Time, Agency, and Responsibility: Understanding Vernacular Notions of Justice in the Global Supply of Brown Shrimp

This paper investigates how multiple understandings of justice emerge from situated understandings of time and agency in the global supply chain of brown shrimp. The brown shrimp supply chain is widely criticized for its unsustainable and exploitative nature; brown shrimp are caught in the North Sea and Wadden Sea by Dutch, German, and Danish fishers, after which they are trucked overland to Morocco where they are manually peeled by women labouring in factories. Shrimp are then trucked back to Europe where they are sold to wholesalers, restaurants, and supermarkets. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands and Morocco, this paper argues that notions of ‘luck’, ‘destiny’, and ‘risk’ are key for understanding how actors within this supply chain enact divergent notions of ‘justice’. Whereas Dutch fishers mobilize luck to account for uncertainties in everyday life, Moroccan shrimp peelers evoke the notion of destiny to construct a narrative about their precarious livelihoods. Corporate managers, in contrast, draw on the concept of risk to manage unpredictability. These concepts entail distinct understandings of the future and actors’ agency in shaping it. The ways in which actors constitute their relation to the future through notions of luck, destiny and risk entail implicit understandings of what a ‘just’ future might look like and how it can be realized. If justice is always, in Jacques Derrida’s words, ‘a will, a desire, a demand for justice to come, for that which is not yet present’, then more ethnographic attention is needed to understand how the future-to-come is understood differently by various actors. Rather than taking ‘justice’ as a theoretical concept, this paper argues that engaging with vernacular concepts such as ‘luck’, ‘destiny’, and ‘risk’ is necessary to understand how locally situated notions of justice are embedded in actors’ understandings of time, agency, and responsibility.