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INTRODUCTION:

THE PRODUCTIVE POWER OF SUSTAINABILITY

At the centre of this thesis is a fish called tuna. Within the context of an ocean crisis

summarised as too many fishers and too few fish (Power 2005, p. 102), its sustainability has

become a modern controversy. Indeed, this slippery subject is a matter of conflict around

which diverse groups gather with differing motivations, concerns, practices, forms of

knowledge and ways of caring for tuna. Often these cultural dimensions slip through the

analytical framework in the politics of saving tuna. This thesis brings these cultural aspects to

the fore and considers the people whose livelihoods and forms of life are caught up in the

project of sustaining tuna. We could thus say that the issue of tuna sustainability is

thoroughly "biocultural". Yet figuring a place for culture in fishery governance is no

straightforward task. There are several paradoxes that emerge in the processes of sustaining

fish and fishing cultures that must be first addressed. To this end my thesis analyses the

productive capacity of sustainability. I ask: What ways of knowing and being are made

possible, or become obsolete, through sustainability projects that respond to tuna crises?

Which groups are positioned to define the term and terms of sustainability and the related

term culture? What means do different groups have to produce and consume sustainably? By

which means – technological, epistemological or economical – do we practice sustainability?

What does it mean ontologically to be sustainable – to fish sustainably, to eat sustainably or

to buy sustainably? Which forms of life are transformed through sustainability? And what

modes of knowledge and expertise matter in rendering tuna sustainable/unsustainable? These

are cultural and philosophical questions with consequences for how diverse groups can be

ecologically and socially ethical, in a period characterised by fish and fisher precarity.

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