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which I investigated the wider sustainability assemblage, including forms of environmental

governance, and the relationship between the tonnara and the tuna industry. Favignana

offered a useful comparison to San Pietro as a post tonnara community facing a different set

of social and ecological problems. In addition to these two sites, I also conducted interviews

with three Greenpeace ocean campaigners (in Australia, Italy and Japan) and followed

sustainability discourses in government and non-government documents, news and social

media, and numerous sustainable seafood campaigns. I conducted research into sustainable

tinned tuna in numerous supermarkets in Italy, Australia and Japan. I closely analysed a

wide-range of ethnographic materials and practices, including sustainable seafood guides; the

certification of a Maldivian skipjack tuna fishery; moves to reinstate certification in the

Sardinian tonnare; Greenpeace’s tinned tuna campaign in Australia, UK and Italy; and

numerous tins of tuna that make sustainability claims. Towards the end of my research I

visited Tsukiji market in Tokyo to attend the tuna auction, observe tuna trade and eat tuna.

Although I do not draw heavily on the research in Japan, I consider it important to mention

since the brief encounter offered a bodily experience of the allure of tuna, added life to

statistics, and provided an alternative to common Italian narratives of Japan’s appetite for

tuna.

I now turn from the methodological/theoretical account to the Coles eco tin, and begin

to navigate a sustainability assemblage, to put following and assemblic ethnography to

practice, and to consider historical, social and ecological dimensions of this tin and its

sustainability.

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