Entre el futuro del recurso y el futuro de los hijos. Usos de términos y expresiones ambientalistas entre los pescadores del Delta del río Paraná

Abstract

The topic of the adoption and re-signification of environmentalist notions by local actors has been generally treated in the framework of their involvement in socioenvironmental conflicts. On the other hand, less attention has been paid to its appropriation in the course of social processes that don’t revolve around the environmental dimension. In this paper, I recur to field materials related to the fish production process that was located at the Victoria Department (Entre Ríos, Argentina) during the second half of the 1980s, in order to analyse the ways in which the fishermen employed environmentalism-related words and expressions to translate the main oppositions of the production process’ structure into moral terms. By examining the sources of the moral connotations attached to those terms and expressions, I am able to consider the fact that, within the next few years, the same fishermen engaged themselves in a process of over fishing.