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…this work was something that I would do because it moved me, it was
something I loved…But later when we would do the mattanze, it’s not that I
would do [pause], many people say that it is gory, because there’s a lot of blood,
it’s a very bloody thing, the room fills up with blood, understand, because the tuna
is full of blood, it’s a fishing practice, it’s not like a bull chase, where there are
two to three thousand people who come to see how you kill. It’s a struggle for
survival. You do it because you earn a living from it. You did it for the need
because it made you earn a living…when we would finish the mattanza we would
get 200, 300, 400 fish, at the end I would jump in the water, not for fun but to
wash the blood off, to clean all the guts and everything off me, it would make me
calm to wash everything off me. And that is fishing for tuna that I have been doing
for 47 years. I’ve probably pulled up 50,000 tuna in my lifetime or more. (2013,
pers. comm. 7 July)

These sentiments are shared by many tonnarotti, some of which I demonstrated in chapter

four, and they contrast many of the dominant perceptions of fishermen and tonnara practices

as brutal and careless.

There are gendered aspects to knowledge. Contemporarily there are both men and

women experts at sea. This raises the question of whether these new experts, some of whom

are women (including myself) disrupt the homosociality of the tonnara. Historically the sea

and tuna fishing was the domain of men, this also meant a division of knowledge. This point

adds to the previous chapter’s arguments about knowledge: the presence of scientific

observers and researchers disrupt knowledge hierarchies; for fisher knowledge to matter it

must be legitimised through science; and finally, within the current environmental regime,

certain knowledge practices are used in the pursuit of caring for tuna.

With no mattanza and local trade, the work becomes less meaningful to these men.

Over the previous twenty or so years the type of work and the style of mattanza have been

changing. These changes can be theorised through Hennion’s notion of taste as a process of

forming attachments (or detachments). One could say that many of the participants have a

taste for the mattanza and the surrounding curing practices. They have attuned to objects

(cured organs), other people, economies, practices, feelings, sensibilities, tuna, as well as

gustatory tastes. As a cultural activity, taste is collective and reflexive with ‘a past and a

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