| This dissertation explores the unfolding of patterns of environmental thinking and acting in the village of Lajes do Pico (Azores, Portugal) with an emphasis on transformations from whale hunting to whale watching. First, it provides an analysis of the whalers' perceptions of the environment—engendered through practical engagements with the oceanic surroundings of Lajes—revealing the reciprocity of human environmental relations and the emergence of whalers' ecological knowledge through time. Second, it describes the role of the local political elite in transforming the ecological knowledge of whale hunters into a discourse that framed the village of Lajes as a place with a whaling identity. It shows that this discourse, used for various political and economic purposes, subsequently became a cultural point of reference for the world views and practices of future generations of Lajence people. Finally, this dissertation looks at the introduction of whale watching in Lajes and the regulation of this activity within the bureaucratic context of the regional government of the Azores. The focus here is on the communicative interactions that took place amongst whalers' ecological knowledge, notions of whaling identity constructed by the local elite, and the views of commercially oriented whale watchers and bureaucratic agents who were both informed by reductionist scientific understandings of ecology.; This ethnography relies on a holistic epistemology developed by Gregory Bateson in order to account for human-environmental relations without falling into a Cartesian dualism that conceptually and substantively separates culture as mental schemata from nature as raw sensual experience. Because Bateson's epistemology makes it possible to scrutinize the reciprocity of relationships between social parts and ecological wholes, it is used in this dissertation as a means to bring together the anthropological study of perceptions of the environment and of processes of socio-cultural construction of ‘nature’. Hence, this dissertation is an example of a form of writing that combines a practice theory of environmental knowledge with a social constructivist approach.; Using Bateson's epistemology this dissertation shows that whale watching became the setting wherein Lajence relations with whales, and all the socio-cultural manifestations this entailed, were framed into the project of defining not only sound ecological practices but also a ‘re-embedding’ of the local economy of Lajes with a new pattern of human-environmental relations. By demonstrating from a historical perspective how both whale hunting and whale watching were part of regional, national, and international discursive formations this dissertation also demonstrates how the Lajence patterns of environmental thinking and acting were simultaneously locally spatialised and globally connected. |
