Societies, Cultures and Fisheries from a Modeling Perspective

Cultures can be viewed as sets of beliefs and techniques allowing societies to cope with their environment. We here propose simple and explicit schemes showing how fishermen could encode beliefs about a renewable resource, fish. We then discuss the dynamics of the society, represented by economic and cultural variables, coupled to the fishery represented by fish abundance. According to different coding schemes and sets of parameters, several dynamical regimes are observed, including one with endogenous crises.