The Mediterranean incarnate: region formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II 9780226450971, 9780226451022, 9780226451169, 022645116X

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The Mediterranean Incarnate

The Mediterranean Incarnate Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II

N a o r B e n -­Y e h o ya d a

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­45097-­1 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­45102-­2 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­45116-­9 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451169.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ben-Yehoyada, Naor, author. Title: The Mediterranean incarnate : region formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II / Naor Ben-Yehoyada. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016052005 | ISBN 9780226450971 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226451022 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226451169 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Fishers—Mediterranean Region. | Mediterranean Region—Social life and customs. Classification: LCC HD8039.F66 M435 2017 | DDC 639.209182/21—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052005 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992

(Permanence of Paper).

Figure 1.  Fathi throws the discarded catch overboard at the end of the sorting round. All photos in this book are by the author.

C o nt e nts

List of Figures / ix Acknowledgments / xi ONE

T WO

T H R EE

/ Introduction / 1

/ Whose Strike Is It? / 35

/ The Craft of Expansive Navigation / 59 FOUR

FIVE

/ One Big Family / 123

SIX

SEVEN

/ Fish and Bait / 89

/ Pissing Rage / 163

/ Terms of  Transcultural Affinity / 203 / Mediterranean Afterlife of a Dying Fishing Town / 229

C o nclusi o n

Notes / 243 References / 251 Index / 265

F i g ur e s

1.

Fathi throws the discarded catch overboard at the end of the sorting round. / v

2.

The aft deck during a sorting round / 3

3.

Southwestern Sicily and the Tunisian coast / 5

4.

The bars along the quay of the old port of Mazara del Vallo / 14

5.

Vito “the Hurricane” / 17

6.

Map of Mazara del Vallo / 37

7.

Layout of the motorized trawler Naumachos / 60

8.

Zu Nino / 65

9.

The captain on the upper deck / 79

10. The bosun Abderrahman and Zu Nino / 81 11. Montassar arranges the shrimp in their trays. / 86 12. Hajj cleans fish for the cooperativa. / 97 13. Montassar and Fathi pack two-­kilogram trays into the cartons at the end of the dawn net while Hajj works inside the overnight freezing chamber. / 101 14. The bosun packs and seals twelve-­kilogram cartons inside the long-­term freezing chamber. / 102 15. The captain, on the upper deck, watches Montassar prepare the trawling gear on the aft deck below. / 107 16. Montassar and Fathi in the deckhands’ cabin / 110 17. The dining hall before lunch / 126

x / Figures

18. Relief above the main entrance of the Mazara cathedral / 144 19. The Transmed pipeline / 150 20. Chief mechanic Paolo and second mechanic Mario watch television in the dining hall. / 176 21. Zu Nino and Hajj in the deckhands’ cabin / 204

Ac k n o wl e d g m e nts

“You should go to Mazara del Vallo,” Gianluigi de Vito, a journalist at the Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, told me in Bari in the first days of 2006. He drew a triangle in the shape of Sicily on my field journal, marked a point at its corner, and said, “I know what you’re looking for.” I had come to Bari in search of what I ended up finding in Mazara. Gianluigi, like so many other people who gave me their guidance, hospitality, advice, and friendship over the past decade, helped me find not only the course to steer but also the ports of call. Vincenzo Bellomo, the cultural animator at the Caritas day center and the heart of the organization, met me for a short conversation during the second day of my preliminary visit to Mazara back in the summer of 2006, at the end of which he practically adopted me and took care of every aspect of my life and work in town. Mario Asaro—­my landlord, teacher of Sicilian, and protector—­took me into his home, taught me everything about how to prepare and eat Mazarese food, and let me become a part of his family. Dino Levi, the founder of the Istituto per l’Ambiente Marino Costiero–­Consiglio Naizonale delle Ricerche in Mazara, and the people of the CNR helped me navigate many a bureaucratic maze and have hosted me throughout the years. For access to resources and guidance, I am grateful to the Centre d’études Maghrébines à Tunis, the Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain, the Institut des belles lettres Arabes, and the Istituto Gramsci in Palermo, as well as the Archivio Comunale, the Capitaneria di Porto, the Archivio Diocesano, the Ufficio Anagrafe, and the Biblioteca Comunale in Mazara. Vito Pipitone and Filiana Scaduto have over the last decade showed me incredible hospitality and friendship at the CNR and at their home. I am indebted to Padre Vito Impellizzeri for his hospitality at the Seminario Vescovile and his help with connections in the town and its diocese,

xii / Acknowledgments

as well as to Suor Mercedes and Carmelina. The kids and the instructors at the Centro Voci dal Mediterraneo taught me much of what I know about the lives of Sicilians and Tunisians in Mazara. Noureddin Benzarti, Lillo Gessone, Giovanni Ingoglia, Abdelkarim Hannachi and Franzina Mannone, Debora Messina, Mustafa Mosrati, and Jutta Mott let me into their lives and made Mazara and the Trapanese my home, as did the late Saverio Safina, whose ironic and delicate mind I miss. Vito Asaro, Giuseppe and Santo Filancia, Ivan Angelo, and Antonino Cusumano helped me find my bearings through the town’s past and present. The late Zu Nino, Capitan Beppe, Abderrahman, Fathi, Montassar, Paolo, Mario, and El-­‘Am Hajj from the M/T Naumachos showed me the ropes and were patient when I insisted that I already knew them. This is also true of my mentors at Harvard. Michael Herzfeld accepted me as his academic kin and gave me the freedom to grab the Mediterranean dilemma by the horns. His intellectual generosity guided me even when this project was at sea. The traces of his thought that pervade this work are modest clues of how much I owe him. Ajantha Subramanian has taught me more than this book can either contain or accomplish about the art of deliberation and about space and power. I am so very grateful to her for being such an incredible teacher, interlocutor, and friend. Steve Caton has shown me the beauty and complexity of the life of signs in society; I am grateful for our many conversations and for his dramaturgical foresight. I thank the Council for European Studies at Columbia University Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, the Frederick Sheldon Fund, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, and the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche for funding and supporting this project during the research and writing phases. I thank Naama Ben-­Yehoyada, Shay Rojansky, and Salvatore Cusumano for their help in constructing the database on which parts of the analysis are built, as well as Angelos Qlos, Pietro Giordano, and Plamen Drenski for contributing their help with the drawings. This book would have not seen the light of day without the fostering care it received during its development into a manuscript. Andrew Shryock patiently guided my attempts to scale up my work on Mazara. I am grateful for his unending generosity with his ideas and for his continuous push for me to engage with our discipline. Michael Gilsenan gave me sage advice and invaluable clues about what this all might mean and how one could put it in words. I am grateful for his inspiration and for the passion for storytelling that he instilled in me. In their unending kindness, Jane and Peter Schneider have shown me the way since before my first day in Sicily. My work in the

Acknowledgments / xiii

island and on the Mediterranean has been an exploration of the paths of their profound scholarship. I am also grateful to Molly Greene, Douglas Holmes, and Julia Elyachar for their sharp and benevolent engagement with my manuscript; and I thank the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies for making this engagement possible. Beyond this precious opportunity, my time as an academy scholar provided a wonderful community of scholars with whom to think, as did my time as a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College. I have been lucky enough to think and write together with Daniel Hershenzon, Jonathan Mair, Jessica Marglin, Corey Tazzara, Alice Wilson, and Emrah Yildiz. I am grateful to them for their spirit of reciprocity. I am also grateful to all those who read and commented on various parts of the manuscript, including Pamela Ballinger, Kerry Chance, Maria Couroucli, John Daniels, Nicholas Harkness, Susan Kahn, Susanna Kaysen, Julie Kleinman, Darryl Li, Itamar Mann, Maria Minicuci, Berardino Palumbo, Anastasia Piliavsky, Mikaela Rogozen-­Soltar, Caroline Schuster, Claudio Sopranzetti, and Joseph Viscomi. My work also particularly profited from discussions with Gadi Algazi, Ted Bestor, Matei Candea, Alireza Doostdar, Jocelyne Dakhlia, Davide Gangale, Paolo Heywood, Engseng Ho, Richard Irvine, Tim Jenkins, Jeff Kahn, Yukiko Koga, James Laidlaw, Inna Leykin, Peter Mandler, Dan Monterescu, Marta Pertusewics, Oded Rabinowitz, Judith Scheele, Ben Siegel, Rupert Stasch, Francesca Trivellato, Anand Vaidya, and Piers Vitebsky. I am grateful to these people for helping me shape the arguments contained in this book. At the University of Chicago Press, I am deeply grateful to T. David Brent for his trust in this project since its embryonic phase. I thank his unfaltering assistant, Ellen Kladky, and my manuscript editor, Renaldo Migaldi, for making the publishing process so professional and so pleasurable. I also thank the three anonymous reviewers for helping me make this a better book. Some parts of chapters 5 and 6 have previously appeared in my article “Transnational Political Cosmology: A Central Mediterranean Example,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56:04 (2014): 870–­901. Portions of the introduction and chapter 7 originally appeared in my contribution “Mediterranean Modernity?” which appeared in A Companion to Mediterranean History, edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 107–­21. This book is dedicated to my parents, Era and Isaac Ben-­Yehoyada, who taught me the love of navigation and inquiry. For their love and support through high tide and low, I am grateful to them and to Naama Ben-­ Yehoyada, Jean Balfour, and Tova Goldberg, as I am to Chiara Superti, my companion in all the voyages to come.

ONE

Introduction

I was squatting on a small wooden stool, on the aft deck of a trawler somewhere between Sicily and Tunisia. In front of me was a mixed pile of marine animals we had just hauled on deck, some of the creatures still alive and moving. The task in front of us—­the crew members who were either squatting next to me or lucky enough to be sitting more comfortably around a table—­was to sort that pile into large baskets that stood for commercial seafood categories. The prawns—­the sturdiest of species—­were using their claws to climb out of the bottom of the muddy heap, while other creatures were shaking their spines and flapping their fins. I reached with my right hand to grab one prawn, but instead of securing my grip on it, I ended up holding its tail. The prawn, which had its claw deep into the mouth and eye of a neighboring sardine, flapped the sardine at me. With my wet and muddy fingers I grabbed the sardine and tried to pull it out of the prawn’s grip, but ended up tearing the sardine’s head. “Start with the big prawns, and go for their backs! That way they can’t grab you,” said Hajj, the Tunisian fisher who had brought me onboard and at that moment seemed amused by my struggle with the merchandise. “Take care that they don’t grab you. If you get your fingers injured, they are not going to heal because our hands are constantly wet.” I did my best to follow his instructions, and started reaching for the prawns and sending them to their baskets. Then came the shrimp, which were slipping out of my hands when I tried to grab them. Now it was another fisher’s turn to instruct me. “Don’t be afraid of them!” exclaimed Montassar, the nephew of the Tunisian bosun (capopesca, or chief fisher), reaching into the middle of my pile and grabbing with all five fingers two large shrimps. “You have to hold them with force.” I reached into the pile, one hand at a time, and grabbed several shrimps before staring at them while trying to decide which belonged to which size category.

2 / Chapter One

After a couple of minutes, Hajj examined the dozen or so shrimps I was about to throw into the basket designated for the “large” category, and stopped me. “This is not large,” he said. “Large is prima.” He showed me how long it should be by stretching his right arm and palm slightly upwards and putting his left index finger on his right wrist. He then raised his right hand a bit, put his straight left index finger next to middle of his right fist, and said: “This is seconda.” Then, moving his left index finger just below the knuckle of his right index one, he concluded, “And this is terza.” Regarding length matters, these were the three categories. “We also have extra; that’s everything larger than your hand, but there are not many of those in this net, so focus on the prima-­seconda-­terza.” “What are you talking about so much?!” the bosun shouted from the sorting table. “Sort with both hands!” Zu Nino, the owner of the fishing vessel, shouted toward us. So we did. An hour or so of sorting later, the social divisions onboard became clear through the strain I started to feel in my back. The bosun (whose name was Abderrahman, though he asked me to call him Gianni), the chief mechanic (Paolo), and the owner (Zu Nino) were sitting and working in front of a table together with the bosun’s nephew, Fathi. As they sorted the catch, they spoke in a mixture of languages and registers often referred to in Mazara as Sicilian, Italian, bastardized Sicilian, Mazarese, or fishers’ jargon. Hajj, Montassar (the bosun’s other nephew), and I were squatting in a much less comfortable position on the deck. Every ten minutes or so, all three of us would straighten and stretch our backs, and then take another portion of the pile for sorting. Since I was regarded as the lowest in the ship’s pecking order, my natural place was among the squatters. The advantage this position had in store for me was that because my two companions were Tunisians, I could get intensive practice in Tunisian Arabic, rather than in the lingua franca mixture that was in use at the table. Montassar did not speak Italian and preferred that people not know exactly how much of it he understood, while Hajj switched to the onboard lingua franca whenever he was disappointed with my performance in Tunisian. “This is the work,” Hajj told me, in a tone that seemed to combine something of a declaration with a bit of sad admission. “That’s what we do.” What the hell was I doing there? As I squatted and struggled with the toil and the tails, I tried to make sense of how I had ended on that aft deck and, quite frankly, what it all had to do with the Mediterranean I was in search of. It was mid-­February of 2008 and we had been at sea for less than a day, sorting the first net in a fishing journey that was supposed to take us to Easter more than a month later. As far as my fieldwork was concerned, being at sea

Introduction / 3

Figure 2.  The aft deck during a sorting round

was already a personal feat. In the previous six months or so, I had continuously failed to convince either the port authorities or any shipowner to let me embark on a fishing voyage. But now that I had managed to board a ves­­ sel, doubts about my course were creeping in. There was not much time for reflection. I mustered all my attention to the grabbing and sorting task at hand.1 This much I knew: we were making our way towards the fishing grounds between the Italian island of Lampedusa and the Tunisian Eastern coast, for a fishing voyage of about five weeks. Our crew was made up of four Sicilians: the first and second mechanics, the captain, and the owner. The rest of the crew was made up of four Tunisian migrant workers. The two cousins and Hajj, my “uncle,” served as deckhands or “simple sailors,” as I was, in addition to serving as the ship’s cook. Our ship, the Naumachos, was a good example, so everyone told me, of the way things were being done in the fishing fleet of Mazara del Vallo, a fishing town at the southwestern tip of Sicily. We were fishing with the method that the Mazara fleet had perfected since World War II, with transformative transnational consequences: motorized seabed trawling. The fleet, which in its Eighties heyday was the largest in the Mediterranean, had been Mazara’s economic and political heart. Through its expanding operation in the North African fishing grounds, the fleet had gradually interlaced the town’s political future with international relations

4 / Chapter One

and cultural politics in the Mediterranean. Yet that morning none of this erstwhile transnational effervescence was visible on the deck of the Naumachos. The answer to my question from that morning forms the backbone of this book, which offers a historical anthropology of the Mediterranean as an example of transnational region formation. In the following chapters I make a case for treating regions as the medium and scales of transnationalism. I argue that the historical processes through which transnational regions like the central Mediterranean form must become objects of anthropological analysis. I propose to view transnational regions as ever-­changing constellations which form and dissipate through the interaction between cross-­boundary practices and official region-­making projects. And I show how we can attain this viewpoint from the moving vessels that weave these constellations together and stage their social relations and dynamics in full view. By returning to the Mediterranean, we may acquire new lenses for looking at transnationalism the world over.

The Mediterranean, Lost and Found When I arrived in Mazara in August 2007, I knew what I was looking for. My aim, as I explained to my professors before leaving the United States, would be to trace the history of social relations between Sicilians and Tunisians since the late nineteenth century. From everything I had been reading, as well as from my preliminary visit to town during the previous summer, I knew that fishers from both coasts had been crossing the Channel of Sicily “since time immemorial.” More specifically, I knew that people from Mazara del Vallo in southwestern Sicily had been migrating to Tunisia, licitly or illicitly, from the 1880s until World War II. I also knew that some of them had worked as fishers in Tunisia; that the Mazara fleet had grown exponentially around the time that Italians returned to Sicily after Tunisian independence and during the turn to postcolonial border regimes; and that illicit practices had continued and in fact intensified in the following decades, when the central Mediterranean hosted one of the main scenes of the Cold War. With all this in mind, I assumed I would find Sicilian seafarers whose families had migrated to Tunisia and later returned to Sicily. The story also helped me explain the presence of Tunisians in Mazara and their dominance in the local fishing fleet. If Mazarese fishers came back to Sicily after decades of fishing in Tunisian waters, it would be only natural to expect that the Tunisian fishers, who had started to appear in town since the mid-­1960s, were following the steps of their former Sicilian employers on their way to Italy. In other words, I imagined that since a certain cluster of maritime practices—­fishing and illicit

Introduction / 5

Figure 3.  Southwestern Sicily and the Tunisian coast. Drawing by Angelos Qlos.

border crossings—­had been taking place at least for the last hundred years, I should be able to find the continuous social structure that had sustained these practices during that century. When I arrived in Mazara, then, the first task I set for myself was to find these families of Sicilian fishers who had migrated to Tunisia before World War II and then returned. After settling down in an apartment in the neighborhood of the old port, I asked Mario, my landlord, to help me find such families. On the first day we went to the navy veterans’ club, where Mario asked the veterans in Sicilian if they knew anyone who fit my description. “No,” they said; they could not think of anyone. “And who’s that kid?” they asked. “No,

6 / Chapter One

nothing, he’s a student who is writing here; histories of seafarers,” Mario re­­ plied, and we went on our way. This short interaction provided me with the first clue that I would not find here any living bearers of the Mediterranean longue durée. The past was alive in Mazara, but not in the way I had expected. Mazara boasts millennia of connections to and tensions with the other side of the Channel of Sicily. Mazara’s city center, which people denote to this day with the Arabic words kasbah and medina, preserves the urban structure and some remnants of an architectural style that dates back to the medieval Arab and Arab-­ Norman periods. The river Mazaro, which gave the city its name and still runs through the old port, was once the trench line between Magna Graecia and pro-­Carthaginian settlements. In AD 827, the Arab fleet landed near Mazara and conquered the town as a prelude to Arab rule over Sicily for some two hundred years. In AD 1072, the Norman Count Roger I completed his conquest of Sicily in Mazara and, to celebrate this feat, established a cathedral in the town. More recently, Mazara has seen sixty years of tumultuous history. It played a minor role in the waves of migration and relations between colonial North Africa and Sicily around the turn of the twentieth century (Clancy-­Smith 2011). Like other Sicilians, Mazaresi migrated to North Africa at that time, but during the wave of anticolonial independence in Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya, they continued on to France, North America, and Australia. The few Mazaresi who did return to Sicily stayed out of the developing trawling fleet and the dynamics it shaped. After World War II, and especially since the Sixsties, Mazara turned from a relatively unimportant viticulture town (Lentini 2004a, 199–­210) into a central stage for fish wars with Tunisia and Libya, labor migration from Tunisia, drug and arms traffic, and transnational infrastructure projects. One of these projects—­the Transmed gas pipeline from Algeria through Tunisia and Sicily to the industrial heart of Italy’s Po Valley—­ connected the fortunes of the Mazara and its fleet to the geopolitical struggles of the Cold War. During those years the Mazara fishing fleet became the largest in Italy, thanks to massive governmental development funds distributed through the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (Barbagallo 1989, 47), and continuously expanded its fishing zone, stretching from Sicily across the Mediterranean into the North African fishing banks. Beginning in the mid-­1960s, Tunisian fishers came to Mazara to work on the same trawlers that fished off the Tunisian and Libyan shores. Several of the first among them married Italian women (at times as their second or third wives), a practice that stopped when, as some Tunisians say, “for Mazaresi we turned from a curiosity into ‘Arabs.’” The town’s relatively large immigrant community—­about a tenth of

