Prologue

Imagine the light of a Mediterranean dawn. Smell the ropes and the rust. Feel the salt in your bones. Listen to the shouts of the crew, and the sound of the Mistral as it whips by at 70km/h. Welcome to the tonnara: the system through which one of the giants of the sea, the bluefin tuna, has been fished on these shores for millennia. For the past eight years, I have spent a few months of each tuna season here, sailing with crews of rais (fishing chiefs) and tonnarotti (tuna fishermen) in the Mediterranean and Atlantic to study from the inside how this fishing method works and what is left of it today.

The tonnara 

The tonnara is a local, fixed and passive coastal fishing system for Thunnus thynnus, better known as the Eastern Atlantic Bluefin Tuna (BFTE) or Red Tuna or Giant Tuna, the largest bony fish in the Mediterranean. Thunnus thynnus is a prestigious species, protected by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), subject to fishing quotas and the object of a veritable gastronomic cult from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and Japan. This extremely complex and refined art of fishing, of remote origin and spread over the most part of the Mediterranean coastline, has almost disappeared today in favor of mobile and less environmentally friendly systems. From the Phoenicians to the present day, from Gibraltar to the Bosphorus, I have surveyed and mapped more than five hundred tuna fisheries (Zambernardi, 2020), but fewer than thirty are still in operation between Sardinia, Andalusia, the Algarve and the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Of these, only three catch tuna in the Mediterranean: these are the ones I focused on with my research in the field—on the Sea.

This research in maritime and Mediterranean anthropology ethnographically documents and analyzes some of the last active tuna traps: it took place on the boats and in the facilities during the fishing campaigns between 2016 and 2023 between Sardinia (Italy) and Andalusia (Spain). In particular I worked in the Sulcitan and Gaditan ones, together with the crews and divers, both active and retired. The Italian term tonnara (mistakenly) refers to both the gear at sea and the supporting structure on land, which is why traps are divided into land and sea, forward and backward, point and gulf, upwind and downwind. This type of fishing, whose origins are very ancient, has a name in almost every language and dialect spoken in the Mediterranean, which certainly testifies to its wide diffusion: from Spanish almadraba to French madrague, from Portuguese almadrava (the structure at sea) or armaçao (the structure at sea with the land establishment, called arraial) to Arabic al-mādhraba, from Greek thynneion or keteia to Provençal la tounaio or la mandrago, to Tabarkino a tunèa. As we have seen, in Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese, the terms used to designate the tuna trap are similar; in fact, the origin is in Arabic al-mādhraba, composed of the article al + the noun mādhraba, derived from the radical dha-ra-ba (to strike, to beat), preceded as usual by the prefix ma- to indicate the place where the action expressed by the verb is performed: thus, “the place where one strikes”. In Spanish and Portuguese, the article has been incorporated into the noun, and in both languages the word has changed its accent: from a slur it has become flat (al-màdhraba, almadràba, almadràva). In any case, this linguistic variation corresponds, of course, to the technique’s broad geographical reach.

Specificities 

The tonnara is a coastal fishery, i.e. it is generally carried out within three miles off the coast. It is a fixed fishery, namely a rig anchored to the seabed that is constructed, lowered and hauled every year in the same area and at the same time of year, and a passive one: the tonnara does not involve actively seeking or hunting prey; it does not use bait or surprise traps; it does not encircle, nor does it entangle, but rather fishes by containment. Because of its passive nature, this fishing technique relies on the ability to predict and consequently direct the path of a school to a place where it will find itself trapped without having been encircled and is therefore based entirely on anticipation. The tonnara is a seasonal fishery, that is to say it takes place in spring, with a two-week peak between the end of May and the beginning of June—in Sardinia—depending on the schools’ trajectories along the different Mediterranean coasts. It follows a strict order of operations: first the preparation of the fishing campaign, followed by the rigging and preparation of the gear in the factory, then the lowering of the trap into the sea, all the stages of the actual fishing (catching, mattanza and transfer to the cages), the landing and the mattanza di terra (slaughtering on land: gutting, butchering and cutting the fish), the refrigeration of the catch, the artisanal processing of both the dried parts of fish (hearts, bottarghe and musciame) and its entrails, the hauling of the gear and eventually the storage of the boats and tools at the end of the season. Finally, it is a collective fishery: net fishing requires the collective and coordinated action of a large group of men and is intended for a school of fish.

