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relationally. Drawing on the work of Tony Bennett, Kane Race and Gay Hawkins (2011, p.

115) suggest:

...reality is enacted or performed through the multiple relations whereby things get
associated. So it is not a matter of identifying actions and practices as evidence of
social forces or representations of deeper structures but rather of tracing how the
“the social” emerges in the dynamic of both durable and fleeting assemblages.

In this sense a cause and effect analysis of change is too limiting. A relational politic

(Abrahamsson et al. 2015, p. 13) allows us to consider that the introduction of new

ways/things and the letting go of others, always take place relationally. Indeed, being

involves a ‘dynamic nexus of relationships through time’ (Marshall & Connor 2016, p. 4).

New assemblages and therefore new forms of life emerge relationally, as the material and

semiotic components that hold such worlds together reshuffle and reassemble.

In this chapter I attend to the various components of an assemblage that have come

together in recent years to create opportunities and constraints for the contemporary tonnara.

My focus is the people whose lives are constituted in part through the tonnara. In San Pietro

in 2013 there were multiple realities of caring for and of knowing tuna. Yet not all of these

realities and modes of knowing were acknowledged or given the opportunity to continue. I

outlined this point in the previous chapter by focusing on the legitimisation of certain forms

of knowledge over others. Furthering this argument, I now consider what happens when some

realities cease to exist or change so drastically that, as in the case of the tonnara, they become

a quite different entity altogether. At the centre are changes to the mattanza and the shift from

a food-provisioning tonnara to a trap which functions to collect and analyse data. Once we

better understand the reality of the contemporary tonnara as “multiple” then we can

understand processes of change as interferences, in which some assemblies are more

powerful and provide the conditions for certain realities to exist over others. The multiple

functions and meanings of the tonnara are not simply perceptions but are part of a performed

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