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legs’ as a way of gaining knowledge in an Icelandic fishing context. Seasickness for Icelandic

fishermen is caused by a lack of practical knowledge (Pálsson 2000, p. 26). Western

discourse has tended to separate scholarly knowledge from everyday understanding (Pálsson

2000, p. 27). Becoming skilful, Pálsson argues, involves being actively engaged with a

practical world, ‘not simply, as many cognitive studies have assumed, the mechanistic

internalization and application of a mental script, a stock of knowledge or a “cultural

model”’(2000, pp. 26-27). According to Mackinson and Wilson (2014, p. 123) experienced-

based knowledge ‘may include the detailed and long term information on fish behaviour,

patterns in distribution and abundance, knowledge of habitats, responses to environment’.

This knowledge could be included in fishery management to increase the credibility of

information (Pinkerton in Mackinson & Wilson 2014, p. 123).

Experiential and tacit knowledge certainly relates to the way that many of the

fishermen explained their accumulated knowledge. For example, Luigi explained how he

learned the role of the rais:

I learnt by watching, by watching rais, by watching tonnarotti. Before in the
tonnara there were only elderly people. You would arrive as a 14-year-old
apprentice. They didn’t teach you a thing, you would only learn by watching
everything. (2013, pers. comm. 18 June)

This process, Luigi contrasted to the knowledge acquisition of scientific observers.

They are not capable of knowing the fish as well as I know it. They study for
doing their work but they have never seen the fish before, they don’t have
experience. But I on the other hand can “read” the fish from under the boat, and
they don’t realise. They have no idea what they are doing, they have to do this
because they have to control and observe. (2013, pers. comm. 18 June)

Clearly Luigi regards his knowledge of tuna as thorough and in a way superior to or at least

more detailed than the knowledge of the observers, because of his long experience in

“reading” tuna. Yet, even though we could say that the observers have a different practical

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