Paper short abstract:

This contribution focuses on a set of practices and meanings that the fishermen of Lake Trasimeno assemble in order to deal with unbalancing forces and to cope with environmental and economic challenges.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of the paper is to describe how a small community of fishermen manage to stay on the market and safeguard their traditional activities, promoting an heritage of techniques, work ethics and a peculiar relation to nature.

"The Cooperative of Trasimeno Fishermen” is the local organization which includes most of the professional fishermen, representing the interests and the history of this traditional activity. Cooperation is the only mean to achieve economic sustainability, and while fishing has always been at the core of their activity, now the new management had to build up a different scheme, based on differentiation of the activities and the reconversion of fishing as a tourist attraction.

However, the strategies of the Cooperative depend on the perception of present and future threats and opportunities, that is to say that different perception of risk (Douglas,1992) result in different sets of practices and narratives.

The research, which consisted of participant observation and in-depth interviews, would like to describe this changing environment, which entails a present of drought, economic crisis and critical entanglements, and a future of uncertainties, tracing human and non human associations (Latour, 2005) and sympoiesis (Haraway, 2018), following the dialectic among local knowledge, scientific discourse and political strategies around an endangered lake.