The Mediterranean Incarnate

Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II

Naor Ben-Yehoyada

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780226451022, 9780226450971
• eBook ISBN: 9780226451169
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

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 Naumacho, 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.
 

Index

Page numbers followed by “f” refer to figures.

Abderrahman (bosun). See Gianni (bosun)

affinity, transnational, of Transmed pipeline, 196–99

Agate, Mariano, 244n3

ALAP. See Association of Free Fishing Shipowners (Associazione Liberi Armatori della Pesca, ALAP)

Algeria, postcolonial positions of, regarding its resources, 152

Andreotti, Giulio, 118, 200

anthropology: Mediterranean, patronage in, 93–95; political, 235–36; segmentation and, 21–24

Asaro, Vito (crewmember), 13–17, 44

Association of Free Fishing Shipowners (Associazione Liberi Armatori della Pesca, ALAP), 48, 115, 116

Banfield, Edward, 128

bars, of Mazara, 13–14

bluefish, as gifts, 109

bootlicking, 98–99, 133, 137

bosun. See Gianni (bosun)

brotherhood. See fraternity, as kinship metaphor

cala (fishing route), 73, 84

calendars, monthly, for fishing activity, 73–74

capital intensification, of trawling, 69

captains: navigation and, 75; obstacles and, 75. See also Enzo, Capitan

Celere, Matteo, 48, 52, 121

Channel of Sicily, formation of, as transnational constellation, 182–83, 234

chief mechanic. See Paolo (chief mechanic)

Christian Democracy party (DC), 47, 112, 185–86

cigarettes, 82–83, 87

class, 27

cleaning fish, the cooperative and, 96–97; bootlicking and, 98; categorization of social labor and, 98. See also seafood

coastal maritime transport, 67

coffee, role and rituals of, 77–79, 87, 131–32, 170–72; and Zu Nino, 79–80

communities of knowledge, 72

constellations, 26, 243n8. See also processes, region-formation

cooking rituals, 123–27; Zu Nino and, 123–27. See also eating rituals; food rituals

cooks, ships’: disappearance of, 130; in the past, 130–31; present day, 132

cooperative: cleaning fish and, 96–97; defined, 96–97; effect of, 97

cosmopolitanism, 27; discourse on, 207; elegies of, 207; modernity and Mediterranean, 205–7; role of, in Mediterraneanist scholarship, 207; as theme, 207

COSVAP (Industrial Fishing Production District) consortium, 36, 219–20, 224; 2008 conference of, 224–27

cousinage: applying, to Mediterranean history, 144–45; during crises, 158–61; as idiom for political relations, 147–48

Craxi, Bettino, 45–46

creation, onboard discussions about, 208–9. See also faith; religious beliefs

crewmembers, of Naumachos, 110–11; Vito Asaro, 13–17, 44; Fathi, 80, 83–87, 95–96, 101f, 177–78; food rituals of, 133–38; Gianni (bosun), 2, 78, 80, 81f, 83–84, 178; ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• ONE / Introduction
• TWO / Whose Strike Is It?
• THREE / The Craft of Expansive Navigation
• FOUR / Fish and Bait
• FIVE / One Big Family
• SIX / Pissing Rage
• SEVEN / Terms of Transcultural Affinity
• CONCLUSION / Mediterranean Afterlife of a Dying Fishing Town
• Notes
• References
• Index