Introduction / 7

its population—­has led to Mazara being dubbed “the most Arab city in Italy” (Hannachi 1998). In an island whose Christian inhabitants often say (in Sicilian), “We are too Arab,” these labor migrants became living emblems of how narrow the channel is (cf. Saitta 2006). This confluence of connections has made Mazara into one of the Sicilian hubs of Mediterraneanist cultural and economic politics. Mazara’s role in contact and conflict across the Channel of Sicily pumped new energy into the old geopolitical imagination of the Mediterranean and shaped the central Mediterranean as a spatiotemporal field of political action. No Such Thing as a Modern Mediterranean When I looked back on the previous six months that morning in mid-­ February, I reminded myself that the key to Mazara’s political, economic, and otherwise transnational vicissitudes seemed to reside with the fleet at sea. That was why I had boarded the Naumachos, I reassured myself in front of the pile of seafood. But what was the key to the fleet’s development and to the dynamics of its transnational expansion? And what did all that have to do with the Mediterranean, apart from the fact that it was all happening right at its center? On the one hand, Mazara and its fleet presented all the elements in a transnational scene of cross-­sea connections. On the other hand, none of these elements seemed connected to the Braudelian longue durée histories that would have connected Mazara to the wider, older Mediterranean: Where were the tales of seafarers, smugglers, and corsairs from the great sea’s past, or at least of the sea’s urbane cosmopolitan diasporas? Migration—­a usual topic in similar studies of confluences across the recent Mediterranean—­appeared both in the old stories about Sicilian migration to Tunisia and in the recent Tunisian migration to Mazara. But the bearers of social continuity between these two periods were nowhere to be found. If Mazara’s fleet generated these new confluences, including Tunisian migration, then this scene had little to do with the previous period or with the premodern Mediterranean, which the culturalist effervescence in town celebrated. A story of migration tout court would have made the fleet and all that it had generated secondary, and this was clearly not the case, neither along the quay in the old port nor aboard the Naumachos. The answer to these questions turned out to be more complex than I had originally expected. This complexity stems from the fact that my topic of study and the object of this book—­an anthropology of the Mediterranean in modern times—­seems in the current state of academic affairs like a double oxymoron. For if there are few things upon which anthropologists and

8 / Chapter One

historians agree, one of them is that the Mediterranean no longer exists. Both the Mediterranean and modernity have been defined and qualified in various ways; and in most of them, one starts where the other ends, whether chronologically, geographically, or conceptually. The rejection of both Mediterranean modernity and a modern Mediterranean has quarantined the ethnography of the sea, discouraging any comparison to the ancient, medieval, or early modern Mediterraneans. Our first task is to overcome this separation between a premodern historiography of the Mediterranean and a transnational anthropology that limits itself to study in the Mediterranean, not of it (Horden and Purcell 2000; Harris 2005). Yet this book is more than a Mediterraneanist tale. As I argue in the following chapters, the Mediterranean offers us a particularly fruitful case for examining transnationalism, because it has often appeared as the uncomfortable alternative to a Eurocentric, modern-­mired view of the world. There is a near consensus among historians that the Mediterranean they reconstruct from premodern times no longer exists, though some aspects of such premodern Mediterranean worlds—­as well as the main preoccupation regarding the Mediterranean’s unity and attempts to unify it—­have made it to our times (Greene 2010). For some historians, the early-­modern Mediterranean they excavate from archives and sites—­from the days of binary religious divisions, sails, corsairs, and the slave trade—­started to “wane” at the turn of the seventeenth century, with the Mediterranean’s diminishing importance in a world system turned both national and global (Tabak 2008). Here historians differ on the cause and aftermath of the sea’s demise: the “northern invasion” of Atlantic European fleets into the Mediterranean either nationalized and thus ended a bipolar Christian-­Muslim world (Braudel 1972, vol. I, 615–­42), or complicated this world by adding nationality to religion (Greene 2002). This difference postpones the end of the Mediterranean as so conceived throughout the seventeenth century. It also en­ables us to challenge separations between political economic process, social dynamics, and religion (Hershenzon 2016). Molly Greene’s analysis of the early modern Mediterranean on the basis of the balance between Ottoman and European powers takes us to the end of the eighteenth century with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 (Greene 2014). It thus challenges other attempts to define the Mediterranean as a “colonial sea” which would be squeezed between the late eighteenth century and the 1950s—­modern and not contemporary at the same time (Borutta and Gekas 2012).2 For other historians, the distinctiveness of Mediterranean history, the combination of relatively easy seaborne communication and a fragmented

Introduction / 9

topography of microregions, lost its central role after the late nineteenth century (Horden and Purcell 2000, 3). Whether modernity stands for Euro­ pean transoceanic colonial expansion, nationalization, or nation-­states’ sea­shunning consolidation, it is said to have sealed the sea’s fate (Pamuk and Williamson 2000, 4). When the industrial and economic dimensions of mo­ d­ernity are the focus of attention, the Mediterranean becomes northwestern Europe’s pre-­1800 periphery, which was abandoned with Atlantic expansion and colonization (Pomeranz 2000, 24–­25). In other words, the “northern invasion” supposedly anticipated a northern abandon: Northwestern Europe’s turning away from the Mediterranean to “the New World” (but see Greene 2005, 93–­99). More generally, because the Mediterranean is defined on the basis of historically delimited characteristics that are said to expire before modernity, applying any conception of the Mediterranean from the historiography of earlier periods to the present runs the risk of anachronism. It matters less whether the aspects or areas of the Mediterranean are believed to be immune to change (as Braudel would have it; 1972, 1239) or to incorporate coping strategies for instability and unpredictability—­that is, incessant change (Horden and Purcell 2000, 13). With the rare exception (Marglin 2014), even those scholars who study the Mediterranean in modern times, conclude that modernity came to the Mediterranean (Abulafia 2003; Burke 2010). The Mediterranean’s latest death dates to as late as the 1920s and 1940s, when cosmopolitan port cities—­the most recent of its historiographical emblems—­perished in nationalism’s wake. Images of interethnic and interreligious cohabitation in port cities like Alexandria and Izmir countered nationalism, “a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones” (Gellner 1983, 1). As the Mediterraneanist opposite of nationalism, the image of cosmopolitan port cities became an object of paradoxical nostalgia for a moment that emblematized a certain image of modernity—­urbaneness, refinement, and intercultural coexistence and conviviality. This coexistence collapsed, at times violently, with the spread of “modern” nationalism in the post-­Ottoman littoral: “Alexandria turned ‘Egyptian,’ Salonika ‘Greek,’ Izmir ‘ Turkish,’ and Habsburg Trieste ‘Italian’” (Tabak 2009, 79). Mid-­twentieth-­century decolo­­nization similarly materialized into North African nationalization, thereby significantly reducing the European presence and the specific kind of cosmopolitanism it had conditioned. The departing of avatars of Europe from port cities in the Levant and the Maghreb marked the end of the Mediterranean—­the last of its many historiographical deaths.

10 / Chapter One

No Such Thing as Mediterranean Modernity That historiographical definitions of the premodern Mediterranean would not stretch to the present should not surprise us. Anthropologists’ rejection of a Mediterranean modernity, however, raises different questions about what we make of transnationalism, where and how we imagine it unfolding, and how we claim to access it ethnographically. It is not that anthropologists do not study along the coasts of that sea. Yet many anthropologists are reluctant to join the cross-­disciplinary Mediterraneanist high tide. Clandestine and legal immigration, ethnic and national conflicts, and international reconfigurations, as well as all other phenomena known to arouse the ethnographic appetite, seem to lure ethnographers onto that sea’s shores in increasing numbers (for example: Cole 1997; Ballinger 2003; P. A. Silverstein 2004; Green 2005; Feldman 2011). But the possibility that such phenomena could or, better, should be studied in relation to each other and to projects that have various things “Mediterranean” as either object, medium, or goal seems to have fallen out of grace among anthropologists. They prefer to reconstruct other more “substantive” regions, like the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, where transnational connections show through the maritime reach and movements of this or that group, which in turn becomes the emblem of the sea in question (Matory 2005; Ho 2006). An anthropological examination of such regionalist projects’ vicissitudes may illuminate the Mediterranean’s recent palpability. Contemporary actors, in the academy and in larger publics, have sought to reactivate the Mediterranean through regionalist projects that include economic planning, political unification, cultural politics, and interreligious dialogues. In the past decade or so, the Mediterranean has returned to occupy the attention of historians, scholars of comparative literature and religious studies, cultural geographers, and others (Chambers 2008; Cassano 2012; Bouchard and Ferme 2013). Many observers are once again defining the Mediterranean as real in more than a cartographic sense. How is it that a part of the world that is so famous for its maritime past has not enjoyed any anthropological attention to its brimming transnational present? What anthropological preoccupations made societies around the Mediterranean stand not for transnational or transregional processes, but for their ultralocal near opposite? Should we write it off as the effect of regionalist discourses or “rhetoric,” or might this rising Mediterraneanism expose a more complex relationship between projects of region making and processes of region formation (and disintegration)? A focus on such a relationship can

Introduction / 11

bring anthropology back to Mediterraneanist studies, and the Mediterranean back to anthropology. It is generally agreed that no area of sufficient coherence today in the zone of the Mediterranean could be profitably compared with contiguous areas that existed in the past or in other parts of the contemporary world. Anthropologists, who had once upheld the cultural unity of the Mediterranean, have since regarded the very attempt to discuss these issues about such a vast and diverse region as a version of orientalist othering (Herzfeld 2005b). Anthropologists had initially sought a comparative analysis of circum-­Mediterranean “problems of social organization” (Pitt-­Rivers 1963, 10,25).3 During the heyday of Mediterraneanist anthropology, the debate pitted against each other three general positions about the anthropological making of the Mediterranean. Some anthropologists followed Braudel in viewing entire swaths of the Mediterranean rim as “museums of Man” (quoted in Horden and Purcell 2000, 463), which survived to the present because they were detached enough from their modernizing surroundings. Social institutions like the hamoula in Palestine (Cohen 1965); patronage, honor, and family among the Sarakatsani in Northwestern Greece (Campbell 1964); and the complex of norms, values, and social structure in rural Andalusia (Pitt-­Rivers 1971) were depicted as timeless emblems of an erstwhile social world (J. Davis 1977, 242). Other anthropologists argued that habits of thought and action continued from the past, whereas contexts of action changed. The result was “a bundle of sociocultural traits” that served as emblems of the Mediterranean: “ ‘atomistic’ community life; rigid sexual segregation; a tendency toward reliance on the smallest possible kinship units (nuclear families and shallow lineages); strong emphasis on shifting, ego-­centered, noncorporate coalitions” (Gilmore 1982, 178–­79). Finally, a third group argued that whatever anthropologists observed stemmed from people’s reactions to the changes modernization had wrought on societies around the Mediterranean, and was therefore a part of the process, not a relic of what preceded it (J. Schneider 1971; J. Schneider and Schneider 1976). The main topics in studies of the contemporary Mediterranean—­land and labor struggles (Silverman 1968), patronage (Gellner 1977), family structures (Banfield 1958), honor and shame (Pitt-­Rivers 1963; Péristiany 1966), and cosmopolitanism (Driessen 2005)—­reveal different combinations of these arguments, and stage different struggles between continuity and change, modernity and tradition.4 Most of the debates took place between the Sixties and the Eighties (Herzfeld 1980, 1984a; Galt 1985; Herzfeld 1985b). At the end, social comparison gave way to cultural unity (Silverman 2001,

12 / Chapter One

45–­50). Most of all, social anthropologists found the strongest sense of similarity in “the continuity and persistence of Mediterranean modes of thought” (Péristiany 1966), specifically the “honor-­and-­shame syndrome” or “the flamboyant virility complexes of Mediterranean males” (Gilmore 1987, 16). The resulting image of the Mediterranean was based on cultural similarities among discrete social units, like Honour and Shame, which the edited volume dedicated to the theme named as the “Values of Mediterranean Society” (Péristiany 1966), and for which Mediterraneanist anthropology is remembered to this day (Bromberger 2006; Sant Cassia and Schäfer 2005). The few studies that did focus on cross-­Mediterranean connections (J. Davis 1977) emphasized connections between “cultures” rather than the cultural conditions of connection: similarities between discrete entities rather than graded resemblance in practices across time and space. With the exception of Jane Schneider’s classic “Of Vigilance and Virgins” (1971), anthropologists circularly concluded that connections and proximity both generated and were based on cultural unity (Galt 1985), or that such claims of cultural unity amounted to the reiteration of stereotypes (Herzfeld 1980). As a result, the Mediterranean has managed to serve simultaneously as a paradigmatic case in studies of erstwhile maritime worlds (Wigen 2006) and as a usual suspect in the critique of practical orientalism (Herzfeld 2005b). The consensus about the contradiction between modernity and the Mediterranean eliminated the sea as a candidate for understanding what transnational regions may look like in present times. Current understandings of transnationalism have preferred viewing people as connected to examining how people see each other as related. The vast scholarship on how terms of relatedness have shaped social relations the world over—­through idioms of alliance, affinity, and allegiance (Parkes 2001)—­has stopped short of informing how we understand the various ways in which people make and break transnational social relations. The focus on cross-­border flows, projects, and institutions has collapsed the entire gradient of transnational scales of action into the two corporatelike scales: the national and the global. This legacy of nationalist ideology in global attire has prevented us from examining how transnational political relations may be expressed in broader and more complex terms of relatedness. Mazarese and Tunisians taught me how to use such terms as they introduced me to the sea and the past they shared.

A Transnational Community of Disagreement Back on that first day in Mazara in August 2007, after Mario, my landlord, took me to the navy veterans’ club to see if they knew anyone who fit my

Introduction / 13

description of bearers of the cross-­channel longue durée, he had another idea of someone who might know where to search. There was a relative of his, he told me. If somebody knows, it’s him. What was his name? “Vito Asaro. But everybody calls him ‘the Hurricane’ or ‘the Auction,’ because he had run the auction at the local fish market for many years.” The next morning, we returned to the quay of the old port in search of Vito “the Hurricane.” We left home when it was time to bring bread for lunch, and walked down the short alley that leads to the old port. There we turned to the quayside in the Porto Canale, where three bars face the canal. The first, Bar Gianni, was partly filled with Tunisian men who, because it was a summer morning, were sitting outside on plastic chairs and drinking coffee slowly. Mario greeted some of them, though he did not reduce the pace of his walking. Nor did he stop to introduce me to anyone. He kept his left hand in his pocket, playing with the key holder, and waved to the men with his right. We passed the bar and kept walking along the canal toward the sea. The second bar, Bar Santino, had a different crowd. On a row of chairs set on the pavement close to the wall sat some old fishers—­Sicilian they seemed to me—­and younger Tunisian men. Inside I could hear the noise of bingo and pinball machines, and the voices of some people, including Santino himself, who was wearing his white apron and playing scoppa, the local card game. We kept going down the street along the canal of the old port, until we came upon the third and last bar, Bar del Molo. This last bar, whose proprietor had not named it after himself, had a different crowd altogether. Inside, various men of all ages and nationalities were drinking beer at the counter. Outside, a group of Sicilian men, who seemed to me to be in their eighties, were sitting and talking in the sun. Mario, who knew all of the old Sicilians, immediately approached one, clasped the man’s hands between both of his, and shook it vigorously. “Fuck [Minchia]! It’s Mario! Mario ‘14’ the ‘American’! Fuck!” the man, who later turned out to be Vito “the Hurricane,” called out. “Assa Benedica Avvossia! [May his excellency be blessed!],” replied Mario, using the most respectful phrase available. “Mi . . . parole sante! [Fu . . . blessed words!]” Vito responded, pleased. While they were still shaking hands, Vito asked Mario, “Who’s that?” “That’s Nauro, he’s a researcher from America.” “Oh! Americano, like you.” “No, he is from Israele, Palestina.” “Palestrina!” Vito called at me, confusing one of the first seven dioceses around Rome with Palestine. “Yes,” I replied. “O Vi,’ ” Mario said, “he is here because he is looking for, let’s say, Christians who went to Tunisia and then came back.”

14 / Chapter One

Figure 4.  The bars on via Molo Comandante G. Caito, along the quay of the old port of Mazara del Vallo

“Went and came back?” asked Vito. “Yes,” said Mario. “We are talking about history now. Sit down!” “I told Nauro,” said Mario, using the name by which I went at the time, before it became Lucio, “for history, you have to go directly to Vito Asaro, ‘the Hurricane,’ ‘the Auction.’ ” “Oh! OK. Let’s see. Fishermen?” “Yes,” we both replied. “From Mazara?” “Yes.” “Why are you looking for them?” asked Vito. “I am studying the relationships between Sicily and Tunisia since the late nineteenth century,” I responded with my ready phrase. “I will tell you a story about Tunisians and Sicilians,” said Vito. “You see down there?” He pointed to a wall on the quayside closer to the sea. “It’s called ‘the little gate’ [lu puyteddu]. In the Twenties, the ‘vapor of Tunisia’ used to come to Mazara.” “Vapor?” I asked. “Vapor, steam ship, how do you call it? It carried passengers, merchandise as well. At the time [ships] could not enter the port, so the boats would

Introduction / 15

carry the people [to the pier]. Inside, there was the customs. . . . On one Saturday during the Twenties, a Catholic woman and her Mohamedan [Maomettano] husband arrived.” “Who?” “A Mohamedan. Islamic religion. Mohamed, Mohamed!” said Vito, helped by Mario. “Ah, OK.” “Halfway through the pier, the woman noticed an ancient church where a musical mass was being performed, turned in that direction, entered the church, and joined the mass. Her husband, who had his hat on, stepped across the church’s threshold, saw the priest performing the mass over the wine, and said: ‘Fuck! It’s a theater, and you don’t need to pay?!’ Upon seeing the husband at the door, the priest asked his sacristan . . .” “Sacristan?” “The guy who helps in church,” said Vito. “The priest tells the sacristan, ‘Go to this person and tell him to uncover himself. Otherwise, he should leave the House of God.’ The sacristan complied, but the husband refused and asked to talk to the priest. Once the priest had finished the mass, he confronted the Mohamedan Turk and asked him why he hadn’t taken off his hat. Instead of replying, the husband suggested a wager. You understand what a bet is?” I was probably frowning. “A bet, a bet,” said Vito. “Yes, I do.” “So the Mohamedan says: ‘I will mime three times. If you guess what I say, I will baptize myself and make myself Christian in this church! But if you don’t guess, I will baptize you and all your church and make you Muslims!’ The priest did not understand what the Turk wanted, and told him to get out. So the sacristan took over: ‘A priest with thirty years of school can’t confront a Mohamedan Turk? I will confront him!’ ” The next morning, the sacristan (whose inferior education is elaborated in the long version of the story) woke up after his habitual Saturday night of drinking, ran to church, and began lighting all the candles for the Sunday morning mass. As he was lighting the last candle, the husband appeared at the door and bowed. After a short exchange of greetings and curses, the husband signaled the number one, with his index finger pointing upward. Upon noticing the gesture, the sacristan signaled the number two with his fingers. (In telling the story, Vito signaled the number two with his hand, and ground his teeth to express the grave importance of the situation.) “The husband then replied with three fingers, to which the sacristan retorted by giving him the fist,” said Vito. (That is, he covered the inside of his

16 / Chapter One

right elbow with his left hand, and bent his right arm upward with a fist.) “The priest, who had been hiding all along in the sacristy because he was afraid, came out and turned to the husband, who fell on his knees and said, ‘Enough! Three questions I have made; and all three, he guessed. Baptize me! Make me a Christian!’ The priest, shocked, asked the Muslim husband what the gestures had meant. The husband answered: ‘When I entered, I said that God is one and only for the entire world. Your sacristan’s reply [marking the number two] meant, “You can say that again!” I then told him, “There are three divine persons and only one God, which they represent.” And [your sacristan] responded: “Confirm your words!” Now baptize me!’ ” To add pomp, Vito hit his fist on the table, making our espresso cups shake, and continued the story. “The priest then turned to his sacristan and asked him: ‘ Tell me something. When you were signaling one-­two-­three, what was it?’ The sacristan then explained himself: ‘Father, he told me he drank a liter of wine in the morning before breakfast every day. So I told him I could drink two liters. He then said he could drink three liters. So I gave him the fist.’ “You see?” Vito said. “This one talked about religion and history, and that one about wine, and their words clashed with each other!” Vito told me this joke many times since that day, each time changing a de­­ tail or two. A couple of years later, when I transcribed the first version, I noticed that at some point, a person had approached Vito and asked him who I was. Vito quickly told him in Sicilian, which I hadn’t mastered during the first months of my fieldwork: “Nothing, he’s no one, a little fool [scemmino].” Then he turned to me and resumed his tale. Vito’s joke provided me little information about the history I was looking for. On the one hand, the tale’s basic structure, the comical outcome of an uncanny misunderstanding, had little to do with either Sicily or Tunisia. Many similar jokes cast rabbis against popes, Greek Orthodox against Muslims, or even people from the same family against each other. On the other hand, one needs to know a lot about Muslims and Christians before one can even “get” the joke. It makes sense only because, though the joke’s main characters seem ignorant of each other’s finger signs, they belong to communities that were on intimate enough terms to marry each other’s members and to understand each other before and after the wager. The misunderstandings between the sacristan and the Tunisian were both total and comical because they depicted a larger and shared “community of disagreement” and the open constraints it set for interaction (Shryock 1997, 57). In other words, the characters share an entire historical world in which they can parse out their disagreements, and the idioms with which to disagree on the past they

Introduction / 17

Figure 5.  Vito “the Hurricane”

share. The choreography stages this disagreement as misunderstanding: the uneducated sacristan wins the wager by shifting the exchange to a terrain on which none of this matters. More generally, the joke suggests that people do not need to read each other’s thoughts in order to pursue their differences in meaningful ways. I hoped Vito would give me some leads to help me connect the past and the present through a history of continuing Mediterranean connections across time. Yet his joke did not even pretend to represent any important moment in the past of relations between Sicilians and Tunisians. Instead of narrating such a history, it pointed to a way to look at it, perhaps to live it. Rules of Cross-­Channel Engagement The next story Vito told me encompassed a clue more directly connected to Mazara’s history of contacts with things, people, and places on the other side of the Channel of Sicily. After Vito finished his first story, I pushed him a bit more, not yet fully accustomed to receiving jokes in response to my questions. “But did the fishers from Mazara go to fish in Tunisia?” I asked. “In Tunisia? Sure! That was before, in the past. But then they started shooting at us.” “Shooting?” I asked.

