ABSTRACT
In this paper we ask what happens to fish and to fishermen who are subjected to modern forms of risk management. First, we consider how fish are being or have been reconfigured in the imagination of fishermen, managers and others who have some tie to the fishing industry. Secondly, we ask how the imagination of fishermen is being reconfigured by the imposition of management strategies that, ultimately, translate the uncertainties inherent in macro-level biological and economic systems into lived experience. The two trajectories of meaning are connected. Each influences the other and each entails an appropriation of understandings. We argue that the two trajectories are driven by the same process: a process that may be understood generally as disembedding and, more precisely, as implicit in an imposed ideology and logic that are underwritten by reification, commensurability, categorization and anonymization.
