Impressões na água : peixes, botos e pescadores na pesca conjunta em Laguna (SC, Brasil)

Abstract

This doctoral thesis is dedicated to a modality of artisanal fishing that occurs in the city of Laguna (Santa Catarina, Brazil). The research tells a story of encounters between mullets migrating along the Brazilian South Coast, bottlenose dolphins that inhabit in Lagoa Santo Antônio dos Anjos and artisanal fishermen. “Good bôtas” and “good botos”, as the dolphins involved in fishing are known, guide schools of mullets towards the fishermen and at the right moment signal the location of the fish with characteristic body movements. Dolphins and fishermen that participate in conjoint fishing have been jointly developing forms of coexistence, collaboration and good living for a very long time. The fishermen recognize each “good boto”, assign names to them, describe their particular habits and other characteristics of their life stories, such as kinship relationships, temporary disappearances and gillnet episodes. This thesis demonstrates an interspecific development of skills between dolphins and fishermen as well as forms of communication linked to the ideas of attraction, bodies, movements, co-responsiveness, human and non-human temporalities, rhythmic adjustments, coordination and multispecies attunement. This approach avoids explanations based on human exceptionalism, typologies and binaries oppositions. Complementaryly the text explores the concepts of ethnoethology, etoethnology and etoecology.