This article revisits Paul Thompson’s major oral history project of Britain’s early twentieth-century fishing industry, situating it within the emergence of oral history as a practice in the 1960s and 1970s, and interrogating assumptions over the fixed category of ‘fisherman’ which informed the original research. Through a detailed look at interviews collected with those involved in the herring fishing of East Anglia and north-east Scotland, it finds that Thompson and his colleagues were still as informed by social science interviewing practices as they were oral history as an evolving methodology, and framed their approach at a time when fixed worker identities were taken as given. Revisiting the transcripts with a different set of research questions revealed how ‘fishermen’ moved in and out of fishing, with ‘farmworkers’ equally being found as regularly employed on boats. Thus the article argues that instead of fixed and life-long fisher identities, precarity, migration and seasonality were key features of many fishers’ involvement in the herring industry. Through focussing on mobility – across place and types of employment – this piece also reveals the central role of personal preference and intimate decision-making in mediating individuals’ choices to ‘follow the herring’.

中文翻译：

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谁是曾经的“渔夫”？重温保罗汤普森的钓鱼生活

本文重新审视了保罗·汤普森 (Paul Thompson) 关于英国 20 世纪早期渔业的主要口述历史项目，将其置于 1960 和 1970 年代口述历史作为一种实践出现的过程中，并质疑了对“渔夫”这一固定类别的假设，该类别为原文提供了信息。研究。通过对参与东英吉利和苏格兰东北部鲱鱼捕捞人员的采访进行详细研究，发现汤普森和他的同事们仍然了解社会科学采访实践，因为它们是口述历史作为一种不断发展的方法，并且在固定工人身份被视为给定的时候制定了他们的方法。用一组不同的研究问题重新审视成绩单，揭示了“渔民”是如何进出捕鱼的，与“农场工人”同样被发现经常在船上工作。因此，本文认为，许多渔民参与鲱鱼产业的关键特征不是固定的和终生的渔民身份，而是不稳定、迁移和季节性。通过关注流动性——跨越地点和就业类型——这件作品还揭示了个人偏好和亲密决策在调解个人选择“跟随鲱鱼”中的核心作用。