Functioning

The tonnara is a very large and sophisticated parallelepipedal underwater net system composed of nets, anchors, cables, chains and floats. It is anchored to a possibly regular and generally sandy or algae-covered sea-bottom at a depth of thirty to forty meters. The entire underwater structure is made up of five to eight consecutive net chambers, with curtain doors that fishermen open and close as the tuna pass through, each time concentrating them in one chamber. Attached to this structure is a weir net that runs perpendicular to the coastline and is positioned to intercept and channel the path of the school. Tuna perceive such weir net as a natural barrier, and are so deceived to enter the tonnara system, to never get out. Here they will move on from one chamber to the next, until the very last: the chamber of death (leva)—the only one equipped with a net floor. Once the school has entered this last chamber, the nets loaded with tuna are lifted on board by fishermen and the mattanza (slaughter) begins. Today, the harpoon system has been replaced by hooks. The fisherman dive into the death chamber and hook the tuna by hand. The fish are then hoisted onto the ship, or they are conveyed through a tunnel to a towable marine stall cage.

The hyper-fish

The tonnara is what is known in halieutic jargon as a mono-target fishery, i.e. fishing for a single species—the Atlantic bluefin tuna. The bluefin tuna is considered the king of the Mediterranean sea fish: a prestige species of unparalleled halieutic, economic, social, cultural and now political relevance. A kind of hyperfish (or even non-fish) because of its extraordinary bio-morphological as well as behavioral characteristics, it is the largest pelagic teleost of its family, reaching up to three meters in length and six quintals in weight and living up to thirty-five years. It is a migratory fish that engages in both vertical and horizontal migrations, with exceptional swimming endurance and speed: it is the second-fastest sprinting fish in the world, after the sailfish (Istiophorus platypterus). It is the only bony fish to have a thermoregulatory system called the “rete mirabile,” which is otherwise found only in birds and mammals and is used to maintain a high body temperature and maximize muscle efficiency. Its flesh is deep red, and its hematocrit value is forty percent (that of marine mammals); its blood is like that of humans in color, texture and smell. Its meat is highly valued from a nutritional point of view; it has almost no waste compared to other species; it is protected by a special supranational body (ICCAT); and it has been and still is an object of worship (once religious, now gastronomic). It is also a great hunter, a voracious predator with demanding nutritional needs that hunts in all oceans and is at the top of the trophic chain: besides us, its only predators are the killer whales in the Strait of Gibraltar and the great white shark in the open sea.

Red tuna have a very vast distribution range: they live in all seas except the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, but the stock we are interested in here lives in the Eastern Atlantic and breeds in the Mediterranean. Its ethology involves genetic reunion and trophic dispersal: it alternates between erratic phases, in which it hunts solitarily, and gregarious phases, corresponding to genetic migrations, in which the reunion of a large number of individuals is necessary for successful reproduction. After reaching sexual maturity at around three years of age, tuna engage in their annual spawning journey, a sort of circumnavigation of the Mediterranean that takes them from Gibraltar to the Bosphorus, along the shores of both coasts and closer to the surface, where, under suitable conditions of water temperature and salinity, both males and females expel gametes in a reproductive whirlpool that promotes pelagic fertilization. After spawning, tuna return to the Atlantic following a reversed path in the opposite direction. During these weeks they almost stop feeding and the need to spawn is so great that the tuna literally run to the best spawning grounds—hence the name tonno di corsa (“running tuna”) under which their meat is sold. Some of them, however, stumble into the traps set along their path and every year, their reproductive journey tragically turns into an appointment with death.

