Connections, practices, and the particular: A multispecies ethnography of the southwestern shore of Nova Scotia

Over the last thirty years of the twentieth century diverse and variegated species ecologies that had taken millions of years to assemble off the shores of Nova Scotia were being cleared, dragged, raked, high graded, shacked, and dumped. The speed of the seascape's radical change alarmed many. The insights and vicissitudes of this unfolding event have not been much appreciated outside of fisheries and/or maritime anthropological research, yet they speak to central dilemmas of our times: how do a multitude of organisms' lives shape and get shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces? How are boundaries and exceptions made or dissolved and enacted? Rather than tell the evolutionary unfolding of a new era of a small fishing hamlet this thesis, drawing on scholarship in anthropology and science studies and based on ethnographic fieldwork, links actants across distance and difference to map ever shifting relations in the context of constant uncertainty.