Glorifying fishing, damaging Nature: ambivalent ethnographies in Saint-Pierre and Miquelon archipelago (North America, France)

Résumé En

Saint-Pierre and Miquelon is an archipelago in North America, south of the island of Newfoundland, the last remnant of the French presence on this continent. Considered as an "extractive periphery" (Daheur, 2022), the major activity of the inhabitants (6000 in 2020) has long been fishing. The "cod crisis", in 1992, led to a moratorium from which the archipelago has never recovered socio-economically. Today, while new species are now exploited (and seen as a kind of new Eldorado of "blue growth"), a "patrimonialization" of fishing is engaged. The fishing activities, especially industrial, are glorified in the objective of a classification as World heritage by UNESCO. A "cold" political anthropology analyzing the "hot" data collected and observed during three in-depth fieldworks will give an account of these local ambivalences regarding the relationship between the local communities and Nature.