FOREWORD

Japanese salmon, the main subject of this creative study, are not merely a nationally identified fish stock in territorial waters of the Japanese nation. They are, as Heather Swanson shows, fish that have been altered in shape, size, and—perhaps even more fundamentally—as culturally meaningful nonhuman lives in Japan. The salmon that take Swanson traveling in Japan and to Chile played a part, she writes, in making fish and fisheries integral to the production of modern Japan. In this way, she offers a more-than-human analysis of the intertwined history of fish, fish industries, and the way Japanese identity is forged in the transformation of coast, food culture, and salmon in the coastal regions of Hokkaido in northern Japan. Food, examined here in the diverse ways salmon enters Japanese cuisine and dining, works simultaneously to produce powerful regional cultures and to illuminate how these cultures are entangled in global flows.

This is a project in multispecies ethnography, an emergent field of inquiry in environmental anthropology (see, for instance, Kirksey and Helmreich 2010 for a useful collection of essays about the contours and concerns of this field of study). Swanson learns from this line of work in her own research on salmon in Japan and Chile to examine how encounters between human endeavor and aspiration and other life-forms generate mutually transformed ecological conditions in distinct socio-spatial locations. In discussing the coproduction of human-salmon worlds in Japan in the many transnational flows that inform the constitution of Japanese food and material culture, while paying close attention to how people and salmon change together, Swanson moves beyond a narrative of management or domestication, even as such discussions remain vital to recognizing the enormous influence of human thought and action in the creation of multispecies worlds (see, for example, Cassidy and Mullin 2007).

Another significant contribution of this study is its attention to processes of nation-state and national culture formation and relating them to the making of multispecies worlds. In that sense, it is a commendable effort to bring political economy and questions of regional scales—and expanding or contracting, or even specifically aligned networks of connection across human geographies and natural landscapes—into view and to recognize their influence in constituting more-than-human ecologies. A welcome consideration of geopolitics, empire, nationalism, and environmental transformation is thus introduced into multispecies environmental anthropology, a field that at times seems removed from discussions of economy, power, and inequality.

Along the way, Swanson learns from environmental humanists as they engage with the discussion around the Anthropocene. Her sustained meditation on how new accounts of the concerns that drove preoccupation with the Anthropocene can effectively study human biological and geological transformation of the world—within still salient and, in fact, vital considerations of processes such as colonization, domination, expropriation, and the export of environmental hazards and toxicity—is central to the way she develops the analytic of comparison that organizes the whole project.

Swanson develops this view of comparison through her wide-ranging examination of specific landscapes of ecological change and human history-making within Japan and in Japanese fisheries development work in Chile. As she notes, economic development, national pride, and international commerce or industrial consulting, as well as environmental sustainability projects that follow in the wake of development and trade, are all grounded in a comparative stance. People in small communities or across nation-states evaluate themselves in relation to others who may be socially and spatially proximate or distant. This roving gaze, embodying aspirations and desires, as well as assessments of self-worth, animates the change that emerges from such evaluative actions. Swanson considers how acts, practices, and memories of comparison are central to fashioning the lifeworlds of people and salmon in Japan. In her account, Japanese salmon emerges as a food, trade good, scientific invention, and species of fish in the highly interconnected world of fish and fisheries, where salmon become a national and natural asset in modern Japan.

In a fascinating series of chapters that reveal her wide reading, sprawling engagement with locations in Japan, of course, but also with the northwestern United States and Chile, Swanson accounts for the history of development of salmon fisheries in northern Japan and a national interest in salmon across Japan as food and commodity. This takes her from earlier Japanese awareness of northwest coast salmon in the United States to a later involvement in what appear to be suitable sites for cultivating Japanese salmon in Chile as an international development project. In the process, the study uncovers a now familiar inequality and environmental injustice created by the transnational relocation of industrial operations—in this case, fish farming—whereby greening and sustainability can reshape Japanese fisheries even as environmental degradation and pollution are exported to Chilean locations. This process is insightfully discussed in terms of shadow ecologies (see Dauvergne 1997), a concept developed to describe timber trade between Japan and Southeast Asia.

As Swanson returns, with fine-grained ethnography, to Hokkaido to consider the next round of making and remaking of Hokkaido salmon and associated industry in contemporary Japan, she also examines the debate and disagreement around belonging in the land and how that is defined by histories of association with salmon. This brings her to the stories of Ainu and Indigenous accounts of relations with salmon, which reveal the tensions of empire and nation-building around a fish and its biological alteration in changing relations with the human communities that are intensely entangled with the lives of the fish. Overall, the project spans interest and instructive findings in environmental anthropology, the political economy of food commodity chains, and social studies of science and technology. In this way, Swanson clears some new space for biological sciences, environmental humanities, and political economy of development to meet and engage in useful ways that can benefit scholarship in all these fields. This is accomplished by Swanson’s close observation of the bodies of fish as she attends to the large-scale socioeconomic webs of connection in which salmon travel in altered physical form.

K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

YALE UNIVERSITY