8 



Even though fisheries managers do not have a clear idea 

 of what social science information they need, officials of the 

 National Marine Fisheries Service have repeatedly stressed the 

 need for social and cultural information on regions as a whole, 

 since these are the units they must manage. Information on very 

 small social units, such as one island, will do them a minimal 

 amount of good. This point of view cannot be ignored. However, 

 anthropologists ordinarily study very small units. They have 

 learned through long experience that the most important social 

 patterns and values of a given culture are rarely talked about. 

 The people of that culture simply act in terms of them. These 

 presupposition and sets of expectations can only be discovered 

 through many months of participant observation, and repeated 

 in-depth interviews with key informants (Pelto, 1970)'. Under 

 these conditions, it is not surprising that anthropologists tend 

 to study small communities, hamlets, sections of tribes, etc. 



The problem, then, it to get the kind of in-depth infor- 

 mation anthropologists know to be essential, and still cover a 

 multi-state area--the kinds of units that will be taken into 

 account by fisheries managers. This problem can be solved, I 

 believe, by doing intensive studies of communities, in combina- 

 tion with broad surveys of whole regions using the information 

 generated by these community studies. 



