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highlights this hybridity. According to the organisation, a fishery can be an area, activities,

gear, vessel type, technique, community, port, flag state, form of exploitation, handling mode

or target species (FAO 2016a, pp. 1-3). For the purpose of distributing and policing quota, a

fishery is the target species and gear. In the case of the tonnara the target species is Atlantic

bluefin and the gear is a trap, licenced to operate in a specific area. Importantly, unless

operating illegally, fishery policy and the laws that administer such policy are part of the

hybrid assembly that defines a fishery.

To define the tonnara and enable certain realities is to delimit (and therefore limit)

what it is and what it is not. Take the EU proposal, as I discussed in the previous chapter. It

draws diverse traps together that are spatially scattered across the Mediterranean, and it

defines the traps, technically and materially as a series of nets that are set near to the coast

and trap tuna on their migration path. From this starting point the history is also important but

it is a particular aspect of that history i.e. numbers and catch records. The ecological

credentials of the tonnara are also relevant but these are based, as I outlined in the previous

chapter, on the trap itself, as a fixed net. And finally the distinguishing social feature of the

trap that the EU proposal identifies is worth sustaining is the labour; the number of people

employed compared to industrial fisheries. Of course the EU proposal is just that, a proposal

at this stage. However, it is a proposal that is based on the contemporary tonnara as a fishery

that operates within specific forms of fishery governance and within a wider sustainability

assemblage.

The EU proposal’s framing of the trap, as a traditional fishery is an act of inclusion

and exclusion boundary making. In the case of the term tradition, it is an act of defining what

tradition is and is not. This happens through technical as well as spatial terms. As I have

already highlighted, the concept of tradition in the proposal is based on the gear, the physical

net and practices of setting and monitoring the net, and excludes the harvest as a relevant

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