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in the stabilisation of certain aspects of a past and the loss of others. The 2015 EU proposal

provides a good example: it situates the trap within the borders of permissibility and relegates

the mattanza and wider post-harvest practices to a position of historical and cultural

background, effectively irrelevant to the future tonnara. Here tradition is a malleable term

that exists in the system of fishing for tuna but that stops at the net. As a result the tonnara is

redefined and the harvest and local processing industries obscured. The contemporary

tonnara is reconstituted as not only a food procuring system but as a system for collecting

scientific data about tuna.

These transformations are produced through the conditions of sustainability. They are

in response to the particular forms of modern fishery regulation, which is based on

controlling access to fishing via the quota system and regulated through regional bodies and

the nation state. In the case of Italy, fishery regulation through quota happens in highly

politicised and unequal ways, at the expense of what it is to be a fisherman in southern Italy

or at least a tonnarotti in San Pietro and Favignana. Within this political context the EU

proposal is an appeal to tradition and to sustainability. This is an example where the political

will and the processes of justifying the trap have interfered with the practice of harvesting,

preserving and trading tuna. It is also a clear example of the problems of bifurcating nature

and culture as distinct areas of governance and intervention. As a result, even attempts to

account for tuna as well as tuna fishers, are thwarted by the institutional embeddedness of

nature and culture as distinct areas of intervention.

Barbara Neis et al. suggest there is a ‘global ecological revolution’ that is based on

‘the transformation of nature, our productive relations to nature, the reproduction of the

fishery household and communities and the dominant legal, political and ideological

frameworks that govern fisheries’ (in Power 2005, p. 102). This ‘global ecological

revolution’ impacts the lives of fishery dependant peoples, which are mediated by

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