The Skipper Effect Debate: Views from a Philippine Fishery

The debate over the "skipper effect" encompasses two issues in the maritime anthropological literature: whether a skipper's skill plays a statistically significant role in explaining variation in catch size among boats and whether folk models of the role skippers play in fishing success explain what statistical models cannot. This article reviews the theoretical debates about the skipper effect and contrasts the cultural and economic context of North Atlantic fisheries with a purse seine fishery for mixed tropical species in the Philippines. Whereas most North Atlantic studies have struggled to identify variables that represent a captain's fishing skill, we argue that a boat's mean catch per trip and the number of crew both serve as reliable, indirect measures of a skipper's skill in this region. We attribute the absence of an ideology of the skipper effect to the limited competition for skippers in kin-based, petty commodity forms of production.