History 

Tuna fishing is attested in the Phoenician-Punic, Greek and Roman civilizations. In the Phoenician-Punic world this species was so important (in terms of catching, processing, sale and consumption) that scholars suggest we may talk of a “symbiotic relationship” (Bartoloni & Guirguis, 2017). Phoenicians seem to have been the first to use complex collective fishing methods at sea, and their settlements have been documented as far back as the 21st century B.C.. They established a number of colonies along the Mediterranean coast nearby saltpans and played an important role in the spread of a maritime, nautical and fishing culture throughout the Mediterranean Sea and beyond. The Greeks and Romans took up this Phoenician legacy. Phoenician, Greek, Roman and Byzantine coins depict tuna, confirming the existence of an already important trade in tuna and its derivatives. Hypotheses about the nature of tuna migrations have flourished since Antiquity and indeed we find them in the literature of authors such as Aristotle, Strabo, Pliny, Athenaeus, Oppianus, Elianus and Philostratus.

Around 1,000 B.C., tuna fishing had become a truly specialized economic activity. It is therefore probable that a primitive preserving industry had already taken shape long before then. In fact, tuna was no longer a subsistence product but a commercial one, and it was therefore necessary to prolong its preservation for this purpose. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire caused a decline in the tuna fishing industry of the western Mediterranean. This was revived in the 7th century A.D. and thrived under the Arab rule. Arabs established tuna fishing sites in Sicily, Spain and North Africa, sites whose productivity reached their apogee between the 8th and 10th century. It comes thus as no surprise that the lyrics of several traditional Sicilian chants sung at sea as well as most of the tonnara terminology (see words such as: rais, musciara, musciame, marfaraggiu, etc.) derive from Arabic.

But the system kept evolving, and the growing early modern economy led to an important development: it was in Spain, where production was also aimed at the foreign market, that the method of preserving tuna in oil was first introduced—a method established in the 15th century in Seville. Canning (appertisation, 17th-century industrial sterilization) is certainly the first of two important turning points in the fate of all tuna, the second being the beginning of industrial fishing around 1950. In the last seventy years of history, one after the other, the tonnare have ceased their activity and the market for bluefin tuna has changed profoundly.

Recently

Since 1998, Atlantic bluefin tuna has been a protected species under the above mentioned intergovernmental body, ICCAT. Since 2008, ICCAT has distributed fishing quotas (TAC - Total Allowable Catch) to member countries every three years. Today, up to seventy percent of the world's bluefin tuna is caught in the Mediterranean, but wild-caught tuna is increasingly subject to market trends involving relaying, fattening and farming.

There are a number of different bluefin tuna fishing systems (longline, purse seine, recreational) which differ in terms of purpose, implementation methods, gear used, profitability, selectivity and investment assumptions. The fixed tuna trap is not the most efficient fishing system, but it is the most compatible with the conservation needs of this species: it is a non-polluting, sustainable, seasonal, species-and-size-selective fishery, with low impact in terms of catch and almost no by-catch. However, the TAC quotas allocated to member countries by ICCAT end up favoring longline and purse seine fishing, to the detriment of the fixed tuna trap.

After eight years of fieldwork and ten years of analysis, I argue that the extraordinary history of tuna fishing reveals not only an ingenious fishing technique, but also a genuine and specifically Mediterranean cultural system, a practical example of the construction of a Mediterranean region from the point of view of the Sea and the people who have crossed and respected it. This pan-Mediterranean maritime culture is based on characteristics and values expressed by the societies that produced and disseminated it in a continuous intercultural and diachronic exchange of techniques, tools, gestures and specialized jargon. Among such values, I identified a certain form of practical and perceptive intelligence (metis), an halieutical wisdom made up of dense and far-sighted thinking (halieusophia), and a discourse on the human being in relation to other-than-human: his environment and all the biotic and abiotic entities that co-exist with him (eco-logos). In fact, despite the apparent brutality of the mattanza, in which a veritable thynnomachy occurs in the hand-to-hand combat between man and tuna, I am deeply convinced that the tonnara is instead a respectful fishing system, based entirely on observation, anticipation and ruse. It is an artisanal and environmentally sound technique: passive, seasonal, selective in species and size, waste-free, non-polluting. In a word, sustainable. Today, the tonnara is considered highly virtuous by many experts and institutions, as well as by the relevant international bodies, including ICCAT, the European Union's Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, and the FAO's General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM). These bodies advocate and recommend the defense and reactivation of this ecologically sustainable technique not only for its responsible management of the fishery resources, but also for the opportunity that this fixed system offers as a privileged observatory for fish biomass and stock assessment, as well as for the preservation of the cultural heritage of the highly specialized knowledge of fishermen.

