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LIFE AND LOSS IN A SOUTHERN ITALIAN

TONNARA

Tradition as Multiple

As we have seen in the last chapter, loss pervades the tonnara – loss of forms of life, loss of

history, loss of community and finally loss of local tuna. This returns us to the question: what

is sustained and what is not in the project of sustaining tuna? Over the previous two chapters

I have analysed tradition and sustainability side by side and argued that certain knowledge

practices have been sustained through fishery management. Now, I extend the discussion to

questions of loss and analyse tensions between innovation and preservation within this period

of transformation. This is an ontological inquiry into forms of life of those human and more-

than-human beings that are changed through a complex of circumstances and practices,

including sustainability. In this chapter I look at the deliberate mobilisation of the term

tradition and its multiple functions. Sustainability and tradition are both, what Marshall and

Connor (2016, p. 1) have called ‘future-loaded terms’, which involve future oriented thinking

and activities. They are also terms motivated by a threat of loss – of species, of ecosystems

and of cultural lives. Central to the sustainability discourses and practices I have analysed is

the threat of the loss of the Atlantic bluefin. Central to the case study of tuna in San Pietro is

the potential loss of the tonnara, and more recently, in relation to regulatory pressures and the

recent EU proposal, is the loss of the mattanza, and its surrounding food production and

consumption practices.

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