Now when you want to publish an article, you write it, you put it on your website and within days hundreds if not thousands of people have read it. Sometimes someone will approach you and ask if they can publish it in the old-fashioned way, in a journal, and you\u2019ll say \u201cWhy not?\u201d In the old days, you would write your paper, send it to a journal, wait for six months, then at long last you would receive a letter telling you about hundreds of changes readers who have no clue about what you are writing about expect you to make, and finally, another six months later your article would be published and you could expect that dozens or people would read it over a considerable number of years.<\/p>\n
This story is about the old days of the printed article. <\/p>\n
In the 1980s I worked for the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. I wrote three lengthy reports for the FAO. They published two (*) and turned down one. The story is about the turned down one.<\/p>\n
I worked on a fisheries project in B\u00e9nin, formerly known as Dahomey, in West Africa. Someone had done a preliminary investigation. He had gone to the beach in remote coastal villages and seen men sitting there. He had asked the first man why he was not fishing and that man had replied that he was not fishing because he was ill. He had gone to the second man, who had told him the same story: that he was ill. Then to the third, and so on. So he wrote in his preliminary report that the beach was littered with slackers and that it would be a smart idea indeed to teach them how to fish. Hence my presence.<\/p>\n
When I went to these villages the first thing I did was what I had learned at school: I wrote a questionnaire to be presented to every hut about who was living there, what were the ages and occupations. I had \u201cstatisticians\u201d go to beach villages and submit the questionnaire. Once the data collected I started analyzing them. I built what is called \u201cage pyramids\u201d: you put each individual in an age bucket, men on one side and women on the other of a vertical axis. It\u2019s called a pyramid because as you put the kids at the bottom \u2013 and there are many – and the old people at the top \u2013 and there are very few \u2013 it looks very much like a pyramid. But then I was in for a surprise: the women\u2019s side looked like a pyramid all right but the men\u2019s side was hollow: there were no men between the ages of 20 and 40, or I should say, apart from the dozen sitting on the beach. <\/p>\n
So I went to the women instead and asked \u201cWhere are the boys?\u201d And they replied: \u201cOh! They\u2019re in Gabon, in Liberia, in the Congo!\u201d \u201cAll right, and what are they doing there?\u201d said I. \u201cWell, they\u2019re fishing\u201d said they. – \u201cAnd why aren\u2019t they fishing here?\u201d – \u201cBecause there\u2019s no fish!\u201d<\/p>\n
So I said to my bosses in Rome \u201cI need to go see these guys where they really are.\u201d First they sent me to the Congo. On my second day in Pointe-Noire a fisherman approached me: \u201cThere\u2019s a woman who wishes to speak to you.\u201d I said fine and she came to see me and she said with much modesty \u201cI think you knew my brother.\u201d And I asked who he was and she gave me his name and I replied \u201cOh yes, I knew who he was: he drowned, he died in our project in B\u00e9nin and I was really mad when that happened.\u201d She added \u201cI know that and that\u2019s why I wanted to see you.\u201d We were several thousands miles away from where the accident had taken place and she had made my day in many more than one way: if anyone would have asked me now \u201cDo you still believe these people migrate?\u201d I knew exactly what to tell.<\/p>\n
I went to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Togo in addition to B\u00e9nin. I wrote up my report about fishermen\u2019s migrations in West Africa but the FAO wouldn\u2019t publish it. I said \u201cBut you\u2019ve published the other two about the social organization of fishing villages and self-subsistence in fishing communities, why not this one?\u201d \u2013 \u201cBecause it\u2019s controversial\u201d was the answer. I said \u201cFine, can I use it the way I see fit?\u201d They said yes, so I had it published in a maritime anthropology journal (**).<\/p>\n
But this is not the end of my story. A few years ago I came across a page-length recommended reading list that the fisheries division of the FAO had put together. My two FAO publications were not part of that list but \u2013 yes, of course you\u2019ve guessed it \u2013 the turned down report was gloriously there! <\/p>\n
(*) The Influence of Socio-Economic and Cultural Structures on Small-Scale Coastal Fisheries Development in B\u00e9nin<\/em>, IDAF\/WP4, F.A.O., 1985: 42 pp. (**) \u201cGoing out or staying home: Seasonal movements and migration strategies among Xwla and Anlo-Ewe fishermen\u201d. Maritime Anthropological Studies<\/em>, 1, 2, 1988: 129-155.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Now when you want to publish an article, you write it, you put it on your website and within days hundreds if not thousands of people have read it. Sometimes someone will approach you and ask if they can publish it in the old-fashioned way, in a journal, and you\u2019ll say \u201cWhy not?\u201d In the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-sociology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nNon-Monetary Distribution of Fish as Food in B\u00e9ninois Small-Scale Fishing Villages and its Importance for Self-Consumption<\/em>, PMB\/WP4, F.A.O., 1985: 26 pp.<\/p>\n