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instructing tonnarotti. The first stage of the transfer involved the crew pulling up the door of

the room. Boats behind us raised the net to corral the tuna towards the camera della morta.

On the boat the conversation turned to the senses. Luca sniffed the salty air and asked

whether we could smell the tuna. Tuna releases oil and you can smell it, he exclaimed.

Another tonnarotti disagreed about the possibility of smelling fish. This was another occasion

when fisher knowledge was expressed with degrees of certainty and suspicion, as well as,

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seriousness and joviality . When I asked Giuliano about this conversation later on he said,
no, but then qualified his statement by saying that you can smell the oil when a tuna has died

and maybe that is what Luca was talking about, because when they die, for instance caught in

the net, they release an oil.

The tuna went through to the camera della morta. Stage one completed. Then there

was a lot of waiting. The tonnarotti are not just skilled fishermen, they are skilled at

conviviality. Every day they prepared food together and ate together. According to Luigi this

was an important aspect of a good team. As he reflected in an interview, ‘I like it this way, I

have created a surrogate family, however still a family’ (2013, pers. comm. 18 June). While

we waited for the next stage, the tonnarotti unpacked and shared food made by one of their

mothers. In between mouthfuls of eggplant in olive oil, bread, mortadella and cooked beans,

they drank beer, smoked a few joints and a lot of cigarettes. But when the time came to work,

they stopped their joking and drinking and quickly rose to the task at hand – a mode of

working I continued to observe after the transfer.

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