3 



largely because of a growing interest within the profession in. 

 maritime communities, and because tradi tonal, rural fishing 

 communities can be studied with the sam.e sets of conceptual 

 tools anthropologists have developed for studying small, tradi- 

 tional societies in other parts of the world. As a result, the 

 little literature that exists on the socio-cultural systems of 

 modern fishing communities in the U.S. and other industrialized 

 nations has a strong anthropological cast to it. Hopefully, 

 other kinds of behavioral scientists can be persuaded to take 

 an interest in fisheries management. But in the meanwhile, 

 only a small handful of anthropologists are interested, pre- 

 pared, and trained to deal with the social, cultural, and 

 historical dim.ension of fisheries management demanded by 

 PL 94-265. The situation is not, in my opinion, as desperate 

 as it might sound, because anthropologists are in position to 

 gather most of the data and answer most of the questions con- 

 cerning fishermen and fishing cultures which will be demanded 

 by fisheries administrators. 



It is critical to note that the problem cannot be 

 corrected by merely collecting socio-cultural data. The inform- 

 ation we v/ish to gather and the way we synthesize it depend 

 very much on the kinds of ideas we have in mind about fishing 

 communities and the ways they work. Data, after all, only make 

 sense in terms of a theory. It is important to note that we do 

 not know how fishing communities work. To phrase the problem 

 in terms of a need for data assumes that the theoretical work 



