Trout Culture

In Trout Culture , Jen Corinne Brown deploys cultural, social, and environmental analysis to explore the historical origins of the Rocky Mountain West’s infatuation with fly-fishing for trout. Noting that this activity essentially amounts to glorified “bug puppetry,” and that it has a centuries-old global history, Brown seeks to understand how and why its western enthusiasts have come to perceive fly-fishing as a nearly religious, transformative experience with a special connection to their region (p. 3). She attributes this development to a prevalent understanding of the sport as a means of communing with nature and the nation’s mythic bucolic past—a romanticized vision that obscures both the deeply human history of the West’s freshwater fish populations and the conflicts that have emerged between people seeking access to them. In an ambitious narrative spanning from the mid-nineteenth century through the present, Brown reveals that the Rocky Mountain West’s present “wild” trout populations consist primarily of introduced nonnative fish, which gained ascendancy partly through the deliberate efforts of anglers and managers to eliminate native coarse fish that fishers found less tasty or aesthetically pleasing. Brown also exposes western fly-fishing’s elitist roots by chronicling the efforts of leisure-class anglers to impose regulations privileging recreational fishing over subsistence or commercial harvests by Native Americans, immigrants, and working-class individuals. She critiques the racist and classist undertones of these early attempts at management while nonetheless recognizing that these sportsmen conservationists often possessed environmental views far ahead of their time.

Archaeology · Art · Ethnology · Fishery · Fishing · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Recreation · Subsistence agriculture · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Ecology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law