Voices from Off Shore: Narratives of Risk and Danger in the Nova Scotian Deep-Sea Fishery

John Van West is a policy analyst at the Ontario Native Affairs
Secretariat.

Marian Binkley, an anthropologist, has had a longstanding interest in
East Coast fishing communities. Voices from Off Shore is a collection of
“interviews with the people involved in the harvesting sector of the
deep sea fishery of Nova Scotia.” Aside from some introductory and
concluding remarks by the author, there is little analysis of the
narratives; the absence of a larger theoretical context makes it
difficult to grasp their anthropological significance. Nor do we ever
discover how Nova Scotia deep-sea fisheries differ from other deep-sea
fisheries. Nevertheless, Binkley’s readable first-hand account of
family and community life in Nova Scotia’s offshore fisheries sector
makes a useful contribution to the field of maritime anthropology.