18 / Chapter One

“There was Ciccio,” “In which year was it?” “Fifty years ago.” “No, which year exactly?” “Fifty-­six.” “Ah, the Tunisian independence?” “They were shooting at our ships. They said that it was in Tunisian territorial waters, but it wasn’t true! It was in international waters! But they were seizing our ships and taking them [Mazaresi fishers] as prisoners. But they shot and killed a fisher, Ciccio Passalacqua. Got it? So, all the fleet’s captains grounded the ships.” “A strike?” I asked. “A strike! And the government intervened in this situation with the Tunisian government. Shit, that was a strike. Sixty days! Now, practically, what happened: I—­Vito Asaro la Bagnatura [‘the Auction,’” his other nickname] from the fish market—­what did I do? I had chickens [in my yard]. I am going to buy, let’s say, food.” “Food?” “For the chickens. In Piazza Regina [of the old port] . . . so I go to buy the food [for the chickens], and there were three persons there: Vituzzadde, Alena, and another one, the brother of a mayor of Mazara, Elio Pernice. A communist. Communists! Ferocious, powerful communists! You know, those who come from Russia,” Vito said, grinding his teeth to clarify his opinion. “But was he a good or a bad communist?” I asked. “Eeee . . . who? Ah, no, it was the brother who was there. And he is a peasant, [he only went to] a bit of school [iddu poco scuola]. And he says to me (personally!) these words: ‘But what were these fishers looking for there [in Tunisia]?’ And I said: ‘ They are going to sea, the fishers, and the Tunisians shoot!’ Says he: ‘ They go on land and they steal chickens, and fruits, and pigs.’ According to him! Some of it did happen. Fishers, who used to go there, were going ashore and stealing chickens, pigs. Then he tells me: ‘They are forgetting when they used to rob chickens and pigs there. Now they complain that they shot at us.’ I respond, I told [him]: ‘Listen to me! When Jesus Christ walked on the Sea of Galilee, he met two persons from Galilee, Simon from the Galilee and the brother Andrea.’ ” “Pietro?” I asked. “He was called Pietro later. Along the shore he meets Giacomo, Giovanni, ah . . . and . . . and what did he tell them? ‘Leave the nets and follow me, for I make you fishers of men, not fishers of fish.’ So Jesus made twelve

Introduction / 19

apostles, eleven fishers, and one who was a villain like the devil, piece of shit! I defended the fleet!” “Were you a fisher or an auctioneer?” Vito did not answer my question, but another man who was sitting with us told me: “Nah, he never worked much.” The story that Vito told me referred to the Fish War with Tunisia, the period fraught with incessant clashes between Sicilian (mainly Mazaresi) fishing vessels and Tunisian and Libyan patrol vessels, which started in the mid-­1950s after Tunisian independence, and intensified throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In those clashes, several Mazaresi fishers were injured or killed, a fact that has added local significance and political charge to the term “war” over the years. Yet the story focuses not on the clashes themselves, but on the right and wrong opinions circulating about them in town. The story narrated this dis­ agreement as a game of framing and the scales they invoked. Pernice—­the communist who in Vito’s tale blamed the death of a Mazarese fisher on the fleet’s age-­old penchant for robbing things from the Tunisian shore—­did not say that the Tunisians had been justified in shooting because the incident had happened in international waters. He rather framed the killing as retaliation, and scaled up the event to the longer temporal cycle of Mazarese pillaging on the channel’s other side. Since the Tunisians attained independence, it was their turn to get back at the Sicilian fishers who had been treating the Tunisian coast as their back yard for several decades. The Mazarese proverb that captures this view of history is “The world turns around, so let it turn.” In Vito’s eyes, Pernice was a traitor, but not because he lied. Vito agreed that Sicilian fishers had not limited their pillaging to the Tunisian fishing banks. Pernice, therefore, was a traitor because in front of a killed Mazarese fisher he took the Tunisians’ side. To confront him, Vito scaled up the question to the highest possible plane of reference. He cast Mazarese as the fishers from the Sea of Galilee, who later became the apostles and were blessed by Jesus (cf. Herzfeld 1985a, 41). Those who went against ‘us’ were therefore compared to the twelfth apostle, who had betrayed Jesus and his followers—­that is, the fishers, Galilean and Mazaresi alike. The communist became Judas, the arch-­traitor, with the devil at his side. If the joke about the sacristan and the Tunisian charted out a cross-­ channel community of disagreement in allegorical terms, the story about Vito’s argument with the communist Pernice grounded that transnational scene in events from the recent past. Together, Vito’s two stories provided me with the first clues about the world I was in search of. First, they directed

20 / Chapter One

me away from the present of the old port in which we were talking and into the past. Second, they did not depict figures from the past—­social personae who would serve as living bearers of a kind of a past continuous—­but rather sets of relationships in the past. Third, these sets of relationships included three figures rather than two. In both cases, people like Vito and the sacristan confronted not only people from the other side, but also people from the town. The priest was the cowardly ignorant who first avoided the Tunisian’s challenge and then needed to have the interaction explained to him. Like him, Pernice, who took the Tunisians’ side, represented those whom the fishers could not trust: the city’s clerical, administrative, and generally landed folk—­in short, the people from the city. People in Mazara have a phrase that captures this antagonism: “In Mazara there are two sorts [razze, or races] of people: Mazaresi and fishers.” As I came to learn in the following months, this antagonism shaped the division—­spatial and temporal at the same time—­between the city and its old port, as well as the relation of both to the sea. This triangle of relationships made the scenes people recounted transnational, and it did so in more than one sense—­first, because the scenes involved interaction across borders; and second, and perhaps more important for our present purposes, because these interactions shaped relations within the national or local scene of Mazara in relation to cross-­border connection. In this sense, the transnational scenes that these stories depicted were both more and less than just global. They were less than global because to understand them, one needed to situate their events not at a global scale, but rather on a subglobal—­that is, regional—­scale. And they were more than global because the events that unfolded within and across borders in these stories required a richer set of analytical tools than the paramount scale that the globe furnishes. Transnational relations here were of a segmentary and not a global kind.

Transnationalism as a Sea of Scales and Segments Although transnationalism emerged as a direction of studies at the height of the Cold War (Nye and Keohane 1971), anthropologists have recently treated it as the globalizing opposite of the localizing processes of nationalism (Verdery 1998, 292), or as “processes and connections across specific state borders,” like religious or national imperialism (Schiller 2005, 440). Either way, what is abandoned is the possibility that transnational processes might be shaped and conditioned by specific dynamics that derive neither from the local and national nor from the global. Transnational regions like

Introduction / 21

the Mediterranean—­with their vague, ever-­changing boundaries and long histories that predate nationalism—­inform many facets of academic life: faculty positions, publications, and professional associations (“European,” “Middle-­Eastern,” “South Asian”). But as direct objects of analysis, they have recently appeared in anthropological literature more as the usual suspects in deconstructions of “area studies” (Guyer 2004) than as objects of historical-­ anthropological reconstruction.5 No matter how transnational our studies and multilocal our sites, after the dethroning of “methodological nationalism” (Goswami 2004), we are left with the choice between methodological globalism (or cosmopolitanism; Beck and Sznaider 2006) and no methodological “–­ism” at all. Yet the transnational needs to be neither global nor cosmopolitan, and should not be confused with either. On the contrary, transnational constellations like maritime regions deserve to be studied on their own terms—­that is, by reconstructing how they attain and lose their palpability as the scales and substance of political relations between the local and the global. How Segmentation Drowned in the Mediterranean The challenge that the central Mediterranean poses to anthropology is to examine transnational regional constellations not against a yardstick of cultural homogeneity, but rather on the basis of the varied idioms of relatedness that people use to inform and shape their political relations across borders. The challenge is double, because the two aspects of such an analysis—­the role that terms of relatedness play in politics and the segmentary shape of political processes—­have been traditionally considered marks of premodern or unmodern social situations. Rather than survey the sea of scholarship that has dealt with the issue, I would like here to trace one key tension that haunted segmentation between an empiricist view of societies as solidary or corporate groups on the one hand, and a structuralist view of society as relations between relations on the other. The first view confounded segments with lineage, giving birth to the way in which segmentation was known and discarded in the United States: “segmentary lineage theory” (Sahlins 1961). Here, segmentation denotes fission and fusion between “solidary groups [that] form, and then combine or conflict, in predictable ways within a system sustained by a balance of power between its elements” (summarized by Dresch 1986, 309).6 As anthropologists pursued segmentary dynamics along the southern shores of the Mediterranean, they gradually argued that this did not occur (Peters 1960, 1967). As a result, writers on Morocco and Libya concluded that segmentation was

22 / Chapter One

an ideology: “As an ideology of social relations among many tribal groups in the Middle East, the notion of segmentation has considerable importance. As a sociological model it is inadequate” (Eickelman 1981, 104). If segmentation occurred between groups, and if grouping followed the lines of kinship (lineage specifically), then in those places in which lineage no longer seemed to shape observable social structure, anthropologists dismissed segmentation as a useful analytical tool (Meeker 1976). As a result, early Europeanist ethnographers shunned segmentation in favor of what they saw as modern social forms: dyadic relations, patronage, and a more individualistic network view of social relations (Boissevain 1966, 1964; Blok 1973). This was most clearly the case as anthropologists became increasingly attracted to the “urban and semimodern context” within modern nation-­ states. As Gellner put it, in these places “informants . . . talk segmentation but fail to practice it; they act patronage” (1973, 6; italics in original). Against this empiricist view emerged the structuralist alternative reading of segmentation. Here, segmentation does not unfold between corporate groups, but occurs the other way around: grouping emerges in practice, from the segmentary course of events. This view requires that we follow the dynamic of the process rather than assume that the groups and alignments present at the beginning of the process persevere throughout. Along these lines, people’s sense of honor is the relational axis on which segmentary processes hinge. When people call others to defend their shared honor, they mark a set of relationships: the group whose honor has been injured and is now in need of defending, and the group who has offended that honor. A political project that conjures and galvanizes honor at any given scale tells people that they belong to the group of that scale and calls them to defend that group’s honor—­that is, their honor. To give two examples of this kind of analysis, both Paul Dresch and Michael Herzfeld have shown in different ways how segmentary structures are “of honor, not of cohesive groups” (Dresch 1986, 315; Herzfeld 1984b). This view of politics hinges on multiscalar political worth—­the defining quality of any given position in a segmentary structure (persons, groups, cities, nations)—­which people cast in idioms of relatedness. Segmentation once stood at the center of political anthropology. Yet it remained peripheral to the anthropology of Europe.7 This is because anthropologists crossing the sea back to Europe failed to bring the study of segmentation and kinship with them, assuming that these categories’ erstwhile prevalence had given way to modernity (wrongly, as two recent volumes have shown: McKinnon and Cannell 2013; Sabean and Teuscher 2007). These concepts’

Introduction / 23

untimely death at sea points to an issue that is central to the political anthropology of transnationalism: our ability to explore how transnational political relations are expressed in terms of relatedness and unfold in a segmentary way (Dresch 1988, 57) that departs from the modern, state-­centered rhetoric of fraternal nationalism and universal citizenship. Here, too, the dynamics of the Mediterraneanist debate point to the problem. The abandoning of segmentation and kinship for cultural unities ended up reaffirming notions of inherent difference between the West and the “rest,” at least from a European point of view. The initial social-­comparison thrust in Mediterraneanist anthropology culminated with a culturalist view of the similarities between southern Europe and North Africa. Europe was thus initially split into two zones, with the southern among them showing cultural similarities to North Africa and the Levant. Such similarities offered south European grist for the ethnographic mill, and legitimized an anthropological beachhead on Europe’s southern coasts. When the “cultural unity of the Mediterranean” was debunked, Europe emerged as that continent which was culturally incomparable with its neighbors Africa and Asia. There was never any sense of urgency in finding a similar anthropological unifying ground for European anthropology, since such a ground was, almost self-­evidently, the West (Asad et al. 1997). By preferring Europe over the Mediterranean as a spatial category, anthropologists opted for a political imagination that was made of a lineage of discrete spatiopolitical entities and cultural identities, not of structural relationships. The deconstruction of the Mediterranean, or of its anthropological concept at the very least, was begotten together with the reconstruction—­indeed, the reaffirmation—­of Europe. The Mediterranean provides an especially fruitful case for challenging this view of Europe, because it has for several centuries served Europeans in staging the distinction between the West and the “rest” in the most intimate geopolitical settings. A reconstruction of a modern Mediterranean, if successful, would offer a geopolitical imaginary oriented away from the capitals of Mediterranean region making: Paris and Sarkozy’s Union for the Mediterranean, or the NATO headquarters in Brussels. It is our task to search for similarities across periods even more than continuities: not to show that the Mediterranean is still alive in the habits of thought of some of its residents—­as clientelism or masculine honor—­but to argue that new transnational constellations can emerge in the Mediterranean in modern times. Acknowledging that would give us both a modern Mediterranean and a Mediterranean modernity. Since in a modern world the Mediterranean is supposed to have expired as an intelligible unit, a counterexample would question the norms

24 / Chapter One

of intelligibility that have declared the sea’s death. The story of Mazara del Vallo—­the home port of the motorized trawler Naumachos—­may serve as that counterexample. Region-­Making Projects versus Region-­Formation Processes Returning to the Mediterranean does not mean reifying regions as areas of cultural unities. Nor do we need to declare the end of modernity, national or otherwise, in order to view various processes from the last century as contributing to the emergence of regional constellations.8 Once we examine transnationalism through segmentation, we can see transnational spaces like the Mediterranean as spatiopolitical constellations, which undergo not only projects of region making, but also processes of region formation (and disintegration). The distinction between project and process is more of focus and perspective than of discrete kinds, yet it may prove instructive. In his magnum opus about the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel describes the historical rhythm of the body of water “between Tunisia and Sicily” in terms of a chain of projects (1972, 116): Political circles in Palermo and Messina were . . . continually suggesting projects of African conquest to the vanity and colonial ambitions of the viceroys of Spanish Sicily . . . These projects translated the dimly felt necessity of uniting the shores and islands of this intermediary region.

As the short history of the now defunct Union for the Mediterranean shows, the age of Mediterraneanist ambitions has hardly ended. As in the age of Philip II, so also in the days of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French ex-­president, the vanity of European leaders is fueled by suggestions of political expansion (or unification)—­that is, by projects of region making. In contrast to projects of region making, region formation and disintegration are the processes through which spatial constellations of  varying transnational scales attain or lose their sense of palpability. The emphasis on process and not on project distinguishes between those cases in which such scaling-­up occurs as a result of institutional official design, and those in which the shift in significant scale overflows any single project (even if such a project would have a similar region in mind). “Making” here is a transitive verb, with the projected region as its direct object. “Formation,” meanwhile, is intransitive; regions form, but no one person or institution forms them. In this sense,

Introduction / 25

European unification and the consolidation of the European Union would count on the “project of region making” side of the spectrum. Europeanization and the institutional reactions to the 2010 sovereign debt crisis would draw our attention to a process wider than the project, in which both centrifugal and centripetal forces are at play, including such events as the 2016 “Brexit” vote and European Union members’ reaction to it. Yet the presence and role of the European institutions (the Central Bank, the European Commission, and so forth) would support the case for a focus on the project as well. Finally, those regional constellations that lack a unique project that shapes them provide examples of formation, not making—­of process rather than project (Subramanian 2009). Indeed, region-­making projects like Europeanization “are simultaneously both products and constituents of social action” (Paasi 2001, 13; Brenner 2001). Yet the official projects that promote them scale up action to an intermediary level on a sequence of nested scales between the subnational, the national, and the supranational, all subsumed under the global (Marston and Smith 2001). For example, the framing of various nation-­states and their citizens as European parallels these states’ transformation into European Union member states, followed by the imposition of political institutions that extend over their territories. The change of scale moves from the national to the supranational, conflating the hierarchical and vertical aspects of scaling up (Leitner and Miller 2007). On the contrary, transnational constellations involve the shifting of scale from the national to the transnational: scaling both upwards and sideways. The categories that people use to frame their social relations in such constellations—­of place, identity, and relations—­are divorced from any one project that would combine the centralization of power, the ideology of sameness, and the control of territory at a higher level in a hierarchy of nested scales (Subramanian 2009). Transnational constellations like the recent central Mediterranean present such an example.

Scaling Up: Framing and Geographic Extension A historical anthropology of region formation can liberate the transnational perspective from the made-­up dilemma between the local and the global. Regions can help us populate and animate this grade of scales not because they have always been there, but because people tend to construct them as frames for transnational action, and because in doing so, they reshape what these regions stand for, what they include and exclude. While both region-­making projects and region-­formation processes hinge on the question of the scaling

26 / Chapter One

up and down of social relations, an attention to formation may help us to distinguish between two dimensions in such scalar changes: framing and geographical extension. Framing casts people, relationships, and sites in sets of types (Goffman 1979; Tannen 1993). The scaling dimension in framing comes into play when people use framing to expand the reach of the categories they apply to events and interactions (Herzfeld 1987b; Caton 1990; Shryock 2012). The rise in Mediterraneanist discourse exemplifies this. It promotes a specific view of people and relationships around the sea as “Mediterranean.” A Mediterra­ neanist discourse that emphasizes interreligious relations—­as Christians versus Muslims, for example—­frames the present state of affairs through a pair of categories; these categories relate people to each other through the past they share, and distinguish them from other people. As a result, such a framing of the Mediterranean through interreligious relations makes people’s religious affiliation the pertinent aspect in their interaction; and it offers that aspect of the relationship between them as the way to understand interaction. Geographical extension denotes the material or infrastructural ways in which movements, connections, and relationships are scaled upwards, downwards, or sideways (Howitt 2003). To give two examples, the Mazara fleet’s use of motorized trawling scaled the fleet’s operation to North African fishing grounds—­both upwards and sideways—­and the Transmed pipeline scaled up the flow of energy between Algeria and Italy, as well as the exchanges and obligations it entailed. As we shall see, people framed these two kinds of geographical extension using categories of relatedness, obligation, and identity, which they projected onto the pipeline and the fleet. The recent history of political relations in the central Mediterranean may show us how we can study transnational regions as constellations that undergo processes of formation and disintegration. The recent central Mediterranean presents a specific case of such a constellation, which was shaped by a shared past, similar idioms of relatedness, and the specific Sicilian-­Tunisian structural relationships in which transnational segmentation unfolded. People came to see each other as related, each side alluding to particular past events that cast the present in its own interest. Both sides’ allusions (as well as the idioms that inform them) transformed their political relations with each other and with the wider transnational constellation in a way that neither nationalism nor internationalism exhausts. The idioms that these people used for their relations come from kinship and marriage; the working of these relations was segmentary; and the resulting transformation was from international to transnational political relations.

