Contested Mediterranean Spaces

“…by insisting on contentiousness and unstable characters of identities and politics that are continuously reproduced within and across the region, the collection testifies to an innovative attitude, providing an insightful framework for the understanding of the Mediterranean as a complicated whole.”  ·  Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale

“This volume makes…significant interdisciplinary contributions that reach out to scholars or practitioners interested in the relations between spatial and social processes…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.”  ·  Society and Space – Environment and Planning D

“This excellent and timely collection of essays follows in the wake of several recent works that constitute what can be discerned as a revival in studies of the Mediterranean region. Far from a return to outmoded social anthropological models of the area, or a recapitulation of tourist-industry driven fantasies of shared cultural values, the essays gathered here cast a critical eye, and ear, on the ways in which the Mediterranean has been reconceived and performed in the context of national and transnational programs of political and economic consolidation…the book adds considerably to our understanding of the politics of place and culture in this contested region and will be essential reading for students and scholars of the region for years to come.”  ·  Anthropos

“It is well known that Charles Tilly left scholars of big structures, large processes, and huge comparisons a tall research agenda. It is less acknowledged that he also left political ethnographers an impressive and provocative set of tools. In the skilled hands of the contributors to this insightful volume, the ‘Tilly toolbox’ is put to good work in the service of a theory-driven and empirically-grounded exploration of Mediterranean contentious landscapes.”  ·  Javier Auyero, University of Texas, Austin; Editor, Qualitative Sociology

“Contested Mediterranean Spaces rescues a cultural geography from the essentialist circularities to which it was once often reduced. These authors examine how circum-Mediterranean identities, at every level from the clan to the nation-state, exhibit the complex impact of ideological and political manipulation. They show how this hothouse of Europe’s self-ascribed cultural origins has been characteristically prey to spatial cleansing, gentrification, and bigotry; they also document a regional activism that seeks more tolerant and environmentally benign futures. By problematizing the political and intellectual manipulations as well as the ideological tensions that inform such revivals of the Mediterranean as category and concept, they persuasively refurbish a tired regionalism with refreshing critical and comparative interest.”  ·  Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University; Author of Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Rome