MORAL ECONOMY AND MAORI FISHERIES

Abstract

In this article I argue that the separation of commercial and customary fishing, which was a result of the 1992 Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Settlement Act, denies their essential integration in the practices of small-scale fishers across time and space. Theorists who have analysed the moral economy and petty commodity production invariably conclude that commercial production (for money and/or profit) and customary production (for subsistence and the fulfilment of cultural activities and obligations) exist on a continuum and that both are indeed necessary for the survival of small-scale producers. The definition of customary activity as the absence of monetary transactions is not consistent with either international legal decisions, or with the social reality of small-scale Maori fishers, who operate in mixed economies, sometimes moral, sometimes capitalist, and exchange fish in much the same manner, sometimes in order to achieve a balance and sometimes for profit.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.