Paper short abstract:

I reflect on the versions of 'the Mediterranean' that emerge and are held together in the course of implementing an EU project, and argue that hypermedia and the web make it possible to imagine the abstraction that is 'the Mediterranean' as the materiality of a lived 'Mediterranean' space.

Paper long abstract:

The fictive nature of place has become a common component of anthropological discourse, a necessary counter to essentialist assumptions about the fixity of place and the locality of social relationships, including those underlying anthropological practice. The practical and theoretical orientation towards scapes, flows, and mobile social relationships, responds to the globalizing trends of 'supermodernity' and the increasingly individualized nature of relationships with a proliferating range of spacialities, mediated by travel and the technologies of the imagination, including the mass media and internet. Yet these developments are also accompanied by a countervailing emphasis on the persistence of the idea of 'place', of people's attachment to 'places', and of the materiality of the ideas in which 'place' is rooted. In this paper I explore these issues through reflection on participation in a European Union sponsored project, <i>Mediterranean Voices</i>, whose remit of representing 'the Mediterranean' is driven by the EU agenda of imagining and reproducing a 'Euromed' zone at Europe's southern edge. I suggest that a number of versions of 'the Mediterranean' emerge and are held together in dialectical tension in the course of project implementation and practice. I argue that the use of hypermedia and the web make it possible to imagine the abstraction that is 'the Mediterranean' as the materiality of a lived 'Mediterranean' space, opening up opportunities for a subversive spatial practice, and tactical engagement with the very discourses of 'cultural heritage' and 'Mediterranean identity' that determined the conditions in which the <i>Mediterranean Voices</i> project took place.