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Paper short abstract:

During my years of research and life on the island of Crete, concepts such as hospitality, honor, and shame have often accompanied me on my journey. However, the Mediterranean, as an analytical category expressed by my informants, has been prominent by its absence, not the sea.

Paper long abstract:

Over the course of more than a decade, I have resided on and engaged in anthropological research on the island of Crete. My inquiries have spanned various topics, with a primary emphasis on the exploration of its traditional music and intangible heritage, alongside an examination of elements associated with retributive justice. Notably, conventional anthropological categories, such as hospitality, honor, and shame, have frequently manifested with heightened prominence through the discourses articulated by my informants, all from an emic perpespective.

Nevertheless, the invocation of the Mediterranean or an asserted sense of Mediterraneanness among the Cretans, as a category articulated by the islanders themselves, remains conspicuously absent within my researches. The sea remains nameless; it stands as a boundary (Doñate and Romero 2008), devoid of the cosmopolitan connotations of intersectionality but rather identified as the point of origin for challenges and dangers.

As a Catalan, and thus hailing from a region along this very shores, where, in contrast to Crete, allusions to the Mediterranean persistently permeate various facets of life (festivals, research institutions, museums, publications, beverages, conferences, ...), I harbor a suspicion that those who expound most fervently upon the Mediterranean are often the furthest removed from the prevailing stereotypes that have historically underpinned this designation—an ideal that, in reality, remains elusive.

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Paper short abstract:

Coasts of Mediterranean islands shed light on multiple issues: economic, legal, environmental. The case of the Maddalena archipelago (Sardinia) will illustrate emerging conflicts concerning eroding beaches. Those conflicts mobilize varied knowledge, regulation and images of an Edenic Mediterranean

Paper long abstract:

The Mediterranean coasts – and in particular those of islands – represent an observation prism capable of shedding light on a plurality of issues: economic, legal, environmental, etc.

This communication will illustrate the case of the Maddalena archipelago in Sardinia, a former military outpost on the border with France and a marine base operated by NATO, today a tourist locality caught in territorial competitions with other localities. Here, conflicts have been emerging around eroding beaches since the 1990s. Such conflicts appear to stem mainly from direct anthropogenic impacts, damage to the seabed and climate change. Lately, a particular phenomenon has regularly been capturing headlines: the theft of sand from Sardinian beaches by tourists. At Maddalena, alongside the closing of beaches, « nature based » programs are also developed, to protect Posidonia meadows and fight against erosion.

We will then explore the possibility of comparing this case to those of other islands and archipelagos, located in more or less close but different spaces with regard to history, tourist development, geology and geography. In each context, conflicts and attempts at action regarding the loss of marine sand take shape in a specific way, mobilizing varied knowledge, regulations and the media images of an Edenic Mediterranean.

Analyzing these specificities will make it possible to analyze the multiple factors that shape the fight against coastal erosion, while questioning the way in which political-economic and cultural issues at different scales relate to sand management and the consideration ecological and social specificities of this material.

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Paper short abstract:

Climate change poses unprecedented threats to coastal areas in the Mediterranean. Drawing on ongoing researches on coastal wetlands, this paper speculates on the necessity of rethinking anthropological lenses to look at the Mediterranean, its shores, and its people in the current ecological crisis.

Paper long abstract:

Climate change poses unprecedented threats to coastal areas in the Mediterranean, with raising temperatures jeopardising water resources, extreme meteorological events causing damages to local agriculture, and sea level rise that will likely impact the most productive and populated Mediterranean regions, compromising the necessary infrastructures on which local economy and dwelling depend. These problems make the Mediterranean a hotspot of climate change where, according to current models, warming is going to be greater than the global average, with heat peaks in summer, higher frequency of droughts and floods, and greater variability in rainfall and temperature. These processes are exacerbated by phenomena of subsidence, coastal erosion, deterioration of water quality, and overexploitation of groundwater resources, mainly due to increasing urbanisation, intensive agriculture, and seasonal beach tourism. This context of environmental uncertainty, in the grip of the Anthropocene, raises challenges to anthropologists exploring the Mediterranean. Drawing on my research on coastal wetlands, this paper speculates on the necessity of rethinking anthropological lenses to look at the Mediterranean, its shores, and its people in the age of climate change.

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Paper short abstract:

The small island of Lampedusa is dotted with radars. With their electromagnetism, they are at the center of a socio-environmental struggle over the health of the local community and fauna, the Central Mediterranean migratory route, in multiple connections that this paper attempts to disentangle.

Paper long abstract:

Radars on Lampedusa rise up like towers or totem poles next to the piles of boats on which migrants have reached—or attempted to reach—the island. Closer to Tunisia than to the Italian mainland, Lampedusa is a crucial point on the Central Mediterranean "illegal" migration route and, at the same time, a strategic place for military control of the area. But the radars also have another feature: with their electromagnetism, they are considered by the local population to be the cause of the many tumors impacting the island’s inhabitants. In addition, the electromagnetism from those radars is considered highly harmful to the many species of migratory birds that pass through the island and for which a protected area was created.

