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(2011, p. 115). We could say that for the trap to endure within the context of alarming stock

levels and the corresponding environmental regime, it has reconfigured to become not only a

food provisioning system but also a data generating system, which performs a role as a

baseline for the development of future tuna management. But what is also important for the

traps to endure, is the institutional support of those regional and global management regimes.

If we understand the trap as a socio-technical and biocultural entity, then we cannot really

separate fishery science and its practices, including knowledge practices, from the trap at this

moment in history. The trap has become a socio-technical, biocultural entity that is made up

of an assemblage of fishermen, fishery scientists, tools of their trades, fisher and fishery

scientist knowledge, tuna, nets, cages, quota, boats, incisions, traders, discourses of tradition

and of saving tuna, scientific papers, EU meetings, passionate men and diverse tastes for

tuna. The tonnara is made possible contemporarily through this assemblage.

Perhaps we are beginning to get a little closer to what is on the table when we call for

sustainability to include culture as a fourth pillar. In the case of the tonnara, tradition is a

flexible category put to use for different political reasons, as seen in the EU proposal,

tradition that exists in the system of fishing for tuna, stops at the net. We could say that the

proposal ticks the boxes of a four-pillar model of sustainable development by addressing

socio-cultural, economic and ecological elements. However, while these boxes may be ticked

it does not negate the point that a four-pillar model of sustainability is a political and

discursive tactic that masks its own historical, technical and cultural makeup. As I have put

forward previously, the notion of a four-pillar model where social, cultural, economic and

ecological elements must be brought together is only possible with the discursive and

disciplinary separation of those elements in the first place. But as it should be clear by now

any conservation practice is a bio-techno-cultural configuration itself, even those that

proclaim to address only one or the other of those elements. What should also be clear by

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