This “tuna civilization,” while possessing a wisdom of dizzying historical and cultural depth, raises very urgent and relevant questions in the broader panorama of fishery management policies in the Mediterranean today, addressing highly topical issues such as pollution, overfishing, depletion of fish stocks and recognition and valorization of local fishermen's knowledge. The tonnara, at this historical moment, is not a glimpse into the past—as some nostalgic literature seems to suggest—but also a living and neglected present, as well as a resource for the future in terms of knowledge, research and valorization of fishing techniques and maritime cultures in the central and western Mediterranean. Underlying such a sophisticated technique is a complex and ecological manner of thinking that I call a “mariculture”: a culture of the Sea, which in my research I have tried to recount through writing, photography, dance and theater. 

Methodologies and Outcomes

Since 2014, my scientific and artistic research project Calar Tonnara has been dedicated to the tuna traps located in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Epistemologically speaking, my project is characterized by an “indisciplinary approach”: in other words, I tried to defy disciplinary boundaries, studying this system through the combined lens of maritime anthropology, Mediterranean history, marine biology/ethology, ichthyology, ecology and blue humanities in order to preserve its richness and complexity, and to strive for holistic knowledge. From this point of view, fisheries are a perfect example of the necessity of interdisciplinarity (or "indisciplinarity"), since it is in fact the classic subject that can be approached from several perspectives, today also for the needs of species conservation; in fact, fisheries cannot do without this multidisciplinarity, and ecologists, specialists in the knowledge of complex and interdependent systems, have understood this very well and first. At the same time, I have been the first researcher to bring an interspecies approach to the analysis of tuna fishing (on which there is a vast literature, but which has never addressed this aspect); the purpose of this choice was that of studying a form of predation moving beyond a purely anthropocentric vision and opening up to a multi-species, even ecosystemic, attitude. The research methodology adopted is thus that of interspecies ethnography, in particular through the analysis of the material and immaterial relationship between predator and prey, which emerges from the local knowledge of informants and an extensive historical analysis. At the same time, fieldwork experience led me to progressively abandon the classical anthropological stance of participant observation in favor of an "observant cum-participation" (Zambernardi, 2020) through which I have actively participated in the work of the fishermen in full sharing, and using the body and sensorium as an explicit semantic filter. 

As part of the dissemination of this research, I embarked on a “heterographic” endeavor that sees the presentation of ethnographic data through means other than classical writing: photography, dance, theater, drawing, music, sometimes involving other participants with whom I initiate forms of co-creation and artistic experimentation. This artistic-scientific research has led, besides the production of an illustrated thesis and scientific articles, to the ongoing realization of: a photo-ethnographic monograph (Calar tonnara. Etnografia di una maricultura mediterranea, expected in 2025), a permanent photo exhibition (Calar tonnara. La pesca in attività fra Mediterraneo e Atlantico, 2022), a play (AlfabeTonnara. 'A tutti li tunni circàmu pirdònu', 2017), a dance workshop (Calar tonnara. Studio #1, 2022), a conference show (L'arte della pesca al tonno, 2021), a narrative video (La pesca dei tonni. Emilio Salgari, 2020), and a science slam (Calar tonnara. Una cultura del mare, 2023). 