At the intersection of the politics and experiences of migration, militarization, environmental conflicts, body and illness, Lampedusa’s radars and their ethnographic exploration suggest a paradigm that allows us to disentangle the elements underpinning the contemporary regime of borders and borderlands—for those who permanently inhabit those territories, for those who attempt to cross them “illegally”, and for non-humans using the island as a crucial passage point.

In this framework, this paper will consider socio-environmental activism, local community struggles, border control, migration management, and differential conceptions of the environment, nature, and human and non-human health in marginalized borderlands, and will attempt to scrutinize these multiple entanglements and to reflect on the contribution of an anthropological gaze to understanding and potential actions in such increasingly frequent situations.

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Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic contribution considers Sicilian oliviculturalists’ navigation and implementation of stereotypes about Sicily, Sicilians, and the Mediterranean, and their importance and meaning to these Sicilians and their livelihood strategies.

Paper long abstract:

The Mediterranean continues to hold sway as both a geophysical place and a discursive category. Ferguson (1988) writes of “metonymic misrepresentation” or “the way that one place, which is simply a part of a much larger place… comes to stand for a whole place” (22). The island of Sicily is referenced as a crossroads of the Mediterranean, nodding to its geographic location and the peoples who have moved across its landscapes; I argue that it comes to stand for the South, as understood via the Southern Question, as a placeholder for backwardness. This ethnographic contribution considers Sicilian oliviculturalists’ navigation and implementation of stereotypes about Sicily and Sicilians—Sicily’s metonymic misrepresentation as the backwards South, exoticized and otherized—to unpack the political economic consequences of such stereotypes, as seen through livelihood strategies, including the move to market their olive oil based on the problematic identity of their island.

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This paper focuses on Skyrians’ recourses to the local past through the Apokries ritual, which emerge in response to a threatening local future. In doing so, it explores how the depiction of the Mediterranean as ‘frozen in time’ can affect communities’ historicity and thus their collective agency.

Paper long abstract:

In the island of Skyros, Greece, the Apokries festivity is the most beloved. It takes the form of a ritual whose participants are collectively known as the ‘ginomenoi’: ‘those who become’, and which was perceived as an unchanged remnant of ancient Greek life by the foreign ethnographers who first studied it. Consequently, the island has been portrayed as offering an authentically Greek experience, ‘uncontaminated' by modernity, particularly during the Apokries. Skyrians exploited this characterization by further inscribing links to the national past in local histories and landscapes.

However, recently, the threat posed to Skyros’ natural landscape and indigenous community’s way of living by tourist overflow and state-backed wind-farm projects, has propelled a recourse to local pasts. In this recourse, the Apokries play central part as an embodied process awakening within participants the counter-memory of the historical experience that gave birth to the ritual – an experience that is discounted by the official national narrative and anthropological/folkloric studies.

This presentation reveals how this threatening future, as well as the nationalist appropriation of the local past and epistemic construction of Skyros as a Mediterranean site ‘frozen in time’, have confronted Skyrians with the problem of their collective agency. It focuses on how Skyrians’ recourses to the local past emerge as part of their wider efforts to regain their collective agency towards both their appropriated past and future of dispossession. It thus explores how collective agency emerges as a property fundamentally linked to a community’s historicity, meaning its sense of historical embeddedness.

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This paper investigates the contemporary food ritual of Saint Joseph's Day 'tables' in Italy, asking how traditional practices are being 'reinvented' in the context of globalisation, mass tourism, trans-Mediterranean migration, and an increased attention to food traditions.

Paper long abstract:

Tavole di San Giuseppe, Saint Joseph’s Tables, are an annual food ritual in parts of southern Italy, and are especially prevalent in central Sicily. Large Tables are filled with an array of dishes to mark Saint Joseph’s Day on 19 March, with care taken to lay the Table attractively, and to convey abundance. Historically the poorest local residents, especially children, were invited to dine at the Table. Both the format and the context of food rituals in Italy and elsewhere in the Mediterranean are undergoing “reinventions … redefining and interpreting tradition in the face of multiple pressures and encroachments” (Grasseni 2017). How, and to what extent, are the Tables also being “reinvented”, and what new meanings are coming to be symbolised by them?