Introduction / 27

The Argument: Scaling Up (and Sideways) as Transnational Segmentation To follow this process, the book’s chapters trace the role that the fleet and the people of Mazara—­Tunisians and Sicilians—­have played in the formation and the disintegration of the central Mediterranean as a regional constellation since the Sixties. This book reconstructs neither the changing fortunes of the wider Mediterranean nor the interaction between all Italian and Tunisian Mediterraneanist projects during that period (Abulafia 2011; Pizzigallo 2008; 2012). Rather, I focus my story on the Mazara fleet in order to make a wider case for an historical anthropology of region formation, in the Mediterranean and beyond. To do this, I use two main stages, one of the present, the other for the past: the deck of the Naumachos and the political scene of the Mazara del Vallo. While chapter 2 dramatizes the role of framing in the Mazara City Council at a crucial moment in the town’s Mediterraneanist trajectory, each of the subsequent chapters traces one scaling device that people used in their attempts to forge and maintain relations across the sea. Viewing recent history through this chain of scaling devices enables us to see how people’s framing of social relations under specific idioms combined with the various threads of geographic extension that were underway, and which people sought to harness to their regionalist projects. The chapters unfold this chain of scaling devices in five acts: labor and class (chapter 3), patronage (chapter 4), family and kinship (chapter 5), honor (chapter 6), and cosmopolitanism or the terms of transcultural affinity (chapter 7). Each chapter stages one of these themes first as an aspect of life onboard, and then extends it to an account of that aspect in the history of Mazara and the channel. This choice of themes stems from several considerations. First, each of these themes has at one point dominated Mediterraneanist studies as emblem and key to the entire region. Some of them began their lives in Mediterranean studies before making a global career and then facing critique as reification, othering, or mystification. By addressing these themes in respective chapters, I both dissociate them from the Mediterranean as emblems for the cultural unity of the entire region and show how, when construed together, they may give us a more complex view of how people have come to view the Mediterranean as a palpable space. In telling the story of the central Mediterranean through this sequence, I acknowledge the importance and limitation of each of these dimensions and the need to chart the structure and dynamics of the transnational constellation through the mutual relationship among them.

28 / Chapter One

Second, each of these themes has occupied not only historians and anthropologists but also the fishers and politicians in Mazara, Sicily, and Tunisia. By telling the story through these themes, I show the central role they have played in the struggles over the framing of social relations and the control of resources. Accordingly, each of the chapters does not reconstruct patronage, honor, or any other theme per se, but follows their roles as the frames in scaling devices, which people employed throughout the formation and disintegration of the central Mediterranean. These struggles unfolded in many places and moments: in meetings in Rome, Palermo, Tunis, Trapani, and in Mazara itself; between the trawlers and the Tunisian coast guard vessels; and during campaigns for the various national, regional, and local elections. To capture these past events in a dramatic setting that would mirror the deck of the Naumachos, I focus on the theatrical stage for political representation that saw Mazara’s transnational fortunes rise and fall: the sessions of the local city council.9 For example, the hundreds of clashes at sea between Mazarese trawlers and Tunisian coast guard vessels stemmed from the geographical scaling up of the Mazara fleet’s operation. The “rage” of fishers after the more violent clashes turned into a scaling device. On the city council’s floor, Mazarese politicians and shipowners framed this “rage” and the events that triggered it in different ways: as offended Italian honor, as a struggle between two subaltern peoples forced upon them by their common Northern oppressors, or as opportunities to forge bonds of affinity between two Mediterranean peoples. These differing framings offered their own scales: continental, internationalist, and regionalist. As a result, the struggle over the framing of events and the control of the scaling device conditioned the course of events and the shape of geographical expansion. Third, my choice to tell the story of the central Mediterranean through the chain of scaling devices and the themes they invoked dramatizes the relationship between the deck of the Naumachos and the formation of the constellation in which it navigated. The perspective this book offers on this process seeks neither a hyperrealist rendition of a seamless global totality nor a self-­professedly fragmentary account from an arbitrary location (Candea 2007), but a moveable dramatic stage: the deck of the Naumachos. The scenes on deck serve the two poetic functions of such a stage in this ethnographic dramatization. The trawler’s deck becomes a theatrical stage of sorts; its crew—­the dramatis personae, whom we will shortly come to know—­stage the preoccupations and imaginaries that have conjured up the Mediterranean since World War II. The ship itself, in its navigation between Sicily and Tunisia, charts the routes of the fleet’s trawlers, which have contributed to

Introduction / 29

the formation of the central Mediterranean as a transnational constellation, as well as to the conjuring up of the wider sea and its past reincarnations. By following each Mediterraneanist theme as a scaling device, from the deck in the middle of the sea to the history of its invoking ashore, the following chapters offer historical anthropology as a way to address the multiple roles of scale and scaling in the scenes we study and the accounts we produce. This attention to scale and scaling dramatizes what relationships and conclusions we can draw between what we see onboard—­or in any other social interaction—­and what we learn about processes that unfold at varying temporal and spatial scales. In what follows, the relationship between the ship and the past is the relationship that people construct when they try to frame the here and now in ways that scale it to a past and future of varying spatial extensions. That they use familiar themes from Mediterraneanist anthropology shows the salience of these categories. That people use more than one of them with contradictions, ironies, and limited success shows why we should not take any one of these themes (like honor and shame) as an emblem of the Mediterranean, but rather should follow people as they use these frames in conjuring up the Mediterranean or the Channel of Sicily. The Naumachos did not sail in the waters of the past. As other theatrical stages (and unlike hyperrealist movies), it does not represent itself as a seamless window to another world. Rather, it necessarily points to the poetic and rhetorical work of connecting what we see onstage to what we are asked to imagine as the object of representation (Goffman 1981, 4). We anthropologists share this work with the people we study. This theatrical relationship makes the history that is summoned necessary for the understanding of what unfolds in the ethnographic present, and it makes the palpable events that take place on stage necessary for understanding the history of changing relationships between Sicilians and Tunisians—­their emerging regionalist political imagination and the struggles that shaped the formation of the channel constellation. This is where the choice of a fishing trawler as a stage for this historical anthropology not only shapes the themes considered, but also limits the gendered perspective of the people concerned. Both women and women’s frames are absent from the onboard ethnography as they are, by and large, from the list of dramatis personae whom the analysis brings forth. This is so because, as we shall see (particularly in chapter 6), what connected the space of the Naumachos to outer space and past events was a “poetics of manhood” (Herzfeld 1985a) which oriented fishers’ sense of masculinity along the lines that belligerent events like the Fish War had charted in the past. As a result, the same dynamic of “vigilance and virginity” that played out

30 / Chapter One

transnationally, at sea, also engendered and at times sexualized relations between persons and persons both in space and through it (J. Schneider 1971). It is this transnational dynamic that the book follows. Finally, the sequence of the chapters follows these scaling devices chro­ nologically. Each of the chapters scales up the analysis, which gradually expands from fleet and town, through their relationship with Rome and Italy, to Mazara’s relationship with Tunisia and the other elements in the central Mediterranean, and to the ways in which people nowadays conjure up the entire Mediterranean in and around Mazara. Chapter 2, “’Whose Strike Is It?’” recounts my growing realization that to understand the current situation, which was visible in Mazara during my fieldwork, I needed to go in two directions, to the past and to sea. The chapter follows a strike that the fleet declared around the end of 2007. By recounting the various framings that people used to interpret the strike to me, I posit the key role of frames for social action and scaling attempts in the historical anthropology of Mazara and the channel. Yet the different conceptions of the fleet, its actors, and the dynamics of the relations among them remained implicit during the strike of 2007, which posed more questions than answers about the political dynamics of the fleet’s operation. To chart the role of these conceptions and to examine the role of framing in explicit political debate, I turn to an earlier strike that took place in the Seventies, and which everyone in 2007 kept comparing to present events. During the fleet’s first major strike in the Seventies, the blurred borders between these three frameworks—­class relations, patron-­client relations between shipowners and national politicians, and “one big family”—­emerged in full sight. By following how the town’s political coalition depended on the refutation of any class divisions in the fleet, I show the role that this framing played in securing the stratified division of labor, and argue that both the division of labor and its misrecognition conditioned the fleet’s transnational trajectory. Chapter 3, “The Craft of Expansive Navigation,” shows how the motorization of trawling scaled up the operation of the Mazara fleet. The chapter focuses on the political economics of the fleet’s operation, the spatial expansion it shaped, and the labor relations it engendered at sea and ashore. I argue that this spatial dimension of the labor process distinguished motorized trawling from other contemporary kinds of fishing and seafaring. I then show how the expansive spatial dimension of this labor process charged the fleet’s operation with region-­forming potential, and how it shaped onboard routine and the stratified division of labor between the owner, the captain, the mechanics, and the deckhands. Yet class relations were only one of three main alternative frames for social action. This chapter introduces onboard

Introduction / 31

life and work through the quotidian struggle over this framing: Is the ship a relationship of production, a web of patronage, or a family? The next two chapters add the layered responses of “patronage” and “family.” Chapter 4, “Fish and Bait,” examines the role of patron-­client relations in the fleet’s growth and operation. The chapter adds patronage to the previous chapter’s theme of class relations. Here too the focus of the chapter—­ patronage—­is examined through the scaling device that people use as its vessel: seafood. The chapter follows the paths of seafood from the hierarchies of onboard sorting and packing process, through seafood’s role in mediating patron-­client relations between fishing magnates and the powers that be, and all the way to Italy’s heads of state, as emblems of power and obligation. Onboard, the chapter examines how the channeling of various kinds of fish shapes social relations, an economy of favors, clandestine gains, and fishers’ outlooks. Following the tracks of these seafood items ashore, the chapter reconstructs the formation of a new class of shipowners—­a “maritime gentry” of sorts. I show how these people, who personified the politico-­economic interests and the southbound drive that conditioned the fleet’s operation, increased their local political influence through the personal patron-­client relations they formed beyond the local political scene and by framing patronage as the condition for Mazara’s prosperity. Chapter 5, “One Big Family,” analyzes the role that idioms of family and kinship played as scaling devices, through the emblems that people charged with their signification, in the struggle over the framing of social relations onboard and in Mazara’s transnational trajectory. Onboard, I analyze how the preparation and consumption of food—­the only daily times when the crew met for a purpose other than sorting the catch—­were charged with the tensions between the alternative frames for onboard life and work: labor, patronage, and family. I show how the relative complexity and potential commensality of the daily lunch and dinner amplified and refracted the semiotic potential of food as a consumable emblem of familial relations. Ashore, the chapter analyzes how these idioms of relatedness served Mazarese and North African politicians in framing transnational relations across the sea. If aboard the Naumachos food turned into the emblem of onboard life and a pawn in that life’s contested framing, ashore it was the fleet, its ships, and its fishers’ rage that became moveable emblems of the channel and relations across it. I show how Mazara’s fleet played a role in the rise of such Mediterraneanist allusions through two intertwined threads: the Fish War with Tunisia and the construction of the Transmed pipeline across the Channel of Sicily. Chapter 6, “Pissing Rage,” charts the role of rage as a scaling device. It addresses the role of honor as a frame of action through the moments of insult,

32 / Chapter One

offense, and rage it frames and the demands it makes: how honor emerges in concrete interactions, and how, when it so emerges, it shapes both the parties involved and the space they conjure up. The chapter opens by discussing how the ship’s layout shaped our daily movements from one task to another, reminding each of us his role and position through the smells, sounds, and sights that one’s position provided. I then show how the ship’s space was connected to the space around it in two related ways. The ship’s course moved us between points of exploitation and compensation, between stretches of submission to one’s role in the ship’s hierarchy and fleeting opportunities to forgo it all and jump ship. The ship also tugged us all between its home port in Mazara and our fishing banks closer to Lampedusa and the Tunisian shore—­between Sicily, Italy, and Europe on the one hand and Tunisia, the Maghreb, and Africa on the other. The chapter examines how these movements between the channel’s symbolic and practical realms connected onboard space to the maritime space. Honor—­claimed, offended, or protected—­provided the theatrical links between the space of the ship and that of the sea and lands around it. Ashore, claims about honor and calls to defend it played in the formation of the channel constellation throughout the Fish War and the Transmed project. Recurrent calls to defend Mazarese trawlers in the name of Italian honor unintendedly distinguished and then separated Mazarese from Sicilian, Italian, and European interests. These segmentary dynamics realigned cross-­channel political relations between Mazaresi and Tunisians along a transnational political imaginary of affinity across difference. This realignment redefined the role and reach of patronage and familial idioms in Mazara as well as between the town and Palermo, Tunis, and Rome. Through this analysis, I argue that understanding transnationalism depends on an examination of region formation as the changing relationships between political imaginaries and segmentary process. Chapter 7, “Terms of  Transcultural Affinity,” follows the role of claims to affinity across difference and distance as scaling devices. It articulates Tunisians’ and Sicilians’ model of relatedness and interaction across difference—­ religious, national, or civilizational. This view of the relationship between history and culture premised multicultural sociability not on the avoidance of difference, but rather on its constant marking. By examining the alternative it poses to cosmopolitan tolerance, global human fraternity, and official interfaith dialogue, I engage recent scholarship on Mediterranean cosmopolitanism and the example that the sea’s past is said to set for a global political order. Ashore, I turn to discuss how this view of transnational relations as relatedness across difference confronted several Mediterraneanist projects in the cultural politics of Mazara, where a new generation of local politicians

Introduction / 33

and businesspersons has been baptizing the fleet’s operation to fit the growing European concerted action in Southern Europe and North Africa. The conclusion, “Mediterranean Afterlife of a Dying Fishing Town,” follows the end of the fishing voyage. Once ashore, the book frames the challenge that the formation of the central-­Mediterranean constellation poses to Mediterranean studies, to transnationalism, and to political anthropology. In their endless fishing voyages, the Sicilian and Tunisian fishers of Ma­­ zara del Vallo personify this reemerging imaginary of the Mediterranean as a transnational space of transcultural difference and relatedness across it, which their fleet’s expansion has conditioned. At the same time, they personify the current decrepit, diseased, and disillusioned shape their craft has taken. Both in the daily onboard routine, which entails labor practices that both Tu­­ nisians and Sicilians called “slavery,” and in their versions of what being Mediterranean seafarers entails nowadays, they offer a shifting perspective—­ moving both temporally and spatially—­on the vicissitudes and tolls of the sea’s reemergence. If we follow their lead, we can see how transnational constellations undergo region formation.

TWO

Whose Strike Is It?

The old port of Mazara, where Vito “the Hurricane” spun his yarns about Mazarese and Tunisians, had been the beating heart of the town’s economy until the Eighties, when the new port was built across the river to host the growing fleet. The bars, which had once hosted the daily activities of the town’s rising class of shipowners and captains, became the meeting venues of retired Sicilians and of  Tunisian fishers. The three bars along the old port’s quay provide the best seats from which one can see the dilapidated skeleton that remained of Mazara’s once bustling old port. Everyone can show you where trawlers used to berth: “Here! Almost at your feet.” These days, the quays are divided between small local boats and the wrecked boats of clan­ destine immigrants that the Italian coast guard has seized and confiscated. The canal’s boardwalk on the other side of the road once hosted the daily auctions of the fleet’s superabundant catch. Vito, who used to manage these auctions, told me the daily catch used to be so large “that you could not see the end of the shrimp trays!” Nowadays, the boardwalk mostly serves those people who steer away from the cafés. During the fleet’s bustling heyday, the hangars along the canal’s two banks hosted the daily toil of shrimp peeling and decapitating (scapuzzare). Mario, my landlord, told me many times how he and his friends used to be awakened by their mothers around five o’clock in the morning to decapitate some trays before they went to school with their hands “stinking of dead shrimp.” Today these buildings have little to do with the fleet, if anyone uses them at all. There was a certain dose of nostalgia in the way that Vito, Mario, and oth­ ers recounted the town’s erstwhile days of glory in front of the decrepit porto canale. Yet there was more to this contrast. In the months that took me to find a berth on a southbound trawler, this contrast emerged twice. Spatially, it appeared between the various parts of Mazara, especially between the city’s

36 / Chapter Two

“historical center” and the old port. Temporally, it emerged between a strike that the fleet declared toward the end of 2007 and an earlier strike—­the fleet’s largest during the Seventies—­which everyone in 2007 kept comparing (often nostalgically) to present events. Together, these two gaps made me realize that to understand the present situation in Mazara, I needed to depart from the town’s present in two related directions: to sea and to the past.

The City and the Port Some of the causes for the old port’s decrepit state stem from development, not neglect. As the fleet expanded, the narrow canal of the old port became too small for the three hundred trawling ships in the fleet. The new port, which was built on the other side of the Mazaro River and the old porto canale, hosts the fleet and the various offices that attend to its operation, far away from the town and its erstwhile beating heart. As onboard freezing and peeling machinery developed, the local auction and packing sites, as well as a significant amount of local labor they had once entailed, disappeared. Finally, since most of the catch is unloaded in Lampedusa rather than in Mazara, the trucks that carry it to Rome, Milan, and Venice no longer pass through Mazara. From Lampedusa, these trucks arrive aboard the weekly ferry to the eastern part of the southern Sicilian coast (Porto Empedocle, near Agrigento) and continue directly to the north through the Messina Strait. If during the Seventies the biggest election rallies in town were held for the en­ tire fleet in Piazza Regina of the old port—­next to Bar Gianni—­by the 2000s this was no longer possible. During the election season of 2008, when one candidate sought the support and votes of the people of fleet, he needed to hold two rallies—­one for the general population of the kasbah in the piazza, and another in the New Port’s bar, the shipowners’ new hangout. The vacuity of the old porto canale, however, has to do with more than ex­ pansion. Indeed, the fleet, which had provided up to a quarter of the town’s employment, first expanded beyond the town’s realms. Then came the fleet’s decline. As fish stocks in the channel gradually diminished and operation ex­ penses rose, every year more and more trawlers would remain along the quay even at the height of the fishing season. Some of those trawlers were later sold to countries in Africa. Some moved to Tunisia to work under binational companies. Others were scrapped, their owners receiving remuneration for ceasing their fishing activities. Nowadays, retired shipowners and crewmem­ bers, who have no business to attend to in the New Port, meet daily in the bars along the quay in the old port. As these café dwellers gaze at the port, expensive cars pass by. Some people in the cars are current shipowners, on

Whose Strike Is It?  /  37

Figure 6.  Mazara del Vallo and the River Mazaro. Map drawing by Angelos Qlos.

their way to run errands in town, see their ships in the new port, or go for the evening walk along the town’s waterfront. Every once in a while an old fisher would call out the nickname of the man in a car. The driver would then stick his head out the car’s window, wave, and call back his acquaintance’s nickname, promising that he would stop by for a cup of coffee sometime in the future. The drivers’ haste marks the disparity between the old port and the two poles in Mazara’s current world: the town’s administrative center and the Trasmazaro—­“across the Mazaro River”—­where the new port and the rich new neighborhoods are located. While the Trasmazaro serves as a dormitory for Mazara’s trawlers and its borghesia, the town’s center hosts the upscale zones in Mazara, which cater to this middle class. Like many other Italian

38 / Chapter Two

towns, Mazara has its Corso Vittorio Veneto, its Corso Umberto I, and its Piazza Repubblica. The two roads, perpendicular to each other, cordon the city’s rectangular center from the north and the east, while the river and the seafront promenade (named after Giuseppe Mazzini) mark the center’s boundaries to the west and south. The two corsi host the shops and the week­ end evening strolls. Piazza Repubblica, which hosts the cathedral, the semi­ nary for priests, the bishop’s residence, and the city hall, lies closer to the old port and the rundown parts of Mazara. In 1981, after a medium-­force earth­ quake hit Mazara, municipal authorities declared many of the old buildings in the kasbah inhabitable. The quarter, which includes many buildings of medieval Arab architecture, gradually came to host the Tunisian migrants and their families, who moved into the houses that the middle classes had abandoned for new residences in the Trasmazaro. For Mazaresi, the combination of Arab architecture and Tunisian mi­ grants in the kasbah gradually became a physical reminder of the connec­ tions everyone was making between the city’s ancient past and its turbulent present. In a turn of historical fortunes, the street commemorating Giuseppe Garibaldi—­the least patrician of the “fathers of the Italian Fatherland”—­ reaches from Piazza Repubblica into the heart of the kasbah. As few borghesi ever venture into the kasbah or the old port, so also Tunisians venture to the town’s richer center only for specific chores, not to use it as their social space. The old port provides Tunisians with a site where they can congregate with­ out being made to feel that Mazara is not theirs to inhabit. In a town that has always turned a cold shoulder to its fishers—­whether Sicilian or Tunisian—­ the fishers of both groups, as well as other labor migrants (authorized or otherwise), pass their days sipping coffee in the old port, surrounded by the remains of the most recent short-­lived wave of Mazara’s maritime glory. The split between the old port and the city center echoes the discrepancy between two ways in which Mazaresi relate to their past and their sea. During the months I spent trying to board a trawler, the city center hosted several cultural events that staged Mazara as the heart of the intercultural Mediter­ ranean in an attempt to ride the high tide of Europeanist interest in the sea. In October 2007, the bishop of Mazara and the president of the province of Trapani—­which includes Mazara—­cofounded the Mediterranean Center for Intercultural Studies in the seminary for priests in town. Across the piazza, the offices of the Industrial Fishing Production District, COSVAP, were orga­ nizing the foundation of the Mediterranean Fisheries District and its adjacent Permanent Observatory on Mediterranean Fisheries. These two institutions were intended to secure Mazara’s role in the region and help its fleet and its economy survive. Meanwhile, cultural entrepreneurs who worked in the

Whose Strike Is It?  /  39

province, in the city hall, and in the diocese ironed out the last details for the foundation of the Cultural District of  Val di Mazara, which united eleven mu­ nicipalities from the area, to be headed by Mazara. As one entrepreneur told me, the organization would “valorize the zone’s Arab past” in the hope that this would trigger economic and cultural development. That winter, the dis­ trict’s first project hosted several concerts and public lectures dedicated to Mu­ hammad al-­Idrisi, the Medieval Muslim Sicilian scholar, whose geographic treatise, which he had dedicated to King Roger II of Sicily, glorifies Mazara. The people in Mazara’s administrative heart in Piazza Repubblica seemed more interested in bathing in the medieval light of Mazara’s Arab-­Norman past than in anything that had to do with the fleet or the living Tunisians who worked onboard its trawlers. The cultural scene in Piazza Repubblica brimmed with people who were promoting one heritage project or another that involved past connection with North Africa. For example, a retired hotel manager turned part-­time cultural entrepreneur suggested a yearly celebra­ tion of the landing of the fleet of Asad ibn al-­Furat in AD 827 in what is now called La Cala dei Turchi, or the Turks’ Cove, next to Mazara. The entrepre­ neur explained, smiling, Furat stayed here for a month before he staged his first battle. We don’t want to celebrate the battle, but he was here for a whole month before that. We will have it on June 13, the day of the landing. It took him a year to get to Siracusa [on the other side of Sicily], and then all the rest. Asad is our passport to the history books! If you search “Mazara” on Google, you find Hannibal’s great-­ uncle, and then Ibn al-­Furat. We waited 1,236 years for Furat, so it means that we need to wait 1,236 more years, counting from AD 827, for more to happen—­for somebody else to come. When will it be?

