Sense like a Fish:fishermen’s community as a sensing and moving community of consumption

This paper sets out to develop a theoretical and methodological approach that enables to capture the specific nature of grass root activities of a fishing community. Towards this aim we draw upon literatures on recent post-human orientation of practice theories, movements and mobility, and the body and the senses. The methodology is based on sensory ethnography. The fieldwork focused on studying a communal fishing competition practice, it was conducted in 2007-2009 in Finnish Lapland.The study shows that it is not enough to theorize and conceptualize the motions and senses of human actors, but to acknowledge the equally important role of the non-human actors, the fish in this case, as well as other non-human entities such as constantly changing weather, in understanding the logic of a communal practice. This insight offers an extension of the scope of the unit of analysis of existing communal consumer research.