Whale stories: An ethnography of late modern nature

My dissertation explores new configurations of 'nature' and 'culture' being created at the juncture of government, science, and popular culture since the 1970s. My lens is the social history of whales and dolphins in the US/Canadian/Native American coastal border areas, but my interest is in the burgeoning forms of political culture, religiosity, and subject formation that surround it. I use a de-centered, multi-sited approach to ethnographic fieldwork that follows the changing parameters of marine mammal governmental regulation, whale and dolphin biology, and cultural understandings of animals and nature across different regions and social groups.;I learned that there has been a forty-year effort towards the total biopolitical management of the 'at-risk' wild Orca whale population of Puget Sound: each whale has a government identification number, a medical and behavioral case history, and a genealogical position within their family line. The more I learned about the routine workings of whale science and governmental management in the US/Canadian Pacific border region, the more convinced I became that the disciplinary techniques and pastoral management of marine mammals shares many of the same features of other bio-political subjects studied by anthropologists.