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for those who fish tuna or understand their identity and community in part through their

relationship to the tonnara and tuna? How is this new assemblage forming? Is the tonnara

still a tonnara without some of the principle practices (e.g. mattanza, curing tuna) that have

endured along with the tonnara for centuries? The focus on gear and the legitimisation of the

trap as traditional and as a data generator, curtails these concerns that are highly pertinent for

locals. Furthermore, the focus on gear denies that the trap is embedded in wider practices that

make the tonnara meaningful for some participants.

This is as much an ontological question as it is a technical and classificatory question.

If we return to the idea that the tonnara, like a fishery, is a hybrid assemblage, then the

relationships among the components and the makeup of those components are surely

important to the tonnara as an entity. If we understand the tonnara as formed through an

assemblage of human and more-than-human entities, then it follows that the relationships

among those entities is important to the ontology of the tonnara: especially when considering

that the purpose of the tonnara is now to operate a scientific laboratory. This is to understand

the tonnara as constituted through relational practices, and to understand those people who

participate in the tonnara, as also constituted in part through relational practices. This

framing positions practice as the means through which relations are enacted and transformed

(Zeigler 2014, p. 10). To practice mattanza or to process and preserve tuna is also to practice

relationships among fishermen, and between fishermen and tuna. Of course these

relationships have been in continual transformation but they have endured until recently, as

part of the complex relationships that have made up the tonnara. If these relationships no

longer exist then what has the tonnara become? Can we still say that the tonnara is a tonnara

without these relationships? This is a question about the degree of change that can take place

for an entity to transform into an entirely different entity. It is also a question of what

constitutes the socio-cultural dimensions of a fishery. As we have seen, transformations have

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