Working Group 1 (WG1) is conceptually and operationally the largest working group in DFM, and the working group that has had the most consistent record of meeting throughout the project.
The mandate of WG1 is to coordinate research on the social economy aspects of dried fish within the project. We use social economy conceptually and descriptively. Conceptually, social economy is grounded in the heterodox economic argument that human economic relationships are influenced by a broad range of context-specific non-economic factors. Such influences include, but are not limited to, ecological (Pradhan et al. 2022), social, cultural, and historical (e-book). In the conceptual sense, our use of social economy draws on influences from a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical sources such as economic anthropology and geography, institutional economics, political economy and ecology, feminist theory, and critical approaches in international development studies. The concept of social wellbeing has played an important role in helping to frame the project’s social economic research.
Descriptively, social economy provides the basis for addressing the foundational project objective of holistically ‘mapping’ social economies of dried fish in Asia and elsewhere. Initially, the project initially aimed to spatially map variables such as flows of dried fish using visual methods. That objective proved difficult to realize, and, instead, the project has come to engage in mapping through written and pictorial descriptions and analysis of dried fish production systems in different locations. Value chains and similar cognate approaches have proven extremely helpful for describing spatial patterns of dried fish production and exchange. As the project culminates, it is engaging in various efforts to look at commonalities and differences in social economies of dried fish across the Asian region.
A particularly productive area of work within WG1 has been research on the place of gender within social economies of dried fish. Gendered analysis of dried fish social economies has strongly informed several of the project’s Research Teams and influenced numerous student research projects. That gender and social economies collaboration is currently at the forefront of DFM efforts to comparatively ‘map’ dried fish social economies across the region.
Woman fishworker with her child in a fish drying yard – Uttan, Maharashtra (Photo: Abhilasha Sharma)
