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Anna Tsing’s (2005) metaphor of friction is a useful analytical space from which to

approach these questions of knowledge and power. As we have seen, the idea of friction

complicates distinctions of local/global without abandoning issues of power. It rejects a

simple explanation that global knowledge is imposed onto a local situation. Positioning

scientific fishery knowledge as an everyday practice allows us to seek out the ‘sticky

materiality of practical encounters’ (Tsing 2005, p. 1), acknowledging its context of

production while accounting for its processes of universalisation into institutions, principles

and textbooks.

In contexts that reinforce temporal and scalar binaries, the tonnara and fisher

knowledge are precariously positioned. To explain this outcome I forward the idea of

precarious knowledge as a way to connect knowledge to issues of power – the power of

expert knowledge and the power for knowledge made possible in a Foucauldian sense. By

precarious knowledge, I mean precarious in relation to specific knowledge practices and

institutions of conserving tuna, and then also precarious in relation to a wider sustainability

discourse of culture as a fourth pillar. Precarious knowledge is knowledge that holds an

uncertain position within environmental conflicts because it is not valued, or it poses a threat

to knowledge categories (such as scientific knowledge compared with traditional knowledge)

by disrupting them. It disrupts the traditional/modern and local/global divides upon which the

terms traditional and local knowledge are based. This is not a subjective precariousness rather

a structural and institutional form of precarity, wherein certain knowledge is valued over

other knowledge in the creation of policy, assessment of stock or classification of culture.

This is similar to the relationship between Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of “nomad

science” and “State science”. Within this relationship, State science functions by limiting and

regulating thought (Adkins pp. 199). State science favours reproducibility and predictability

(Adkins pp.197-198). Within this relationship nomad science can be inhibited by the

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