Maria Kousis, Tom Selwyn and David Clark (eds) Contested Mediterranean Spaces: Ethnographic Essays in Honour of Charles Tilly, Berghahn, New York and Oxford, 2011. 330 pages, 9 illustrations. $ 120.00, £ 75.00, ISBN: 978-0-85745-132-3.

See Sara Fregonese's most recent Society & Space contributions: Beyond the ‘Weak State’: Hybrid Sovereignties in Beirut and The New Geopolitics of Responsibility in Barack Obama's Cairo Speech

This edited collection comprises mostly non-Anglophone contributions by social anthropologists, historians, scientists, area experts, and practitioners in European and Mediterranean institutions. The volume resulted from two events: the Euromed-funded “Mediterranean Voices” project, an ethnographic research project on urban space and heritage across the Mediterranean, and the “Contentious Politics and Economic Opportunity Structure” conference held in 2002 at the University of Crete, to honour the work on the Mediterranean by late sociologist, political scientist and historian Charles Tilly. This valuable and well-written series of urban ethnographies reflects on cases of urban contention all around the Mediterranean, including disputes over metropolitan development and environmentalism, community relations, and ethno-religious conflict.

According to Tilly, the city is an ideal ground for ethnographic study. The contributors employ Tilly’s urban theories and methodologies to highlight the hybrid nature of urban disputes that are both imbued with local dynamics and influenced by larger-scale processes. The chapters are thus underpinned by scalar tensions: the local impact of larger security and cultural EU policies, the reflection of state power and sovereignty disputes at micro-regional scales, and the acts of resistance, struggle for legitimacy, and transnational connections of local groups to influence wider agendas.

The volume is organised in four parts. The first part “Recovering the Mediterranean” (chapters 1–3) deals with the wider cultural, epistemological and geopolitical frames that shape contemporary understandings of the region. Chapter 1 by Vassiliki Yiakoumaki conceptualizes the Mediterranean as a spatial category that produces specific policies and shapes the positionality of researchers involved in the Med-Voices project. Chapter 2 by Minas Samatas reflects on Fortress Europe as a post-Cold War project of spatialisation and the pursuit of specific threats including illegal immigration, terrorism, and protest. These topics are particularly relevant in light of the recently awarded Peace Nobel Prize to the European Union. Chapter 3 by Eleni Kallimopoulou discusses the role of scholars in the cultural reproduction of the Mediterranean through the case study of music festivals and their relation to nationalist taxonomies.

The second part “State, Capital, and Resistance” (chapters 4-6) undertakes a more ‘street-level’ analysis of the dialectics and spatialities produced by neoliberal state policies and local activism. Chapter 4 by Sune Haugbolle delineates the discrepant responses to post-war Beirut’s reconstructed city centre and its adjacent war-torn neighbourhoods. The neoliberal agenda of reconstruction, re-branding and place marketing has, until recently, isolated Beirut’s city centre from the everyday spaces of its adjacent neighbourhoods, where myriads interpretations of the memories of war are still contested. In chapter 5, Jeremy Boissevain and Caroline Gatt look at the rise of civil society and environmentalist movements within post-independence Malta. From being ostracized as ‘extremism’, activism has gained increasing competence, contacts, legitimacy, and impact on public policy. Looking at the case of building speculation and environmental degradation caused by unruly resort development, the chapter exposes the lacuna in the Maltese state in guaranteeing its people’s welfare. This, the authors argue, is due to blatant corruption and complicity with neoliberal developers, leaving politically-relevant change essentially in the hands of EU- and sub-national actors.  Chapter 6 by Maria Kousis and Katerina Psarikidou looks at the ways in which environmental activists responded to EU-Habitat restructuring of the Caretta-Caretta turtle protection schemes on the islands of Zakynthos and Crete. They expose the contestation between differing ideas of science, knowledge, and evidence at EU and local level in the governance of biodiversity. Building on the migratory behaviour of the Caretta-Caretta species, they call for a trans-national, Pan-Mediterranean approach to sustainable environmentalism.

The third part of the collection, “Capital and Neighbourhood Governance” (chapters 7-9), looks specifically at the sphere of the neighbourhood, and especially at the impact of capital-driven measures on local governance and community relations. Chapter 7 by Carol Sansour Dabdoub and Carol Zoughbi-Janineh delineates the traits of the political economy of occupied Palestine by focusing on one street in Bethlehem, its connections to the NativityChurch and the battle for politically sustainable tourism, which this place has the potential to attract, despite the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Chapter 8 by Günhan Danisman and Ismail Üstün illustrates the tensions between central government and local communities in Istanbul around the construction of a new bridge across the Bosphorus and its likely impacts on the local environment and social fabric. Here, resistance to common threats and against physical interventions that alter social equilibriums reinforces community cohesion even in contexts of traditional ethnic disputes. In chapter 9, Marc Morell and Jaume Franquesa tackle the impact of EU-funded urban renewal policies at the neighbourhood scale in Mallorca. In particular, they analyze how these reinforce specific local networks of trust and power relations that, paradoxically, promote inequality and hinder neighbourliness.

