The Estuary’s Gift: An Atlantic Coast Cultural Biography (Rural Studies)

History

Griffith, David

Americas

Penn State University Press

A coastal region's oldest inhabitants, particularly families of watermen and commercial fishers, often possess the deepest knowledge about a region and its ecological problems. Because of this, assaults on watermen lifeways and commercial fishing families—whether from organized recreational interests, real estate developers, or public policy makers—reduce the cultural and biological diversity of the coast and often upset the delicate environmental balance. Through the lens of the Mid-Atlantic Coast, especially the Chesapeake Bay and the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds of North Carolina, David Griffith develops the theme that environmental degradation follows the loss of the most intimate understandings of coastal ecosystems. In The Estuary's Gift, Griffith traces the development of Mid-Atlantic cultures from the Algonquins and the earliest European families who hunted whales and netted herring, to present-day commercial fishing families who work the complex estuarine systems of the coast. In the process, he chronicles a series of developments that erode communities across American landscapes: the wearing away of local and regional history that results when national retail and restaurant chains convert local merchants into clerks and busboys, or the loss of biological diversity that follows the reconfiguration of countrysides to support monocrop agriculture, industrial chicken production, hog farming, forestry, and mining.Griffith insists that we heed the ways we treat one another in light of the ways we treat nature, measuring both by the standards we invoke when we give and receive gifts. Stories of conflict among fishers, of Mexican immigrant women brought to seafood houses to pick the meat from cooked, cooled crab—displacing and replacing African-American women—and of the slow yet steady attempts to criminalize family fishing practices that reach back thirteen generations show the ways in which the rights, obligations, and responsibilities of gift exchange have eroded. Only when we consider human relations as an integral part of the natural cycles will we begin to restore the balance.More than an account of the decline of fishing families or stressed natural resources, The Estuary's Gift illustrates how pressing social problems, such as environmental degradation and assaults on working families, play out in local contexts and local history.

A coastal region's oldest inhabitants, particularly families of watermen and commercial fishers, often possess the deepest knowledge about a region and its ecological problems. Because of this, assaults on watermen lifeways and commercial fishing families—whether from organized recreational interests, real estate developers, or public policy makers—reduce the cultural and biological diversity of the coast and often upset the delicate environmental balance. Through the lens of the Mid-Atlantic Coast, especially the Chesapeake Bay and the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds of North Carolina, David Griffith develops the theme that environmental degradation follows the loss of the most intimate understandings of coastal ecosystems. 
In The Estuary's Gift, Griffith traces the development of Mid-Atlantic cultures from the Algonquins and the earliest European families who hunted whales and netted herring, to present-day commercial fishing families who work the complex estuarine systems of the coast. In the process, he chronicles a series of developments that erode communities across American landscapes: the wearing away of local and regional history that results when national retail and restaurant chains convert local merchants into clerks and busboys, or the loss of biological diversity that follows the reconfiguration of countrysides to support monocrop agriculture, industrial chicken production, hog farming, forestry, and mining.
Griffith insists that we heed the ways we treat one another in light of the ways we treat nature, measuring both by the standards we invoke when we give and receive gifts. Stories of conflict among fishers, of Mexican immigrant women brought to seafood houses to pick the meat from cooked, cooled crab—displacing and replacing African-American women—and of the slow yet steady attempts to criminalize family fishing practices that reach back thirteen generations show the ways in which the rights, obligations, and responsibilities of gift exchange have eroded. Only when we consider human relations as an integral part of the natural cycles will we begin to restore the balance.
More than an account of the decline of fishing families or stressed natural resources, The Estuary's Gift illustrates how pressing social problems, such as environmental degradation and assaults on working families, play out in local contexts and local history.

American Guestworkers: Jamaicans and Mexicans in the U.S. Labor Market (Rural Studies)

The H-2 program, originally based in Florida, is the longest running labor-importation program in the country. Over the course of a quarter-century of research, Griffith studied rural labor processes and their national and international effects. In this book, he examines the socioeconomic effects of the H-2 program on both the areas where the laborers work and the areas they are from, and, taking a uniquely humanitarian stance, he considers the effects of the program on the laborers themselves.

Business & Money

Economics

Decorative printed tins: The golden age of printed tin packaging

Science & Math

Technology

Studio Vista

This book addresses the ways employers in American industries use race, gender, ethnicity, and institutions of the state and the church to manipulate workers’ networks and communities, and ultimately, to control the supplies and characteristics of their labor. Griffith focuses on the labor processes in the seafood and poultry processing industries, paying particular attention to the growing use of new immigrant workers, women, and minority workers. He traces relationships between capitalist expansion overseas in peasant and tribal societies and evolving labor practices of “advanced” capitalism in the United States. As such, his work offers a critique of conventional, neoclassical economic approaches to the study of labor.

Jones's Minimal: Low-Wage Labor in the United States (S U N Y Series in the Anthropolgy of Work)

Job Hunting & Careers

State University of New York Press

Uninterruptible Power Supplies (Electrical and Computer Engineering)

Engineering & Transportation

Engineering

CRC-Press

Right man, right time: David Griffith, 'Clwydfardd', the first archdruid of Wales

Biographies & Memoirs

D. Griffith

Traditional wage labor has experienced a significant decline in industrialized countries over the past few decades. The spread of temporary work, the proliferation of subcontracting arrangements, the use of artificial intelligence (AI), the shipment of manufacturing jobs overseas, and the employment of foreign contract workers are among the key factors driving this decline. The result is a rise of labor insecurity and fragmentation among increasingly diverse forms of flexible labor arrangements. This book examines this important transformation by considering the impact of foreign contract labor on temporary migrant workers in their places of employment and home communities. It assesses work as a source of value in capitalist, reproductive, domestic, and cultural economics, and argues for a new, work-centric field of economics. Rich in examples, it is a sophisticated anthropological appreciation of the many forms that work can take and what these forms mean for the creation of value in people's lives.

The Cultural Value of Work: Livelihoods and Migration in the World's Economies

Cambridge University Press

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