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- Convenors:
-
Margaret Neil
(University of Oxford)
Sean Wyer (University of California, Berkeley)
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- Discussant:
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Alessandro Corso
(University of Oxford)
Short Abstract:
Is the Mediterranean, or the idea of the Mediterranean, undergoing a 'renaissance'? Or, does it need to be 'revived' or 'healed'? This panel asks what exploring revival, healing, sickness, death and related themes in (and of) the Mediterranean might offer to a broader anthropology of healing.
Long Abstract:
The idea that the Mediterranean is 'dead', 'dying' or 'ill' is not new (Ben-Yehoyada 2017). The precise date in which modernity 'killed' the Mediterranean is debated - Ben-Yehoyada notes that some historians believe the 'discovery' of the Atlantic was enough (Braudel 1949); others place its death as late as the twentieth-century demise of the sea's great port cities - but the topos itself is rarely disputed. Shryock's conception of the Mediterranean as a discursive category, however, inverts the metaphor of death. He instead perceives the Mediterranean as "always returning" (2020) - on the brink of revival.
Given that 'our world appears fundamentally unwell', as the theme of this year's conference suggests, what might anthropological inquiries in and of this region offer to a broader anthropology of healing?
This panel welcomes papers grounded in ethnography, and in anthropological theory in (and of) the Mediterranean, broadly defined. Topics might include:
Whether a 'View from the South' might help create a resistant framework to that of capitalist modernity set by a reified 'north';
Whether presuming a need to 'heal' positions the south as a 'problem', or reinforces the idea of the Mediterranean as a 'periphery';
Whether the work of migrant activism and reception at the 'border of Europe' offers pathways for rethinking futurity and hope in the region; and
Whether the revival of notions of a welcoming, hospitable, and multicultural Mediterranean - partly in response to the hardening of 'Fortress Europe' - may or may not contribute to ideas of healing and futurity.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 11 April, 2023, -Eleonore Bully (Université Gustave Eiffel - Paris Est) Martina Bovo (Politecnico di Milano)
Paper short abstract:
The contribution discusses the need to reframe prevailing understandings of the Mediterranean region and migrant hospitality across it. It argues that assuming a reciprocal gaze on both terms helps to do so. Based on ethnographic works, this hypothesis is discussed in Palermo (IT).
Paper long abstract:
The contribution discusses the need to reframe the Mediterranean region and migrant hospitality reciprocally. On the one hand, there is a growing need to affirm the centrality of the Mediterranean region against long standing visions of it as a periphery of bordering continents (Cassano, 1997). On the other hand, the region is the space of recent migration and hospitality experiences that deploy through complex and circular trajectories across it (Babel, 2018). However, both discussions are still in the making: the Mediterranean region is yet often defined in relation to Northern contexts. Migration processes and hospitality still deploy through rigid institutionalized categories (e.g. departure, transit and destination cities) that deny their plural nature.
We argue that intertwining a gaze on the Mediterranean through hospitality and a gaze on hospitality through a Mediterranean perspective has a productive value, able to “liberate” both terms. The geography of migration pathways and spaces triggers a shift in the understanding of the Mediterranean, and it affirms its centrality as- the core of plural experiences of hospitality. In return, a Mediterranean gaze (Cassano, 1997) on hospitality reveals the characteristics of a “local and adaptive” (Briata, 2014) model that is complementary - and only partially comparable to Northern ones.
Drawing from two pieces of research in urban studies, the contribution emplaces such hypothesis in the city of Palermo, in Southern Italy. Here, grounded on ethnographical material, the work unpacks the politics, policy, spaces and practices of hospitality in an urban Mediterranean crossroad.
Sean Wyer (University of California, Berkeley)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the growing local interest in Palermo’s ‘hidden’ medieval Jewish heritage, as well as the inchoate ‘revival’ of a small contemporary Jewish community. It analyses how these developments relate to twenty-first century geopolitics and the idea of a 'cosmopolitan' Mediterranean.
