ENSKILMENT AT SEA

By focusing on Icelandic fishing, this article suggests that personal enskilment, in both fishing and doing ethnography, means not mechanistically to internalize a stock of knowledge but to be actively engaged with an environment. Such a perspective - informed by theories of practice - resonates with certain aspects of Icelandic discourse; when discussing enskilment, Icelanders sometimes refer to learning about fishing as the recovery from seasicknes, 'getting one's sea legs'. Practice theory, I suggest, has important implications for studies of economic production and differential success, in particular for discussions of the 'skipper effect'. Skills are bodily dispositions with differential distributions, but to isolate their acquisition and application from everything beyond the boundaries of the soma would be to subscribe to a reductionist theory of both learning and sociality. The alternative view of practice theory emphasizes the importance of attending to whole persons, master-apprentice relations, and the wider community to which they belong - decentring the analysis of enskilment and craftsmanship.