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ABSTRACT

Sustainability is a contentious and value laden “keyword” (Williams 1983). While its modern

definition places it firmly in the realm of the environment, it also espouses socio-cultural

interconnections. From the late 1990s diverse cultures and their ecological knowledge and

practices came to be seen as key to addressing global environmental problems and thus

worthy of being sustained. Some fifteen years on, an integrated sustainability discourse

persists, yet the term, culture, remains elusive.

This thesis analyses the discursive and material relationship between culture and

sustainability, through the case study of tuna and la tonnara - a tuna trap fishery used for

many centuries in Southern Italy. I employ two different analytical lenses concurrently: an

empirical lens to research cultural elements (e.g. practices, knowledge, values) of marine

management and tuna fishing, and a conceptual lens to analyse the production and

mobilisation of culture as a key term. I theorise sustainability as a global assemblage that is

made up of heterogeneous actors and situations. I analyse these actors and situations through

multisite and assemblic ethnography and discourse analysis. Rather than assuming a fixed

definition of sustainability I ask how, by whom, and to what effect, is this term defined and

mobilised in contemporary environmental conflicts?

Taking from Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse and “productive power” I ask

what ways of knowing and being are made possible, or rendered obsolete, through a

sustainability assemblage? Which groups are positioned to define the term and terms of

sustainability (and culture)? In the context of an integrated sustainability discourse, I analyse

the discursive connection between biological and cultural diversity that sought to challenge a

nature/culture binary, which had dominated environmental management. I argue that an

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