Complex ocean ethics: examining human-ocean relationships through south Africa’s abalone crisis.

Pay, Megan Amanda (2023) Complex ocean ethics: examining human-ocean relationships through south Africa’s abalone crisis. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

In this thesis I explore ethical complexity in literary and ethnographic narratives about human-ocean relationships, focusing in depth on the South African abalone fishery, which many have described as in “crisis.” At a time when the fluidity of oceans is being restricted globally as they are increasingly bought, sold, and commodified as a new “frontier” for extraction and development, stories about humans’ changing relationship with the ocean give insights into meaningful questions, dilemmas, and concerns about the future of the seas. Contemporary narratives about abalone poaching highlight the complexity in human relationships with the ocean, and the existential challenges inherent in relating virtuously to the ocean. In South Africa, environmental debates about conservation and climate change have been pitted against social concerns, such as the need for poverty alleviation and investment in local communities. The escalating abalone fishery crisis represents a meeting point of crucial and high-profile ethical concerns across environmental and social lines, including inequality, criminality, global neoliberalism, ocean biodiversity, and species loss. I bring close examinations of local fisher ethics and poaching into dialogue with lived and imagined storying of these issues in English-language literature. Through this methodology, I examine how narratives across a range of genres explore the complexities and tensions inherent in concerns about how to live well with the ocean. Across three chapters, I look at how the abalone fishery crisis is represented across a range of narrative forms, including in Mike Nicol and Joanne Hichens’ crime fiction novel Cape Greed, Shuhood Abader and Kimon de Greef’s collaborative non-fiction book Poacher: Confessions from the Abalone Underworld, and Mohale Mashigo’s speculative fiction short story ‘Floating Rugs’, among others. In doing so, I argue that existential and narrative approaches to virtue ethics act as fruitful theoretical lenses for the articulation and analysis of grounded and practical understandings of ethical complexity.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies (former - to 2024)
Depositing User:	Nicola Veasy
Date Deposited:	12 Nov 2024 11:46
Last Modified:	12 Nov 2024 11:46
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/97639
DOI:

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