Most people in town took this initiative with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, it showed how much more comfortable Mazara’s borghesi were with their town’s erstwhile contacts with Arabs or Muslims than with the ongoing pre­ sent of such connections, which the old port harbored. As for the dwellers of the porto canale—­they insisted that for anyone to understand anything, they had to board their trawlers and see what life was like at sea. Munsef Munsef, a Tunisian itinerant vendor in his fifties who had come to Mazara in the early Eighties, was my guide in navigating both worlds of the port and the center. He moved between the two worlds and belonged to neither. We

40 / Chapter Two

had met briefly on a couple of occasions during the autumn of 2007, but never got to talk at length. One day in November, Munsef showed up in the old port. He came there pushing a wheeled cart filled with a variety of shirts, pants, watches, cell phone chargers, pens, and various other things he sold. There was an air of detachment to him. He parked his cart neither in front of the cafés nor close to the butcher and the bakery, where most people passed. Instead, he parked it close to the curve at the corner of the street that goes down from the old town to the square, as if he were saying to the people in the square, “Come here only if you really want to buy something.” By that time I was spending most of my mornings on the quayside—­that is, when I was not going through all the fleet-­related offices trying to con­ vince every relevant official in town that I should board a ship, any ship, as a researcher. One day as I was finishing my morning routine, I saw Munsef and his wheeled cart. It had just started to rain and he was busy securing a nylon cover to protect the merchandise, battling the wind that threatened to blow the cover and the whole cart with it to the ground. Thrilled at the opportunity to make myself useful, I walked quickly to his cart and started to help him with fixing the cover. Once we were done, he started to ask me about my work. I told him I was just coming from talking to the old fishers in the cafe. He had never gone fishing. He didn’t like his job as a street vendor either. He had been trained as a high school teacher in Tunisia and mastered German, French, Italian, and Arabic. Yet he had never wanted to have a boss, so he sold things off his cart. “This is a damned town,” he said. “Don’t stay here too long, or you will never leave.” After we met, I would come to Munsef ’s cart almost every day. At first I tried to make him help me practice Tunisian. Yet in the first week or so, he would always answer me in literary Arabic, telling me it was too hard to teach me “the dialect” because I was not good enough. He used to carry a book or two with him. One of them was always an edited volume of Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia, the book about medieval Sicily written by the nineteenth-­century Sicilian orientalist Michele Amari. Others were often English-­language books or books in German. “You will find Tunisians to talk to, don’t worry,” he used to tell me. “You will write your book, don’t worry. But why write about Mazara? Why not write about the culture and history of this country? Dante, that’s culture for you! Have you read La Divina Commedia?”

Whose Strike Is It Anyway? Early in November 2007—­right around the time I first met Munsef—­words of a strike in the fleet started to circulate in the old port. At the time, I was

Whose Strike Is It?  /  41

invested in finding a berth on a trawler for the month before Christmas, when all the ships would return to port. The captain of the ship who had been entertaining my hopes for the previous month told me somewhat casu­ ally that they might not go out to sea after all, because a strike was imminent. Since Munsef used to help many fishers with various forms and written re­ quests they needed to submit, he received a daily update on the situation. Some days, after I had spent several hours talking to people and fishing for news, he would tell me what he had heard standing in his corner the entire morning, much more than I had managed to gather. Yet whenever I tried to ask him questions about what he had told me, he would usually lose interest and start packing his wheeled cart. Then he would go to the bakery, get some bread for lunch, and head home pushing the cart. Anxious as I was to learn about my chances to embark on a fishing voy­ age, I began to inquire as much as I could about the strike. The answers I received about the impending event covered reasons and conditions rang­ ing from labor relations to inclement weather. The myriad explanations spanned the various frames people used for social action in the fleet and in town, and their structures of expectations—­themselves based on past experi­ ence and worldview—­regarding what made events and processes, persons, things, relations, and so forth (Tannen 1979, 1993). The differences between these alternative framings for the strike pointed to the dilemma that struc­ tures much of portside and onboard action: Are the ship and the fleet a re­ lationship of class-­based production, a web of patronage, or are they like a family? As the days passed by, my search around town for a berth on a south­ bound trawler changed into a quest for the strike’s origins and dynamic. Ev­ erybody outside the fleet was talking about the strike and raising various ex­ planations about its causes and origins. Yet no one from the fleet was willing or able to provide me with a definite cause of the rumored strike. A Tunisian university student who was working with me in the afterschool center for immigrant children told me that, according to his father, “They are about to go on strike since there is a storm; once the storm is over they will go to sea.” Beyond the inclement weather, the global oil market explained the strike: “[The shipowners] are saying that if America bombs Iran, the price will get to three hundred dollars a barrel.” One shipowner sent me to the director of his shipowners’ association—­ one of the two in operation in town at the time. When I arrived at the direc­ tor’s office, I presented myself and my failed attempts to go sailing. He was unable to help me with my wish, but seemed happy to discuss the various explanations I had been gathering about the strike. “There is no secret here,” he said. “You just have to go and speak with the right people.” Yes, there were

42 / Chapter Two

preparations for going on strike after Christmas, and there were two condi­ tions for such an action: fuel and fish. Oil prices had reached one hundred dollars a barrel; with a daily consumption of a ton of fuel a day, and with the diminishing catches at sea, owners had reached the limit of profitability. “We can’t do anything about the price of fuel,” he said, “so we want help from the government, subsidies. We are waiting for a response from Rome, and after Christmas we will see what we will do. The rest is quayside stories.” For a while, I was pleased with this political-­economic explanation, but when I pronounced it in front of a Tunisian political organizer in town, he dismissed it. Every Christmas there is a strike. The shipowners are organizing it so that they would not pay their fishers. After New Year’s Day, they all go out to sea again. . . . The unions aren’t doing anything about it. Each union only tries to get as many fishers to sign up to its own lists, so that they would channel the unemployment payment the government dispenses to fishers for the yearly fishing ban. The problem is that there is no organization; the fleet would never strike.

The old Tunisian fishers in the quayside cafés corroborated this version. It used to be different, one of them told me. “The biggest strike happened after the Tunisian patrol vessel killed a cook on a trawler. We all returned to port and went on strike.” As Christmas was nearing, all the trawlers returned home and the cafés in the old port were filled with fishers. Every morning someone would have a new bit of news—­about his owner who had told him that they were going on strike, or regarding a meeting of one of the associations. After New Year’s Day, a new rumor circulated among the Tunisian fishers: The shipowners were supposed to attend a course in English required by the international maritime safety communication protocol. “That’s why we’re not going out to sea,” one of the Tunisian fishers told me. When I asked why no one had told them about that earlier, he said: “That’s how things work here.” Two days later, the fishers’ unions finally organized a joint assembly. Some speakers called for a concerted action with the owners’ associations, while others suggested that the unions use the opportunity to demand what was on everybody’s minds, minimum salaries most of all. After the meeting I went to see the owners’ association director. He seemed angry, and told me he was “offended” by a letter he had received from the three fishers’ unions. What letter? He would not show it to me, but he told me that the letter accused the owners and their association of “thirty years of misbehavior.

Whose Strike Is It?  /  43

They should not put all of us in the same bag . . . we are the most open as­ sociation, and I am always here. . . . There is a conflict of interest between the big shipowners and the small owners, who can no longer survive. [Our association] is of the poor, weak ones.” Whereas the unions had failed to mobilize the crewmembers for a strike along class lines, the director of the largest shipowners’ association claimed his permanent personal availability (disponibilità)—­ever a gesture of patronage—­and claimed that the real divi­ sion was among the shipowners, not between them and their employees. The following Monday, the strike evaporated as mysteriously as it had ap­ peared. Somebody in the port told me that there was a decision to go out to sea. When I asked the association director about it, he said that there was no decision to speak of: “People just went out, but they stand to earn nothing.” After the big shipowners sent their ships out, the rest of the fleet followed suit. One old Tunisian fisher, whom some people called “the strike-­monger,” summarized the previous two months: We are slaves, and we are letting people do it to us. Fishers are not standing up for themselves, and they are not united. They are excluded from society, and that’s always been like that. It is important to board the ships and see the situation. . . . That’s why [the fishers] in the north don’t want to see us; we are bringing the mentality of slavery there.

When I think of it now, I see his line of reasoning: after yet another strike without organized labor, it was clear that workers had failed in framing their relationships with the shipowners as class relations, let alone in mobiliz­ ing along any class-­based alignment. The “class” frame would have perhaps given a political sense to the fishers’ predicament; without it, all that work was just “slavery.” The term “to go on strike” conjures up concerted actions and labor rela­ tions. In the sociology of labor, strikes are seen as “part of an established repertoire of collective action; [their] success requires solidarity by a large fraction of the workforce, at a considerable economic cost, by people usually operating close to the margin, for an open-­ended period of time” (Clawson and Clawson 1999). During the last weeks of 2007, no such organized ac­ tion framed the course of events. Rather, what was debated was the panoply of rumors about the actual motives behind each actor’s actions. In addi­ tion to that, the frequent declaration that this happened “every Christmas” made the strike look like a yearly ritual, not an eventful political drama.1 Each of the recited explanations implied a different conception of the fleet, its actors, and the dynamics of the relations among them. Was the struggle

44 / Chapter Two

between working fishers and owners, between big shipowners and all the rest of the fleet, or between the entire fleet and the government? Who represented which of these categories—­elected associations, quayside gatherings, or self-­ appointed actors? The ground for these questions was as ambiguous; was the fleet made of employers and workers, patrons and clients, disparate individu­ als in search of their personal honor, or members of “one big family?” This dilemma shaped the fleet’s early history. Motorized trawling stood at the heart of the political economics of the fleet’s operation, the spatial dynamics it shaped, and the labor relations it engendered at sea and ashore. The key to the fleet’s spatial and political-­economic dynamics resided in the seafood and its fishing: a labor process as spatially expansive as it was monotonous. It was this spatial dimension of the labor process that distin­ guished motorized trawling from other contemporary kinds of fishing and seafaring; it charged the fleet’s operation with region-­forming potential. In this sense, motorized trawlers formed scaling devices; they jettisoned Mazara and its socioeconomic fortunes southward, and shaped political relations across the sea. Moreover, since motorized trawling had scaled up Mazara’s fortunes, those who controlled the device had attained significant power over the town’s fortunes. Yet in the days around Christmas 2007, this di­ lemma remained implicit, which brought home to me the need to go to the places and the times in which the struggle unfolded onstage: to the history of the fleet’s development, and to sea.

Mediterraneanist Monologue In my meandering attempts to understand the strike, I found one clue about how the sea and the past have together shaped the present. One day, when I asked Vito “the Hurricane” about the origins of the various strands of what was happening in town—­the strikes, Tunisian labor migration, and the fleet’s importance—­he told me: “You have to speak with lu cumminnaturi. He brought the first Tunisians to town.” Lu cumminnaturi ( or commendatore, Italian for “commander”) was one of the nicknames of Ignazio Giacalone. I found him a couple of days later in his office in the new fishing port of Mazara del Vallo. At that time, I had my three-­liner self-­presentation prac­ ticed. I would present myself as “a doctoral student from America” of Israeli origin who was conducting research on the maritime relationship between Sicily and Tunisia. Finally I would say: “And everyone thinks I am a Mos­ sad or CIA agent.” At that point, my interlocutor would laugh, out of either amusement or courtesy, and the conversation would be afoot.

Whose Strike Is It?  /  45

So imagine my surprise when, upon reiterating my icebreaker, I noticed that lu cumminnaturi was not laughing. Sitting as he was in a large leather manager armchair, dressed in a dark blue suit over a light pink shirt with golden cufflinks and with his son-­in-­law and deputy at his side, he replied: “Many years ago, when there was tension between America and Libya, there was a moment when Mazara was a crossroads.” Intrigued as I was by both the code and the message, I realized I had stumbled upon something I was not expecting. “And how did Mazara become that?” I asked timidly. “The fishers [of Mazara del Vallo] were the occasion for urging Rome to initiate a Mediterranean strategy. Because during the Seventies [and] Eighties, Rome, a Mediterranean strategy it did not have. So much so that Tunisians [and] the Algerians accused Rome of having a ‘crick in the neck.’ ” “A what?” “When the neck muscles stiffen. Don’t you have that disease in your country? The countries of North Africa accused Rome of having a ‘crick in the neck [storcicollo].’ ” “Why?” “Because regarding the Mediterranean, they [Rome] looked to Paris. They were dragging behind. Understandably, the countries of North Africa did not want Paris to have a monopoly, but they wanted . . . they accused [Rome] of having a ‘crick in the neck strategy.’ ” This response sent me on an inquiry that ultimately produced this book. Certainly, there was a tone of bragging to his admission, which made me take it with a grain of salt. Yet, regardless of Giacalone’s bravado, his description of the Mediterranean’s rise in geopolitical importance within Italian politics suggested a connection between the Fish War and the construction of the Transmed pipeline. Moreover, it points to the role that the two threads of events played in Mazara’s recent past. The nickname lu cumminnaturi refers to the title of commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (commendatore Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana), which Giacalone received in 1976, approximately the time when Italy’s “crick in the neck” started to heal (Pizzigallo 2008, 2012).2 He is also known in Mazara as one of the three men believed to have con­ trolled the town’s fate in recent decades: he is “the man of the sea,” the oth­ ers being “the man of the mountain and the man of the gun.”3 He held various municipal roles, including mayor and chair of the council, until his expulsion from the local political scene and prosecution for Mafia collusion during the early Nineties. Like Italy’s former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, Giacalone escaped from the country to Tunisia when charges were building

46 / Chapter Two

against him (Purgatori 1994). Unlike Craxi, who died in exile, Giacalone came back and was later exonerated, like many others. After his return he continued to oversee his fisheries business and the independent political party he had established in town, though his official political career was over. Another thing that Giacalone said provided me with a lead. When he heard that I had served in the Israeli navy, he asked me whether there were red shrimp to fish along the coast where I came from. I told him that there were, but that no one was fishing that type of catch. “If I were younger, I would have gone fishing there,” he then said. “Because I would have gotten the recommendation of the Italian secret service.” I tried to explain to him that the Israeli navy was quite sanguine about keeping any unwanted foreign­ ers away from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. But he did not seem impressed. “If I were younger, I would have gone to my friend the head of the Italian secret services; he would have arranged it for me,” he said and con­ cluded the discussion. The longtime friend Giacalone mentioned was Fulvio Martini, the late admiral and head of the Italian secret service (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare, or SISMI). Martini’s code name, which decorates the title of his memoir, was Ulysse, as Mediterraneanist a proper name as they get. Giacalone himself adopted this Homeric name for the political party he had established in town after his return from exile in Tuni­ sia. Martini’s own career ended when he resigned after various political and international affairs involving his activities during the governments of Craxi and Andreotti were exposed (Bellu 1991; see also La Repubblica Correspon­ dent 1984). In one of his appearances before a parliamentary investigation committee, the late admiral discussed Italy’s decision to bring about a coup d’état in Tunisia in 1987. The coup, which had been triggered by the need to facilitate the operation of the Transmed gas pipeline, was brought about by an operation in which, so they say in Mazara, ships, fishers, and interests from Mazara played a role. Together, Giacalone’s words and his oscillating biography stood in con­ trast to the sense of obscure interests and unclear, shifting alignments dur­ ing the 2007 strike. Here was a shipowner who became a politician through the development of the Mazara fleet. Yet his tale suggested that Mazara’s Mediterraneanist vicissitudes had to do with more than Italian industrial development policies regarding a fishing town in Southwestern Sicily. It also involved the rising importance of the Mediterranean in Italian poli­ tics. This specific regionalist imaginary connected interests and relations in two realms—­fishing and pipelines. Moreover, Giacalone’s vision made both of these “Mediterranean,” and because of that, it made the Mediter­ raneanist perspective more important than it had been. In addition, the

Whose Strike Is It?  /  47

various political and economic interests of various shades of opacity and legality clarified that during those years, in which “Mazara was a crossroad,” the struggle over control of the fleet was entwined with the plausibility, the attractiveness, and the palpability of this Mediterraneanist perspective. In other words, this struggle revolved around the framing of the social rela­ tions that motorized trawling shaped.