The last part of the volume (chapters 10-12) shifts from the neighbourhood to identity negotiation through the lenses of multiculturalism, memory, and conflict. In chapter 10 Javier Rosón Lorente and Gunther Dietz discuss the communal tensions generated by immigration in Granada, and the ways such process shapes understandings of ‘Andalusi’ identity. The authors argue that contemporary constructions of Andalusi identity and the use of urban public space are not simply defined by islamophobia and islamophilia, but also by interpretations of Islam among its supporters and members. Identity and memory are tackled in chapter 11 by David Clark. The author illustrates the case of the management of Jewish heritage in the two Italian cities of Bologna and Ferrara. The chapter focuses on museums and the networks of actors and power gravitating around them. More broadly, it addresses the issue of combating racism through heritage projects and within the frame of the EU capital of culture initiatives. Chapter 12 by Elia Vardaki also recounts the local, EU, and national sites of identity negotiation and tensions in the Cretan city of Khania. It explores its music festivals as sites where the implementation of EU cultural policies renegotiates ideas of belonging and borders in the locality. Chapter 13 by Tom Selwyn takes us back to the Palestinian/Israeli border, this time through another specific site mirroring a wider struggle: Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem. Here, locality and national sovereignty disputes are tightly intertwined. Israeli architecture of security around the tomb has produced a scar in the local social and built fabric. By following the history of the biblical protagonist herself, Rachel, Selwyn reflects on the possibility of reimagining the borderscape as a potential landscape of cosmopolitan transformation, rather than of polarizing destruction.

This volume makes at least three significant interdisciplinary contributions that reach out to scholars or practitioners interested in the relations between spatial and social processes.

Firstly, on the theoretical and epistemological front, the assumption of a Mediterranean regionalism is tackled up front. As Tilly argued, it is difficult, if not impossible, to capture the Mediterranean within clear territorial and political boundaries. On the contrary, the region offers a rich ground for the study of hybrid trans-scalar processes (Abulafia, 2011; Matvejevich, 1991), as well as alternative geographical and historical enquiries (Leontidou, 1993; Giaccaria and Minca, 2010; Horden and Purcell, 2000). The Mediterranean portrayed in the book is also very much a critical sea rather than a coherent one. Instead of pinning down coherent traits, the book traces contestations, contradictions, and controversies across scales and across multiple actors, from the nation-state, to the city and its neighbourhoods, down to the individuals populating them.

Secondly, the notion of the Mediterranean as a critical space leads us to Charles Tilly’s idea of “contentious politics”, or the use of disruptive tactics (like protest) for political change. As an ethnography of practices of contentious politics across the Mediterranean, this book is relevant nowadays more than ever. Relations between Mediterranean Europe and the MENA region are under pressure as an effect of the Arab revolutions. Perhaps the only consistency we can find in the Mediterranean is its history as a sea of dissent and resistance, as well as of authoritarianism and dictatorship. In the twentieth century, virtually every country on the northern bank, from the Iberian Peninsula to Greece, endured a dictatorship. In the twenty-first century, the Mediterranean is again witnessing the fall of decades-long regimes in the southern banks, modifying or reinforcing relations, mobilities, and security agendas across its waters.

Thirdly, the methodological remit of the book is important for scholars researching the Mediterranean. The city, according to Tilly, offers a toolbox for the ethnographer to link large-scale processes to micro-scale social relations- One way to observe these links is through the material textures of the urban environment. Several chapters, especially those on Bethlehem, Bologna, Granada, Malta, and Istanbul are of particular use here. They show how formal contentious politics converge with everyday life around a single street, like Star street in Bethlehem, individual neighbourhoods, like el El Albayzin in Granada, or specific infrastructures like the bridges across the Bosphorus. All too often, these convergences break down community relations, especially where new mega-constructions like hotels and bridges, or urban renewal schemes disrupt existing social fabrics. The Mediterranean boasts plenty of examples of physical contact spaces being systematically destroyed, or divided as a trickle-down effect of identity and political conflict at higher levels. Not only does the richness of case studies in this collection offer a powerful illustration of the experience of geopolitics beyond the national scale, but it also provides a useful tool for ethnographers and practitioners alike.

While the volume would have certainly benefited from more maps, it also presents methodological constraints. Some of the chapters construct their narrations around the very actors at the centre of the controversies (the Caretta-Caretta migratory trails, Rachel’s biblical journey, and so on) and highlight the transformative potential of these narratives. Yet, while the networks are so well traced, the power imbalances are not (or not enough) highlighted. While the EU and its socio-cultural interventions is an omnipresent frame behind the contentions in the countries on the northern shore, extra-EU sites like Istanbul and Bethlehem appear much more distant from the EU socio-cultural galaxy. Here lies a considerable question mark about the balance of relations between the northern and southern banks of the Mediterranean, both in the frame of the ‘Mediterranean Partnership’ launched in Barcelona in 1995, and of the EU’s neighbourhood policy initiatives. 

References

Abulafia D (2011) The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean. London: Allen Lane.

Giaccaria P and C Minca (2010) The Mediterranean alternative. Progress in Human Geography 35(3): 345-65.

Leontidou L (1993) Postmodernism and the city: Mediterranean versions. Urban Studies 30(6): 949-65.

Horden P and N Purcell (2000) The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Matvejevic P (1991) Breviario Mediterraneo. Milano: Garzanti.