This book explores how fishers make the sea productive through their labour, using technologies ranging from wooden boats to digital GPS plotters to create familiar places in a seemingly hostile environment. It shows how their lives are affected by capitalist forces in the markets they sell to, forces that shape even the relations between fishers on the same boat. Fishers frequently have to make impossible choices between safe seamanship and staying afloat economically, and the book describes the human impact of the high rate of deaths in the fishing industry. The book makes a unique contribution to understanding human-environment relations, examining the places fishers create and name at sea, as well as technologies and navigation practices. It combines phenomenology and political economy to offer new approaches for analyses of human-environment relations and technologies.

IntroductionPart I: A metabolism of labour and environment1 'Working the ground'2 From Wullie's Peak to the Burma: naming places at seaPart II: Techniques and technologies3 Techniques to extend the body and its senses4 From 'where am I?' to 'where is that?' Rethinking navigationPart III: Capitalism and class5 'You just can't get a price': the difference political economy makes6 Structural violence in ecological systemsConclusion: labour, class, environments and anthropologyIndex