Until today, anthropological studies of locality have taken primary interest in local subjects leading local lives in local communities. Through a shift of conceptual emphasis from locality to location, the present volume departs from previous preoccupations with identity and belonging. Instead, Locating the Mediterranean brings together ethnographic examinations of processes that make locations and render them meaningful. In doing so, it stimulates debates on the interplay between location and region-making in history as well as anthropology.
The volume's deeply empirical contributions illustrate how historical, material, legal, religious, economic, political, and social connections and separations shape the experience of being located in the geographical space commonly known as the Mediterranean region. Drawing from research in Melilla, Lampedusa, Istanbul, Nefpaktos/Lepanto, Tunisia, Beirut, Marseille, and elsewhere, the volume articulates location through the overlapping and incorporation of multiple social and historical processes.
Individual contributions are linked by the pursuit to rethink the conceptual frames deployed to study the Mediterranean region. Together, the volume's chapters challenge strict geopolitical renderings of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa and suggest how the 'Mediterranean' can function as a meaningful anthropological and historical category if the notion of 'location' is reinvigorated and conceptualised anew.
Carl Rommel is a researcher at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at Uppsala University. He is an anthropologist, whose research focuses on masculinity, sports, future-making and 'projects' in contemporary Egypt.
Joseph John Viscomi is a lecturer in European History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a historian and anthropologist specialised in temporality, migration, and political processes in the Mediterranean region.
Rommel, Carl: - "Carl Rommel is a researcher at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at Uppsala University. His ongoing research - 'Egypt as a Project: Dreamwork and Masculinity in a Projectified Society' - is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Rommel's anthropological research in Egypt focuses on masculinity, emotions, future-making, sports, revolution and 'projects'. In 2015, Rommel earned his PhD from SOAS, University of London. Between 2017 and 2021, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project 'Crosslocations' at the University of Helsinki. Rommel has published articles in Men & Masculinity, Critical African Studies, Middle East - Topics & Arguments, and Soccer & Society. His first monograph, Egypt's Football Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity and Uneasy Politics, was published with the University of Texas Press in July 2021."
Viscomi, Joseph John: - Joseph John Viscomi is a lecturer in European History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. He trained in anthropology and history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is specialised in temporality, migration, and political processes in the Mediterranean region. He is currently completing a book that examines migration, political membership, and historical time by studying the departure of Italians from Egypt in the twentieth-century. This research has been published in The Journal of Modern History, History and Anthropology, and Modern Italy. He has begun new research on depopulation in Southern Italy since the late-eighteenth century.
