Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CROSSLOCATIONS (Crosslocations in the Mediterranean: rethinking the socio-cultural dynamics of relative positioning)

Teaser

The Mediterranean is a key social, cultural, economic and political crossroads, and Crosslocations is developing a new way to research changes in the relations and separations between its different parts. The contemporary era of globalization and digital interconnection, high...

Summary

The Mediterranean is a key social, cultural, economic and political crossroads, and Crosslocations is developing a new way to research changes in the relations and separations between its different parts. The contemporary era of globalization and digital interconnection, high levels of political instability in many parts of the region, widening and ever more visible inequalities between different areas, and environmental and climate challenges there, have led to profound changes in the relative value and significance of the region as a whole as well as shifts in the relations and separations between its parts. Existing research has focused on particular issues (e.g. migration, climate change, or conflict), or on particular countries or sub-regions (e.g. the Arab states, Greece, Israel, the Maghreb region). Instead, Crosslocations focuses on the dynamics of the many different kinds of relations and separations between the different parts of the Mediterranean, and also on the relations and separations between these parts and other parts of the world.

With the help of a large team of specialists from many disciplines (law, cartography, finance and banking, theology and religion, digital systems specialists, linguistics, EU politics, history, infrastructure, and even plant biology), a core team of social anthropologists are researching the dynamics of how particular places are connected to, and disconnected from, other places in the Mediterranean, and with other parts of the world. Placing anthropologists at the heart of this project also places people at its centre: although we are working with many different disciplines and sectors, our primary concern is to understand how the importance of being somewhere in particular (wherever that may be) is changing, and how that is directly relevant to people’s lives.

In the approach taken by the project, the separations or disconnections between places are as important to understand as the relations and connections: although the world is increasingly connected through various technologies, high levels of disconnection between places have continued. Indeed, increased technical possibilities for connection might simply make more visible the way disconnections are maintained and enforced, and the way people in some parts of the world have many more options to be connected than people in other parts of the world.

Connections and disconnections across space have always been a crucial part of human life, but the way in which that works changes across time. Crosslocations is providing the tools to comprehend how that process works in the contemporary era. In recent years, researchers have focused strongly on globalization and the introduction of digital technologies, and argued that perhaps physical location is becoming less important than it once was; we now know that physical location is no less important than it has always been, but the way in which it remains important, and the relative value of one place as opposed to another, has profoundly changed. Crosslocations aims to provide a means to analyse and explain that process of change for the Mediterranean region.

In theoretical terms, the Crosslocations approach builds on the idea that social and cultural location is a form of political, social, economic, and technical relative positioning, involving diverse scales that calibrate relative values (which we call ‘locating regimes’). This implies that locations are both multiple and historically variable, so different types of location may overlap in the same geographical space, particularly in crossroads regions such as the Mediterranean. For example, while some areas may be divided by political borders, they could also be linked in terms of religious affiliation (e.g. countries that are predominantly Christian Orthodox in the Mediterranean region, as opposed to those that are predominantly Catholic or Sunni Muslim). These different kinds of connections and separations gener

Work performed

By the end of February 2019, we have reached the half-way point in the project, and are still in the middle of collecting our research data.

In the first year, we set up the project, appointed personnel and began contacting external experts in order to roughly map out ‘locating regimes’ across the Mediterranean. Then we sent out a team of three ethnographers, who developed their projects together in Helsinki, to carry out Phase I of their ethnographic research on these locating regimes (months 13-22); the team returned, worked together intensively on their initial results for two months (Months 23-24), and then went out again for Phase II of the research (Months 25-34). We are currently in the midst of Phase II of the research.

In terms of fieldwork, the core Crosslocations post-doctoral researchers carried out projects in Cairo (Carl Rommel), Thessaloniki, Lesvos and Meteora (Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki), and Calabria (Joseph Viscomi). Further, the PhD researcher (Samuli Lähteenaho) carried out one year of fieldwork in Beirut. In addition, Patricia Scalco and Laia Soto Bermant, post-doctoral researchers on the Academy of Finland’s Transit, Trade and Travel (TTT) project, but who are also part of the Crosslocations team, have carried out ethnographic research in Istanbul (Scalco) and the Spanish enclave of Melilla (Soto Bermant) during this period. Although the focus of the TTT project is different from Crosslocations, both projects are attempting to test similar premises, and are focused on the same region, the Mediterranean. Scalco and Soto Bermant will join Crosslocations full time so after their part of TTT is completed in the summer of 2019.

