Cultural ecology seeks for transactional interrelationshps or dialectical dialogues between natural setting and socio-cultural phenomena. Its recent development has made it possible to make clear the essential characteristic of fishermen's cultures, since their cultures, overt and covert, especially at the subsistence level are conditioned to a larger extent or even determined by various natural conditions such as submarine topography, bottom material, tidal and ocean current, temperature on the surface of the sea, direction of the wind, cyclical movement of the moon, biofacies as well. In view of these facts, it seems that fishermen's cultures in the Far East and Southeast Asia can be roughly classified into two types of cultures, that is,
gata-culture and
pisyi-culture (reef-culture) from the ecological viewpoint. The central theme taken up in this article is the ethnological and ichthyological explanation of a particular fishing boat, called
t'iao-pai-ch'uan in Chinese,
rûa philok in Thai,
ghe tre in Vietnamese and pinek, mandit, pondit, etc. in Indonesian.
T'iao-pai-ch'uan is regarded as a representative culture trait of the
gata-culture together with other traits of fishing technological system, such as mud sled, special kinds of rake, crab stake net, special kinds of lift net, etc. Since I first made public an article concerning
t'iao pai-ch'uan on the occasion of the IXth Pacific Science Congress in 1957, I have been collecting data concerned in my field work and literature. Now I would like to summarize the results of my researches made so far.
The “Idealtypus” of
t'iao-pai-ch'uan is a long and narrow fishing boat, with a white board attached to the one side and a net stretched on the other side. While a fisherman sitting in the stern of the boat slowly rows the boat in the dark night, fish frightened by the reflexion of the white plank hung down obliquely into the water, plunge into the boat or in the net set on the opposite side of the boat and fall down to the bottom of the boat where the leaves of nippha are spread to prevent the fish from jumping out of the boat. In view of this characteristic, we may regard the boat itself as a composite “aerial trap” stemmed from the “Kulturherd” of China. It is true that mention was made of
t'iao pai-ch'uan in many classical and ethnographical literature, Chinese, French, English, Duch and Indoneisan. Therefore, I endeavored to make use of these materials as much as possible in this article.
One of the main problem dealt with in this article is to make clear the meaning of the description “
ming chi fang” in the Chinese classic entitled “Kwan-tung Hsin-yü”. The Chinese writers in the past seem to have falsely interpreted
lang as a long piece of wood used for threatening fish, or plank of boat. It is considered that
lang was confused with
chi, the synonym for
chieh meaning comb. Apparently in the poem entitled “Hsi-chêng-fu” writteen by Sunfên at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, we can find the following verse:
fêng ch'i ming chi, that is, the wind begins to blow and chi sounds. In this verse the word
chi is used instead of
lang. During my stay in Vietnam I found
ghe tre or
t'iao-pai-ch'uan equipped with a comb-like auxiliary gear and also a white board in a river near Cap St. Jacques. This gear is just the same as
tuasiatti-ra-kung equipped with in shrimp catching boat used in Thailand and also as the auxiliary gear provided in
kalaskas used in the Philippines. In view of the above facts, I would like to regard “
lang” mentioned in “Kwan-tung Hsi-yu” as
chi or comb-like auxiliary gear.
Lastly I tried to explain various functions of
t'iao-pai-ch'uan in connection with visual
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