Paper long abstract:
Sicily’s Spanish rulers expelled the island’s remaining Jews in 1492, and Sicily not had a substantial Jewish population since. Recently, however, some in Sicily argue that Judaism is now ‘returning’ to the island. Street signs in Italian, Hebrew and Arabic now mark Palermo’s former Jewish quarter. A possible miqweh, or Jewish ritual bath, has been ‘discovered’, but its authenticity is contested. The Church has granted use of a deconsecrated chapel to the city’s nascent Jewish community. This interest might appear disproportionate to Judaism’s numerical significance in Palermo, which lacks a minyan, the ten adult men required for liturgical purposes. What, then, might explain these changes?
This paper demonstrates that the increased visibility of Jewish Palermo is employed to symbolise and encourage the city’s oft-cited ‘tolerant’ identity. This narrative reinforces an idea that Sicily is ‘rediscovering’ its vocation as a cosmopolitan island, in implicit contrast with the mainland. According to its proponents, twenty-first century immigration therefore represents the evolution of this multicultural city, rather than a novelty or an aberration.
Some in Palermo hope that the renewed visibility of Jewish heritage might be a catalyst for a return of Jewish religious life. I argue that tourism, immigration, European and Middle-Eastern geopolitics, and a broader resurgence of interest in the contested idea of the Mediterranean as a potential model for multiculturalism, all contribute to the increased prominence of the idea that Palermo is undergoing a cosmopolitan ‘revival’, of which the inchoate return of Judaism to Palermo is both a symptom and cause.
Margaret Neil (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues against longstanding calls for 'more legality' in Sicily. Instead, I argue that 'legality' is a racialised term, which needs to be decolonised also to show the ways in which it is now affecting (anti)immigration policy and praxis.
Paper long abstract:
The presumed absence or dearth of legality (legalità) in Sicily - in favour of informal and illegal work and customs - has long been viewed as one of the island's central problems by scholars and citizens alike. This is because, first, it is often considered the reason behind the island's so-called 'underdevelopment' (La Spina 2005). Second, as I observed during a year of ethnographic field work, the lack of legality is often tied to the idea of a 'mafia mentality' - a way of thinking that is in some way considered to be sick, deviant, deficient or criminal (cf. Schneider 1998). If Sicilians and Italians also attribute it casually, and biologically, to a Mediterranean or Arab 'essence' of Sicilians (the lingering effects of Lombroso's 'scientific studies' of the 1880s), other times it is considered to be a 'culture' that needs to be eradicated. Today, longstanding and engrained stereotypic notions of legality are being transposed onto migrants, providing discursive fodder to racist policies and praxis. In this article, I critique the above points of view, arguing rather that 'legality' is a racialised notion that originates in a historic attempt to 'other' southern Italians. 'Healing' in this case involves not more legality, but a decolonisation of the term - deconstructing it to reveal its racialised underpinnings and the uneven ways in which it is applied.
Alessandro Corso (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I will discuss the ways in which the local communities who live at the Italian borderland of Lampedusa, deal with deadly encounters at sea and on land, and articulate potential paths for change, where death can come to dialogue with life through memory.
Paper long abstract:
Has the world ever been well? If we claim to live in an era of unwellness, where we seek remedies to the threats that we see raising around us, how do people deal with unwellness, and learn to live with it, in their ordinary lives? In a time of ongoing war, famine, human rights suspension, climate change challenges, and violence of all sorts, the Mediterranean emerges as a crucial borderland where questions around life and death shall be articulated. Surveilled and patrolled by a growing security and military technology, the Mediterranean Sea is both a bridge and a graveyard which hosts the forgotten victims of deadly border crossings. The sea however gives back what border regimes seek to neglect. Fishermen retrieve dead bodies in their fishing nets at sea, and borderland inhabitants find the belongings of migrants washed ashore. In this intervention, I will discuss the ways in which local communities who live at the borderlands, with the specific case of the Italian island of Lampedusa, deal with these deadly encounters, and articulate potential paths for change, where death can come to dialogue with life through memory.
