Surprises in the form of risks and uncertainties reinforce and sometimes complicate the vulnerability and precarity of human and nonhuman lives. We see such complex relations unfold in the coastal Philippines, where struggling smallholder fishers bear a significant share of the impacts of climate change, marine ecosystem collapse, and market failures. Montefrio explores how human and nonhuman coastal lives and their socio-material relations negotiate, co-constitute, and embody surprises in predictable and confounding ways. In his ethnographic work in Capiz, he examines the interactions among the smallholder fishers and the fishing infrastructures they build, the inshore fish they catch, the erratic weather that surprises them, the neoliberal regime that governs them, the debt they accumulate, and the precarious lives they live. Surprises brought about by extreme weather and other stressors impel smallholder fishers to engage in greater risk-taking behaviors akin to gambling. Left to their own devices, smallholder fishers negotiate surprises with a modest sense of control, shaping their material world as best as they can to improve their lives. Often, they are resigned to just the luck of the draw.

Marvin Montefrio is an associate professor of social science (environmental studies) at Yale-NUS College in Singapore and an affiliate faculty of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is also a faculty fellow of the Food Politics and Society Cluster of the Asia Research Institute at NUS. Marvin specializes in food, agrarian, and environmental studies, with a specific interest in food and sustainability in Southeast Asia.

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