Eating and Existence on an Island in Southern Uganda

This article examines contemporary ontological conflicts between people who make their living on an island with fish that fisheries managers consider "commercially extinct" and people who make their living managing "commercially important" fisheries for this region as a whole. What follows is an experiment in worlding, the work of wading between content and contexts to configure webs of relevant relations through which the ontological politics of livability play out along Uganda's southern littorals. Although violence both stark and slow sometimes erupts and is often simmering within the kinds of conflicts I describe, accounts of violence here evidence the ethical stakes involved in this analysis, rather than comprise the content of it.

Ontology, in the anthropological sense, concerns what and how entities exist in the world.¹ By attending ethnographically to observable actions and concrete practices that are always already situated within webs of relationality, it becomes possible to examine reality as enacted (rather than existing by default).² Fisheries, for example, do not exist outside of relations between people and fish. Fish and fisheries come into existence (and sometimes into extinction) differently through the work of catching and transforming fish into edible products and objects to be scientifically managed.³ The methods, material forms, and aims of these practices, as I have come to understand them, are sufficiently distinct along Uganda's southern littorals as to enact fish and fisheries there as ontologically multiple. Attending to this multiplicity is crucial for considering already existing alternatives to an overdetermined future of death, depravity, and collapse that features within scholarly, popular, and policy-oriented accounts of fish and fisheries as singular entities there. This is a politics of what might already also and "could be."⁴

To be clear, the point of this essay is not to argue for the definitive existence of multiple realities or to solidify descriptions of them. Reality itself is not at issue. Rather it's the shape of the relations through which knowledge, wealth, and power circulate to enact realities that are in play and at stake.⁵ I will consider this experiment a success if readers consider alternatives to the crisis continually unfolding in conventional accounts of fish and fisheries in this region as merely plausible (rather than absolutely real). We begin now with one such worlding, where a possibly ancient spirit, a definitely ancient fish, and a multiethnic assemblage of fishworkers work together to enact a plausibly livable present.

Somewhere in a fishing camp …

Somewhere in a fishing camp along the shores of an island in southern Uganda dwells a being who defends ways of being that most formally trained fisheries experts consider extinct, or to have never existed in the first place. My friends and colleagues who live and work in the camp call this figure Sirya Maluma, a title that means "I do not eat pain," or more specifically, "I do not eat food without sauce."⁶ Admittedly, it is difficult to describe figures like Sirya Maluma. Their ways of being in the world alongside people and fish do not readily exist in the minds, practices, and, ultimately, realities of most who have never lived and worked there. For now, it is enough to consider Sirya Maluma as a spirit of this fishing camp whose continued existence foregrounds an ontological distinction between food and sauce practiced widely throughout the region (and possibly many others farther afield). The politics of food in Uganda is necessarily a politics of sauce.

In recent years, from March through June, hundreds of women and men have started to converge in a fishing camp within Sirya Maluma's littoral domain (see fig. 1). Most are from Uganda, but others travel from as far as the neighboring nations of Kenya, Tanzania, South Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some residents have settled in this camp more or less indefinitely, while many more come for a few months out of the year to make a good living catching, processing, eating, and selling a seasonally abundant type of fish they call nkolongo. When hot smoked over fire, sprinkled with salt, and carefully...