Marie-Aude Salomon (Aix Marseille University Maison Française d'Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims at presenting the context of the construction of Marseille as a welcoming city for migrants by both civil society and local public actors, showing the specificities of its location in a border region, the narrative on its Mediterranean identity, and its divided urban context.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on a 12 months long fieldwork carried out in 2022 in Marseille as part of a PhD project in the field of geography. It relies on qualitative and ethnographic methods within migrants reception scene in Marseille (Hastings et.al, 2021).
It aims at presenting the context of Marseille as a welcoming city for migrants, showing the specificities of its location in a border region, its Mediterranean identity, and its divided urban context in the process of its construction.
I will show how the image of an open Mediterranean port, local migrations heritage and the city’s foundation myth spread the imaginary of a welcoming and mixed city are used by the municipal team (2020, various lefts) to support its commitment to building a welcoming policy.
I will argue that this welcoming city, considered by some activists as the "first big city of solidarity after the border"(1) , had developed in the context of its location in the French-Italian border region, which characterizes the migratory patterns of newcomers in the city. An analysis of local and translocal networks of actors allows to regionally scale (Brenner, 2011) the construction of this welcoming city regarding the circulations of information and actors along the region.
I will explore how the geography of the local reception scene reflects telescoping effects between reception challenges, socio-economic divisions of the city and strong issues on substandard housing, with vulnerable migrants being particularly exposed. It also shows the place of emerging cross-sectors coalitions around temporary occupation in the making of urban hospitality.
(1)Expression taken from an activist from Briançon during an inter-collective event with autonomous collectives from Briançon, Ventimiglia, and Marseille, on the 11.12.2022
References:
Brenner, Neil. “The Urban Question and the Scale Question: Some Conceptual Clarifications.” Locating
Migration: Rescaling Cities and Migrants, edited by Nina Glick Schiller and Ayşe Çağlar, 1st ed., Cornell
University Press, 2011, pp. 23–41, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt7zh6v.5
Michel Hastings, Bénédicte Héraud et Anne Kerlan (dir.), Le sens pratique de l'hospitalité : accueillir les
étrangers en France, 1965-1983, CNRS Editions, 2021, CNRS alpha, 582 p
Lukas Ley (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Paper short abstract:
What roles do sand and concrete play in ‘curing’ and ‘protecting’ the Mediterranean city? In Marseille, where many buildings are at acute risk of coastal erosion, the company Seacure develops 'natural concrete,' a peculiar “geosocial formation” to stabilize shoreline infrastructure.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on work that investigates sand to disentangle the sociomaterial foundations of cities (John 2021) and conceptualize the porosity of geospatial relations (Jamieson 2021), this paper reflects on ongoing fieldwork on the production of ‘natural concrete’ in Marseille. How does this emergent body of literature speak to and allow to conceptualize the use of natural concrete along Mediterranean and Atlantic shores? What roles do sand and concrete play in ‘curing’ and ‘protecting’ the Mediterranean city? In Marseille, where many buildings are at acute risk of coastal erosion, the company Seacure offers a peculiar “geosocial formation” (Clark and Yusoff 2017) to fix corroding jetties or stabilize shoreline infrastructure. The production of natural concrete combines human, material, and abiotic agencies (Gesing 2021) to promote a ‘blue urbanism.’ Questioning the environmental impact of reckless urban expansion into the sea, this urbanism incorporates sediment and seawater into new material and economic configurations that can be put to work pretty much anywhere, regardless of historical or social context. Fixing the sociomaterial foundations of port cities by mobilizing seawater benefits a niche economy that attempts to decarbonize construction. How do attempts to cure port infrastructure map onto urban economies, such as Marseille’s, that are “disintegrating” themselves (Dell’Umbria 2006:16)? I argue that sediment in the Mediterranean reveals “a porous continuity between dispossession and accumulation” (Jamieson 2021) in that it plays a role in making and unmaking territory and belonging at various places and scales.