The topics of these projects are quite varied, which is deliberate: we want to be able to see how the basic premises and hypotheses of the Crosslocations approach works across different topics, regions, and themes. Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki has been studying Greece’s shifting landscape of religious tourism, as well as the broader economic, political, and social synergies that Greek Christian Orthodox pilgrimage has effectuated in the Balkans and the Mediterranean region. She has also compiled a historical overview of state-church relations in Greece. Carl Rommel is working in Cairo, focusing on the obsession that many men in that country have with the idea of a ‘project’ (mashru‘), either big or small. Joseph Viscomi is working in a tiny village in Calabria that has been largely abandoned by its residents, who have now moved to many different parts of the world. While most research on migration focuses on the people who move, Viscomi is focusing on the place they have left behind, considering how places become ‘de-located’ or remote, despite continuing to be connected to the world through the diaspora. Samuli Lähteenaho is studying urban development in Beirut, focusing on issues of public spaces and related conflicts, as well as the management and privatization of the city\'s coastline, and work of coastline-oriented civil society organizations. Patricia Scalco is working on the carpet trade in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, focusing on the city and the bazaar as an historical crossroads connecting different parts of the Mediterranean as well as the world. Laia Soto Bermant is working on Melilla, a small Spanish enclave surrounded by Moroccan territory. It is a 12 square kilometre part of the European Union located in north Africa, and that strange positioning affects everything about the place. Soto Bermant is exploring the city’s relative location, given that it has been under Spanish sovereignty since the late 15th century and part of the Schengen space since the early 1990s.

In addition, the leader of Crosslocations, Sarah Green, has developed a project designed to focus on the Mediterranean region as a whole. She is studying the border regime for the control of the movement of live animals across the Mediterranean region, and the process of attempts to cont

Final results

The most significant achievements at this stage in the research have been (1) successfully getting the research underway, (2) major steps forward in testing and developing the key concepts of the project, and (3) redesigning the project in light of what we learned. By the end of the project, we aim to fully describe the Crosslocations approach and how it helps to rethink the relations and separations across the Mediterranean region; we also aim to publish full ethnographic descriptions of how these dynamics work on the ground in the field sites of our researchers; produce an exhibition of the photographic part of the project, which will also be available online; publish a series of maps that visually represent some of the locating regimes and their relations and separations with others; and provide a publication that shows how the Crosslocations approach can be used as a tool to better understand the social implications of the dynamics of connections and disconnections across the Mediterranean region. By the end of the project, we should have a much better understanding of how the relative value and significance of location is undergoing transformation, and the dynamics that are generating those transformations.

Some notable issues that have already arisen during our work have been:

1. The dynamics of the contested concept of ‘Mediterranean’: The dominant contemporary meaning of ‘Mediterranean’ has roots in European scholarship: Classics and modern history, which are also echoed in social science scholarship. This stereotype of the region runs quite deep and has strongly influenced social and political perceptions of the relative value of different parts of the region. When the implied hierarchy is contested, it appears as if the Mediterranean, as a place, is being rejected, rather than the European-influenced definition of it.

For example, many have suggested that Egypt ‘turned its back’ on the Mediterranean during Abdel Nasser’s presidency (1956-70). Nasser was determined to break free of former colonial ties to Europe, and to create a set of new relations across Arab states. From a Crosslocations perspective, this appears as Nasser’s effort to transform the relative value and significance of Egypt by breaking ties across the Mediterranean and creating new ties more horizontally across the north African region – a shift of orientation, in a sense. Traces of this contestation, which has come to be understood by many as a rejection of the Mediterranean, as such, has been noted by Carl Rommel in his ethnographic research in Cairo, where he is studying contemporary Egyptian men’s obsession with both small and large ‘projects’.

This understanding of ‘Mediterranean’ as a dominant concept that contains an implicit hierarchy of different parts of the region (a hierarchy that is regularly contested) has important implications. The Egyptian political rejection of the Mediterranean could be described as an attempt to recalibrate the relative political, historical and social value and location of post-colonial Egypt. A Crosslocations lens encourages the expectation that this attempt is likely to have co-existed with other ways that Egypt is connected to, or disconnected from, the northern shores of the Mediterranean region, which implies that Nasser’s efforts are likely to have only been partially successful (though field research is needed to demonstrate this one way or the other). In addition, this insight is likely to add important material to the debate over the meaning of ‘Mediterranean’ in the social science literature.

2. The importance of time, tempo and rhythm. Questions of temporality have emerged as being important to relative location. This is not only in terms of history, but also the way different locating regimes may affect how time is calibrated, particularly tempo (the pace at which events occur) and rhythm (the synchrony or dissonance of events). This has obvious resonances in

Website & more info

More info: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/crosslocations.