Cultures in Contact: Transfer of Knowledge in the Mediterranean Context (original) (raw)

Introduction: Remapping Mediterranean anthropology

History and Anthropology, 2020

We introduce this special issue, which reexamines the fluctuating fortunes of the Mediterranean in anthropology and ask what it offers for contemporary anthropological explorations. We locate the Mediterranean within the history of anthropological (and more broadly, ethnographic) development of core ideas and methodologies concerning personhood, narrative, and culture making. Our approach to the study of the Mediterranean focuses less on why anthropologists abandoned a notion of regional cultural unity, and more on the bases through which such unity is performed and on the concepts and categories which anthropologists might recuperate to account for such performances, even in the wake of their rejection of 'cultural areas' as such. Such an analytical move requires the remapping of the Mediterranean as a regional formation that is both multiscalar and transnational. We argue that the Mediterranean must be approached alongside other attempts to critically remap space and human and ecological connections in anthropology and at is margins; that the study of the Mediterranean should converse with recent developments in the study of sea and oceanic worlds, whether from a historical anthropological or transnational/ transregional perspective. At the same time, we outline the benefits of paying attention to the unique place that the Mediterranean might occupy among such maritime worlds. Such a Mediterranean projects a kaleidoscopic vision, combining not just premodern pasts and modern presents, but also a long and conflictual present perfect, in which past and present processes enliven each other, underwriting possible futures.

Cultural Dialogue in the Mediterranean Region

My doctoral thesis defence in last century's pre-digital era, marked the end of almost half a decade of leapfrogging between the four corners of the Mediterranean. Today, you can complete a digital thesis without leaving the comfort of your Wi-Fi zone. But, that practice of amassing photocopies and reports whilst out on the road, however outdated, slow, primitive and environmentally-unfriendly it may have been, somehow forced one to find a balance between the translation of what people wanted to appear in texts and what was inadvertently pulsating in the street. Equally, you could perceive the colours and smells of places; things that weren't to be found in the books. In short, you experienced, first-hand, the "countryside and countrymen." The conclusion I would like to reach is that the Europe and the Arab world of the 1980s, once you were in them, were much less different to each other than each of those past worlds differ from one another today. As this is the first idea I would like to highlight in this text, I will try to be a little more specific: Europe in the early eighties, pre-Erasmus and low-cost flights, was an expanding hive of old folk; happy for having left behind their old suspicions and distrust and expanding and gaining strength because of the clear perception that problems, from now on, would always come from outside. But it was a hive, as I said. With its separate compartments. The youth were yet to pull down the walls and reach today's plain-to-see uniformity after decades of university exchanges, low-cost weekends away and clothing at bargain prices, all bearing the same labels.

Syllabus: Anthropology of the Mediterranean

2019

This graduate seminar offers an overview of some of the ways that “the Mediterranean”—as well as the people, places, and cultural processes associated with it—has been rendered as an object of inquiry. In the first unit, “Critical Foundations,” we begin by considering influential strains of scholarship that have understood the Mediterranean as a region and culture area fundamentally shaped by geography, climate, and human movement. Alongside several canonical works in history and anthropology, we will read critiques of this earlier work and debates about how best to study the cultures in and of the “sea in the middle of the earth.” Next, we review some of the principal theoretical concerns that have animated scholarship in and on the Mediterranean in recent decades, including colonialism and empire, the space and time of modernity, race and religion, and various ways that power and human difference are interwoven. Readings in the second unit, “Exile, Diaspora, Return,” range across historical and contemporary examples of the politics of origins, ownership, and belonging in the Mediterranean world. In particular, we will address some of the modern political dilemmas raised by the exiles and returns of Jews and Muslims—two quintessentially “Mediterranean” collectives whose fates and self-understandings have varied wildly across time and space. The third unit, “Senses, Materialities, Subjectivities,” tracks how people and objects marked as “Mediterranean” have remade and continue to remake each other. The final unit, “Mediterranean Crises: Austerity, Insurrection, Migration,” asks how narratives of “crisis”—and their embedded assumptions about the past, present, and future—have enabled and constrained what is politically thinkable and doable in recent years. This resolutely interdisciplinary course will draw on scholarship within and across the fields of history, anthropology, political theory, and literary theory. This will be supplemented by various forms of media, including film and music, as well as the unpredictable unfolding of events related to the modern and contemporary Mediterranean in journalism and cultural criticism (for this, we will especially rely on your sense of what is relevant in your weekly presentations and commentaries). While we cannot, in fifteen weeks or ever, hope to fully do justice to the complexity of the Mediterranean and the peoples and places associated with it, the readings are arranged to offer both breadth and depth. In terms of geography, our itineraries both reflect and transcend what has been humanly possible (points of departure, arrival, and detention include Spain, Morocco, Tunisia, France, Syria, Italy, Algeria, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Albania, and Israel/Palestine). Although our focus is on the modern and the contemporary, we will frequently attend to the ways that deeper histories inform and are produced in the present.

The study of Mediterranean connections and Humanities

Helade Journal, 2019

Studies on Mediterranean connections are an ongoing field of research since the 1980’s. In this field, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, and literati began to observe more accurately and critically models that emphasized the static and limiting character of cultures. This process heightened more acutely the fluidity and connectivity of peoples, considering both the present time and Antiquity.