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- Convenors:
-
Carl Rommel
(Uppsala University)
Joseph Viscomi (Birkbeck, University of London)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Sarah Green
(University of Helsinki)
- Discussant:
-
Matei Candea
(University of Cambridge)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- Horsal 9 (D9)
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
The displacement, unsettling, and uprooting provoked by recent events highlight connections and separations across the Mediterranean. Through rigorous crossings of intellectual traditions, this panel explores how temporal and spatial relations comprise and dissolve regional boundaries.
Long Abstract:
Over the last century, scholarly understandings of the Mediterranean have gone through multiple transformations. Braudel saw the Sea as overlapping temporal durations (1949). Following this, anthropologists of the mid-twentieth century conceived of shared norms and practices that united peoples 'of' the Mediterranean (Pitt-Rivers 1954; Davis 1973). Their conceptions were ruptured by critique that dissolved regional unity (Herzfeld 1984). More recently, historians and anthropologists have explored how micro-regions and small-scale ecosystems conjoin to shape a Mediterranean of both 'connectivity' and 'separation' (Purcell and Horden 2000; Albera 2006; Ben-Yehoyada 2017).
In conjunction with contemporary events, these debates have recently generated a new wave of interest in Mediterranean region-formation. Popular uprisings unsettle regimes, economic crises uproot families, right-wing nationalist movements call for expulsion of those rendered different, and violent wars force people to abandon homes. The processes of people, ideas and goods moving, settling, and staying provoked by these events question connections and separations between Southern Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. What historical, legal, political and social threads weave together this Mediterranean constellation? What are the particular epistemologies, logics, materials, infrastructures, and discursive systems calibrating value and meaning across this maritime space-time? How are experiences of 'being somewhere in particular' generated by and within these 'locating regimes', which simultaneously comprise and dissolve the Mediterranean (Green 2015)?
This panel intends to put into conversation intellectual traditions that have all too often been developed in isolation. We thus invite papers that explore these questions through historiography, ethnography, and rigorous crossings of these disciplinary boundaries.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 August, 2018, -Carl Rommel (Uppsala University) Joseph Viscomi (Birkbeck, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This panel introduction has two aims. First, it reviews anthropological and historical literatures about the 'location' of the Mediterranean, stressing their attention to connections and separations. Second, it outlines a framework for empirical research based on overlapping 'locating regimes'.
Paper long abstract:
In this panel introduction, our aim is twofold. First, we provide a critical assessment of the ways in which the Mediterranean region has been studied and conceptualised over the past century. Examining writings by historians (Braudel 1949; Purcell and Horden 2000; Ben-Yehoyada 2017) and anthropologists (Pitt-Rivers 1954; Davis 1973; Herzfeld 1984; Albera 2006), we illustrate how the 'location' of the Mediterranean(s) has taken radically different shapes through dialogue between scholarly traditions. We also suggest that these iterative relocations in the literature can be read as a process of overlapping connections and separations across space and time. Such an approach seems particularly apposite in the face of centrifugal and centripetal current events: popular uprisings, economic crises, migration flows, and the rise of isolationist right-wing political movements.
Taking off from this historiographical oeuvre, the second part poses questions of theoretical framing and methodology. How could the large-scale historical, legal, political and social threads that come together in the region be approached through ethnography or historical research attending to minute details? How could we explore vernacular understandings of the Mediterranean as stable within an analytical framework which maintains that locations are fluctuating and ever-changing? One possibility, we suggest, is to attend meticulously to the particular epistemologies, logics, materials, infrastructures, and discursive systems that calibrate value, meaning and a sense of locatedness across this maritime space-time. The experiences of 'being somewhere in particular' that such 'locating regimes' facilitate are shown to simultaneously comprise and dissolve the Mediterranean as a regional unit (Green 2015).
Laia Soto Bermant
Paper short abstract:
Taking as a departure point one of Europe's most remote borderlands, this paper explores how the constitution of Europe as a political, economic and cultural project has re-defined and re-signified local conflicts in Europe's southern periphery.
