Drawing attention to scientific work as labour, the need for a closer examination of the subjectivities of educated, trained government employees in charge of field data collection on marine fisheries is emphasised. Field sciences such as fisheries science offer an opportunity to examine how workers engage with the field to produce value.
Tracing historical influences that contribute to dissimilar identities and experiences with the field among scientific workers in India today reveals how value in routinised forms of field-based scientific labour is better understood through embodied skills and cultural relations forged by fieldworkers.
Convincing people higher up for [us to do] this stock assessment was always a problem for CMFRI The top person will be mostly from agricultural science and he has to be made to understand what exactly is stock assessment, why this is necessary.
To my mind, there is always a questionwhy you are keeping on doing it for the last [ ] for the last few decades! what is it that you are doing? What is the value of that? What is the conclusion, how it is helpful for anyone, fishermen, or whoever it is?a retired CMFRI scientist. (Interview conducted on 4 January 2018)
State investment in institutionalised science cyclically poses existential challenges before government scientific organisations such as the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI). Explaining how their scientific labour creates value, why the scientific worker is an exemplary category of government employee and how the organisation’s expertise is irreplaceable, persist as continuing trials for CMFRI’s leaders since its formation.
The production of value through scientific labour on marine fisheries as generated by those at lower rungs of hierarchy of this scientific organisation is the focus of this article. The critical lens on labour relations in nature is often trained on the practices of resource-dependent humans such as agricultural peasants, fishers and forest dwellers with few exceptions examining other forms of labour in nature such as scientific work.
This article draws inspiration from studies of field sciences to understand the contextualised practices in which value in the field sciences such as fisheries science is produced by a class of scientific workers.3 The rise of fisheries genetics and a range of laboratory-based, mathematical and statistical computing research no longer requires successful scientists to be directly dependent on the field to demonstrate their expertise.
Despite this, some CMFRI scientists, particularly from the older divisions of the CMFRI, still engage in short and long-term field-based scientific practices and produce narratives that privilege and value fieldwork.
However, the forms of engagement with the field vary among scientific workers. In this article, I focus on the subjectivities of lower grade technical staff of the CMFRI whose primary responsibility is to visit the field and collect fisheries data, a crucial step in the making of catch statistics and fish stock assessments.