Second Edition, DAY 1 - Introduction: The Imagined Mediterranean

The Mediterranean goes beyond the confines of simple physical fact. Can we view the Med as an imagined space? And what role will perception play in many of the arguments that will be presented throughout the summer school? What is the Mediterranean to most of us: is it home, is it the home we are running away from or the home we are longing to return to? Is it a place we leave to transform ourselves and come back to as renewed bodies, via pilgrimage, tourism or migration? (Nadja Dumann, Stefano Malatesta and Diogini Albera will discuss these matters in detail). Ultimately, how do we ascribe meaning to the world around us?

The meaning that individuals and groups give to space and place provides an interesting dynamic. Studying these spaces allows us to gain insight into the different people’s world views and the sharing of spaces (or not!) leads to the creation of communities, many of which are also transient and at times in conflict (Maria Pisani and Dionigi Albera will speak about this and some of the activists too from the perspective of environment, tourism and migration). 

The sea has provided ample opportunities for trade by legal or illegal means, throughout history. Corsairs, pirates, and many traders have used the sea currents and central Mediterranean islands like Lampedusa, Malta, Sicily and Sardegna as safe harbours connecting the western to the eastern Mediterranean as well as north Africa to Europe…..a special axis that will most likely dominate much of our discussions here this week. In the words of David Abulafia (2011):

“Mediterranean history can mean many things. (T)his book is a history of the Mediterranean Sea, rather than a history of the lands around it; more particularly, it is a history of the people who crossed the sea and lived close by to its shores in ports and on islands. My theme is the process by which the Mediterranean became in varying degrees integrated into a single commercial, cultural and even (under the Romans) political zone, and how these periods of integration ended with sometimes violent disintegration, whether through warfare or plague”.

 These words are timeless, and could well apply to our contemporary reality. 

Looking towards tourism will combine many of the abovementioned strands to provide a context to discuss the socio-economic and socio-environmental impact of such movement of people and goods on local and environmental realities. Local(ised) consumption of the tourism product is leaving its mark on more sensitive ecologies (including human ecologies). The material culture we carry with us and leave behind, speaks of the stories of things-changing-hands. Of routes and journeys, of meaning and of emotion where value is ascribed to things and things are used to transact and build connections and relations via reciprocal exchange. This aspect of material culture and the transience it embodies is also of interest to Camille Faucourt’s session. Many of these strands will flow through the research that will be presented in Giovanna Di Matteo’s session discussing the research presented by our doctoral researchers here. 

(Except from Rachel Radmillli's Introduction to the summer school, Lampedusa, 15th September 2021)

Tracing past routes, engaging in present challenges, imagining possible futures

Cultural heritage is commonly thought as a product of the longstanding link between people and their own territory. But, as James Clifford shown us, in our contemporary world culture and identity are associated to "routes" as much as to "roots". We are prompted to recognize that different kinds of mobility and flows are closely connected to the global dynamics of place making.

The Mediterranean is one of the most significant areas where we can observe this phenomenon. Here the constant movement of tourists and migrants across both sides of the sea in the last decades has been producing several (un)expected encounters. On the beaches of Lesvos and Kos as in the ethnic neighborhoods of Marseille and Barcelona, in the "Sea Memory Museum" of Zarzis as at "Porto M" of Lampedusa, the clear cut border between tourism and migration is contested and vanished.

In order to follow the paths of this "heritage on the move" we can combine different fields of studies and manage a variety of approaches, ranging from engagement in theoretical debate to application of our skills in innovative projects.

The main aim of the Summer School is to improve the knowledge of the participants in the anthropology of mobility and heritage and their capacity to develop a fruitful cooperation with private and public agencies.

The Summer School will be divided in sets of lessons and activities including: analysis of theoretical and methodological tools; presentation of case studies with an ethnographic approach; visits to specific places and institutions engaged in migration and tourism.

First Edition, DAY 7 - Migration, heritage politics and the role of tourism

The seventh day of the summer school began with a morning lecture by Meghann Ormond, Associate Professor in Cultural Geography at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands.

After discussing the theoretical framework and the fundamental concepts of space, place and landscape we have explored the different connotations of heritage.

Through an interactive exercise we reflected upon the concept of heritage not only as it is often described by the dominant historical narratives and practices but also as an individual and collective present experience.

Following the innovative approach of Thrift and Massey we have tried to compare the dominant representation with our own experiences and we realized that our environments are both actively shaped by us and actively shaping us. This raised our awareness that memory is not a passive depository of facts and that heritage is more than monumental. It is an individual and collective sense of experience from the past and the use of this inheritance in the present (Robertson). 

This perspective allowed us to break away from the authorized heritage discourse that naturalizes hegemonic western elite cultural values and to start thinking about alternative narratives (Smith).

Professor Ormond showed us a practical application of these theories. Usually guidebooks fix people in space and time and tend to misrepresent, under-represent or overlook migrant communities. Her current work on the project “Roots Guide” aims at portraying a destination as it is seen through the eyes of migrants and at making people feel aware of a shared cultural heritage.

In the afternoon we had a really interesting class held by Virginia Monteforte and Isabel Farah from the Rima Project. Rima is an anthropological and artistic project born in 2014 in Malta with the aim of exploring the multifaceted aspects of migration, displacement and exile through a variety of creative activities. During the first half of the meeting they shared with us some of their most recent projects, most of which were theatre pieces or short films created in collaboration with artists, scholars and people who have experienced migration, in order to provide them with a space to make their voice heard.

One of these project was “To be [defined]” an artistic anthropological exhibition held in 2018 in La Valletta, that dealt with past and contemporary experiences  of displacement, using objects as its main tool and focus. 

During the second half of the afternoon we used some basic theatre exercises to experiment different ways of expressing ourself and communicating with the others. We worked especially on our body language and how it is possible to communicate effectively just by paying attention to the space surrounding us and the position of our bodies. We ended the day discussing briefly the meaning of the word “home” for us and sharing our views about the objects we connect to mobility and migration.