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‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men’: the moral and political scales of migration in the central Mediterranean
Author(s) -
BenYehoyada Naor
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9655.12340
Subject(s) - politics , sovereignty , hospitality , action (physics) , political action , mediterranean climate , sociology , environmental ethics , political economy , political science , tourism , law , geography , philosophy , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics
This article offers recent dynamics of unauthorized migration and interception in the central Mediterranean as an example of historical anthropology of transnational region formation. It exemplifies how we can rescale classical themes in Mediterraneanist anthropology – hospitality, in this case – to illuminate transnational processes. I argue that anthropologists actually share with human rights advocates and European officials these ways of thinking about the scales of the moral and the political dimensions of migration, and I offer an alternative understanding of the scales of action, responsibility, and sovereignty as well as a clue about how regions come to life.