Sustaining More Than Fish: Tradition and Transformation in Environmental Conflicts

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 outcome of this was the production of further binaries – local/global, small-scale/large-scale and traditional/modern. These binaries have gained traction in sustainability politics. The central study of this thesis, the tonnara, is no exception. The case study demonstrates the limiting and enabling forces of an integrated sustainability discourse. It also ultimately reveals two paradoxes. The first is that sustainability practices were complicit in transforming the socio-technical configuration of the tonnara to the extent that what constitutes the tonnara as a distinct cultural system today has been challenged. Yet if the tonnara had not transformed it was unlikely to exist in the future. The second paradox is revealed in the context of an appeal to the EU for the tuna traps of the Mediterranean to receive support based on their ecological and cultural characteristics, and potential as a source of scientific data to contribute to the management of bluefin tuna stocks. I use this situation to analyse the compatibility and place of diverse epistemologies and ontologies, and ultimately the compatibility of the project of sustaining tuna and sustaining a tuna fishery. I conclude that these paradoxes highlight the importance of defining the boundaries of culture and the limits of tradition and transformation. Thus this thesis develops a framework that deepens our understanding of the social formation and function of sustainability and addresses challenges of defining and sustaining cultures.