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tiamatschild) wrote2010-02-18 09:46 pm
tiamatschild) wrote2010-02-18 09:46 pm
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A quick observation about the cultural discourse around whaling...
The commercial exploitation of whales has always been multifaceted, but the most valuable product derived from them has always been the unsaturated fat produced by rendering their blubber. Whale oil.
In the middle ages the Basques hunted bowheads for their meat as well as for their oil, and they would, of course, take their baleen, which is a very versatile substance, but it was the oil that made it profitable to lay out the substantial amount of capital required for the journey. Several centuries later the same would be true of the whaling industry centered in Nantucket. When that industry turned its attention to sperm whales, it would be for the oil, as well as for the spermaceti and the possibility of ambergris. But while these were excellent and valuable side benefits that helped determine choice of target, it was always the oil that made the venture the profitable.
When, at last, the factory ships were invented, and the blue whale population in the Antarctic sea was heavily targeted for the first time, it was for the oil. By that time the oil was not being used to light lamps, it was being used to make margarine for inter-war households. It was this round of whaling, with the trying out occurring on the high seas, that, though it lasted for what was probably a single generation, whale wise, made the Antarctic blue whale population one of the most endangered in the world.
Oil, oil, oil. It was always the oil that drove the industry. Now, with the ban on large scale whaling, this is no longer exactly true. The whales killed by humans now are killed primarily for their meat. This is the case whether it's Japan's heavily mechanized whaling fleet or the handful of whales taken by traditional fisheries yearly. But the traditional fisheries were never part of commercial whaling to begin with, being about subsistence and, generally, communal generosity and bonding - no one can eat a whale alone, just as no one can catch and kill the creature without aid. Japan always was fishing for meat as well as oil, and the bottom is gone from the whale oil now. That shift isn't surprising.
It was about the oil.
So why exactly does the social construction of "why whaling?" always involve so much discourse about things gendered feminine? Corsets and parasols (somehow the illustrations conveniently omit that men used whale bone umbrellas as well) and bonnets. Unless you are actually reading a book that is explicitly about whaling, you won't generally get a discussion of whale oil, and the market's vast hunger for clear burning lamp oil, and for lubricants that wouldn't readily dry out. That was what commanded the bulk of the profits from whaling, that is what drove the industry. But instead we get this discussion of women. Frequently the word "vanity" is actually used. There's a lot of implicit condemnation of women for wanting pretty things and by that desire causing the death of these magnificent animals.
It's bizarre, but it's really not just whaling. It's a discourse you see a lot around intensive exploitation of wild animals and the endangerment there-of. God forbid we have a discussion of human interaction with our ecology without invoking a misogynist Aesop or two (or three, or four, or...) about women's frippery to leaven the loaf.
In the middle ages the Basques hunted bowheads for their meat as well as for their oil, and they would, of course, take their baleen, which is a very versatile substance, but it was the oil that made it profitable to lay out the substantial amount of capital required for the journey. Several centuries later the same would be true of the whaling industry centered in Nantucket. When that industry turned its attention to sperm whales, it would be for the oil, as well as for the spermaceti and the possibility of ambergris. But while these were excellent and valuable side benefits that helped determine choice of target, it was always the oil that made the venture the profitable.
When, at last, the factory ships were invented, and the blue whale population in the Antarctic sea was heavily targeted for the first time, it was for the oil. By that time the oil was not being used to light lamps, it was being used to make margarine for inter-war households. It was this round of whaling, with the trying out occurring on the high seas, that, though it lasted for what was probably a single generation, whale wise, made the Antarctic blue whale population one of the most endangered in the world.
Oil, oil, oil. It was always the oil that drove the industry. Now, with the ban on large scale whaling, this is no longer exactly true. The whales killed by humans now are killed primarily for their meat. This is the case whether it's Japan's heavily mechanized whaling fleet or the handful of whales taken by traditional fisheries yearly. But the traditional fisheries were never part of commercial whaling to begin with, being about subsistence and, generally, communal generosity and bonding - no one can eat a whale alone, just as no one can catch and kill the creature without aid. Japan always was fishing for meat as well as oil, and the bottom is gone from the whale oil now. That shift isn't surprising.
It was about the oil.
So why exactly does the social construction of "why whaling?" always involve so much discourse about things gendered feminine? Corsets and parasols (somehow the illustrations conveniently omit that men used whale bone umbrellas as well) and bonnets. Unless you are actually reading a book that is explicitly about whaling, you won't generally get a discussion of whale oil, and the market's vast hunger for clear burning lamp oil, and for lubricants that wouldn't readily dry out. That was what commanded the bulk of the profits from whaling, that is what drove the industry. But instead we get this discussion of women. Frequently the word "vanity" is actually used. There's a lot of implicit condemnation of women for wanting pretty things and by that desire causing the death of these magnificent animals.
It's bizarre, but it's really not just whaling. It's a discourse you see a lot around intensive exploitation of wild animals and the endangerment there-of. God forbid we have a discussion of human interaction with our ecology without invoking a misogynist Aesop or two (or three, or four, or...) about women's frippery to leaven the loaf.
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Tangent:
Neither Japan nor Iceland's food-whaling is subsistence-based, or indeed necessary, though--whale meat is very hard to sell in Iceland, and Japan has a vast stock of frozen whale meat. It's partially ideological, and partially (at least in Japan) to keep jobs in traditional whaling towns (which, arguably, could probably convert to whale-watching tourism instead). There's still a big difference between that (small-scale) commercial whaling for meat and, say, whale hunts for meat by Alaskan tribes.
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The margarine is a whole story in itself - I am pretty sure I remember Richard Ellis referring to it in some of his stuff from the seventies, but I haven't read his newer work on whales, he might talk about it more there. Dan Bortolotti's Wild Blue: A Natural History of the World's Largest Animal has several chapters covering his interviews with whalers who worked the Antarctic, and he discusses it in those. It was not widely known. The companies which produced the margarine actively concealed it, because eating whale meat was considered unpleasant and vaguely unhygienic by their target markets.
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...I should probably ingest this caffeine.