On the Ethnographic Categorization of Biodiversity in the Danube Delta “Biosphere Reserve”

This paper is an interpretative approach of a conflicting state of affairs in the Danube Delta, Romania, where local communities of Russian and Ukrainian fishermen claim their “rights” of wetland management in the context of (and sometimes against) the government policies of “conserving biodiversity”. My general assumption is that divergences acting between fishermen and the authorities in the Danube Delta are essentially rooted in a kind of “generalized (but not insurmountable) incongruity” of two such occupational and institutional “worlds” and, moreover “worldviews”.