Coastal Lives: Nature, Capital, and the Struggle for Artisanal Fisheries in Peru ( Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2019 ), pp. 228, $50.00 hb.

Maximilian Viatori and Héctor Bombiella, Coastal Lives: Nature, Capital, and the Struggle for Artisanal Fisheries in Peru (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2019), pp. 228, $50.00 hb.

In this compelling case study of artisanal fisheries in Lima, Peru, Maximilian Viatori and Héctor Bombiella draw on historical archives and over ten years of ethnographic research to document how lives, actions and interactions among artisanal fishers have been shaped by centuries of global forces beyond their control. In particular, the authors draw attention to neoliberalised fisheries policy over the past several decades, which has catalysed the reduction of complex social-environmental systems into single, commodifiable, manageable resource units. The authors argue these transformations extend an ongoing process of dispossession that has been unravelling the fishery commons throughout Peru's colonial history to present. The book is ethnographically centred on the fishing wharf in the Chorrillos district of Lima, Peru. Viatori and Bombiella describe the local debates around the development and ‘modernisation’ of the waterfront to illuminate tensions between working classes and affluent residents, and the rhetoric that reinforces these forms of social differentiation. The authors interrogate the pervasiveness of dominant discourses in fishery policy that depict artisanal fishers as uncivilised ‘coastal others’ in need of regulation and education about ‘individual responsibility’.

In Chapters 1 and 2, the authors convincingly argue that the contemporary crisis in Peru's...