Risks, rewards and uncertainty : fishermen of Southern Sri Lanka

Abstract

In recent years many anthropologists and economists have turned away from the construction of highly abstract models in favour of analytically focussed studies of the ways individuals choose among ; alternative possibilities of behaviour. Such studies may be called indigenous economics, generative models, the new ethnography and several other rubrics, but common to all is an emphasis on the processes of choice and decision-making. One outcome of these studies is that many of the ideological and rather sterile questions which have pervaded economic .anthropology, have been reformulated into topics open to empirical investigation. The important question is not whether peasants are "economic men", but rather to what extent their actions are directed towards the goal of profit maximization, and to what extent they are pursuing other goals such as leisure, prestige, amicable social relations and survival. Not whether peasants are intrinsically conservative, but to what extent their lack of reliable information, their social institutions, and the ecological uncertainties, restrain their responses to new economic opportunities. Not whether they are rational, but what factors, in what combinations, enter into their decisions.