The Scientific Basis for Belief in Superstition: The Case of Fishermen in the United States

Series 2025-03

The Scientific Basis for Belief in Superstition: The Case of Fishermen in the United States

By Mu-Jeong Kho

Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4545-8731

Email: khomujeong@yahoo.co.uk

Empirical research has consistently demonstrated that certain occupational groups display a heightened propensity towards superstition. In the United States, one of the most salient examples is found among fishermen - a workforce consistently classified within the most hazardous category in national U.S. fatal injury statistics (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023, Table 1).

Table 1: Fatal work injury rates1 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers by selected occupations, 2021-23

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2023: 10)

The prevalence of superstition within this community is striking, encompassing a diverse repertoire of ritualised constraints - here employed as an analytic umbrella for taboos, proscriptions, and symbolic prescriptions that carry both normative authority and perceived functional value, operating simultaneously as codified rules of conduct and as culturally recognised mechanisms for enhancing safety, solidarity, and morale - through which occupational norms are codified, reinforced, and legitimised over time (Douglas, 2003; Hofstede, 2001). These include:

(1) boarding a vessel with a black bag, a practice avoided in fishing communities in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, where ethnographic accounts record a belief that black objects - particularly bags or boxes - bring misfortune (van Ginkel, 2007);

(2) transporting bananas on board, a long-standing prohibition in Atlantic coastal and southern U.S. fisheries, explained in historical and folkloric sources as arising from associations with rapid spoilage, insect infestation, the spread of disease, and symbolic links to bad luck (Kurlansky, 2013);

(3) hanging a mug so that its interior is not visible, documented in maritime ethnographies as part of a broader symbolism attached to the orientation and placement of bowls and cups, which can carry protective or magical significance (Firth, 2013); and

(4) whistling while fishing, believed to summon storms - a conviction deeply embedded in maritime symbolic culture and perpetuated through oral tradition, with examples recorded in both North American and European seafaring traditions (van Ginkel, 2007; Firth, 2013; Kurlansky, 2013; Fishing Booker, 2024).

While each superstition possesses its own culturally or historically contingent rationale, their cumulative prevalence warrants analytical scrutiny, as they collectively constitute an emergent, socially and institutionally reinforced occupational culture of risk mediation rather than a disparate assemblage of irrational acts (Beattie, 2013; Luhrmann, 2012).

Rather than being reducible to the discrete content of individual beliefs, the proliferation of such superstitions can be interpreted as a coherent - albeit informally constituted - system of regulation, emerging through unplanned yet actively reinforced, institutionally anchored, and collectively sustained processes of social reproduction. These processes are not merely the passive inheritance of tradition, but are continually enacted and validated through daily labour, thereby strengthening socially mediated perceptions of agency among individuals working in environments characterised by extreme unpredictability and mortal hazard (Bourdieu, 2020; Giddens, 2023). This interpretation aligns with Malinowski’s (2014/1948) seminal ethnographic observations among the Trobriand Islanders, where magical rituals proliferated in high-risk, low-control activities such as open-sea fishing but were largely absent in safer, lagoon fishing contexts. Similarly, Gmelch’s (1971) analysis of baseball players demonstrated that occupational superstitions frequently operate as ritualised strategies for re-establishing a subjective sense of control when performance outcomes are uncertain. 

Veblen’s (1899) conception of “habit” as a socially structured and institutionally reinforced mode of conduct directly explains the persistence of these maritime practices: in the case of fishermen, superstitions function as habituated behavioural patterns sedimented through generations of shared experience in hazardous work. These habits constitute an occupational “habitus” (in a Bourdieusian sense) that governs not only technical routines but also symbolic assurances of safety and competence - both essential to sustaining operational effectiveness and group cohesion in dangerous conditions (Bourdieu, 1990). Equally, Polanyi’s (1944) notion of the economy as “embedded” in social and cultural relations clarifies how such superstitions act as embedded regulatory mechanisms, integrating fishing as an economic activity with communal norms of safety, solidarity, and moral order, thereby ensuring the cultural reproduction of these safety-oriented practices under conditions of uncertainty. Together, Veblen and Polanyi’s insights offer a directly applicable explanatory framework for understanding the fishermen’s occupational culture in this case.

When working at sea - where the possibility of encountering fatal storms is a persistent reality - these ritualised constraints operate as a symbolic-psychological framework for anticipating and managing uncertainty. From a psychological perspective, such practices can be linked to locus of control theory (Rotter, 1966), wherein superstition shifts the perceived locus from uncontrollable external forces (e.g., weather, fate) towards a symbolically controllable social order (Kay et al., 2009). By codifying certain actions as forbidden or inauspicious, fishermen construct an implicit normative system that enables them to confront existential hazards with a heightened - albeit primarily perceived - sense of stability, preparedness, and control.

In this way, superstition (as an informal institution) functions not merely as a vestige of tradition or occupational folklore (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2011), but as a culturally mediated and occupationally embedded mechanism of perceived risk management, sustained through the socio-ecological context of maritime labour.

End.

References

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Fishing Booker (2024, October 30). Fishing superstitions from around the world (written by Albert). FishingBooker.com. Retrieved [2025-08-11], from https://fishingbooker.com/blog/fishing-superstitions-bananas/

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U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2023). National census of fatal occupational injuries in 2022. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf

van Ginkel, R. (2007). Coastal cultures: An anthropology of fishing and whaling traditions. Apeldoorn: Het Spinhuis.

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Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2011). Managing the unexpected: Resilient performance in an age of uncertainty (Vol. 8). John Wiley & Sons.

 

One should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following form:

Kho, Mu-Jeong. (2025, August 14). The scientific basis for belief in superstition: The case of fishermen in the United States [Blog article]. IPEAD Insights: Letters on Economics, Politics, and Philosophy [online]. Series 2025-03. Retrieved from https://mujeongkho.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-scientific-basis-for-belief-in.html [pdf download]

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