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hierarchical, as well as gendered divisions of labour in local fishery economies and

communities (Power 2005, p. 102). For some who work in the fishery industry in southern

Italy, opportunities have emerged for greater mobilisation and for global industry

connections, while others have experienced limitations, especially in relation to their

involvement and secure work in the local tuna industry, as in San Pietro.

Socio-cultural elements that are sustained through the project of sustaining tuna

include: tastes for fatty tuna in a Japanese market, scientific knowledge as the authoritative

knowledge of tuna, myths that inform fishery governance (such as maximum sustainable

yield); nature/culture concepts; multinational businesses; trap fishery and a tonnara

consortium (if proposal is successful); tourism based on the tonnara and tuna; and a local

tuna gastronomy (albeit possibly disconnected from its socio-cultural history). Even though

the sustainability situation has offered some opportunities for the recovery of the tuna species

and for the fishing industry, loss nonetheless characterises the contemporary tonnara due to

its disconnection from the harvest and local tuna processing industry. This includes a

disconnection from forms of life and certain modes of knowing tuna that the wider socio-

cultural network has entailed.

Compared to such complexity the broader four-pillar model of sustainability is simply

naive – involving hierarchies and compromising on social, cultural, economic and ecological

components. The socio-cultural processes that are sustained depend on discourses, objects

and practices of a sustainability assembly. They depend on particular entities forming durable

and powerful relationships and sharing common concerns. The argument here suggests that

the notion of reality as performed and interfered with, is a useful way to frame research into

the socio-cultural aspects of a sustainability issue. As I have argued throughout this thesis, a

more comprehensive understanding of culture in relation to practices of sustainability is

essential if we are to take seriously the lives of fishers as well as fish, and if we are to

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