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As we have seen, contemporarily the tonnara performs several roles: it is a live fish

lab, which functions as a baseline for tuna management; it is a food provisioning system; for

some it is a tradition wherein the mattanza is central; for others tradition is centred on the

tonnara as a sea trap; it is also a land processing plant; and it is a fishery complying with

fishery regulation. This latter reality is overwhelmingly what the contemporary tonnara must

perform, and so to operate, the other tonnara realities must work within the tonnara as a

fishery. This is one of the constraints and drivers of change for the contemporary tonnara.

Following on from the reality of the tonnara as a fishery, is the fact that for the tonnara to

operate successfully within the contemporary conditions characterised by the dynamic of

tight regulations and capitalist competition, it needs a level of quota that is economically

sustainable. For this reason the EU proposal has appealed for more quota for the traps.

However, through this appeal, which exists within a fishery governance regime, some modes

of the tonnara are being supported – the set trap as a food provisioning system and as a data

generating system – and others – mode of harvest and processing – are forsaken. In other

words, the invocations of tradition via the institutional frameworks of fishery regulations

provide the conditions for particular new realities of the tonnara to emerge.

To further our understanding of the emergence of new realities (and the simultaneous

rendering obsolete of others), we need to examine the tonnara as a fishery. The tonnara has

always been a hybrid social (political, cultural, technical) and ecological entity. Even though

the tonnara predates the term fishery, under contemporary sustainability discourses and

environmental regimes it is a particular hybrid entity officially called a fishery. Ontologically

a fishery is an interesting entity: a complex socio-material construction (Mansfield 2003, p.

6), ‘where various actors have attempted to contain and control the fluidity’ (Bear & Eden

2008, p. 487). Its hybrid construction includes a species, fishing methods, fishers and a range

of legislations (Bear & Eden 2008, p. 493). Even the FAO’s more prosaic description

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