In some cases, Saint Joseph’s Day is no longer primarily associated with feeding the poor, although in Salemi in central Sicily, for example, the practice has been “reframed” as an act of generosity towards recently-arrived asylum seekers. Elsewhere, it is encouraged as a local folk tradition, promoting the area’s visibility to culinary tourists. Using ethnographic fieldwork, we identify how the Tables are being “reinvented” in the context of globalisation, mass tourism, trans-Mediterranean migration, and an increased attention to food traditions, asking what new meanings the ritual is acquiring in the twenty-first century.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper revisits classics themes in Mediterranean anthropology--cosmopolitanism and hospitality--in the context of tourism massification and resistance thereof in Marseille, France. The paper explores contemporary articulations of cosmopolitanism and hospitality by opposing publics.

Paper long abstract:

Writing about the physical and human landscape in the 16th century, Fernand Braudel (1995[1996]) argued that the Mediterranean constituted a unit of analysis. Mediterranean cities, with their cosmopolitan cultures were a crucial element of this broader geographic and cultural unit. With the end of the Ottoman empire and the Cold War, claims to Mediterranean geopolitical and cultural unity began to fade. The end of the Cold War and increasing migration flows across the Mediterranean have once again brought attention to the region and its unity (Albera 1999, 2006; Bromberger 2006). This emerging literature returns to the study of the Mediterranean as a space united by difference, a fractured and hybrid space, shaped by postcolonial legacies as well as by contemporary hierarchies generated by fortress Europe (Chambers 2008) and neoliberal economics. Working alongside this literature, this paper brings attention to contemporary articulations of classic themes of cosmopolitanism and hospitality in the context of a relatively new phenomenon in Mediterranean cities: tourism massification. Capitalizing on a global imaginary of the Mediterranean climate, food, and architecture, many Mediterranean cities have promoted mass tourism as a key to economic development. At the same time, protests against overtourism have intensified. Looking at urban policies, market trends, and grassroots movements in the city of Marseille, France, this paper explores how imaginaries of cosmopolitanism and hospitality are deployed by various actors advocating or contesting tourism massification.

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Paper short abstract:

This study examines how the architecture profession responds to perceived threats to the status of the government and the hegemony. It analyzes the ways in which Israeli architects dealt with the fear of Mediterranean Arab cultures during two historical eras, using political violence.

Paper long abstract:

This study analyzes the ways Israeli government-employed architects dealt with the fear of "Arabism" – native Mediterranean Arab cultures – during two decades in the 20th century. During the first decade (1948–1956), the architects erased Arab cities and villages and rejected any signs of Arab architecture in the new cities planned for the Jewish population. In the second decade (1967–1977), the architects fought against the increased power and the heightened protests of Jews of Arab descent who posed a threat to the ruling hegemony.

Through this case study, we examine the relationship between three concepts in an architectural context: profession, hegemony, and government, focusing on times of crisis. The crisis is caused by two types of perceived threat: one is overt and recognized by the government, and the other is covert and not officially acknowledged, posing a latent threat to the hegemonic order. In both cases, the threat has the potential to overturn the power hierarchy and thus damage the status of the architects. The findings indicate that in a time of crisis, which is perceived—even by the authorities—as a threat to society at large, the architecture profession makes itself entirely available to assist the governmental authority to preserve the existing hegemony, exercising state-sponsored political violence. By contrast, when the ruling authorities do not consider the crisis to constitute a threat to the hegemonic order, the architecture profession ‘chooses its battles’ based on its interest in preserving the hegemony, to retain its own power and status.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which Turkish Cypriot youth living in an unrecognised state now identify with the Mediterranean as a way of avoiding misrecognition as Greek Cypriot or Turkish, resisting categorisation by others, and connecting with European and Middle Eastern cultural heritages.

Paper long abstract:

Focusing on the unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, this paper explores young adults’ experiences of identifying with the Mediterranean in the absence of an alternative recognised, uncontroversial term for themselves. Growing up with international embargoes, competing nationalisms, and existing as a “minority within a minority”, Turkish Cypriot participants described being incorrectly identified as Turkish, Greek Cypriot, or Greek. Caught between these politicised identities, many young Turkish Cypriots stress the importance of their Mediterraneanness, identifying with the sea, the climate, the laid-back culture, and the importance of family, food, and lemons. These popular stereotypes of the Mediterranean serve as useful images for Turkish Cypriots to reference when attempting to explain themselves and their culture, without having to explain the history and politics of the unrecognised Turkish Cypriot state.

This paper focuses on Turkish Cypriots in their twenties, particularly looking at the ways in which they relate to a Mediterranean identity as a way of demonstrating their proximity to both European and Middle Eastern cultural heritages, and to the challenging economic conditions being faced by youth elsewhere in the region. The term ‘Mediterranean’ also allows Turkish Cypriot youth to imply Europeanness without getting into the intricacies of their partial membership of the European Union. Throughout, the paper demonstrates the importance of a Mediterranean identity as an uncomplicated way of maintaining complexity, which ultimately allows Turkish Cypriot youth to resist categorisation by others in the absence of a recognised and uncontroversial national identity.