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sustainability as a discourse. I take up the proposition, which the four-pillar sustainability

discourse presented, to include traditional and local knowledge in environmental

management regimes. I aim to question the primacy of knowledge categories that reify

traditional/modern and local/global binaries and to describe a biocultural complex, within

which multiple ways of knowing tuna interact but only some ways of knowing tuna become

legitimate in global fishery governance.

Reflecting on the day of the mattanza some two years later, these incisions in the tuna

have left a mark on my mind. They are signs of knowledge practices. As Cornelius Schubert

suggests ‘[k]nowledge can be embodied in the technology, gestures, looks, or bodily

configurations; it is knowledge in action, constantly being produced, transferred, stored,

retrieved, and changed within the ensemble’ (Schubert 2007, p. 134). In 2013 in San Pietro,

knowledge was embodied in the technologies, gestures, experts, policies, people, cuts, fish

and tools of the trade. Multiple forms of knowledge were present in those assembling. To

better understand these forms of knowledge in practice I delve into the nitty gritty – fish,

blood, weighing scale, knives, tagging devices, an EU proposal, and landing documents. I

focus on two activities at sea: the transfer of tuna from the trap to sea cage and the tagging of

tuna. Moving from the context of the fishery to the macro institutions I explore the processes

by which certain knowledge is legitimised and then circulates globally through policy and

environmental campaigns. Knowledge is produced in specific settings with tools and

institutionalised processes. It then goes through a socio-political process through alliances

with regulatory bodies to become regulation (and regulatory devices such as quota) and add

to a scientific body of universal tuna knowledge and feed into sustainability discourse. Within

this process only some kinds of knowledge achieve hegemony (Robbins 2000, p.132).

In relation to concerns over the future of the tonnara and of bluefin, I am interested in the

place of fisher knowledge in fishery management and how certain knowledge comes to

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