Three Frames and a Strike The struggle over the framing of expansion and development emerged in full view during the fleet’s first major strike in the last months of 1973. The strike exposed the dilemma between three competing frames: political econom­ ics of production, patron-­client relations between shipowners and national politicians, and “one big family.” As in other places, the dilemma also in­ cluded alternative definitions of what each of these three frames constituted (Silverman 1970; Yanagisako 2002; Mollona 2009). At the end of October 1973, the Mazara city council discussed the news of the Italian-­Algerian agreement to construct the Transmed pipeline against the background of the immanent effects of the OPEC embargo following the Israel-­Arab War. The contrast between a global oil crisis and the prospects of an African-­European energy artery ignited everyone’s imagination. A month later, at the end of November 1973, as the effects of the oil crisis began to be felt in the fleet and in the town’s agricultural sector, the council discussed the fleet’s first major strike, this time on a less festive note. The 1973 strike realigned political forces in town and shaped the relations between owners, fishers, unionists, and politicians. Most of all, the strike dramatized in front of the entire town the new importance of the fishing fleet’s shipowners in the political scene. At the same time, the debates about the strike in the city council articulated the differences among the various political economic forces in town about how to understand the fleet’s rise, as well as what should be the relationship between the town’s political institutions and the fleet—­by then clearly the town’s golden goose. The rising shipowners-­turned-­politicians joined a stable cast of political figures on the local stage. The party that governed the city for most of this pe­ riod was the center-­right Christian Democracy party (DC), which also domi­ nated national politics. The main contender for local hegemony was the Ital­ ian Communist Party (PCI). The local PCI section was strong in national and regional standards, but it lacked internal connections to the fleet, as did the DC until those years. The constituency of the PCI came mainly from the local peasantry and the leftist intelligenzia. But in the early Sixties, the Communists

48 / Chapter Two

were open to collaboration with the Italian Republican Party (PRI), the party “of the fleet” and “of progress”—­that is, of the rising shipowners.4 The PRI was in those years the only party to include prominent fishmongers and rising shipowners among its ranks. The PRI also mustered the patron-­client relations between its rising national politician, Aristide Gunnella (who hap­ pened to come from Mazara), and the Association of Free Fishing Shipown­ ers (Associazione Liberi Armatori della Pesca, or ALAP), which was headed by Ignazio Giacalone—­the most outspoken shipowner in those years. In their own words, Giacalone and his party member Matteo Celere, the fishmonger who headed the local PRI section, were “making the still waters move . . . against the wishes of others.”5 Unlike the old shipowners’ association, which they claimed was servile to the agenda of “a certain political party [the DC]” the PRI offered Mazara and its council a more autonomous strategy in rela­ tion to both national and international politics.6 These connections and the spatial project in which shipowners were invested—­fishing off the North African coasts—­gradually turned the PRI into the tip of the balance in the city council and transformed the fleet into the axis of events both in Mazara and in the town’s connections with the world around it. Every possible coalition drew on a different set of justifications. Each justification implied a different worldview. Was the fleet’s expansion the result of capitalist intensification of the labor process? And if so, should it be politically prevented, harnessed, or controlled in order to secure labor’s rights? Was it the felicitous outcome of the patronage that rising shipowners had managed to establish with eminent and rising politicians? Or was the fleet’s growth the fruit of efforts exerted by all fishers as one organic whole, as if they were a family? Finally, what was the fleet for Mazara—­a branch of the local industry like any other, or “the boat of the town’s future”? These questions initially surfaced during the late Sixties, when Ignazio Giacalone and Celere made the PRI into “the party of the fleet.” Yet they moved to center stage during the strike in late 1973. This strike revolved around the semiotic dimension of political representation: Who can speak for whom, using what form of relation between them, to justify the act of representation? In procedural terms, the political representation of the fleet entailed the representative’s authorization through election and his account­ ability to those who voted for him. Crucially, however, the question of repre­ sentation contained a semiotic dimension that went far beyond vote counts (M. Silverstein 2005; Cody 2011; Stasch 2011). As was the case more widely, the political representation of the fleet depended on representatives’ claim and ability “to stand for it”: because those representatives formed part of that

Whose Strike Is It?  /  49

fleet which they represented, because they were connected to it in person more than others, or because they resembled those whom they claimed to represent (in life course, craft, opinion, and so forth). This semiotic dimension shaped the conditions of political alliances and alignments in Mazara. Institutionally, the Republican shipowner Ignazio Gi­ acalone, like other shipowners who would later join him in the council, was a party member and political representative like the other council members and figures in the local political scene. Yet his was a new and debated form of representation. He was not only a formally elected representative, stand­ ing for the electoral aggregate of the people whose votes he received. He represented the fleet because he was from the fleet, of the fleet. By so defining his representation of the fleet, Giacalone claimed what the fleet actually was (Bourdieu 1991). “No Classes in the Fleet” In the summer of 1973, the PRI dismantled its local coalition with the DC and joined the PCI to elect the town’s first Communist mayor of that de­ cade.7 One thorn in the new coalition’s side was the class issue. By forming a coalition with the PRI and its base in the shipowners’ class, the PCI allowed its local politics to be governed by the most visible employers in town—­ the people who opposed the working class it claimed to represent (Vallauri 1986, 413–­16). Traditionally, the local Communist party had represented the local agricultural workers against the landowning class, but in this new situation, the PCI was not on the workers’ side. The city council discussed this issue just as the fleet was preparing for a strike in November 1973, after the national government had decided to raise industrial fuel prices in light of the global oil crisis (Varsori 2001, 962–­64). Originally, the council convened to discuss the effects of the oil crisis on both the viticulture and fisheries sectors.8 Yet in the various accounts of the event—­in the newspapers and in the stories people told me about it—­no one mentions the “Wine War.” In the minutes of that session, the events start to pick up the pace when the PCI mayor presents a motion for solidarity with the fleet, which two PRI members have proposed.9 People must have taken this as a sign of the relative importance of the fleet and its representatives within the administration, because the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) attacked the administration for discriminating between the city’s vari­ ous productive sectors and for succumbing to the overbearing influence of “the shipowners’ class.” Yet the PRI representatives would have none of that.

50 / Chapter Two

They used that moment to enlighten the council as to the origins and social constitution of that rising class. “It is necessary to demystify the figure of the shipowners,” the leader of the Republicans declared. “They are not true owners [armatori] who operate by investing personal or public capital, but merely authentic fishers who—­by uniting themselves in groups of two or three—­manage to construct a trawler, on which they personally work.” Be­ cause the fishing fleet of Mazara “was founded on human investments rather than those of capital,” the PRI called on the council to “depoliticize” the debate at hand and approve the motion.10 This view of the Mazara fleet as free of class conflict enjoyed a wider ap­ peal. Even the national Communist newspaper L’unità adopted this line in its report on the strike and the heated debate in the city council (S 1973): We walked up and down the old port together with the fishers and then we moved to the hall of the City Council, where an extraordinary session was taking place to discuss the situation. . . . In the back of the hall the audience was composed exclusively of fishers and small [ship] owners, who are often one and the same (down here there are no Costa or Lauro [rich industrialists from the North of Italy]). It’s from there that the murmur slowly grew, until it turned into shouting in dialect. Every once in a while, one could grasp phrases in “Italian,” said for the journalists who had come to Mazara.

There was no class struggle, claimed the Republicans, and there should be none, because there were no multiple classes to speak of in the fleet, let alone any class antagonism between them. The fleet was an industrial operation that could be presented as cooperativist—­a frame about which the leftist members had no qualms, at least not at that point (as elsewhere in Italy; Holmes 2000, 94). At the height of post–­World War II fordist Italy, the claim that the fleet contained no class struggle enabled communists and capital­ ists to join hands in promoting the fleet’s expansion and solidify its owners’ internal and then town-­wide hegemony (cf. Goswami 2004, 241). Representing and Intervening: Monologue During one of these shouting rounds, Ignazio Giacalone took his cue. “To tell the truth, I did not want to talk,” he told the audience. “But since it is my responsibility as representative of the fishing sector, I accept the obligation to intervene in order to allow the council, public opinion, the friends from the press, and the parliamentarians who are present to understand the prob­ lem.” Italy, he said, lacked a fisheries policy, and this made him “bitter . . .

Whose Strike Is It?  /  51

this is really a bitterness that torments us not only economically, not only financially, but also morally.”11 Giacalone cast himself not as a member of his party, but as the representative of the fleet, with the obligation to educate the audience and the public. For only a shipowner could illuminate the vari­ ous facets of the problems of the fleet to the town’s “political class.” The rest of the council members were only “political,” while the tormenting toll of the problem on him was “moral.” At the same time, through the act of speak­ ing about the fisheries—­as the representative of the fleet and educator of the council, rather than as someone on one side of the debate—­Giacalone both declared and celebrated the turning of the fleet into the res publica in town. In his words, “There is . . . no doubt, and this makes me satisfied, that the problem of the Mazarese fisheries has entered the city council, from the VIP entrance.” Having entered the city council carrying the cause of the fleet, and with the fleet behind him in the hall, Giacalone then turned to the mayor:12 “You, Mr. Mayor, have rightfully called on us to behave in a just and proper manner. But you have to think about these things, this rage that is born, this tremendous rage that emerges out of these men.” The strike and the demonstrations of the fleet were born, Giacalone said, because “we feel mortified. We feel abandoned.” This “we” referred to the entire fleet, and accused the political class. The bitterness and the rage led to concerted action. Yet, instead of proposing that the council adopt this or that plan of action, Giacalone recounted his intervention during a meeting with the president of the Sicilian region:13 I told the president of the region, Mr. President, we are people who do not know nice words, who do not know how to make speeches. We are people who wish to work in silence and we did not come here to ask for assistance. We come here to represent our exigencies, with our dignity, because actually, when a directive of the government brings us down on our knees it is the responsibility of the public authorities to take some measures . . . and I told him that if his government would decide to reply to us with a refusal, our fishers—­not as a threat, I said—­will occupy the ports of Messina and Palermo. Because yes, it is true that fishers never speak, it is true that fishers do not pro­ test. But when we reach certain limits—­I compared the fishers’ rage to the sea storm that had destroyed the port of Palermo. And that is why this moment is difficult and delicate. . . .

This was a reported threat, an exercise in the political transformation of rage into a call for concerted action. The shipowner-­cum-­politician depicted

52 / Chapter Two

suffering, enraged fishers, and he warned of their precarious and politically unstable situation; all this while he was celebrating the fact that the council had just turned into a site where the plight of the fleet would be a political matter. This was more than giving the fishers a voice. The speech at the city coun­ cil and the menacing conversation in Palermo were accompanied by an or­ ganized strike and the threat of violent demonstrations. And here again, it was a shipowner who presided over such actions. The PRI through its leading ship-­owner members was not asking the council to second a political rep­ resentation of the fisheries limited to a deliberative, sanctioned, procedure. Quite the contrary, the council was being asked to grant one of its members a deliberative aegis for a mobilizing project that was unfolding outside such institutional settings. If any of the council members might have had doubts regarding the feasibility and justification of such a self-­authorization, the mentions of the fishers’ “rage” should have made them reconsider such doubts. The subsequent vote on the motion was unanimous. The council witnessed a triple ritual transformation: the fleet’s predica­ ments turned into the town’s and the council’s, the shipowners became the category of the fleet to be actually represented, and one member of that cat­ egory anointed himself as the political representative of that group and of the fleet as a whole. It was as if Giacalone completed the ritual transforma­ tion that had begun with the demand of his bench mate Celere “to demystify the figure of the shipowner.” If Celere had dismissed the class-­relations frame for action, Giacalone replaced it with a composite alternative: the fleet’s fate would be governed and should be regarded as a combination of familial soli­ darity and patronal redistribution. The fleet was one organic whole, and its leaders would seek to forge bonds of obligation with persons and positions more powerful in Mazara, Palermo, and Rome. Any lack of such obligation on the part of national or regional institutions marked not the fleet’s political failure, but the institutions’ moral betrayal. It is in this light that we should see Giacalone’s turning to narrate his threat just as he moved to talk of “ac­ tions.” It was his threat, performed elsewhere, on behalf of a social category whose “rage” he mustered and harnessed not as their political representative but as their organic extension, flesh of their flesh. At the time, no other party or political force was attempting a similar form of representation. The wine and the fish pointed to the town’s main two productive sectors. By preferring to discuss the latter, the coalition played out the change in balance that was underway, clarifying its political implications. As the ship­ owners gained importance in the council, their version of the relations be­ tween power, violence, and hierarchy (Gilsenan 1996)—­in the fleet as well

Whose Strike Is It?  /  53

as between its leaders and local and national politics—­took over the floor. By declaring the fleet’s strike, they showed their power in mobilizing and uniting the town’s growing sector. In their appearance as “the fleet” on the council floor, they dismissed any claims about class divisions. Pronounced from within a coalition that the PCI headed, these claims condemned the fate of class issues and relations of production in the debate between the three main frames for action. The precedence of fish over wine reflected another shift that was unfolding along Mazara’s political horizon. The Wine War dramatized Italian-­French relationships, which were transforming within the regionalist agendas of the European Economic Community. The fleet’s strike veered the town’s atten­ tion away from Europe and toward the Mediterranean. The 1973 oil crisis articulated political relations not so much within Europe as between various European countries and their oil (and gas) producing counterparts, on the other side of the Mediterranean. These incipient political relations echoed the kinds of transnational contacts that the fleet’s expansive operation began generating. In the process, the Mediterranean emerged as a spatiotemporal field for political action on a transnational scale. Ultimately, the struggle over the framing of relations in the fleet in those years contributed to the rise in Mediterraneanist discourse in and around the Channel of Sicily. The boat of Mazara’s future was sailing southward, as was its trawling fleet.

Hajj One day before Christmas, as news of the strike were still in the air, Munsef told me: “Tomorrow there will come a friend of mine whom you will meet. His name is Hajj. He should be here tomorrow.” Hajj, a Tunisian fisher who was then in his early fifties, had come to Mazara from the “Nose of Tunis,” the northern Tunisian peninsula that stretches into the central Mediterra­ nean. As he told me, though, he was “really from the Western coast,” his fa­ ther’s origin. The day after Munsef told me Hajj would be around, Hajj came to Munsef ’s wheel cart just before noon, on his way to buy bread for lunch. When he got there, Munsef and I were talking politics, as we often did, while Munsef was occasionally selling some pyrotechnic party tricks to the pass­ ersby who stopped for some New Year’s provisioning. Hajj first talked to Munsef about some form he needed to fill out, while Munsef was examining it closely. I waited for a couple of minutes until Munsef introduced us. Hajj followed with a curt Arabic “Welcome,” and asked me whether we should get coffee. We then went to Bar Gianni (without Munsef, who could not leave his

54 / Chapter Two

cart, and who generally does not drink coffee). Since Hajj’s ship had re­ turned from the sea together with other ships, the old port was filled with fishers, and Bar Gianni hosted most of the Tunisians among them, who had not seen each other for about a month. Because the trawlers were return­ ing to port with meager catch, regular fishers would not even make enough money to make ends meet. We were standing next to the counter and wait­ ing for the coffee, when a friend of his from their mutual days in the mari­ time school in Tunisia approached him to tell him about his last voyage’s money issues: “The owner told me that this time there is no money. He told me he could give me nothing on the account. I am going to disembark.” Hajj later explained to me that prices were, as they are always, estimated, since no one really knows the prices that the owners receive from the mer­ chant who is buying the catch, as the agreements to sell the catch take place when the ship is still at sea, and are never really expected to be accurately represented in the receipts. Hajj’s explanation of the fleet’s ways revealed to me how the flurry of pecuniary discussions intensified toward Christmas, because that was one of the three yearly moments of “settling the accounts.” The spartuta (pro­ nounced “spaytuta,” as the adjacent city’s name “Marsala” is pronounced “Maysala”) or partition of profits, currently a euphemism, dates to the days in which each crew would actually meet to balance accounts of income and expenses. It still occurs three times a year: at Christmas, at Easter, and in mid-­August. Nowadays, each shipowner balances the periodic payment with each of his fishers separately—­usually, but not always, when the ship is in port. Fishers receive money “on the account” before each voyage, and settle the account retroactively three times a year. More often than not, fishers take more money upfront than what their boss tells them they have “earned” by the next spartuta. In such cases, the boss would often tell them “andiamo in pace [let us depart in peace].” This implicitly means that the fisher should excuse his boss for not giving him his accurate part of the revenues, since the boss “excuses” him for spending all the money he was advanced (a sum smaller than what is actually owed to the fisher). In some extreme cases, Tunisian fishers, who have a higher than average number of children, make more money from the monthly childcare stipends than they do from their work. Since this money is sent to them through their employ­ ers, they often “lend” (another euphemism) that money to their employers and have to argue with them to receive it. During our coffee sessions in the old port, Hajj introduced me to several fishers who were trying to reach their shipowners, and from our seats outside

Whose Strike Is It?  /  55

Bar Gianni we saw several owners who slowed their cars down in search of this or that crewmember. The period between the ship’s arrival in port and its subsequent departure opens a negotiation sequence that is about more than the amount paid. Fishers, eager to come home with money they know they will be bound to spend, especially if they have families, do all they can to receive some cash as soon as possible. Shipowners, on the other hand, prefer not to part with any significant sum—­and, if they are forced to do so, then at the latest point possible. Yet this prolonged interaction is not strictly one-­sided. Owners, who are busier when the ship is ashore than when it is at sea, have various chores to perform on the ship when it is in port, for which they need their crew: changing fishing nets, fixing the motor, or repairing various onboard systems. This is why owners attempt to fix a payment ap­ pointment with their crew “onboard,” so that the fishers would be forced to come aboard and work before any monetary transaction could happen. For the same reason, fishers try to meet the owners as far away as possible from the ship. Most of this struggle takes place over the phone or, more accurately, by answering or ignoring each other’s phone calls. Both sides assume they know exactly what a telephone call from their counterpart means, and what they want to get out of it; they also know that when they call each other they are about to ask something the other side prefers not to grant them. In this catch game, both sides know not to answer many phone calls. Since most fishers ashore are in the porto canale at several points during the day, an owner who wants to get a hold of his crewmember even at the price of risk­ ing his position in this struggle will drive by the bar in his car and shout to his crewmember that he wants to talk to him. The same goes for fishers who, when push comes to shove, “forgo their honor” and go to find their bosses at their homes. The gift-­giving season before Christmas is exactly such a time. As Hajj told me, “The sailor loses everything. The fish he sees in his own hands are worth one thousand euros, but then he gets three hundred euros at the end of the month.” Faced as I was with this bounty of new information, I flooded Hajj with dozens of questions. He answered some of them at the bar and many others in the following weeks, yet many of our discussions ended when he told me that if I really wanted to understand how things worked, I needed to go to sea. When the “strike” ended several days after New Year’s Day, Hajj left on a fishing voyage, as did most other fishers. The bars along the porto canale were almost emptied, and the cold and dampness of the frequent winter storms made even those who had remained in port spend their days at home. With the fleet out to sea, the contrast between the town’s center and the port grew

56 / Chapter Two

starker. Then, one morning towards the end of January, Munsef greeted me with a grin when I came to see him next to his cart, and he told me that Hajj was back in town. His ship’s motor had broken down and they were now stranded in port for a while. “He should probably come by any minute now.” And indeed, not much time passed before Hajj showed up on his scooter. After parking the scooter next to Munsef ’s cart, he took me by the hand and told me that we were going to get coffee. At the bar, Hajj told me that he had all the time in the world because they were waiting for motor parts from Japan, which meant a shore leave of about two weeks. Was he worried about it? No, he had bought his house here in town, and one in Tunisia, and he got childcare stipends so that he did not depend on the money from his boss. When I asked him how he had ended up in Mazara, he told me that after he had graduated from the naval academy in Tunisia with the diploma of a ma­ rine chief mechanic, he had found work on a ship bound for Sicily for some repairs. Once he was in Mazara, there had not been much to do onboard, so he had joined a trawler from Mazara and started to work, though not as a chief mechanic. After a while he had found a shipowner he had liked, and decided to stay in Sicily. “You know, the Italians drink their coffee fast. Whoosh! One sip. We Arabs like to sit down and drink it slowly. You have to enjoy the coffee.” He later told me that this held true for drinking coffee in port, not at sea. “It’s a different world there,” he told me. “It’s slavery.” But like everything else, I would understand it only when I boarded a trawler. By the end of January I was trying to get help from wherever I could. Since the main obstacle for my sailing was the Capitaneria del Porto, I was spending more and more time there—­in the new port. I would go there every other day, ask if there are any shipowners looking for crewmembers (there weren’t), or if I could by any chance join any of the ships as a researcher (I couldn’t). Several days later I saw Hajj on the street outside his house. “If you want to go sailing with us,” he told me, “I will go and talk to my shipowner. I know that we may be looking for a deckhand. You only have to tell me if you want to do it imbarcato or sbarcato”—­legally or not. After thinking for a couple of seconds, I said I wanted to go imbarcato. He said that on the elev­ enth of February we would go and talk to his shipowner. That was also the first time I heard the name of his ship: the Naumachos. On the day before we were supposed to go to sea, Hajj and Munsef could probably see my excitement. Hajj told me that we should meet on the mor­ row at eight o’clock in front of his ship. I already had all the fishing gear, since I had bought the boots, the two different types of gloves, and the weather suit three months earlier, the first time I thought I would imminently go sailing. All that was left was to say goodbye to Munsef. I was cautious, and still did

Whose Strike Is It?  /  57

not want to believe that this time the journey would materialize. Munsef, probably trying to calm me, told me, “Here, you have made friends. Would you have believed four months ago that you would make these friends that you have now? You even have your friend Hajj, who takes you out with him to fish!” Hajj, with a cool expression, replied: “Friendship, we make at sea.”

