Naor Ben-Yehoyada

In The Mediterranean Incarnate, anthropologist Naor Ben-Yehoyada takes us aboard the Naumachos for a thirty-seven-day voyage in the fishing grounds between Sicily and Tunisia. He also takes us on a historical exploration of the past eighty years to show how the Mediterranean has reemerged as a modern transnational region. From Sicilian poaching in North African territory to the construction of the TransMediterranean gas pipeline, Ben-Yehoyada examines the transformation of political action, imaginaries, and relations in the central Mediterranean while detailing the remarkable bonds that have formed between the Sicilians and Tunisians who live on its waters.
         
The book centers on the town of Mazara del Vallo, located on the southwestern tip of Sicily some ninety nautical miles northeast of the African shore. Ben-Yehoyada intertwines the town’s recent turbulent history—which has been fraught with conflicts over fishing rights, development projects, and how the Mediterranean should figure in Italian politics at large—with deep accounts of life aboard the Naumachos, linking ethnography with historical anthropology and political-economic analysis. Through this sophisticated approach, he crafts a new viewpoint on the historical processes of transnational region formation, one offered by these moving ships as they weave together new social and political constellations.

The “Dancing Satyr” is a bronze statue that sunk to the 500 meter deep seabed of the Channel of Sicily between the fourth and second centuries bce and resurfaced towards the end of the twentieth century. In 1997, a Sicilian trawler returned to its homeport with the satyr’s left leg. A year later, the trawler reported recovery of the statue’s torso and head in the same fishing zone—in international waters between Pantelleria and the Tunisian coast. The satyr underwent restoration before embarking on a global tour of museums and exhibitions. It is now on display in a museum dedicated to it in Mazara, the trawler’s homeport. This chapter follows the satyr’s resurfacing in international waters as an emblem of Mediterraneanist heritage: regionalist, transnational, and sea-centered. The satyr’s voyage from the bottom of the sea to its home in Mazara depended on the interplay between forms of submarine contact with the past: motorized seabed trawling, archaeological and classicist scholars...

In this paper I argue for the application of the term gentrification, which is usually used within urban studies, to the historical anthropology of the Channel of Sicily since World War II, in order to illuminate the scope and depth of the social transformations that both gentrifiers and the political projects that initiate the process undergo, in the spatio-political aftermath of gentrification. I focus on the formation of the trawler-owners class in Mazara del Vallo—Italy’s largest post-World War fishing fleet—and the spatio-political process that unfolded when their trawlers began conducting expansive maritime presence-asserting project in growing intensity in North African fishing grounds, known as “the Fish War.” I show how Mazara, beginning in the 1960s, became gradually intertwined in an ever-intensifying network of connections—licit and illicit, cooperative and belligerent—with the Tunisian and Libyan shores. By examining the role of trawler captains and owners in the spatial transformations that the Channel underwent, I show how the formation of space, class, and subjects are intertwined processes. This process allows me to suggest the reintroduction of class formation into studies of gentrification, urban and otherwise.

This paper examines the workings of kinship and marriage idioms in transnational political imaginary in the central Mediterranean to challenge current academic reliance on the notion of fraternity as the symbolic building block of both national and global political relations. Since the 1960s, the Sicilian town of Mazara del Vallo and its fishing fleet have become entwined in intensifying interactions with Tunisia and the wider Maghreb. These interactions—specifically the Tunisian-Italian “Fish War” and construction of a trans-Mediterranean natural gas pipeline between North Africa and Europe—rejuvenated the old geopolitical imagination of the Mediterranean and helped produce the central Mediterranean as a spatio-temporal field of political action. Italians and Tunisians perceived each other as related, and staged the trans-Mediterranean infrastructural project as a sort of European-African (cross-cousin) marriage. I begin by examining the tensions between two central kinship idioms—...

This historical anthropology of the rise and fall of Israel's post-1948 sardine purse-seining development project shows what happens when marginalized groups, who are initially excluded as “backward” or “primitive”, enter modernization projects that are based on politics of skillfulness and experts' control over the labor process. By focusing on the role that skills play in the struggle between experts and artisans over the labor process, I show how the dynamics within state-run production apparatuses can make workers and experts face dilemmas about productivity, profit, and effectiveness, leading to such projects' implosion. This mode of analysis exposes the contradictions within projects of governance as well as in their relational intersection with the people they subjugate and exclude.

