Awards

• Winner of Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize 2023
• Winner of Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize 2023 (United States)

Overview

Since the mid-nineteenth century, agricultural development and fisheries management in northern Japan have been profoundly shaped by how people within and beyond Japan have compared Hokkaido's landscapes to those of other places, as part of efforts to make the new Japanese nation-state more legibly ""modern."" In doing so, they engaged in non-conforming modes of thinking that reached out to diverse places, including the American West and southern Chile. Today, the comparisons made by Hokkaido fishing industry professionals, scientists, and Ainu indigenous groups between the island's forests, fields, and waters and those of other places around the world continue to dramatically affect the region's approaches to environmental management and its physical landscapes. In this far-ranging ethnography, Heather Anne Swanson shows how this traffic in ideas shapes the course of Hokkaido's development, its fish, and the lives of people on and beyond the island while structuring trade dynamics, political economy, and multispecies relations in watersheds around the globe.

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9780295750385

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Reviews

Altogether, Spawning Modern Fish succeeds resoundingly in its intentions...Because it addresses so many audiences effectively, Swanson’s study will help us realize one of multispecies ethnography’s hopes and promises. We can think with salmon toward how new, better, and more just relations among uneven arrangements of humans and nonhumans might be built. * H-Environment *

""Altogether, Spawning Modern Fish succeeds resoundingly in its intentions...Because it addresses so many audiences effectively, Swanson’s study will help us realize one of multispecies ethnography’s hopes and promises. We can think with salmon toward how new, better, and more just relations among uneven arrangements of humans and nonhumans might be built."" * H-Environment * ""Spawning Modern Fish provides a good model for a critical area studies that draws on in-depth place-based knowledge yet has its eye on both transnational connections and domestic diversity. It is a rich, original, and thought-provoking work."" * Monumenta Nipponica *

"""Altogether, Spawning Modern Fish succeeds resoundingly in its intentions...Because it addresses so many audiences effectively, Swanson’s study will help us realize one of multispecies ethnography’s hopes and promises. We can think with salmon toward how new, better, and more just relations among uneven arrangements of humans and nonhumans might be built."""

Author Information

Heather Swanson is associate professor of anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark, and director of the Aarhus University Centre for the Environmental Humanities. She is the coeditor of Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet.

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