THREE

The Craft of Expansive Navigation

Going Aboard On the morning of my hopeful voyage, I was waiting at 8 a.m. in front of the Naumachos in the new port. At about 8:30, Hajj arrived on his scooter. He came to say good morning, and told me to wait on the other side of the pier while he talked to the boss. He then went to the captain (who, it turned out, was married to the owner’s sister). Then Hajj called me to say that he would now present me to the captain. He took me to the captain, but did all the talking. He said that I could “ ‘do’ cook and deckhand [ fare cuoco e marinaio].” “Cuoco?” the captain asked. To which Hajj replied, “I swore I would never be the cook again!” Hajj was not attesting to my culinary talents; he was explaining to the captain that since he would not serve as the ship’s cook on the next voyage, the captain’s best chances would be with taking me onboard. They then told me to go and wait for a while on the pier. After fifteen minutes or so, the shipowner, Zu Nino, came and we talked to him again. Zu Nino told Hajj and me that I should go and “prepare the papers,” and that “we would see later.” So I did, without yet knowing whether I would actually, finally become imbarcato. Most of the fishing ships in town tie up to the pier with their stern, which is also the main working deck. When you climb aboard, a long, wide wooden deck, which is used daily for sorting the tons of catch for hours on end, greets you with its greasy planks and fish scales. At the end of the work deck stands the veriscello—­the hydraulic drum by which all the net’s cables and lines are pulled. Since it is the heart of the ship, second only to the motor, it is constantly greased. Zu Nino was working on the aft deck when I arrived at the pier. He told me to get on deck, so I jumped aboard and followed him around the veriscello and into the cabin. When I passed by the drum, the odor of dead seafood changed to that of mechanic lubricant, and, following

Figure 7.  Layout of the motorized trawler Naumachos. The lower deck (working area) is on the right. Length markings approximately represent half-­meters; the ship’s overall length is about 30.95 meters. Rendering by Pietro Giordano, RINA, and Plamen Drenski.

The Craft of Expansive Navigation  /  61

Zu Nino’s maneuver, I instinctively touched the drum with only the pillow of my right hand—­as he had done—­while making sure that the rest of my arms and body did not touch it. Ship’s decks tend to subjugate their crewmembers by paving the specific gestures and maneuvers one constantly makes when traversing them from port to starboard and from the bow astern. Every ship does so differently—­forcing you to bow your head to avoid injury as you go through a companionway, shaping how you reach for handles and rails to make way when the sea is rough and the vessel is rolling, pitching, and yawing. A crewmember’s first submission in front of the ship’s space and the authorities for which it stands is already underway before any interaction has taken place. I was standing at the entrance to the cabin, facing a long corridor in front of me and a staircase to its left, which, I imagined, led to the bridge. Zu Nino told me to come inside, which I did, and after a couple of meters I found myself in the dining room, where a large wooden table left just enough room for people to sit and eat. As we sat down, Zu Nino told me to come at 9 p.m., and that we would be going out to sea that night. That was the first time I was told that I would go sailing. The nonchalant way he said it made me realize that though I assumed it was unclear whether I would sail with them, it had been unclear only to me. I prepared everything, at the office and at home, and then Mario took me to the ship. When we arrived only Zu Nino was there, and he told me to put my things in the front cabin. He had just come with the food supplies in his truck, and I helped put them inside the ship. Zu Nino knew Mario, and asked me how I knew him and whether I lived with his family. Mario later told me that he knew Zu Nino, just as he knew everybody else in town. Once onboard, Zu Nino realized that the ship lacked a cooking gas bottle, and Mario said that he could give him one. So we all drove back to Mario’s home, and Zu Nino and I loaded the gas bottle on the truck and drove back to the ship. At that point, Mario came back again to the pier to see us off. We left port right away, and headed south by southwest. As a deckhand, I was helping Hajj and the other deckhands coil up the lines and take in the ship’s fenders. After we were out and everything was ready for the open sea, everyone went to bed. Often when a vessel goes out to sea, a rite of passage of sorts takes place. Crews and loved ones wave goodbyes to each other. When vessels sound their sirens, as required by the rules of the road, they also announce their departure from the world of firm land. The crews of naval vessels often go into battle stations, the captains thus affirming the new social order in the sea that lies ahead, conducting a social rite of passage in which each crewmember, upon arriving at their post and responding “in position,”

62 / Chapter Three

completes their own transformation. Then comes the “This is your captain speaking” speech; not unlike what people hear when they fly on an airplane after they have been shown the emergency exits, told not to worry if the oxygen masks do not inflate, and—­with their seatbelts secured—­have seen the land disappear underneath them. If we regard ships or airplanes through their functioning and the authority relationships it requires (Homans 1946), why should we assume otherwise? Yet none of this took place aboard the Naumachos. “Space and the language to describe it make a ship” (Dening 1992, 19). Space on the Naumachos—­as on HMS Bounty, that archetypical example of the floating theatrical stage a ship can become—­“was inseparable from the authority it displayed and the relationships it enclosed” (19). Instead of the class relations of English society during the late eighteenth century and the navy’s role in the imperial project, the spatiosocial recipe for the Naumachos made it into a floating scene for a different drama. The labor process in mechanized trawling and the intimacy of onboard space shaped a unique rhythm of work astern and short periods of sleep. In that rhythm, the communal consumption of food, coffee, and cigarettes and the occasional fights they produced turned into a contest over the framing of onboard relationship: was it family-­like, patronal-­clientelistic, or class-­based?

A Floating Transformative Input-­Output Operator The Naumachos is a trawling vessel that operates twenty-­four hours a day, seven days a week, for voyages of up to forty days, as a trawling machine. In trawling or, more specifically, seabed trawling, a vessel drags a net along the bottom of the sea along a preset route that is thought to be both “open”—­ that is, free of obstacles that could tear the net or the towing gear—­and close enough to where seafood should be found. Each captain builds his bank of routes during an entire career, and guards those routes ferociously. Trawling vessels throw their nets in specific places and follow more or less determined routes, which are supposed to fill the net with sought-­after species, usually the ones seen on the same route in the past. In effect, the net dredges all that it encounters: fish of all kinds, rocks, ropes, oil barrels, and corals. Recently, with the increasingly tragic ends of unauthorized migrants’ voyages, it also dredges bits of sunken boats and corpses. The vast area to the east and north of the Tunisian coast offers more than a thousand such routes. Sicilian trawlers fish in the deeper ones for nets (cala, or “drop”) of three to seven hours, as well as over shallower coral reefs for nets of between thirty-­five minutes and two hours (Di Trapani 1994, 60–­61).

The Craft of Expansive Navigation  /  63

At the end of each net run the net is hauled aboard, opened, and emptied on the aft deck. The catch is then sorted, cleaned, organized on trays according to species and size, and lowered to the freezer. Most of the catch is frozen in a preliminary cell of minus forty degrees Celsius until the next morning, when it is organized in cartons and stored at minus twenty degrees in the large freezer until it is shipped away. The final commercial product of this process, branded as pesce congelato a bordo [frozen-­on-­board fish],” attains a shelf life of eighteen months. The Naumachos is a floating sorting mechanism for intake and output of various kinds of things and energies: the food, water, drinks, and cigarettes the crew consumes, and the fuel, oil, ropes, threads, nets, and cables consumed in the ship’s normal operation. There is information about the weather and about where large concentrations of fish should be. There is the catch that is sorted, cleaned, and arranged in trays and cartons and then frozen; the unwanted catch that is thrown overboard; the catch that is stolen from the owner; the catch that is too low in prestige or quality and is stored, arranged, and sold by the crewmembers for their own profit; and the catch that is used to bribe officers, merchants, and clerks. There is money for buying provisions ashore and then in Lampedusa every time the crew runs out of something; money paid to the crewmembers just before leaving if they insist on taking something to their wives before they board the ship; money received from the fish merchant for shipments of produce in Lampedusa or Sicily; cash money paid by merchants who come to buy whatever the crew is selling each time they go ashore; and money paid, if at all, three times a year to the crew—­the “part.” Finally there is labor, the fishers’ energy spent on the aft deck. Most of all, there are the hours on end that the deckhands spend squatting on the aft deck with their hands in the piles of seafood, when they sort the valuable, commercial items out of the muddy heap of whatever the net has brought aboard. After the sorting is done, the deckhands—­led by the bosun and aided by the shift mechanic or any other person who feels either the benevolence or the obligation to help—­clean, organize, and stow everything. The sorting of each net’s catch takes place after the next net hits the water; it usually takes about two hours for the longer fondo (“bottom,” or seabed) nets and about an hour for the shorter banco (“bank,” or reef ) nets, leaving anything between ten minutes and an hour and a half until the next round of sorting begins. This labor determines the rhythm onboard, and is second in priority to nothing. That is, it comes before sleeping. The kind of trawling that the Naumachos practices is the extreme mechanized perfection of a very specific labor process, which bears little resemblance to fishing as it was practiced before the second half of the twentieth

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century (Acheson 1981; Bestor 2004). The spatial aspect of the labor process in this form of mechanized trawling transformed economic investment in vessels into spatial expansion, specifically Sicilian expansion into Tunisian territorial waters, and swirled the central Mediterranean—­mainly Tunisia and Sicily—­into a new spatiopolitical dynamic. Aboard the Naumachos, the bearers of this spatial energy were the ship’s owner and captain. They were most deeply invested in the voyage’s success: the owner through the operation’s profit, the captain through his share—­ quadruple that of a deckhand, even without any bonus or illicit gains. The ship’s captain, who was the owner’s younger brother-­in-­law, cultivated his relationships with the ship’s Tunisian bosun (head fisher) and Sicilian primo motorista (first or chief mechanic) in order to sell parts of the catch behind his relative’s back. Beyond the two daily meals, the captain descended from the bridge rarely, safeguarding his authority through absence and separation rather than ostentation. As the elders onboard, the captain and the owner represented through their presence and their stories that expansive thrust and, through their economic predicament, that same thrust’s demise. Take, for example, Zu Nino. Our seventy-­year old shipowner went fishing with his ship, though not as her captain. With almost sixty years of fishing experience behind him, he came onboard because of his economic predicament and his lifelong inclination. His ambiguous position was reflected in the fact that he shared the bosun’s cabin, next to the kitchen, though as the ship’s owner he oversaw the captain’s decisions. Since the departure, Zu Nino was moving around the deck faster than anyone else, as if the weight of the voyage rested on his shoulders. The Naumachos was not his first ship. In 1980, when he was forty-­two years old, he had bought a wooden trawler together with two of his three younger brothers. They named the ship after their father, keeping the way he had been called, by his first name and nickname, Alberto Pagano, or “the dwarf.”1 Two years later, all four brothers bought another trawler. In the mid-­Nineties, Zu Nino and his son, Alberto, took over the other brothers’ parts, sold the two aging vessels, and bought two new, steel trawlers, the Antonino Genovese and the Elisabetta Genovese. But the economic investment did not succeed, and since the family partnership was unable to pay the shipyard for the building of the second trawler, it remained moored in front of the Capitaneria di Porto in the Mazara port. Zu Nino sailed with us on that voyage for two reasons. First, the ship’s actual captain, Capitan Enzo, was unable to serve as its official captain, so Zu Nino took his place on the crew list. Additionally, by going out to sea Zu Nino was saving money that otherwise would have gone to another fisher, which he could use to pay the loan in the hope of retrieving his confiscated

The Craft of Expansive Navigation  /  65

Figure 8.  Zu Nino

trawler. It was as if this urgency was reflected in each of his actions and movements—­from arranging the pasta packages to releasing the ship lines and setting out to sea. A Short History of Fishing and Moving across the Channel Zu Nino’s vicissitudes resemble many stories about captains and owners in Mazara. More than a thousand persons appear in the ships’ registry in the town’s Capitaneria di Porto. Some of them appear as owners only for a fleeting moment, when they are listed together with their siblings and widowed mothers as inheritors of parts of their deceased fathers’ trawler, only to disappear that day or several weeks thereafter, once inheritors sell their parts to a relative or an established shipowner. Other owners dominate the registry with dozens of trawlers constructed, bought, sold, and demolished. The people in Zu Nino’s class started going out to sea after World War II, around the time they were ten years old. Their fathers had either fished by trawling under sail and by other methods before the war, or had worked as peasants in the Mazarese hinterland and switched to motorized trawling immediately before or after the war. The expansive spatial dynamics that motorized trawling triggered in the fleet between the generations of Zu Nino and his father transformed the

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relationship between labor, space, and social relations. By outlining this change we can illuminate how different forms of mobility contribute to processes of region formation. Fishing in Sicily and Tunisia until World War II was a particular kind of trans-­Mediterranean craft. On the one hand, fishing as a practice was connected to the shore. Whether they were fishing for tuna, sardines, or other types of fish, fishing groups sailed along the coast according to the species and seasons in question, and often added local people as deckhands (Sarà 2007, 13, 20). On the other hand, fishers also used to move this same coastal operation to other shores of the Mediterranean. The rich fishing grounds off the southeastern coast of  Tunisia have drawn fishers from the entire Mediterranean for centuries (Boubaker 2003; Clancy-­Smith 2011, 166).2 The fishers who travelled seasonally to the North African coasts would at times preserve their products locally and ship the processed fish back to Europe. Each year, fishers would arrive in the area for the spring and summer (usually from March to August); they would salt or dry the catch by themselves, and then send it to Tabarka—­the Tunisian port town closest to the Algerian border—­where agents of the four principal commerce houses (in Isola delle Femmine and Terrasini [near Palermo], Livorno, and Trapani) would collect and ship it to Europe. Tuna fishing and preserving—­a common object of Mediterranean maritime studies—­unfolded in a similar way, as far as cross-­channel mobility is concerned. In terms of the management of knowledge and work, this type of fishing is perhaps the most complex of them all. The tonnara, both the site of fishing and the net system, has a community-­sized labor process with a hierarchical division of labor.3 Establishing a tonnara on the Maghrebi coast was thus the privilege of the large Italian fishery houses, which would buy the concession to fish for tna in a specific site. But, spatially speaking, it was as stationary as fishing can get. That is so because the tonnara is the classic and most elaborate trap that fish meet. Moreover, since the large amount of caught tuna needs to be processed, the tonnara includes many elements in its labor process other than (though connected to) the fishing. It was therefore a highly complicated colonial undertaking: in order to establish a tonnara on the North African coast, a site was designated for the canning and salting workshop, local people were found and contacted, and all auxiliary elements in the fishing process had to be established. In that sense, it was the type of fishing most resembling any other landed economic colonization: it involved the moving of fishers, equipment, knowledge, and dead fish before and after the mattanza; but as a spatial operator, the mattanza itself was spatially grounded.

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Until the end of the nineteenth century, the yearly cycle of fishers’ voyages from Sicily (as from Napoli and other Italian ports) included sailing vessels of various types and gears, which sailed to the North African coast in order to fish at specific sites there or somewhere along the way. Yet all those movements did not harness the labor process in fishing as a platform for more than the occasional clandestine mobility. That is so, because the cross-­ channel fishing cycle was based on a spatially anchored labor process: fish in North African waters were rendered available, politically and technologically, and all operations for the transformation of the catch would take place in situ. Finished products were thus sold in Tunisia and sent to Europe as commercial products, but usually not by the fishers themselves. The geographic trajectories of workers were thus both temporally and economically dissociated from the stationary labor process on the one hand, and from the mobility of the products of labor—­conserved fish—­on the other. Apart from fishing, the other form of cross-­channel navigation was coastal maritime transport, or cabotage. In Sicily as in Tunisia, sparse roads and bad inland traveling conditions made cabotage a preferred means of transport (Benigno 2001, 74; Moricola 2001, 62–­63, 67). Smuggling was also a frequent phenomenon, carried out by Sicilians, Tunisians, and Maltese. Since the mid-­nineteenth century these movements had increased in ways that often intermixed nationalities and eluded French and Italian officers’ control (Loth 1905, 257–­59). As Julia Clancy-­Smith writes, contraband reveals how North Africa and Sicily had undergone “greater commercial and financial entanglement with Europe” since the second half of the nineteenth century (2011, 196). The maritime world of the central Mediterranean permitted a plethora of unsanctioned forms of mobility. Sicilian peasants would evade the hardships in Sicily; the occasional mafioso would escape his prosecutors (Lupo 1996, 158, 180–­82); but this effervescent host of movements did not overflow its own conditions. If we could draw all the routes mentioned until now on a nautical chart of the Channel of Sicily, we would get a dense web of routes over this ninety-­nautical-­mile sea stretch: English, Dutch, and French merchant ships going in and out of Trapani and Tunis, cabotieri, smugglers, purse-­seiners, and tonnara operations moving from Italy, Greece, and Malta southwards at the beginning of each season and coming back at the end of it (while some choose to stay behind); coral and palangra (longline) fishers going back and forth for shorter voyages; and people of all walks of life taking a ride with those fishers. Yet neither density nor frequency of movement (or mobility, “the state of being in motion”) necessarily generated a spatiopolitical dynamic—­at least not such a dynamic that would draw into it social

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formations, economic and political interests, or cultural models of action and personhood. As long as the fishery houses in Italy paid for processed sardines and anchovies, as long as tonnara owners needed to transport the entire fishing and conserving complex to a site in North Africa in order to exploit its banks, and as long as all fishing voyages were limited to the specific, largely preestablished goal of exploiting the sea, the maritime constellation did not make all aspects of life on either side of the channel collide and reshape each other. The central difference between all these modes of mobility and the motorized trawling central to the Mazara fleet was the specific spatial aspects of their labor processes. The Spatial Aspects of the Labor Process In general, the labor process denotes the process in which social labor is invested, through the physical enactment of previous planning, in order to act on nature in the production of valuable things (Marx 1867, 198; Braverman 1974, 58, 194; Burawoy 1985, 25, 39)—­in the case at hand, food commodities. By the spatial aspect of the labor process in fishing, I refer to those aspects of the labor process that translate the specific goal of production—­ catching the intended fish—­into a specific spatial pattern of movement. Unlike in other fishing methods, trawlers plough the seabed in search for fish, rather than waiting to trap their catch. Before motorization, this fishing method was conducted by pairs of sailing boats, each of which would drag one end of the net’s towing lines while sailing “alla pari [evenly or equally],” hence its earliest name: paranza. Such fishing formations would thus totally depend for their forward propulsion on the wind and currents, as well as on a good level of coordination between the two crews. Moreover, since the method was practiced by relatively small vessels, the nets could be used only in shallow depths and close to shore—­exactly the sites of traditional coastal fishing. Because of these qualities, the paranza did not pick up during its first decades in Sicily (Gangemi 2007, 36–­38). Where it did, it underwent a series of restrictions and regulations meant to make sure it would not interfere with the contemporaneous state of fisheries. In Sicily, for example, paranza was prohibited in certain zones and seasons as of 1835 (Targioni Tozzetti 1871, 1:572), and was later regulated through restrictions on the minimum size of the nets’ “eyes” or holes (Magnani-­Ricotti 1899). In Tunisia, on the other hand, regulations addressed the minimum length of the unloaded fish as a way to prevent the killing of fish before their reproductive age (Flutre 1947, 15).

The Craft of Expansive Navigation  /  69

The motorization of trawling turned it into an ultramobile operator for the translation of capital interests into spatial expansion (Subramanian 2009, 159). The process is comparable to tractorization in agriculture (Olmstead and Rhode 2001), except that without ownership of land—­the main threshold to tractorization (Martini and Silberberg 2006)—­motorized trawling’s expansive potential was even greater. In other types of fishing, motorization facilitated windward navigation and shortened the time it took to get to and from the fishing banks, but it did not transform the labor process itself. If we remember that until the late nineteenth century, most fishers sailed or rowed to their fishing sites, we can see that motors were not necessary for fishing methods; nor did much change when fishers using any method other than trawling started to install motors on their boats. If you are fishing for sardines with a purse-­seine, or for tuna using the mattanza net array, then a motor would make the voyage to and from your fishing site shorter; it would also make your life easier when you need to set your gear; but it would not significantly change the way you fished or your potential catch. Your local fish merchant (or other capitalist) who offered to fund the installation of a motor on your boat would find it hard to convince you of the merits of motorizing your craft and thereby intensifying your production. In trawling, however, every investment in motorization immediately translated into deeper and larger trawling operations. Consequently, the motorization of trawling made this fishing method much more prone to capitalist intensification and to continuous expansion of fishing power and zones of operation. If trawling was your craft, then a motor would make you keep your course with no regard to the wind, and a larger motor would enable you to use a larger net, fish over a deeper bottom, and catch far more fish. Trawling is thus much more prone to capitalist intensification of production, because in trawling capital can enter the labor process itself more deeply than in any other way of fishing.4 Merchants, who until this point bought the products of labor rather than labor itself, and who earlier could only invest in the preservation and commercialization of the catch, could now invest in the fishing gear itself. Money meant motored trawlers, and more money meant bigger trawlers with more potent motors staying at sea for longer periods and working literally around the clock, farther away from one’s homeport. The differences in the spatial aspect of the labor process among the various types of fishing may shed light on the relationship between questions of mobility and social change—­the relationship between spatial and social dynamics. It is well established anthropological wisdom that mobility is a crucial element in many production and exchange processes—­a point that has been finely discussed at least since globalization became a term in vogue, if

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not earlier (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006). Indeed, the rising interest in mobility, or in connectivity for that matter, has reconfigured the Mediterranean and other social and political formations previously conceived in terms of their cultural unity of functional coherence (Horden and Purcell 2006). But when either concept is taken as the opposite of stationary social formations, it may be granted powers of social explanation it does not necessarily merit. True, the main and original thrust behind the studies of mobility showed how circulation and movements are essential and ubiquitous elements in any social formation. Yet spatially mobile societies can still be grasped as socially complete or functionally stable. Modern anthropology’s fundamental text, Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific, constructed exactly such a social formation (1922). The opposition between things stationary and mobile is both too wide and not sufficiently sociologically informed to grasp the spatiopolitical dynamics rather than the more strictly spatial ones: social and spatial change beyond spatial movement. In our case, maritime mobility becomes an interesting element of a given labor process when the cycle of production contains a navigational element that is central enough to the process to change the latter significantly. Any vessel that crosses the channel can take onboard something (or someone) illegal in its port of departure, its estimated arrival point, or anywhere along the way. Yet as long as such transportations were only supplementary to the voyage’s labor process, they remained peripheral to the role of such voyages in the larger channel scene. The relative marginality of Mazara as a fishing port for the dominant methods of line and net fishing contributed to its postwar dominance as a motorized trawling port, which came to host the largest Italian trawling fleet in the second half of the twentieth century. The rise of its fleet made Mazara into a hub of this spatial expansion, which in the central Mediterranean was directed southward, to the North African fishing banks. The mechanization of trawling and the intensification that this labor process had undergone since World War II shaped the Mazara fleet’s southward expansion, with far-­reaching consequences for the shape of the Mediterranean.5 The dynamics it triggered became sociospatially effervescent—­redefining political and economic interests and their corresponding social relations. It can therefore provide a clue about the motors of region formation.

