P-05/03 Paradigm lost? The post-modern situation in the Fisheries in Finnmark, Norway

Paradigm lost? The post-modern situation in the Fisheries in Finnmark, Norway Jahn Petter Johnsen, Centre for Rural Research Summary In more than 50 years considerable effort has been put into the project of modernising fishing communities in the northern and eastern county of Norway, Finnmark. Modernity has pervaded Finnmark, and has changed the material conditions in Finnmark. Finnmark is today much less fisheries dependant than in earlier decades. However, this does not seem to have changed the rhetoric about Finnmark as a region of fishermen and fish processors. The language games that we can identify in the Finnmark discourse do not necessarily correspond to empirical findings. The paper address the question whether Finnmark today is better conceptualised through some of the terms borrowed from post-modern ideas? If so, also social science has to abandon the pre-assumption of one privileged sector, the fisheries, that forms the material centre in a society or community, and instead follow both practices and rhetoric through more of the relations that together constitute reality.