Why not confine oneself to scholarly writing? Personally, I felt a strong need to include memory in research, understood as a form of knowledge and as a tool for interrogating history, precisely the history that persists under the ashes, not quite extinguished. I had the ambition, perhaps naïve, to document what was not institutionally transmitted (through museums or literature), because it was not considered canonical or useful, or because its transmission had been forgotten as no longer useful or necessary. To me, memory, that set of cultural practices, individual and collective, discursive and embedded, that allows for the preservation and transmission of experiences and representations of the past, constituted one of the privileged ways of accessing a past that had not been recorded in archives, but that resisted and remained in people's bodies. In order to make this operative, non-discursive memory emerge, it was necessary to place oneself differently, to investigate a bodily archive, a living archive. If, in this métier, bodies are the sites of memory, bodies in motion are forms of archiving and then transmitting knowledge. The levels of implication of the body in this research are therefore multiple: the first level implies observation, observation of bodies at work; the second calls for learning, the appropriation of the body sequences and knowhow of the fishermen via incorporation (without necessarily becoming an experienced tuna fisherman myself, though aspiring to); the third implies analysis, the transition of this knowledge from embodiedness to awareness and then translation into written form; finally, the fourth level uses the body in the further translation and restitution of such expertise into the form of a choreography. In short, the body serves at first as a tool for knowledge and investigation, then for learning and experimentation, and finally as a site for memory, elaboration, and restitution. At the beginning of this project, it was clear to me that the body and sensorium, in order to qualify as an object of study, should also be a method of investigation. What I have tried to do is to describe and analyze the universe of tuna fishing, starting with the body and its relationship to space (the sea, the coast, the boats), to others (men and fish), to tools (nets and other instruments) and to work (body techniques, movements and gestures). I call this “choreographing history/histories”.

Calar tonnara is ultimately a multidisciplinary and multimodal scientific and artistic research and creation work on the Mediterranean theme of tuna fishing through the tonnara system. Specifically, in this video I try to provide an insight into the dance workshop and site-specific dance performance, Calar tonnara. Studio #1, that I designed and experimented with in different places that have hosted tuna fishing in the past or present. It is a format of guided but always different work, aimed at local inhabitants for the co-construction of a story about them, to be brought on stage. Memories, stories, tales, practices and local specificities carried by the participants are integrated into the choreographic proposal resulting from the ethnographic experience. Working with short sequences of choreographed movements, guided improvisation and exercises accessible to non-professional dancers, we interpret a dance above and below the sea: we are from time to time men, fish and weather-and-sea agents to relive and tell the extraordinary history of the Mediterranean tuna fishery. We reenact the gestures of the tonarotti, the swimming of the tuna, the movements of the fish in the net chambers, the overwhelming emotions of the mattanza, the waves, the currents, the winds and the posidonia (Posidonia oceanica). 

This participatory dance workshop attempted to shape and reenact a marine symphony, to relive and tell a sea story, both spatial (the migration of tuna in the Mediterranean) and temporal (from the Phoenicians to the present). We worked on energy, presence, posture, breath, impulse, imbalance, gaze, listening, the truth of bodies. We danced alone, with partners and in groups. We experienced the crossing of gazes and bodies, trajectories in space, intentions of partners, movement, stasis and slow motion. We conversed without words and realized how powerful this can be.

We were men, fish and weather-and-sea agents. We lived the gestures of the tonnarotti as they dropped anchors and tied and untied knots to prepare the nets. We reenacted the tuna fish's swimming and movements in the trap chambers, when they hunt alone or move in shoals behind the leader, when they do not realize they are prisoners or when they are squeezed in the death chamber, when they spawn in a whirlpool in the surriàta or when they die exhausted on the ship. We interpreted the sea waves acting on the boats, with their disorienting effects of rolling, pitching, and yawing. We imagined the sea currents caressing the posidonia, and then we indulged in the wind that moves our bodies when we put ourselves to feel it. We experienced and danced the final embrace between Man and Tuna as they bid farewell at the bottom of the nets, in the death chamber. We were bastassi and cargadores, in the canon of the funeral march that leads the tuna to the hanger. We have felt and interpreted the strong emotions that the tonnara arouses in its universal story of love and death, that is: we danced Life. During the final performance at the Carloforte-Isola Piana tuna fishery in La Punta area (San Pietro Island, Sardinia, Italy), Sardinian watercolorist Riccardo Atzeni, sitting on the sidelines after his participation, took out his album and brushes to draw on paper what he saw, lived and imagined during this interspecies dance experiment, while the filmmaker Francesco Rosso documented the whole process of creation during the workshop and the public performance during the festival.