Paper long abstract:
Taking as a departure point one of Europe's most remote borderlands, this paper explores how the constitution of Europe as a political, economic and cultural project has re-defined and re-signified local conflicts in Europe's southern periphery.
The Spanish enclave of Melilla is a 12 km² territory located on the north eastern coast of Morocco which has been under Spanish sovereignty since the late 15th century. When Spain signed the Schengen Agreement in 1991, this far-flung, remote enclave became Europe's southernmost border area. This changed drastically the enclave's geopolitical significance, both locally and internationally.
The paper shows how structures of mobility and immobility across the Melillan border respond to a host of shifting alliances and interests that extend far beyond the enclave itself, and considers how new and old linkages and separations intersect. Spain's ambivalent relationship with North Africa since the 15th century, and the particular form this relationship takes in the Spanish enclave, is key to understand how and why Melilla came to assimilate its role as Europe's gate-keeper.
Laust Lund Elbek (Aalborg University (Copenhagen))
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork on the island of Lampedusa, this paper argues that visions of the central Mediterranean as a European border zone clashes with local experiences of detachment from both the Italian and European communities as well as transnational connections with North African seafarers.
Paper long abstract:
In the winter of 2011, a group of local fishermen gathered on the harbour of the Italian island of Lampedusa to protest against rising fuel prices and increasingly precarious living conditions. A few days later, national media reported that the protest had concerned African boat migrants allegedly occupying the pier, thus obstructing the fishermen's work. This may appear to be little more than a curious misunderstanding, but I contend that it illustrates a significant schism in contemporary imaginations of the central Mediterranean, particularly the Strait of Sicily. Because of the so-called 'refugee crisis', this area has moved to the centre of political attention in recent years, and places such as Lampedusa have become synonymous with shipwrecks, migratory flows and the often draconian politics of border management (e.g. Friese 2014). However, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among the local population of Lampedusa, this paper argues that the political centrality of the Euro-African border clashes with local experiences of marginality and detachment from both the Italian and European communities as well as age-old transnational, albeit often contentious, maritime connections between southern Italian and north African seafarers (see also Ben-Yehoyada 2011, 2017). Specifically, this paper tentatively employs Edwin Ardener's concept of "remote areas" (1987) as a theoretical springboard to think through the disjunction between 'grand' political understandings of the Central Mediterranean and local interpretations of the very same place - and, importantly, how these two scales of regional imagination intersect and sometimes even reinforce one another.
Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar (University of Nevada)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how Spanish return migrants, arriving home from northern Europe to a Spain in economic distress, are reconceptualizing the meaning of Spain's "Mediterraneaness." Ethnography of this case reorients and thus reinvigorates theoretical frames for an anthropology of the Mediterranean.
Paper long abstract:
Spain's place in the Mediterranean has long been understood in terms of its historical and contemporary entanglements with North Africa. But how do Spanish interactions with Northern Europe illuminate what gets defined as "Mediterranean"? During the Franco dictatorship, many Spaniards emigrated north, fleeing unemployment and political repression. Today, thousands have returned home, believing Spain had achieved political and economic stability. Their return was supposed to signal Spain's full membership in the European "club," ending the labor migration that long marked Spain as Europe's Mediterranean periphery. But returnees arrive amid Spain's dramatic return to a situation of economic hardship, political instability, and a renewed sense of marginality to Europe. Returnees often grapple with the disappointments of return by ruefully explaining that Spain has failed in Europe because it is "too Mediterranean," citing corruption, Catholicism, or lack of industrialization. Yet, they also blame Europe, criticizing EU policy, the Euro currency, and "European capitalist values." In this discourse, returnees find the solution to the current crisis in what they cast as good Mediterranean values—strong kin networks, a commitment to "the good life," and honorable social behavior. Based on fieldwork with returnees, I trace how they both rebuff and embrace tropes of Mediterraneanness. I argue that returnees' discourse echoes and revives old Mediterraneanist anthropological tropes of "honor" and "shame," here not as questions of essentialized gender and kin relations, but as framings for a broader political discourse of ambivalence about being Mediterranean as shameful and/or honorable vis-à-vis Europe.
