Being Salmon Being Human

In chapter 12 of Martin Lee Mueller’s book Being Salmon Being Human, Mueller juxtaposes two different stories; one he finds lacking in imagination and in its ethical orientation to the world, while the other, he argues, points the way to a more sustainable, more ecologically justified and spiritually fulfilling existence. The first story is a fairytale, and like many fairytales, the story is supported by a kind of magical thinking that dismisses ecological limitations, as well as cross-species kinship. This Norwegian Salmon fairytale frames salmon farming as a question of national identity and technological sophistication. However, just like most fairytales the story hides a darker, more violent version of itself, one that revolves around the suffering of the salmon in captivity, the industry’s degradation of ecosystems, and the impoverishment of our imagination as a consequence of the commodification of the salmon.

The other story called Salmon Boy is indigenous to the Pacific Northwest and although it too is magical in its enchantment of the world, it inspires a vastly more grounded, indeed more rational, relationship to the salmon. The story tells of a boy who learns the importance of reciprocity – of giving the annual, nutrient-dense gift of the salmon back to river, where it can continue to give itself to others. Taken up in practice, the story of Salmon Boy moves us closer to a circular, gift-giving economy, in which periods of privation necessarily precede moments of plenty. Its power can also be felt in indigenous social practices governing the use of technologies, such as the fishing weir, which although it could fish the river dry, is designed not to, and which by the end of the season, is given back to the river (i.e. destroyed). Mueller calls these technologies participatory tools because they “facilitate a circle of participation, in full membership with both the human community and the more-than-human world” (238).

Being Salmon Being Human can be read as a work of material ecocriticism. This approach posits that “every material formation, from bodies to their contexts of living, is ‘telling,’ and therefore can be the object of a critical investigation aimed at discovering its stories, its material and discursive interplays, its place in a world filled with expressive – or narrative – forces” (Iovino 70). However, as Serenella Iovino is careful to point out, “the narrative agency of matter acquires its meaning and definition not merely per se, but chiefly if referred to a reader” (77). This is where Mueller’s book is a little incomplete – perhaps due to the work’s disciplinary influences which are mainly drawn from philosophy, as opposed to, say, anthropology. The book suffers from an absence of any explicit reflection on the situatedness of the author’s perspective (Mueller cites Latour at length, but perhaps he needs more Haraway?). And yet the work is infused with a conspicuous kind of sincere, middle class sentimentalism that shows itself in the work’s emphasis on the harmony of ecological processes and of the societies of those people attuned to them, and its corresponding silence on matters of entropy which becomes especially noticeable when the work scales out in (deep) time and space.

In conclusion, the work demonstrates a desire to move between narratives, but it does not examine closely the way in which these narratives are essentially overlapping, or the way in which people can live with and in multiple stories at the same time. Finally, its understanding of the origins of these narratives, ecological determinism on the one hand (Salmon Boy) and Cartesian dualism on the other (Salmon Fairytale), could have been supplemented with a more thorough Marxist understanding of the economic and political circumstances of their creation.

Laura op de Beke

Works Cited

Iovino, Serenella. “The Living Diffractions of Matter and text: Narrative Agency, Strategic Anthropomorphism, and How Interpretation Works” Anglia,  Anglia, 2015, vol. 133, no. 1, pp. 69-86.

Mueller, Martin L. Being Salmon Being Human. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017.