Changing Tides: Gender, Fisheries and Globalization. Barbara Neis, Marian Binkley, Siri Gerrard and Maria Cristina Maneschey. Halifax: Fernwood, 2005; map; xii+307pages; ISBN I-55266-159-8; $34.95 (paper). What Do They Call a Fisherman? Men, Gender, and Restructuring in the Newfoundland Fishery. Nicole Gerarda Power. St. John's: ISER Books, 2005; photographs, tables; viii+220pages; ISBN I-894725-026; $24.95 (paper).
The two books under review, although rooted in case studies of fisheries, are important contributions to the wider study of gender and globalization and will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars, students and activists. Changing Tides brings together work of the Gender, Globalization and the Fisheries Network, founded in 2000 by an international group of feminist researchers, community workers and fish workers. It is a collection of articles based on scholarly research, poetry, personal reflections and community reports on the impacts of economic

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restructuring of fisheries in diverse settings and from diverse perspectives. What Do They Call a Fisherman? by Nicole Gerarda Power is a full-length study of gender and restructuring in one particular setting: Bonavista-Trinity Bay, Newfoundland. Power is also a contributor to Changing Tides. What is most exciting about both of these books is the comparative perspective that informs the writing and the diversity of experiences that are documented, revealing the complex gendered dynamics of globalization which has brought both new constraints and new opportunities to individuals, households and communities. The careful attention paid to the household in these volumes is most welcome. The household appears to be a lost level of analysis in much contemporary research on globalization, which emphasizes either the individual or aggregate data on assumed homogeneous populations and communities. Both volumes also offer reflexive discussions of the ways that globalization has affected the roles and responsibilities of researchers and the possibilities for collaborative research.
Power's What Do They Call a Fisherman? is a rich full-length ethnographic study that firmly reminds us that people confront globalization not as isolated individuals but as gendered actors within households. Through the narrative voices of the men and women of Bonavista-Trinity Bay, Power takes us inside local understandings of and responses to the ecological and socioeconomic crisis of the cod moratorium. She identifies key elements in the ideals of masculinity embodied in the "traditional male fisher model" which some local actors follow in their efforts to maintain continuity with the past in a time of crisis. Meanwhile, others follow what Power calls the "modern male fisher model." They "look to the future" by adopting professionalization, science, privatization, limiting access and "transnational business masculinity." Both models disadvantage women through "the patriarchal dividend" that re-identifies women with domestic roles, renders invisible the work they do to sustain the fishing activities of the household, and removes them from consideration for retraining opportunities in malecentered government adjustment programs. Power's study urges re-evaluation of any assumptions that men as fishers have been more disadvantaged than women by economic restructuring in Newfoundland.
The work presented in Changing Tides offers glimpses into a diversity of gendered experiences in

contemporary maritime societies. Nayak describes the gendered impacts of the emergence of new elites with the privatization of once-communal water bodies for shrimp aquaculture and the marginalization and impoverishment of artisanal fishers in Kerala, India. Maneschy and Álvares analyse the changing consciousness of some women in fishing communities in Pará, Brazil. In order to receive social security benefits for their households, women need to re-classify as "work" tasks in the informal economy they formerly performed as extensions of household domestic labour. Overa's study on the coast of Ghana describes how local people actively engage with new opportunities globalization presents and how people's responses to global processes depend on where they are situated in local power relations. Here, a centuries-old "female market hierarchy" is in place denoting wide variation among women in income and social status. Market women's recent innovative entrepreneurial activity, based on their identification of a new commodity, "trawler by-catch," has inverted existing hierarchies (between elder sister and younger sister) but also undermined collective institutions (the lineage system).
McKay analyses the fascinating case of 33 women fish-processing workers and members of the Fogo Island Cooperative who filed a human rights grievance against the Cooperative when they were not called back to work for the 1999 season because their husbands were selling fish off-island and not to the Coop. The Co-op has as its mandate to maintain the economic viability of communities on Fogo Island and, for the collective good, had decided to link jobs in the fish-processing sector to family members of boats that continued to sell their catch to the Co-op. The dismissed women, many of whom had worked at the Co-op for more than two decades, argued that their right to their jobs should not be dependent on where their husbands sold fish, i.e., on their marital status. McKay interprets the women's victory as "fraught with ambiguity and the potential for unintended consequences" as the women's actions both established their identities and rights as globalized individuals and potentially undermined the communal and economic integrity of their local social context.
Pahlke presents a short tragicomic reflection on her experiences as a representative of Nova Scotia's Women's FishNet at a consultation session about fisheries management organized by the Canadian

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Department of Fisheries and Oceans. A male representative of a draggers' association objected to the presentation by the women from FishNet and suggested that, if women were speaking, Martians should be invited to speak as well. Titling her essay "Are Women Martians?" Pahlke highlights how decision-making about Canadian fisheries in the current context of globalization is a "closed circuit" that valorizes the knowledge of scientific experts, professionals and corporations and increasingly silences the views of residents who live their everyday lives in the environments and communities that are really affected by changing policies. Her contribution is a clear example of the reflexive, dialogic feminist approach taken in this volume that seeks to place the experiences of the global north on the same critical plane as those of the global south. As she finds, patriarchal cultures continue to thrive in the global north.
The essay by Power and Harrison is another interesting reflection and a deliberate attempt at antiimperialist feminist research that applies the conceptual framework of South Asian feminist theorist Bina Agarwal to the global north through an analysis of the gendered effects of the collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery. Following Agarwal's argument that resource degradation and privatization in commons-dependent rural communities promotes "revivalist" male-dominated hierarchical gender relations, Power and Harrison document the agentic role Newfoundland women play in re-trenching the gender division of labour within households by trivializing the attempts by un(der)employed male members to develop skills to contribute to domestic tasks and by supporting the personal consumption and leisure activities of husbands.
One topic that could have received more elaboration in the volume is tourism. The impact of privatization of coastal commons through tourism and the destruction of sensitive intertidal ecologies are briefly mentioned as are new sources of income through house rentals, food vending or cultural heritage tourism, but the global expansion of mass sex tourism in beach communities is a gendered impact of globalization in maritime communities that requires immediate and urgent attention.
The conclusion of Changing Tides is a valuable reflexion and auto-critique by two of the editors, Neis and Maneschy, who point to the potential

for collaborative research and networks to "challenge the negative tendencies within neo-liberal globalization." Certainly the diverse cases, methodologies and perspectives grounded in microlevel observation and analysis that are presented in both of these books take readers inside globalization and connect us to actors with alternative views and experiences of new opportunities and constraints and help us avoid the McDonaldization of contemporary research on globalization.
Sally Cole Concordia University