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

The musical piece that acts as soundtrack of the dance workshop Calar Tonnara. Studio #1 is Movement III "Solemn and measured, without dragging" from Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 1 in D Major "Titan" (1888—1894) performed by the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Maestro Lorin Maazel (1986). I chose this piece, which also figures among the ones selected for the play AlfabeTonnara. A tutti li tunni circàmu pirdònu for the following main reasons:

• It is a funeral march, suitable to evoke the occasion of a planned slaughter, especially in the image of the bastasso—the porter who, until the first decades of the twentieth century, carried the giant tuna on his shoulders from the dock to the hangers, reminiscent of the undertaker (for a detailed analysis of this incredible figure and for an argumentation on the necessity and levels of implication of the body of both the researcher and the fisherman in ethnographic work on tuna fishing and, more generally, in seafaring, see Zambernardi, 2020).
• In music it is what we call a round, in which the entrance of the instruments (timpani, double bass, to which are gradually added in the canon bassoon, cellos, bass tubes and then gradually the whole orchestra, while the oboe seems to defiantly comment) is functional to the entrance of the characters of the show on stage.
• The name of the symphony could not be more apt if it were dedicated to the hyperfish Thunnus thynnus—the titan of the seas.
• The third movement of this symphony is the moment when the destructive and deadly aspect of nature appears: “A funeral march in Callot’s manner” about which Mahler noted: “The external stimulus for the composition of this piece of music came to the author from ‘The Hunter's Funeral’, a satirical illustration from an old fairy tale book known to all Austrian children. The forest animals accompany the coffin of the dead hunter to the grave: hares carry the banner, in front of them is a group of Bohemian musicians, with whom cats, toads, crows, deer, roe deer, foxes and other forest animals, winged or four-legged, follow the procession in farcical postures” (the woodcut is by Austrian painter Moritz von Schwind and dates back to 1850). The atmosphere is ambiguous, oscillating between sarcasm and ominous foreboding. The kettledrums beat in the silence (D-A-D-A...): and on this beat, sad and ghostly, a canon looms on the melody of the well-known cantilena Brother John, transposed to a minor key. As the conductor Bruno Walter (1876—1962) wrote, “we are led into a hell that perhaps has no equal in the symphonic literature” (Walter, 2024). The purpose of this choice is thus also to experiment musically and emotionally with the reversal of roles between predator and prey in the image of the “funeral of the hunter,” followed by the anthropomorphized animals: the exact opposite of the dynamics of fishing in the tonnara, where the fishermen kill and at the same time magnify the fish, towards which they do not cease to feel respect and gratitude.

Image

But enough talking, now. Do you feel…do you feel that fresh air? The Mistral is blowing in, tomorrow morning the nets will be full of tuna!
See you at the dock before dawn.

Works Cited

Bartoloni, Piero, and Guirguis, Michele. I Fenici del mare e le vie dei tonni. Un'inchiesta storico-archeologica dal Mediterraneo orientale all’Atlantico. Editrice Democratica Sarda, Sassari 2017. 

Zambernardi, Ambra. “Calar tonnara. Etnografia di una maricultura mediterranea” with nine author’s tables by Alberto Valente, PhD diss., University of Turin and University of Seville, 2020.

Walter, Bruno. Gustave Mahler. Ortholes, Napoli 2024.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express gratitude to the curators Juliette Bessette and Margaret Cohen for the invitation to take part in this Colloquy; to IMéRA - Institut of Advanced Studies residency program of Aix*Marseille Université, under which auspices this article was written;; and is most grateful to the project Tunèa by U-Boot Lab and its partners and collaborators, under which the artist’s residency that gave birth to Calar tonnara. Studio #1 was hosted; the talented video maker Francesco Rosso / Casa Uiza for the filming and editing of the video, as well as the most generous artist Riccardo Atzeni for his watercolors. A warm thanks to my amazingly supporting family during the writing and revision of this article. This contribution is dedicated to the generosity of all the informants and the support of all the colleagues with whom I share my passion for tonnare around the Med Sea, with a heartfelt thought to ever-present rais Luigi Biggio, to unforgotten capitán don Vicente Zaragoza Casamayor  and to the last master rais Agostino Diana (in memoriam).