An Anthropology of Crosslocations introduces a radical new approach to understanding location. The co-authors show that the question of where something is depends on how places are mutually connected and disconnected. The location of a place can be established by different logics, such as national borders, ecosystems, or economic zones. These different ways of classifying the relative value and significance of a place coexist and overlap: for example, national borders are regularly crosscut by ecosystems. By thinking of 'location' as a process defined by several different coexisting locating regimes, the book showcases a fresh way to think about the multiple and overlapping connections and disconnections between here and elsewhere. This approach can fundamentally revise ethnographic and anthropological views on the importance, value and significance of where people, things and animals are located and, as such, redefines the idea of ‘the field.’
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.
“This fascinating and multistranded book opens up anew the question of how ‘somewheres’ come to be. Moving back and forth across the Mediterranean, tracing disconnections as much as connections, the authors carefully and vividly triangulate the rich complexity of spatial coexistence and the shifting struggles between overlapping ways of locating particular places. An Anthropology of Crosslocations is also a genuine 'multigraph' – a brilliant reimagination of what writing together can look like. This is social anthropology at its experimental best!“
- Matei Candea, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
“An Anthropology of Crosslocations offers a refreshingly new perspective on how 'place' can be productive in the world, by rethinking the ways in which locations are assembled vis-à-vis each other out of not-so-stable distinctions, distinctions that ethnographically discoverable people and practices labor to stabilize. To read this book is to learn a rich new theoretical framework for understanding that where one is in the world is always already a moment of locational plurality. When and how this plurality is revealed has everything to do with ‘crosslocations’, this subtle and novel approach to analyzing power.”
- Ilana Gershon, Professor of Anthropology, Rice University
