Lines in the Water: Nature and culture at Lake Titicaca by Benjamin Orlove, University of California Press, 拢13.95, ISBN 0520229592 Reviewed by Daniel Pauly
SWATHED in legend and fishing nets, Lake Titicaca is the star of Benjamin Orlove鈥檚 Lines in the Water. It鈥檚 a well-written book and an excellent source of facts for anyone interested in the fisherfolk and fisheries of the lake, and how the former have managed to maintain the latter in spite of centuries of pressure from outside.
But Orlove reminds me of the Mork and Mindy TV series from the 1970s. Mork, you may recall, was a space alien in human form who kept stumbling over our human ways because they did not match those of his home planet. So, in Morkian fashion, Orlove devotes a large chunk of his first chapter to explaining how much the villagers insisted he should not forget them after his departure. Does he believe that other cultures, including ours, fail to understand the themes of remembrance and forgetting?
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As most anthropologists appear to do, Orlove uses bits of knowledge from other places to interpret what happens around Lake Titicaca, without returning new, broader insights. Unlike Mork, he eventually returns to his planet, the University of California at Davis, part of a system that has sent us many visitors. Most of them have failed to report to their leader that, for all our diversity, we make largely predictable responses to the challenges thrown up by living on Earth. And some of these responses generate the same new set of problems, as illustrated in the chapter on fish.
Introductions of new fish species are usually bad news, says Orlove. The trout introduced into Lake Titicaca fuelled a short boom of canning and exports, but also caused the extinction of at least one species of endemic fish. Cage culture of carnivorous fishes is also bad news. It leads to pollution and waste of the smaller fishes used previously for human food and now as fishfood. Yet setting up marine parks without involving the local people leads to active sabotage and 鈥減aper parks鈥�.
Orlove goes some way towards addressing these matters in a Titicacan context. But he needs to remember that whether we鈥檙e in Peru or Davis, California, none of us is really an alien.