From Practice to Artefact: Heritage Licensing and the Ontology of Coracle Net Fishing in Wales

Abstract

This paper examines how the designation of coracle net fishing in southwest Wales as intangible cultural heritage is reshaping the ontology of the fishery. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research with the Carmarthen Coracle and Netsmen Association, the study approaches river fishing not simply as an economic activity but as a culturally embedded practice through which relationships with river environments, kinship, ecological memory, and seasonal time are enacted and sustained. Coracle fishers on the River Towy possess detailed ecological knowledge developed through repeated engagement with water conditions, fish behaviour, and shifting river rhythms across generations. In the context of salmonid decline, polluted catchments, and regulatory tightening, heritage licensing now permits continued practice while restricting the sale and retention of migratory fish. The paper argues that this shift operates as an indirect form of displacement. While affirming cultural value, it reclassifies a working fishery as heritage display and constrains the material rights and adaptive capacity that sustain it as livelihood practice. By analysing how fishers interpret and respond to this reclassification, the paper shows how bureaucratic heritage frameworks transform what the fishery is understood to be, from reciprocal labour and livelihood to curated cultural artefact. The Welsh case contributes to anthropological debates on heritage governance, bureaucratic classification, and the regulation of small scale resource practices under environmental change.