The heritage industries of the Long Island seacoast.
Item
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Title
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The heritage industries of the Long Island seacoast.
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Identifier
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AAI9530895
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identifier
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9530895
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Creator
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Lang, Steven.
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Contributor
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Adviser: William Kornblum
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Date
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1995
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, General | Sociology, Social Structure and Development | American Studies | Geography | Agriculture, Fisheries and Aquaculture
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Abstract
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This thesis explores the changing symbolic meanings attached to commercial fishing and the seacoast during a period of environmental and economic change. In particular, it focuses on how small-scale commercial fisherman struggle to maintain their livelihood and preserve their heritage in a period of drastically declining resources and coastal change.;The gentrification of the seacoast and the proliferation of service-based economic activities associated with tourism has displaced and marginalized commercial fisherman and their traditional style of work. Despite their declining numbers, fisherman and their occupational culture exert a powerful cultural aura which has come to play a large role in maritime heritage tourism. The more economically marginal and anachronistic their work becomes, the stronger this symbolic and cultural aura becomes. In many coastal regions, the cultural and economic logic of tourism is transforming the declining productive activity of fishing into a new form of cultural consumption. Increasingly, fisherman aren't harvesting seafood as much as images of the natural, the authentic, and the traditional. They have become another vanishing species, an object of visual consumption for the tourist gaze. Traditional fisherman have gone from being treated as "eyesores" that ruined waterfront views, to picturesque objects of local color and regional pride.;Drawing on ethnographic work in the Long Island coastal zone, this thesis explores the social process by which cultural practices and meanings become "traditionalized" and acquire an aura of heritage.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
