W&M Homepage
[PAST EVENT] 2019 Vinson Sutlive Lecture: "The Mediterranean Incarnate" by Naor Ben-Yehoyada
Access & Features
- Open to the public
This year's Sutlive Book Prize winner is Naor Ben-Yehoyada for his book The Mediterranean Incarnate. The Mediterranean Incarnate is a vivid account of one anthropologist’s five weeks aboard a fishing vessel in the Mediterranean waters between Sicily and Tunisia. Brimming with sensuous detail and trenchant analysis, this ethnography offers a riveting and unglamorous portrait of labor, masculinity, and what Naor Ben-Yehoyada terms “affinity across difference” as they play out in the cramped quarters of a fishing trawler. At the same time, The Mediterranean Incarnate places the quotidian on-board dramas between owners, captains, deckhands, and others within a much larger story that extends through space and time, thereby connecting the vessel’s home port of Mazara del Vallo in Sicily to Tunisia and to a wider Mediterranean imaginary reaching back to the end of Second World War and well before. The result is not only a singular investigation into the postwar political economy of industrial-scale fishing but also a compelling case for how a place anthropologists and historians thought they knew might allow us to rethink the meaning of the transnational.
Naor Ben-Yehoyada is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.
Contact
[[jglasser, Jonathan Glasser]]