[Book review] The Mediterranean incarnate : region formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II

Abstract

Like kinship, the Mediterranean’s many proclaimed anthropological deaths have often been followed by its reinventions. This intelligent and brave book reinvents Mediterranean anthropology in an innovative and highly productive way. It explores how transnational regions are woven – with particular reference to Sicily (Mazara del Vallo) and Tunisia – through processes (in this case, the evolution of Mazarese motorized seabed trawling) and projects (here, the building of the Transmed gas pipeline from Algeria through Tunisia and Sicily to the northern Po valley), which in turn create new social processes that transform these projects. Naor Ben-Yehoyada’s transregionalism is thus not a historical tracing of pre-Second World War Sicilian-Tunisian exchanges (migrations, contraband, etc.), nor its romantic evocation through memories, but rather an anthropologically grounded analysis of the forces, evolving social relations, and strategic evocations of identity and difference through idioms of affinity.