An Anthropology of Crosslocations
About this ebook
The volume brings together seven anthropologists who have worked together for six years. The chapters take the reader through a series of journeys around the Mediterranean region—to North Africa, the East Mediterranean, and Southern Europe. Each chapter unfolds an ethnographic or historical account of the coexistence of different values and meanings of location in different places.
About the author
Sarah Green is a social and cultural anthropologist at the University of Helsinki. She has spent her academic career studying issues of space, place, location, and borders. After researching the concept of safe space for feminist separatists in London (Urban Amazons, Macmillan, 1997), she moved on to study the reopening of the Greek–Albanian border following the end of the Cold War (Notes from the Balkans, Princeton University Press, 2005), and to look at the introduction of internet and digital technologies to Manchester. She was the author and principal investigator of the European Research Council (ERC)-funded Crosslocations project. Her own research in An Anthropology of Crosslocations involved looking at the transportation of livestock across borders, the tracking of the movement of wild animals (including ‘invasive species’), and efforts to stop the spread of microbes across borders, especially infectious animal diseases. She is currently writing a monograph on that aspect of crosslocations.
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Samuli Lähteenaho is a PhD candidate in social and cultural anthropology at the University of Helsinki and a researcher at the Finnish Institute in the Middle East in Beirut. His research interests cover ethnographic theorisations of space, place, and location, alongside questions of ecology and social movements. His doctoral research focuses on the politics and poetics of the coastline in Lebanon, based on ethnographic fieldwork with civil society and volunteer groups engaged with the country’s littoral. He holds a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Helsinki. His doctoral research was a part of the ERC project ‘Crosslocations: Rethinking Relative Location in the Mediterranean’.
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Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki is a social anthropologist who specialises in the ethnographic study of Greece, Southern Europe, and the Mediterranean. Her research interests lie in patterns of social reproduction and processes of socio-political transformation. Among others, she has explored provisioning practices amid the Greek economic crisis, ongoing reconfigurations of Church–State relations in contemporary Greece, and emergent landscapes of religious tourism. Her ongoing research ‘From Extractivist Pasts to Post-Carbon Futures: An Ethnographic Study of Lignite Phase-out in Southern Greece’ is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation. She earned her doctoral degree in social anthropology from the University of Manchester in 2017. Shortly afterwards she joined the University of Helsinki as a postdoctoral researcher for ‘Crosslocations: Rethinking Relative Location in the Mediterranean’. She is the co-editor of Anthropology Matters, the Association of Social Anthropologists’ early career open access journal.
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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, Soccer & Society, and MERIP. His first monograph, Egypt’s Football Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity and Uneasy Politics, was published with the University of Texas Press in July 2021. He is also the co-editor of Locating the Mediterranean: Connections and Separations across Space and Time (Helsinki University Press, 2022).
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Joseph J. Viscomi is a Senior Lecturer in History at Birkbeck, University of London. He trained in anthropology and history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and specialises in time and temporality and the history of migration in the Mediterranean region. His book Migration at the End of Empire: Time and the Politics of Departure between Italy and Egypt is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. With Carl Rommel, he edited Locating the Mediterranean: Connections and Separations across Space and Time (Helsinki University Press, 2022). His research has appeared in Diasporas, The Journal of Modern History, History and Anthropology, and Modern Italy. He has begun new research on depopulation and the intersections of environmental, social, and political histories in Southern Italy since 1783.
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Laia Soto Bermant is a social anthropologist who specialises in the anthropology of borders, identity, and location, with a regional interest in Europe and the Mediterranean. She earned her MA (2007) and PhD (2012) in social and cultural anthropology from the University of Oxford. After graduating, she held postdoctoral research fellowships at the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University, and at the University of Helsinki, where she participated in the ERC project ‘Crosslocations: Rethinking Relative Location in the Mediterranean’ and the Academy of Finland project ‘Trade, Transit and Travel’. She has been the editor-in-chief of the European Association of Social Anthropologists’ flagship journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale. Her current research, funded by the KONE Foundation, explores the global spread of conspiracy theories about Covid-19.
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Patricia Scalco is a social anthropologist working on the intersection of kinship studies, economic anthropology, and anthropology of moralities. Trained in law in Brazil and later in anthropology in Türkiye and the UK, she first studied sexual moralities, reproductive health, and marriageability among unmarried youth in Istanbul, before turning her attention to the carpet trade in the Grand Bazaar in the Crosslocations project. She is currently working at the University of Helsinki on another ERC project concerning the anthropology of irritation (Principal Investigator Anni Kajanus), in which she is focusing on the dynamics between kinship and trade moralities within kinship-based enterprises in Brazil. Her experiences across locations and academic institutions have led her to advance decolonial agendas both within and beyond anthropology.
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