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to take into consideration and the authors suggest further research would help to explain these

observations.

Katherine Emery, who on a Fulbright award participated in scientific investigations in

San Pietro in 2008, suggests that the university’s program ‘provides invaluable outreach and

exchange between academics and fishermen’ (2010, p. 31). While this is the case, it is worth

thinking about the process of legitimising fisher knowledge. As McGoodwin et al. suggest,

equality between knowledge frameworks within attempts to integrate fisher knowledge is the

exception rather than the rule (2000, p. 249). Even the word ‘integration’ highlights the

uneven knowledge hierarchies in the context of fishery management. In the contemporary

environmental order, the only way for fisher knowledge to be made relevant to the wider

body of knowledge is for it to be proven through official scientific methods.

This example demonstrates the process of decontextualisation. That is, the process of

legitimisation of fisher knowledge involves a scientific framework. Fishers’ observations of

mistral winds are confirmed or denied by fishery scientists and science and can then become

part of a wider knowledge pool on Atlantic bluefin. The knowledge generation process, in

this and earlier examples of data collection, follows the path of specific to general, contextual

to decontextual. That is, the eventual use of knowledge in the current environmental regime is

to create data on tuna that feeds into management responses and State (EU) fishery policy.

Fisher knowledge has a particular relationship to what Deleuze and Guattari have called State

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science, (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p. 362) , which I defined in the introduction of this

chapter. What is not appropriated into State science is de-legitimated or becomes repressed

(Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p. 362). In this sense fisher knowledge is a precarious knowledge

that exists in pockets of practices relating to the tonnara or goes through a process of

legitimisation and decontextualisation to become part of a State science. Perhaps it is, as

Robbins has argued, the proximity to the State that allows for some kinds of knowledge to

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