The reigning view of unauthorized and forced Eurobound movements is that, whatever their various shapes, in essence they all impinge on the same contradiction between universal humanity and bounded citizenship. This contradiction now lies at the core of the European political order. Against it, the chapter argues that the period of 2015–2017 aggravated migrants’ plight but also brought several changes of substance and not just in magnitude. I compare the dynamic relationship of migration and its interception along two kinds of routes: over sea and over land. Important features of this relationship include how routes have changed and the way interception policies have been enacted. The framings used by politicians, officials, journalists and activists to understand migration also play a role, too. During the summer of 2015, European authorities and public opinion turned their attention from the Mediterranean alone to a combined focus on the sea and the overland parts of the Western B...

We introduce this special issue, which re-examines 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 multi-scalar 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.

This paper traces the changing role of wealth and movements of money in investigators' evolving anthropological imagination of the social structure of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and its relationship with its surrounding in key moments of Antimafia investigations in one Sicilian province over the past 40 years. The routes of money, which initially marked exchange-based relations between two otherwise mutually extraneous actors, gradually indexed a more complex combination of reciprocity, exchange, and redistribution both within the mafia legally constructed and in its relationship to its surrounding. At the same time, the public and official anthropological imaginary of the mafia-politica nexus permits only exchange between mutually-external parties or reciprocity as an entity-creating internal thread. As a result, the complexity of wealth, which investigations reveal by 'following money,' requires constant reduction to individual bearers of monetary worth and interests.

This article offers recent dynamics of unauthorized migration and interception in the central Mediterranean as an example of historical anthropology of transnational region formation. It exemplifies how we can rescale classical themes in Mediterraneanist anthropology – hospitality, in this case – to illuminate transnational processes. I argue that anthropologists actually share with human rights advocates and European officials these ways of thinking about the scales of the moral and the political dimensions of migration, and I offer an alternative understanding of the scales of action, responsibility, and sovereignty as well as a clue about how regions come to life.

This paper examines the workings of kinship and marriage idioms in transnational political imaginary in the central Mediterranean to challenge current academic reliance on the notion of fraternity as the symbolic building block of both national and global political relations. Since the 1960s, the Sicilian town of Mazara del Vallo and its fishing fleet have become entwined in intensifying interactions with Tunisia and the wider Maghreb. These interactions—specifically the Tunisian-Italian “Fish War” and construction of a trans-Mediterranean natural gas pipeline between North Africa and Europe—rejuvenated the old geopolitical imagination of the Mediterranean and helped produce the central Mediterranean as a spatio-temporal field of political action. Italians and Tunisians perceived each other as related, and staged the trans-Mediterranean infrastructural project as a sort of European-African (cross-cousin) marriage. I begin by examining the tensions between two central kinship idioms—fraternity and cousinage—in current understandings of transnational relations. I then discuss the growing prevalence of a transnational political cosmology of affinity across difference over that of shared descent and sameness that characterize national alignments. I conclude by examining how Tunisians and Sicilians in Mazara today cast each other in roles deriving from segmentary schemes they share, but on the content of which they disagree. By applying concepts associated with kinship and marriage studies to recent Mediterranean history, I show how segmentation, a concept anthropologists abandoned when they crossed the Mediterranean on their way into Europe, can help us understand transnational politics.

The “Dancing Satyr” is a bronze statue that sunk to the 500m-deep seabed of the Channel of Sicily between the 4th-2nd centuries B.C. and resurfaced towards the end of the twentieth century. In 1997, a Sicilian trawler returned to its homeport with the Satyr’s left leg. A year later, the trawler reported recovery of the statue’s torso and head in the same fishing zone – in international waters between Pantelleria and the Tunisian coast. The Satyr underwent restoration before embarking on a global tour of museums and exhibitions. It is now on display in a museum dedicated to it in Mazara, the trawler’s homeport.
The chapter follows the Satyr’s resurfacing in international waters as an emblem of Mediterraneanist heritage: regionalist, transnational, and sea-centered. The Satyr’s voyage from the bottom of the sea to its home in Mazara depended on the interplay between forms of submarine contact with the past: motorized seabed trawling, archaeological and classicist scholarship, and Cold War underwater reconnaissance technologies. I argue that this interplay shaped the relationship between transnational connections and regionalist imaginaries. Objects like the Satyr decenter states’ national heritage projects, by pointing away from national territories and their consolidated histories and towards a potentially shared transnational past. At the same time, these objects enter the struggle over ownership and representation among various heritage projects, which attempt to harness the regionalist energies emanating from these objects to their national (Italian or Tunisian), subnational (Sicilian, Mazarese), or wider (European, North African, Mediterranean) projects.

