oil Point is a cultural landscape in which the human element is completely invisible to even interested observers. Far from being untouched, Coal Oil Point has been a human landscape for thousands of years. This essay will examine the invisibility of cultural landscapes in the context of human desires for untouched environments. 4. Oysters from tide to table in the Pacific Northwest Lisa Price, Oregon State University This chapter examines oyster collection, farming, and consumption with a focus on the Puget Sound in Washington State and the Oregon Coast. It touches upon the various edible species along the Pacific Coast from Mexico to Canada, examines the near extinction of the small oyster of the PNW and the introduction of the current commercial species from Japan (the Pacific Oyster). Also touched upon is the nature of current oyster cultivation businesses, and restoration efforts for the indigenous PNW species. The chapter includes a look at a small number of historic oyster bar restaurants in Portland, Oregon and Olympia/Seattle, Washington that remain from the turn of the last century.
4. Resilient fishing families: adapting to changeFlaxen Conway and Lori Cramer, Oregon State University This chapter synthesizes over 20 years of interdisciplinary scholarship by the co-authors on fishing families and coastal communities. Amidst the narrative of increasing coastal storms, erosion, and other physical hazards associated with climate and related coastal hazards facing coastal communities are concerns about cultural and social dimensions of community resilience. Fishing families have exhibited their resilience through changing family roles, a graying of the fleet, and never-ending management and resource shifts. This notion of adapting to change has been a thread in our research from one of our first collaborative projects, entitled Adapting to Change: Fishing Businesses, Families, Communities, and Regions in 1995 to our current project, The Old(er) Men of the Sea: Graying of the fishing industry and its impact on local community resiliency. In our current project, we use oral histories and semi-structured...