Economising the Rural: How New Markets and Property Rights Transform Rural Economies

How do new markets and property rights transform rural economies? Based on an ethnographic case study of the Icelandic fisheries, this article shows how the organisation of markets for fishing rights and fresh fish has transformed the rural periphery into a globally entangled site of investments, valuation and exchange. The empirical material shows, on one hand, how the economisation of the traditional small-boat fisheries has disentangled locally bound fishers into independent market actors and investors; and on the other hand, how daily economic coping re-entangles fishers into a new web of money-mediated relations and debt that pushes them to economise their operations for the purpose of increasing profit-making in order to stay afloat. While economisation has led to a general valorisation of small boats and the construction of a ‘quality’-oriented market niche, fishing communities of the rural periphery maintain their struggle to survive in a new and volatile culture of liberal rural capitalism.