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Fig. 6.5 Antica Tonnara di Favignana, Antonio Tammaro. Brochure collected 2013.

Through the framework of assemblage I would now like to concentrate on taste, and

suggest that there is a “taste network” of human and more-than-human components that are

connected, and changing in relation to the tonnara. A taste network frames the connections

between taste in a gustatory sense, taste as an aesthetic preference and tasting as a way of

learning about and attuning to modes and meanings surrounding tuna. Learning to process,

cure and taste tuna is also about attuning to gustatory tastes just as much as attuning to

meanings and practices surrounding tuna. As Antoine Hennion (2007) asserts, taste is more

than a connoisseurship of an object: taste represents a cultural activity that concerns a wide

range of practices, exchanges and attachments. Probyn suggests that taste ‘acts as a connector

between history, place, things, and people’ and ‘can also come to form communities: local

places that are entangled in the global’ (2012, p. 62, p. 65). Within this framework, taste

moves away from Bourdieu’s notion of taste as a social distinction towards an understanding

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