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 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.