Economic-anthropological approach tostudy of fishing trade on the island of Cres

Šantek, Goran Pavel. (2000). Economic-anthropological approach tostudy of fishing trade on the island of Cres. Narodna umjetnost: hrvatski časopis za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 37(2). pp. 133-150. ISSN 0547-2504

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Abstract

Using the economic-anthropological approach, the author has shown in this paper that the production intended for sale has been existing since the pre-historic periods on the island of Cres, and that it became the dominant means of economy in the late nineteenth century at the latest. The early twentieth-century Cres economy can therefore be defined as the goods economy. Regarding Wolf's classification of the rural communities into open and closed, due to its firm economic, political and cultural connections with the world, the Cres community can be defined as open. This way, neither in Croatia nor outside the country, in ethnology much preferred ideal of the village as the closed corporate community does not dominate. It has also been shown that the process of industrialization has taken place in Cres simultaneously as in other parts of the world, followed by identical effects: the rural community becomes increasingly dependent on its social surroundings, and the fishermen become industrial workers. The Adriatic fishing- -trade has been discovered as an exceptionally early feature (about 6,000 years old) and as a folk trade, meaning that it was accepted by the Croats living along the coastline and that it therefore became a part of their tradition, but not folk in the sense of being a feature that would be characteristic of the Croats from the pre-historic times and that could be used as a distinctive feature that differs them from other ethnic groups. Having emphasized that other ethnological approaches to the study of economy do not have a thoroughly worked out system of researching the goods economy and the continuing changes that occur in an open community, as well as that they do not have a possibility of viewing such a community in its diachronic and synchronic contexts, the author advocates for a more intense use of economic anthropology in the Croatian studies of the rural economy.

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