After an examination of the ways in which the Mediterranean and modernity have been defined in contradistinction to each other, this chapter shows how an analysis of the similarities and differences among the three main strands of modern Mediterraneanist studies—honor and shame, patronage, and cosmopolitanism—may help us overcome the academic separation between nostalgic images of past Mediterraneans and lamenting accounts of the current state of affairs. By searching for structural similarities across periods more than for continuities through them, and by liberating our concept of processes of regional formation from any time-bound or essence-based definition, we may discover that the Mediterranean can re-emerge as a transnational constellation in modern times.

This historical anthropology of the rise and fall of Israel's post-1948 sardine purse-seining development project shows what happens when marginalized groups, who are initially excluded as “backward” or “primitive”, enter modernization projects that are based on politics of skillfulness and experts' control over the labor process. By focusing on the role that skills play in the struggle between experts and artisans over the labor process, I show how the dynamics within state-run production apparatuses can make workers and experts face dilemmas about productivity, profit, and effectiveness, leading to such projects' implosion. This mode of analysis exposes the contradictions within projects of governance as well as in their relational intersection with the people they subjugate and exclude.

About 78 nautical miles separate the Tunisian town of al-Huwariyya at the head of the Cap Bon peninsula from Capo Feto at the southwestern tip of Sicily. An Italy-bound voyage between the two points, on the straight line headed roughly northeast-east, takes about 13 hours at an average speed of six knots under sail. A speedboat moving at 30-45 knots would traverse the same distance in about two hours.

In this paper I argue for the application of the term gentrification, which is usually used within urban studies, to the historical anthropology of the Channel of Sicily since World War II, in order to illuminate the scope and depth of the social transformations that both gentrifiers and the political projects that initiate the process undergo, in the spatio-political aftermath of gentrification. I focus on the formation of the trawler-owners class in Mazara del Vallo—Italy’s largest post-World War fishing fleet—and the spatio-political process that unfolded when their trawlers began conducting  expansive maritime presence-asserting project in growing intensity in North African fishing grounds, known as “the Fish War.”
I show how Mazara, beginning in the 1960s, became gradually intertwined in an ever-intensifying network of connections—licit and illicit, cooperative and belligerent—with the Tunisian and Libyan shores. By examining the role of trawler captains and owners in the spatial transformations that the Channel underwent, I show how the formation of space, class, and subjects are intertwined processes. This process allows me to suggest the reintroduction of class formation into studies of gentrification, urban and otherwise.

Naor Ben-Yehoyada: We are here today to discuss region formation and region making in the Mediterranean with Michael Herzfeld and Hashim Sarkis. Michael Herzfeld is the Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. Hashim Sarkis is the Aga Khan Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism in Muslim Societies at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Thank you both for joining us today.
As the theoretical framework of this issue of New Geographies argues, in architecture and urbanistic literatures on the Mediterranean, cities are taken as emblems of ancient and medieval cross-sea connections, of early modern capitalism, and of modern cosmopolitanism. Cities like Naples, Thessaloniki, Izmir, Alexandria, and Tunis are often contrasted on the one hand to Atlantic cities, and on the other hand to the Mediterranean hinterlands. Recently this image of Mediterranean cities has been questioned. Some argue that the boundaries between cities and their hinterlands are exaggerated.  Others claim that Mediterranean hinterlands have actually been as connected to the worlds beyond their national boundaries as to their urban centers, if not more so.
These developments in urbanistic scholarship on the Mediterranean raise several questions that may shed light not only on these cities but also on their relationships to the wider Mediterranean as well as the rest of the world. The Mediterranean is sometimes examined as an emblem or model for global interactions and connections.  Yet most historians agree that the Mediterranean world, however defined, died with the advent of modernity. How do megacities like Istanbul serve in the articulation of these tensions? What is the role of tourists, heritage projects, migration, and cultural politics in the ways in which such tensions unfold?
This issue’s thematic exploration frames this inquiry more generally: “What are the elements in the formula that determine Mediterranean regional formations? And how are they spatially manifested?” If the Mediterranean is not made of “cities and the routes between them,” if cosmopolitan urban centers are not the main building blocks in this regional puzzle, what spatial-social constructions are?
Finally, the relationship of urban form and transnational constellations may help us distinguish also between region making and region formation—the former drawing our attention to projects and the latter to processes. Prima facie, anthropologists seem to reside safely on the “process” side of the fence, whereas urban planners seem to focus on the “project” side. But anthropologists and other social scientists have celebrated projects of “making,” and scholars of the built environment have paid attention to the processes through which projects interact. How do you combine these approaches in your studies, and how does your work on the Mediterranean shape your approaches?

