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benefits of being associated with either end of those poles. To date the tonnara has not

received support by way of extra quota or finances from the European Union or the national

fishery authority: for instance, there has been no additional quota for traditional fisheries. Nor

do the powerful purse seiner and longliner industry groups, which have the capacity to lobby

in the European Union, support the tonnara. Indeed the tonnara must compete with these

large fisheries for quota. In the context of a country where the notion of tradition and

traditional foods is a significant part of the national imagination, this is interesting and says

something of the economic pull of tuna and the size of the industry. On the other hand the

recent changes to how and where harvest is done (i.e. transferred in cages to fattening ranches

in Malta) may hinder any appeal to tradition. The use of cages would also challenge its eco-

friendly reputation. For example, as we saw previously, Slow Food and Greenpeace do not

support these new methods and technologies.

In the context of the tonnara and struggles over resource use, how useful are the terms

traditional and local knowledge? My analysis so far suggests that these framings are not so

useful. Furthermore, it suggests that we should be just as critical of relatively new knowledge

paradigms in relation to culture (e.g. traditional and local knowledge), the experts and

institutions that generate these knowledge paradigms, as we should with the expert and

institutional knowledge about nature. Perhaps then, a more productive focus is to seek to

better understand the power dynamics of knowledge conflicts by examining how certain

knowledge and ways of knowing tuna are legitimised. In a Foucauldian framing this means to

ask how certain knowledge is made possible. This then involves abandoning the simplified

framing of certain knowledge as contextual and decontextual, and considering the process of

“decontextualisation” and “contextualisation”. The next section aims to explore these

processes in relation to the tonnara. The questions that seem important now include: How

does knowledge come to be in localised situations? To what end is such knowledge mobilised

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