Flatheads and Spooneys: Fishing for a Living in the Ohio River Valley (Ohio River Valley Series)

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Description

For the reason that early 1800s, people have made a living fishing and harvesting mussels within the lower Ohio Valley. These river folk are conscious of an occupational and social identity separate from people who earn their living from the land. Sustained by a shared love of the river, deriving joy from the wonderful thing about their chosen environment, and feeling great pride of their ability to subsist on its wild resources and to master the skills required to make a living from it, many still identify with the nomadic houseboat-dwelling subculture that flourished at the river from the early nineteenth century to the 1950s.

Today’s community of fisherfolk is small and economically marginal, but their activities sustain a complex set of traditional skills and a body of verbal folklore associated with river life. In Flatheads and Spoonies, Jens Lund describes the activities, boats, gear, verbal lore, and sense of identity of the fisher folk of the lower Ohio River Valley and provides historical and ethnobiological background for their way of living. Lund connects the importance of river fish within the diet of inhabitants of the valley to local fishing activities and explores the relationship between river people and those whose culture is primarily land-based, painting a colorful portrait of river fishing and river life.

This book offers a look―historical and ethnographic―at a bit of-known aspect of traditional life within the American Midwest, still surviving these days in spite of immense changes in environment, resources, and economic base.

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