Michael Herzfeld: I find the question very disturbing, because that question presupposes a reification of the Mediterranean. It presupposes everything that I’ve argued against in the last thirty years and more, inasmuch as it seems to suggest that there is something that is identifiable as the Mediterranean other than a geographical fact. I would wonder what the purpose of this perspective is. Certainly the idea that the Mediterranean has, as a general region, included a lot of areas where cities have interacted with hinterlands, have drawn very heavily on the populations of those hinterlands, but also have emphasized the distinction between city and country holds true. But it’s also true for many other parts of the world. As for the idea that it’s a place where people now are beginning to construct cities that are specifically Mediterranean—perhaps because those who claim this have in mind a particular kind of climate—there again, what I fear is the domination of a set of stereotypes over individual planning and over the understanding of cultural processes. And this is particularly worrying, because Southern European countries and Middle Eastern countries, in very different ways, are now homes to new forms of violence. It would be easy for someone to say, “Ah, yes, this is typically Mediterranean behavior.” Then we would be back to square one. All the stereotypes that were common in the 1960s and actually animated much of the anthropological and sociological thinking about the area, would move to a different plane, with the result that instead of focusing on the play of honor and shame in the villages we would be talking about the play of violence and refuge, or something of that sort, in the cities. So I worry about this kind of formulation. I think it would be much more useful to ask the question: Why is the idea of the Mediterranean so important to people who are looking at processes that have taken place in the area over a very long period of time?” If we approach the matter in that way, I think the answer will be clear and it will serve as an admonition to those who want to plan the future of the countries that sit around the rim of the Mediterranean Sea.

Hashim Sarkis: Let me start by situating the discourse on the Mediterranean within architecture and urbanism in relation to what I understand to be its reception, rejection, and criticism, in history and anthropology. I know I might be conflating two discourses that differ in their understanding and construction of the Mediterranean. However, I did see them conflated last year in the history/anthropology conference you organized.
At the conference, I felt that we were at one level way behind you in our understanding of the Mediterranean as a region, and at another level way ahead of you. Let me start with where I felt we were behind. As much as our discourse has come to dismiss the issue of contextualism or regional expression in the last twenty years, we haven’t yet critically assessed where we go from there. Because of the phenomena of globalization, the increasing mobility of architectural practices, and the waning interest in the expression of locality, we have lost interest in the past regionalist discourse, but we have not questioned it. We continue to operate with models that assume that architecture is indelibly bound to its region, even if we do not want to talk about it. We haven’t asked the question: If architecture is in crisis in relation to the context, and this context is not going to go away, how are we going to be dealing with it? We understand region to be given rather than something that we are actively involved in constructing, which I saw both anthropology and historiography elaborate as a deep problematic at the conference last year.
However, I feel we are ahead of you because we are beginning to look at the Mediterranean differently, not with new eyes but because of the radical transformations that are happening in that region and that we as architects and urbanists have to deal with as projects. Irrespective of whether we define it, draw a line around it, to be corresponding to one of the lines of the different existing definitions or not, we are seeing radical transformations in the region, and we try to map and define them in different terms. And yet we keep resorting to our stereotypes because we haven’t yet questioned them in the manner that you have. So we look at the littoral, at the coastal development of many of these cities, which have completely eradicated any sense of the Mediterranean port-city type, and yet we still seek to confirm this type in some implicit manner. So at the level of what constitutes the Mediterranean city, we are confronted with examples that are fantastically transforming it, if there ever was such an “it.”  We are still holding on to some grounding in a particular conception of the Mediterranean city, its history, and its evolution; evolution is very important for us in thinking about cities. We do not like cataclysmic shifts and breaks.

Second-generation immigrants are often imagined by social scientists, their receiving communities, their parents, and sometimes also by themselves, as those who should close the cycle of immigration that their parents have opened. Inasmuch as Italy is a contender in the international competition for the most ‘Mediterranean’ of countries, those youths are expected either to become Italian, fail to do so, or ascend to the globalized sphere of multiple participation, belonging and citizenship. Based on a reconstruction of several realms of action and meaning that constitute second-generation Tunisian immigrant youths' lives in Mazara del Vallo – from education, the annual voyage to Tunisia and self-identification, to kinship strategies, labor and municipal elections – I show how children of Tunisian immigrants practice a kind of personhood that receives its form and flexibility from their entrapped position in the current situation of the Mediterranean constellation in the Sicilian Channel.

