Page 205 - KATE_JOHNSTON_2017

matter and is regarded as expert knowledge. What are the contexts and processes through

which some experts matter, rendering other experts (fishers) less relevant in defining the

terms of tuna management, culture and sustainability? This inquiry helps to develop our

understanding of the productive capacity of sustainability.

To deepen this analysis we need to look at culture as practices of knowledge, values

and customs that are not always consciously experienced or articulated, while also viewing

culture as a discursive and political tool that is mobilised in specific contexts, for example the

use of the term traditional fishery or traditional knowledge. Returning to Bennett’s (2013)

framework of the culture complex, we can think of culture as a term best understood in a

historical context and as a series of knowledge practices, which are the ‘product of specific

forms of expertise performed in particular institutional settings’ (Bennett 2013, p. 2). My

inquiry is into experts and institutions of culture and of nature (fishery scientists, universities,

fishery authorities, social scientists, UN and EU) as well as those intersecting spaces and

moments, an example would be when fishery experts call upon the term culture.

Fishers, scientists, business operators and observers practice diverse forms of

knowledge in the tonnara. Annemarie Mol’s notion of interference helps us to think through

knowledge conflicts and collaborations, and the epistemological and ontological changes in

the contemporary tonnara. Mol suggests that reality is multiple and is performed and

interfered with, rather than simply seen from different perspectives or constructed (1999, pp.

76-77). In situations of multiple ways of knowing and being, some ways are rendered more

stable than others. In San Pietro there were multiple realities of caring for and knowing tuna

but not all have been acknowledged or given equal opportunity to contribute to fishery

management.

To analyse this situation I consider all knowledge to begin in a local context. That is,

not only is knowledge contextual in geographical and scalar terms but also in terms of one’s

193