重思「海洋」與靠海生活：能供性的取徑

Reconceptualizing the Ocean and Marine Culture Through the Theory of Affordance

近年有越來越多關於海洋與濱海人群生活方式的研究，尤其著重在海洋不同於陸地的特性以及相關的傳統生態知識，但經常從一般預設的海洋特質展開推論，或者著重於列舉環境知識本身，而將人們在與海洋的互動中一方面創造性地生產知識，另一方面建構自身經驗的海洋特質，並進而在此二基礎上活出生活的過程簡單帶過。本文以雲林濱海漁村為田野，以能供性勞作（labor of affordance）為分析取徑，呈現包含潮汐、海氣象與各種水產生物特性等海洋要素如何在漁民的日常實踐中，透過工具的活用被經驗甚至改造，並說明正是在這樣的海上勞動過程中，海洋成為能支持當代靠海生活的地方。這樣的民族誌書寫著重於漁民與海洋的創造性互動，以回到漁民日常生活的脈絡來理解「海洋」，並嘗試從漁民構作環境與生活處境的日常實踐來描繪「海洋文化」。

Inspired by the theory of affordance, this article seeks to focus on fishermen’s creative engagement with their lives and the marine world in order to develop a novel understanding of marine culture. Recently, there has been a growing body of research on the lifestyles of fishing communities, focusing on the distinctive characteristics of the ocean as opposed to the land, and traditional maritime knowledge, in order to deal with issues such as environmental governance, cultural politics and the construction of nation-culture discourses. However, some such studies tend to assume certain characteristics of the ocean in order to imagine how political and social life in an oceanic context can be critically different from land-oriented assumptions, which in turn essentializes the researcher’s own conceptualization of the sea. Others often put too much effort into the enumeration of traditional environmental knowledge, overlooking the processes through which people creatively produce knowledge and construct lived experiences through their interactions with the sea. Taking a coastal fishing village in Yunlin as its field site, this article adopts the concept of affordance as its analytical framework to explore how oceanic elements including tides, marine weather, and the characteristics of various aquatic species are experienced and even transformed through the creative use of tools in fishermen’s daily practices. Located right beside the sea, Kao-Hai village has a significant number of residents working as fishermen or seafood traders. For people here, the ocean is obviously not only a dangerous site, but also what sustains their lives. It is through the fishermen’s labor that the ocean is transformed into the foundation of their livelihood, and the process involves various tools. This article illustrates that the fishermen’s catch depends on the fishing gear and methods they use, and through practicing different fishing methods, fishermen have distinct perceptions of the ocean. Furthermore, whether the weather is suitable for fishermen to go to sea is not an objective issue, but deeply influenced by what kind of vessel the fishermen use. The temporality of the ocean, which is often seen as one of the most distinctive characteristics of the marine environment, also depends on how the fishermen use their tools. As a result, although the marine environment has its material essence, it is also constructed through fishermen’s daily labor and the tools they use in their labor process. It is precisely through these maritime labor processes that the ocean becomes a place capable of sustaining contemporary fishery livelihoods. Attentive to how the ocean and people’s lives are mutually constituted through practice instead of solely focusing on how the marine environment has shaped people’s specific lifestyles, this ethnography has two goals. The first is to understand the ocean within the context of fishermen’s everyday lives through emphasizing the creative interactions between fishermen and the ocean, and the second is to depict marine culture with a more concentrated focus on the creativity of human beings through the lens of fishermen’s daily practices in constructing both the marine environment and the livelihood of living by the sea.