Fishing for Heritage
Modernity and Loss Along the Scottish Coast
Jane Nadel-Klein
Fishing for Heritage – Some might think a book on Scottish fishing villages to be a mite esoteric, even obscure. How many could there be, after all, and why should we care about them, other than as pretty places to visit on a holiday?
I have spent a quarter of a century studying these villages and the people who live there, thinking about them almost daily. I have come to know many as informants and some as friends, so 1 feel entitled to give an answer. Actually, three answers.
The first is simply the one that any right-minded anthropologist or humanist might give, that all people, “great and small,” deserve our attention, not least because “human populations construct their cultures in interaction with one another, and not in isolation,” as Eric Wolf said in his preface to Europe and the People Without History (1982: ix). Fishers have been part of the larger story of Scotland, Europe and the world beyond.