Patricia Scalco (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the centuries-old trade of carpets and kilims within Istanbul's Grand Bazaar as a means to explore the relationship between circulation, value and the construction of a location as crossroads.
Paper long abstract:
Problems of connectedness, mobility and flow are common - and not exclusive - to any large urban center in the contemporary world. In the case of Istanbul, however, these matters are significantly inflected by the magnitude of the city's historical relevance, its unique topography, and its geopolitical position. Having tourism as one of its main industries, iconic postcards of the city depict landscapes or places which evoke those attributes. As the world's largest and oldest covered market of its kind, the Grand Bazaar stands as one of this prominent places, having occupied a major role in inscribing Istanbul as one of the most significant Mediterranean 'crossroads' throughout the centuries. This paper focuses on one of the most iconic trades within the Bazaar, namely, the trade of carpets and kilims. Through an ethnographic informed analysis of the circulation of these goods -and of ideas associated with them - the proposed paper engages with how changes and adjustments in this centuries-old trade provide insights into the making of a location as a temporal and spacial crossroads - and the potential value of establishing 'crossroads' as a relative location (Green 2016).
Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses Christian pilgrims' trips to the Meteora, Central Greece, and inquiries into the social, spatial, and temporal relations and connections that become enacted through Christian narratives, practices, and imaginaries.
Paper long abstract:
Pilgrimage shrines possess qualities that make them worthy of travel, worship, and other creative actions, while pilgrimage sites emerge as parcels of sacredness, at once different to the rest of the (profane) world and belonging with the world. What matters for pilgrims is to find themselves in places where saints have lived and died, in places where visitations and miracles are known to happen, in places endowed with relics, icons, and other significant material objects. In journeying towards these places, pilgrims encounter the sacred, yet they also encounter a great deal of the profane too — passports and visas, ferry rides and bus drives, tourist industries and market capitalism, the sceptic and the blasphemous. If the quality of sacredness positions these places within religious realms, then national borders, state regulations, and market exchanges position these very places within secular realms. In this paper, I address the coexistence and interaction of religious and secular significations of place, with particular reference to pilgrimage to Meteora, a magnificent rocky formation located in Thessaly, Central Greece, neighbouring the town of Kalambaka. Meteora is at once included in the UNESCO World Heritage List, an important geological and archaeological site, a popular destination for climbers and nature lovers, and finally, a significant centre of Christian Orthodoxy, second only to the Holy Mountain of Athos. This paper will attend to Meteora's variegated 'relative locations', and will attempt to delineate the different 'locating regimes' that operate in its multiple, conflicting, and (dis)connecting designations.
Samuli Lähteenaho (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the colonial institution of a legal and bureaucratic framework on public coastline and land ownership in Beirut, and how traces of it are negotiated by the civil society to promote public space. It argues that new connections across the Mediterranean are formed in the process.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, the Lebanese capital of Beirut has seen a prolonged debate and contestation over the issue of public space in the city. The discussion, taking place mostly through civil society initiatives and the municipal and state administration has focused on a number of contested spaces in the city. This paper, part of a wider work-in-progress ethnographic doctoral research on the question of public space in Beirut, is an examination of some of the conceptual and epistemological strains stretching from debated public spaces beyond Lebanon. This paper examines two connected cases, one being the legal and bureaucratic framework instituted during the colonial times and their effect on the contemporary issue of public space. This includes legislation on Maritime Public domain regulating the use of coastal land, and the institutionalization of cadastre organizing land ownership. The other case is current civil society campaigning for public spaces, and how traces of the colonial framework still form an essential reality to be navigated in order to promote public parks and beaches in the city. Based on interviews and participatory observation with civil society activists and professionals working with legislation and cadastre in Beirut, this paper suggests that these traces of historical connections are creatively engaged by civil society activists in Beirut today in their work to promote public space. It further concludes, that parallel to this negotiation, new connections are formed across the Mediterranean sea.