Contested Mediterranean Spaces: Ethnographic Essays in Honour of Charles Tilly (review)

Which is more important, a third bridge across the Bosphorous to ease traffic congestion or a community’s heritage that would be lost in its construction? Are immigrants the real “threat” to the European Union, or is it the unstable conditions that encourage immigration that should be dealt with? And who speaks for the musical traditions of the Mediterranean—folk bands from Palestine or professional musicians that fuse genres? The fourth volume in Berghahn Books Anthropology of Space and Place series, Contested Mediterranean Spaces: Ethnographic Essays in Honour of Charles Tilly, examines the role of politics, capital, and identity in the struggle to answer these questions.

Editors Maria Kousis, Tom Selwyn, and David Clark have brought together a series of twelve politically oriented ethnographic essays that peel back the lid on decision making over natural and cultural resources, revealing a conglomerate of forces at work and giving voice to those actively resisting imposed urban development, governance, and community identities in often David-and-Goliath-like battles.

The volume is greatly influenced by the late Charles Tilly, a sociologist, political scientist, and historian who helped develop a set of anthropological tools for assessing contentious politics. Here, his benchmarks of “coercion, capital and commitment” used to compare politico-economic regimes are shifted to “politics, capital and identity,” with the terms referring “respectively to political activities and discourse, the place of capital and the cultural/symbolic processes shaping the formation of identities.” The authors, all anthropologists themselves and many of them former students and colleagues of Tilly’s as well, take an active role in their ethnographies with an understanding that their work is also influenced by outside forces. Some choose to advocate for a particular solution to the problems they are examining.

Contested Mediterranean Spaces is divided into four parts: “Recovering the Mediterranean?” “State, Capital and Resistance,” “Capital and Neighbourhood Governance,” and “Transforming Identities: Imagination and Representations.” Ten of the twelve essays stem from field research originally conducted for the European Commission – funded Mediterranean Voices: Oral History and Cultural Practices project (Med Voices) that took place between 2002 and 2005.

Part one, “Recovering the Mediterranean?” explores how the region as a concept is both complex and malleable. Vassiliki Yiakoumaki reflects on the desire of EU bureaucrats and policy makers to portray a unified history of the Mediterranean with strong cultural connections to Europe in order to advance the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. This has led to funding projects such as the Med Voices, whose ultimate objective is “to establish the idea of a common Euro-Mediterranean heritage that incorporates different traditions and customs and highlights the visible and invisible links between them.” Yiakoumaki shows how anthropologists brought in to do such work are themselves entering the field with a politically charged assignment.

But while some agencies push for a vision of unity, Minas Samatas shows that there are other policies dividing the region. The EU’s prioritization of immigration as a top security threat has led to increased surveillance via the Schengen Information System and creation of “Fortress Europe.” Harrowing figures on the number of people whose movement has been restricted via the Schengen system as well as the incredible number who have died attempting to immigrate illegally are presented. Instead of addressing issues that may be driving immigration, which Samatas argues is more important, the EU is investing in further detention and holding centers in non-EU Mediterranean states while buffing up its own. Under this scenario, there is a sharp divide between those inside and outside of Fortress Europe.

Eleni Kallimopoulou completes the section with a review of the 2005 Medi-Terra Music Festival in Crête, which culminated the Med Voices project. Kallimopoulou highlights the political processes in determining what types of music would be presented, the logistical difficulty in obtaining visas for participants to attend, as well as thoughts from the artists themselves on...