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Locating the Mediterranean brings together ethnographic examinations of processes that make locations and render them meaningful. This volume stimulates anthropological debates on the interplay between location and region-making.
Both a symbol of the Mubarak government’s power and a component in its construction of national identity, football served as fertile ground for Egyptians to confront the regime’s overthrow during the 2011 revolution. With the help of the state, appreciation for football in Egypt peaked in the late 2000s. Yet after Mubarak fell, fans questioned their previous support, calling for a reformed football for a new, postrevolutionary nation. In Egypt’s Football Revolution, Carl Rommel examines the politics of football as a space for ordinary Egyptians and state forces to negotiate a masculine Egyptian chauvinism. Based on several years of fieldwork with fans, players, journalists, and coaches...
An Anthropology of Crosslocations introduces a radical new approach to understanding location. The co-authors show that the question of where something is depends on how places are mutually connected and disconnected. The location of a place can be established by different logics, such as national borders, ecosystems, or economic zones. These different ways of classifying the relative value and significance of a place coexist and overlap: for example, national borders are regularly crosscut by ecosystems. By thinking of 'location' as a process defined by several different coexisting locating regimes, the book showcases a fresh way to think about the multiple and overlapping connections and d...
How has migration shaped Mediterranean history? And what role did conflicting temporalities and the politics of departure play in the age of decolonisation? Using a microhistorical approach, Migration at the End of Empire explores the experiences of over 55,000 Italian subjects in Egypt during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before 1937, Ottoman-era legal regimes fostered the coupling of nationalism and imperialism among Italians in Egypt, particularly as the fascist government sought to revive the myth of Mare Nostrum. With decolonisation, however, Italians began abandoning Egypt en masse. By 1960, over 40,000 had deserted Egypt; some as 'emigrants,' others as 'repatriates,'and still others as 'national refugees.' The departed community became an emblem around which political actors in post-colonial Italy and Egypt forged new ties. Anticipated, actual, and remembered departures of Italians from Egypt are at the heart of this book's ambition to rethink European and Mediterranean periodisation.
This sophisticated book presents new theoretical and analytical insights into the momentous events in the Arab world that began in 2011 and, more importantly, into life and politics in the aftermath of these events. Focusing on the qualities of the sensory world, Maria Frederika Malmström explores the dramatic differences after the Egyptian revolution and their implications for society—the lack of sound in the floating landscape of Cairo after the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, the role of material things in the sit-ins of 2013, the military evocation of masculinities (and the destruction of alternative ones), and how people experience pain, rage, disgust, euphoria, and passion in the body. While focused primarily on changes unfolding in Egypt, this study also investigates how materiality and affect provide new possibilities for examining societies in transition. A book of rare honesty and vulnerability, The Streets Are Talking to Me is a brilliant, unconventional, and self-conscious ethnography of the space where affect, material life, violence, political crisis, and masculinities meet one another.
Hired Daughters examines a fading tradition of domestic service in which rural girls familiar to ordinary Moroccan families were placed in their homes until marriage. In this tradition of "bringing up," the girls are considered "daughters of the house," and part of their role in the family is to help with the housework. Gradually, this tradition is transforming into one in which workers unfamiliar to their host families are paid a wage and may not stay long, but where the Islamic ethics of charity, religious reward, and gratitude still inform expectations on both sides. Mary Montgomery examines why Moroccans so often talk about their domestic workers as daughters, what this means for workers...
What does migration look like from the inside out? In The Outside, Alice Elliot decenters conventional approaches to migration by focusing on places of departure rather than arrival and rethinks migration from the perspective of those who have not (yet) left. Through an intimate ethnography of towns and villages notorious in Morocco for their striking emigration to "the outside," Elliot traces the powerful ways migration permeates life: as brutal bureaucratic machinery administering hope and despair, as intimate force crisscrossing kinship relations and bonds of love and care, as imaginative horizon of the self and of the future. Challenging dominant understandings of migration and their deadly consequences by centering non-migrants' sharp theorizations and intimate experiences of "the outside," Elliot recasts migration as a deeply relational entity, and attends to the ethnographic, conceptual, and political imagination required by the constitutive relationship between migration and life.