This paper offers a historical anthropology of fishing in Palestine in the decade preceding the 1948 war. It focuses on the polarisation, engendered by the Zionist Fisheries Project, between ‘modern’ fishing – designated for Jews within the project – and ‘primitive’ fishing, limited in scale and seasonal, which was gradually imagined by both British officers and Jewish bureaucrats as the destiny of Palestinian fishermen, in sharp contradiction to the reality on the waterfront in Jaffa. To understand the encounter between Zionist and Palestinian projects, the changes affecting the two communities are presented as parts of an intertwined history. By reconstructing the two projects, their respective development and struggle, the article analyses their different accessibilities to transnational networks – within the eastern Mediterranean and outside it – and the implications the projects’ different possibilities for action had on the shaping the social reality along the coast of Palestine.

In my dissertation I offer a new kind of anthropology of the Mediterranean, one that illustrates how the sea has been recreated through the interactions between maritime cross-border practices, the transnational networks that evolved out of these practices, and the official regional politics that the network begat.  Much recent scholarly interest in the Mediterranean has been sparked by clandestine migration, new European regional agendas, as well as a steady stream of local conflicts. Yet anthropology, weary of the essentialisms of an earlier generation, has been the exception to this general fascination with the Mediterranean. 
To show how the Mediterranean developed as a geopolitical framework for action and perception, my dissertation focuses on the historical anthropology of the maritime network that developed between Mazara del Vallo—a Sicilian fishing town—and the Maghreb in the aftermath of World War II.  I examine how the Mazara fleet’s illegal fishing off the North African coast and the continuous conflicts with Tunisia and Libya that ensued begat the maritime network that wove the two coasts of the Channel of Sicily together.  Finally, I show how people gradually confronted the Channel as a central site for Italian and North African regional politics, as “the most Mediterranean of places,” and as an operative emblem of the Sea as a whole. 
By following the lives of crafty captains, sardonic smugglers, and greedy gentrifiers, I combine ethnography with political-economic and cultural history and bring anthropology to bear on the emergence of the contemporary Mediterranean as a case of region formation.

New Books in the Arts & Sciences
Celebrating Recent Work by Naor Ben-Yehoyada
Thursday, September 14, 2017  6:15pm - 7:30pm
Second Floor Common Room

Participants

Author

Naor Ben-Yehoyada
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology
Columbia University
Panel Chair

David Scott
Professor of Anthropology
Columbia University
Discussant

Mark Mazower
Director/Chair
Heyman Center for the Humanities
Columbia University
Discussant

Konstantina Zanou
Assistant Professor of Italian
Columbia University
Discussant

Jane Schneider
Professor of Anthropology
The Graduate Center, CUNY

In one of the most cited references to the waves of Eurobound undocumented migration, Pope Francis called the Mediterranean a massive “grave”. While use of the term picked up over the previous years, the pope’s adoption of the term enshrined it. This paper uses the term as a key to decipher the role of underwater material relics of undocumented migration in the calls to address the ongoing situation. In recent years, the Mediterranean’s seabed – images and imaginations of it – has played an important moralizing role in accounts of European treatment of undocumented migration. At the same time, the use of the term “grave” in reference to the seabed raises several questions. How does the maritime medium shape the ways in which people acknowledge, relate to, attempt to access, or commemorate migrants’ vicissitudes? How does the sea shape our ability to access and understand forced and undocumented migration? In what ways the transnational stretch of the sea materially shape the challenges we face? To address these questions, I focus on the role that material remains of migrants’ voyages – pieces of sunken ships as well as migrants’ personal items – play in claims to relatedness and the obligation they might entail. I examine how Tunisian and Sicilian fishers, UK-based forensic oceanographers, as well as migration-awareness activists and marine biologists in Sicily treat the presence of sunken ships and human remains at the bottom of the Central Mediterranean. I draw on anthropological analyses of the ways in which people claim and contest social relations through interaction with similar material relics (like graves, graveyards, relatives’ remains, and saints’ relics). The archaeological perspective thus contributes to our understanding of the spaces of undocumented migration and interdiction by replacing the regnant scholarly attention to global connectedness across distance with attention to relatedness: how and when people come to see each other as related – in different ways and at different scales – and how they engage material relics to claim such relatedness.