In the last decades, coastal issues have become a matter of concern both for academics and development practitioners. During this period the Brazilian coast and adjacent waters, even in remote areas of the Northeast and of suffered from increasing pollution and degradation, due to a rapid industrialization, urbanization, deforestation and over fishing. Coastal communities, particularly those of artisanal fishermen, that were geographically and socially isolated in the past, also became important social actors in this process. In most cases, the beaches where they lived were expropriated by land speculators, for sale to tourists. In the mid 1970’s, some of these communities and small-scale fishermen organizations started reacting against land expropriation and over fishing by industrial fishing boats that threatened their livelihood. At the same time, increasing pollution of the rivers and estuaries, particularly in the Northeast threatened important ecosystems on which artisanal fishermen depend for their livelihood. Later, this social reaction was backed by progressive sectors of the Catholic Church and Unions, during the period of re-democratization of the country, following twenty years of military dictatorship. In some regions, these fishermen obtained a high social visibility and were able to create new democratic institutions to counteract those controlled by local oligarchies.
This process generated a growing interest by researchers to analyse these complex changes. It became clear that the methodology used by the social sciences to study social processes in rural areas was not appropriate to tackle the changing ecological and social relationships between society and the marine environment. Some of these researchers, particularly anthropologists, started claiming the need to establish a new and specific field or sub-discipline within Social Anthropology to deal with the complex relationships between man and marine ecosystems, called Marine Socio-Anthropology. This Reader is an attempt to give an overall and interdisciplinary view of the research in different fields of the social sciences undertaken by several Brazilian universities aiming to analyse the processes of social change in coastal communities, particularly those of artisanal fishermen. It is a result of papers presented at a series of national workshops called “Social Sciences and the Sea”, organized by NUPAUB-Research Center on Human Population and Wetlands, of the University of São Paulo, from 1988 to 1991.