This work addresses theoretical questions regarding economic production, particularly in relation to fisheries, emphasizing the ways in which human-environmental interactions are represented in social discourse, among both indigenous producers and anthropologists. The first chapter explores some of the parallels between two kinds of theoretical discourses, one on production and the other on language, each of which may be characterized as a language of nature. These discourses suggest a rigid dichotomy between the individual and the superorganic (society or culture), placing production and the act of speaking outside society. The producer and the speaker are presented as autonomous individuals posited by nature; they become intermediaries rather than agents, incapable of consciously modelling their own activities. An alternative, social approach emphasizes that human action, whether it be the appropriation of nature or verbal communication, is consciously motivated and necessarily embedded in human relations.