Capitani Bravi: Zu Nino and Capitan Enzo Mazara del Vallo did not leave a significant mark on Sicilian contemporary history prior to the Thirties. By the turn of the nineteenth century it was

The Craft of Expansive Navigation  /  71

still primarily an agricultural town whose residents worked mainly church-­ owned land and exported, apart from grapes for wine, mainly tuff stone and sand for the Palermo construction business. The town’s purse-­seining catch went to seven salting workshops which employed a modest number of thirty-­nine workers (beyond the eleven family members who also worked in them).6 Until the Thirties, Mazarese fishers excelled in neither of the two reigning, mainly stationary methods for fishing.7 In the two decades prior to the war, they began practicing trawling under sail. This method was not so successful at the time because without a motor, it depended for its operation on the wind more than did other fishing methods. But after fishers from the fishing port of  Viareggio in northern Italy came to exploit the Sicilian fishing banks, this technique caught on (Quinci 1931, 46–­47). In 1926, three motorized trawlers from Viareggio (the Delfino, Triglia, and Fratelli Albula), headed by Captain Mario Malfatti, came to town. Since these vessels were the harbingers of what would make Mazara into Italy’s largest trawling port, it is worth asking what could have made Captain Malfatti and his trawling squadron come specifically to a town that was hardly the region’s fishing capital. A possible answer comes from a decree of the national ministry of agriculture (Decreto reale del 22 settembre, no. 554), which prohibited trawling from May to September in most of Italy’s fishing centers, including Trapani (Direzione generale dell’agricoltura 1906, 18). This law created the political geography of trawling in the following period: where purse-­seining and tuna fishing were strong, trawlers (either local or visiting) could not es­ tablish themselves, both because the law named such centers in its list and because in these centers the local resistance would be strong. Mazara thus became an attractive trawling port because it was close enough to the shallow banks in the channel, and because it was not important enough a center to lobby against the arrival of this method.8 In the following year there were already seven motopescherecci (motorized trawling vessels), owned mainly by people from the region of Tuscany. Another trawler joined the new fleet a year later, and in 1929 Mazaresi already owned most of the ten trawlers in port. One of the vessels had been working as a motorized coral fishing boat before its owner transformed it into a trawler. The same year, 1929, only one pair of vessels still operated the paranza method. At the end of that year, one of the vessels was also transformed into a motorized trawler (the Viareggini still came to town, but only for the first four months of the year). The growing Mazarese fleet started to expand its fishing grounds westward to the Egadi island group (west of Trapani), and southward to Pantelleria and beyond (Quinci 1931, 42–­43, 38–­39). The technological changes were followed by shifts in funding channels

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and ownership structures. By the end of  World War II, Mazara already boasted a fleet of seventy motorized trawlers, which unloaded six thousand tons of catch annually worth 1.3 billion lire. All the vessels in the fleet were owned by 150 people, an incipient shipowner class (Lentini 2004a, 218). Until the early Fifties, Luigi Vaccara, an erstwhile cart driver who had worked for the local aristocrat and vine landlord Count Giovanni Burgio, owned the town’s largest four trawlers and almost singlehandedly controlled the town’s vine industry (Lentini 2004b, 71). Since the Sixties, the Mazara fleet had seen increased funding from the regional government of Sicily, which gained its own autonomy in 1946 and subsequently underwent massive agrarian reforms and governmental intervention through the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno and its affiliated initiatives and entities (see chapter 4). Between 1950 and 1962 the Cassa allocated more than two billion dollars for infrastructure development, land reclamation, and industrialization projects throughout the south of Italy (Servidio 2015). Most of the ships that appear in the ships’ registry in those years were funded in part by the Cassa for anything from expanding the motor on a wooden ship to constructing a new trawler. This influx of funding set the stage for the emergence of Mazarese captains as the leading protagonists in the town’s chronicles. Their craft, which developed together with them, revolved around the deployment of financial resources for the expansive exploitation of fishing banks: the farther away from shore, the deeper the fishing grounds, and the longer the voyages, the better. For that, people in town still call these persons i capitani bravi, or “the crafty captains.” The first years of the fleet’s growth were thus also the years in which a new “community of knowledge” was formed, that of the trawling captains (Delbos and Jorion 1984).9 More accurately, the existing communities of knowledge were gradually taken over, both personally and in terms of their relative value, by the new group that came to rule the local fleet.10 Like other forms of mastery, crafty captaincy combined inculcated knowledge, communal resources, and self-­fashioning and the consolidation of power (Elyachar 2005, 96–­111). In the trawling fleet, to be a capitano bravo meant to experiment constantly with routes and to look for new places for better and larger catch. As one retired fisher told me, at first fishers from Viareggio did the ex­ ploring; then Mazaresi began to take their captain’s roles. “These trawlers [in the Twenties] were captained by the same Viareggini, because in Mazara there weren’t people who could sail as captains.” “Why?” I asked. “Because they were illiterate; illiterate fishers. . . . Then [the Viareggini] taught [the Mazaresi] the fishing banks, et cetera. After the Mazarese fishers with two years of elementary school followed these Viareggini, and with time

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and motorization, they became great persons! They ‘bumped off ’ the original [captains] and grabbed the ships [as] their own possession.” It is not coincidental that professional advancement goes hand-­in-­hand here with the deposition of one’s masters or teachers of the craft (cf. Herzfeld 2004; E. N. Goody 1989). Since the teachers were outsiders, conflictual self-­ assertion and local patriotism became intertwined. As a result, the antagonistic nature of the apprentice’s trajectory found local-­patriotic justification. The Net and Its Route The elementary unit of labor in trawling consists of a run over a fishing route, or a “cala.” The term, which translates into “net” in English, comes from calare, the verb for lowering or dropping the net into the sea. Trawlers start dragging their nets at the beginning of the route, and they haul them in at the route’s end. At its simplest, a “net” follows two conditions: it is expected to take the ship over a fishing ground, and it is supposed to contain no obstacles. The ways in which Mazarese captains have managed these two conditions has shaped the relationship between knowledge, skill, spatial expansion, and profit. The organizing principles of fishing knowledge have been the time of the year, the fishing zone, and the specific location of the “net.” While these three categories still govern the fleet’s operation, the increased precision of navigation and the seaworthiness of vessels have changed the balance between them over the years. To this day, captains denote the time of year with a monthly calendar. They speak of each month’s fishing activity though a combination of general weather conditions and the expected presence, sizes, and types of catch in deep or shallow waters. One retired captain’s memorized calendar, which starts at the end of the summer, exemplifies this. The months of September through November, when the Mediterranean is relatively calm, permit fishing in both shallow waters (mainly for fish) and deep (for shrimp). “Bad weather started in November, so we started to work on the banks,” explained the captain. “We kept close to Lampedusa, about south to southeast [of the island]. If a storm came, we could take shelter quickly.” The choice of zone from November through February also depended on the relative “bareness” of the deep waters. Then, in March, “things started to change. You got more fish on day-­runs in deeper routes.” To call this change, the captain explained, “We used to say that the deep waters ‘got dressed [si vestiva].’ Fish started to migrate towards the deeper waters, and we [Mazarese trawlers] went to catch them there, together with the shrimp during the day.” At night, the trawlers would come back to fish on the shallower banks. In April, when the weather

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improved, captains would spend about two-­thirds of the time in the deeper waters and a third on the bank. From that point onward, trawlers gradually focused on the deep waters—­until August. Then, explained the captain, “the deep waters didn’t give much and the banks gave nothing, so we stopped fishing until the autumn.” While this yearly fishing pattern governed fishing generally, it unfolded differently in the various fishing zones. Captains constructed a new zone by marking a point on the chart—­usually in relation to a main point on shore (like Lampedusa)—­and defining a radius around it of anything between fifteen and thirty nautical miles. Such zones corresponded to the depth and the type of the bottom in the area: mud, sand, weed, and so forth. As the fleet expanded, each captain specialized in several of these zones. Technological change has shaped the dynamics of specialization, as well as the relationship between a zone and the routes or “nets” it contains. Until the mid-­1950s, crews measured depth and the quality of the seabed manually. Captains would decide to work in a given zone—­for example, in what many of them called “the bank of the South [banco di Mezzogiorno].” As another captain explained it to me, “You leave Lampedusa on [a course of ] 185 degrees, [sailing] for twenty miles. Depth thirty fathoms. Trawl toward the southeast.” The naviga­tion from Lampedusa was estimated, and upon the ship’s arrival at the supposed beginning of the route, it stopped and a crewmember would lower a sounding line—­a rope with a five-­kilogram pyramid-­shaped weight at its end—­into the water. The sounding line served two purposes. The length marks along the line were used to measure the depth of water under the ship. The weight was used to determine the quality of the bottom; the fishers would at­­tach some seaweed to it, and then check what type of soil was stuck to it after they hauled the line back onboard. The introduction of electric echo sounders improved captains’ ability to adjust their routes to the seabed depth contours, which captains took to correspond to the relative position of fish in any given month. After the midFifties, captains stopped trawling along straight lines and started following the depths they measured at the beginning of any given “net.” Navigation along the sea’s surface remained inaccurate, but routes now corresponded to the seabed more closely. The distinction between these two aspects of the role of knowledge and technology in the labor process becomes clear in the treatment of underwater obstacles. Before electronic navigation, the difficulty of marking the ship’s position when the shore was under the horizon forced captains to maintain a wide berth around any obstacle they knew of. As one captain explained it:

The Craft of Expansive Navigation  /  75 At the time, if we were trawling [and ran into an obstacle], we approximated our position and tried to account for the current and the wind. We marked the position using the clock: “After half a net, there is a group of rocks.”

Here, obstacles—­especially rocky reefs or sunken ships—­played a double role. On the one hand, they could tear the fishing gear. On the other hand, as havens for fish, they promised a bountiful catch. Captains treated obstacles with ambivalence, trying to come as near to them as possible without getting their fishing gear damaged. In the latter case, after fixing their position and counting their losses, they would move on to adjust their route while the crew fixed the net on the aft deck. What was then created in the captain’s personal logbook, on the navigation chart, or (more recently) in the navigation instrument resembled the opposite of a draw-­by-­numbers picture. While captains kept all coordinates and depth measures in their well-­ guarded booklets, this kind of information formed the minority of the whole. A captain could have a chart overflowing with routes all over the Tunisian coast, but he would still not know when to follow which one. Captains’ craft relegated some of this information to writing and others to skill and memory. In one captain’s words, “We kept 20 percent in booklets and 80 per­cent in our ‘personal computer’—­in our head.” Towards the end of the Seventies, the first electronic navigation computers arrived in the fleet. The first computer had a memory of only thirty points, forcing captains to reenter the points they wished to use for almost every voyage. The same captain continued: Then the diskettes were born, together with the more complex and modern systems. . . . We had a diskette for each zone, and when we returned to fish in a zone, we would go back to its diskette. You could follow the route [from the computer], but if you wanted to experiment, you played with the route. Each diskette had the names of zones on it, and we used to exchange them with each other.

By the end of the Nineties, satellite navigation instruments like GPS and onboard computers that serve as chart plotters have permitted captains to determine their ships’ positions and follow charted courses to an accuracy of several meters. This technological change has gradually enabled captains to drag their nets much closer to shallow banks (“si arriva sotto”). Nowadays, an average trawler’s navigation computer contains around two thousand way­ points—­between obstacles, waypoints, and routes—­covering the fishing

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zones along the North African coast. In one captain’s words, reefs or rock concentrations used to be “little nature reserves” because trawlers could not access them without risking their gear. “Nowadays, that’s no longer the case.” Craftiness Within and Without The fleet’s lore—­especially the antagonism between Mazarese and Viareggini captains—­has bequeathed to its captains a foundation tale infused with craftiness that, at the right moment, was directed at the masters of the craft. When we set out to sea, however, not one but two capitani bravi boarded the Naumachos: the owner and the captain, who also happened to be brothers-­ in-­law. That both owner and captain sailed with us already inserted a wedge of ambiguity regarding onboard authority and the flow of hierarchy. As an industrial operation, the Naumachos was structured to serve the owner’s interests through navigation and fishing. Through both the ship’s spatial organization and the daily routine, the captain would relegate his authority to the heads of departments, who would oversee their subordinates’ work. Function and hierarchy were to flow from the captain in the bridge who was looking forward, as they were supposed to guide the deckhands astern, who were looking backward, but mostly downward, at the catch they were sorting. Yet onboard the Naumachos there were relationships other than this industrial division of labor. Not only was the owner aboard, turning his economic interests from an absent force into the choreography and lines of an actor onstage. He mediated between the captain and the crew, rather than the other way around. This mediation took a spatial, dramatic shape: the owner worked and slept with us, whereas the captain guided the ship above us. This split made the spatial and social layout of the ship ambivalent, blurring the distinctions between industrial labor relations and alternative frames for the voyage. There was the tension between employer-­worker commodified exchange and reciprocal collaboration: between the ideology of contracted remuneration and that of a unifying goal. There was the tension between power and command: between Zu Nino, who could decide who should do what exactly when, and the captain, who gave us the orders to go about doing those things. Then there was the tension between the captain’s almost total absence and Zu Nino’s overbearing ubiquity. It was one thing to work for days on end for what one saw as the profits of an absent interest. It was another thing altogether for the bearer of that interest to wake you up for work, cook your food, and beseech you to work harder, stronger, for that same interest, around the clock—­ever more intimately than the absent captain above your head.

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These tensions drove a wedge between onboard life and work and the labor relations that were supposed to frame them as contractual interaction for the exchange of commodified labor. Already before I had boarded the Naumachos, when I was looking for a berth and learning all I could about the ways of the fleet, the fishers I spoke with were calling their work “slavery.” After this or that question about the pay or the hours, they would conclude by saying, “We are slaves.” Whereas ashore this conclusion tended to come after exasperated discussions of the lack of fishers’ collective action (especially during the short-­lived strike), at sea the same declarations that life onboard amounted to “modern slavery” pointed to a spatiotemporal variation on the same theme. If the fishers’ work had been “hired labor,” then their relationship to the captain and Zu Nino would have been one of workers against employers across capitalist relations of production and the class conflicts they entail. But the ability to put it in these terms was exactly the main bone of contention: Was the ship a family, a web of patronage, or a relationship of production—­made of reciprocity, redistribution, or exchange? This bone of contention did not take long to emerge. Coffee, “the Net,” and the Onboard Hierarchy After we spent the voyage’s first night sailing the sixty nautical miles from Mazara to the island of Pantelleria, we were prepared to start fishing. Late in the morning, Zu Nino came into our cabin shouting: “Amonin! A travagghià! [Let’s go! Let’s work!]” At the sound of this wakeup call, nothing happened. Then, slowly, Hajj, who had been sleeping on the bunk below me, woke up, sat up in his bunk, and started to put on his boots. On the other side of the cabin, the two other fishers—­the bosun’s nephews whose names I did not yet know, did the same. I jumped out of my bunk and onto the floor, put my boots on, and walked out. “O Luscio!” the bosun ordered me as I walked out into the saletta [dining room], “Fai café! [Make coffee].” “Luscio” had become my name several months earlier when my landlord decided “to christen” me—­to replace my first name with an Italian name—­as Mazarese have done to many migrants. The name’s root, which means “light,” was close to the meaning of my name in Hebrew (they tried “Luciano” first, but concluded that “it sounded too much like a soccer player’s name”). The bosun was sitting on the edge of his cabin, the one next to the kitchen, which he shared with Zu Nino, and was taking his time smoking and putting his clothes and boots on. When Zu Nino heard the bosun’s request he fired back, “Niente caff è! [No coffee!]

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We haven’t even done anything yet, and you already want coffee?” A minute later, after Zu Nino had left the saletta and gone upstairs to the bridge, the bosun told me again to make coffee. Hajj, who had been following the exchange from his bunk, probably still half asleep, came out at that point and told me: “You are a [simple] mariner, so you follow Abderrahman’s orders. He is your capo dipartimento [head of department].” “Call me Gianni,” the bosun continued, smiling at the clarification of hierarchy. We had not yet hauled out one net, and it was already becoming clear that food was where the action was. “Do you know how to make coffee?” Hajj asked me. “You mean, with the moka?” I replied, resentful of the level of ignorance I realized they all expected of me. After all, everyone knew how to use that, I thought to myself. “Yes, the moka. Let me show you,” Hajj continued, disregarding my objection. The trick was to fill the tray that held the coffee powder to the maximum, and then to add a bit more coffee. “That’s the way you build pressure. Nothing like the pressure in the bar at the quay, but it’s still something.” Then there was the sugar issue: Hajj, the owner, and the chief mechanic did not add sugar to their coffee. “That’s the only true way to drink it!” Zu Nino said. “I drink only Arab coffee with sugar,” Hajj added, “and the chief mechanic is trying to lose weight. It’s because he is a finocchio [literally, a fennel, and a stigmatizing term for gay men].” With Hajj and Zu Nino watching me, I waited for the moka to stop boiling and poured coffee into four cups (I was at that moment invested in following all cultural clues I could encounter). I then emptied the rest of the liquid into a stainless steel pitcher, added two tablespoons of sugar, stirred it, and went astern to serve the coffee. “The first cup goes to the captain!” Hajj declared. While following me through the corridor to the cabin door, he told me to leave the pitcher and all but one paper cup on the working table next to the veriscello, and to climb to the bridge to serve the captain his coffee. As I was walking up the stairs, I saw that the bridge was abandoned. I then called out, “Capitan’!” somewhat festively, imitating the way I had heard the crew pronouncing it, with the final ‘n’ almost silent. The captain then appeared from his cabin—­a small chamber adjacent to the bridge—­looked at the cup, grabbed it with his left hand (his right one was holding a cigarette), cleared his throat for a second or so, and turned away. When I came down from the bridge, Hajj was sitting on a shaky stool in the small space between the bathroom and the working table. His head was resting on his right arm, which lay on the table, and he was sipping his coffee with his eyes half shut. I handed the plastic coffee cups to everyone who was there, and went to stand next to Hajj. “The captain

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Figure 9.  The captain on the upper deck

doesn’t speak?” I asked him. “The less he does, the better,” Hajj explained. “Serve the coffee and get ready for the net.” “The net” was the rolling out of the net. Usually a net would be hauled out just after it had been hauled in and emptied on deck. But this was the voyage’s first net, and there was no net to haul in and sort. The sequence of actions for which most hands were needed on deck was, therefore, not followed by the long sorting period—­when only those whose role onboard destined them for that toil, or those who were anyway awake, remained while the rest went back to their bunks. But a net was a net, and one was awakened to haul it in, roll it out, or sort its content, with a cup of coffee; a temporal gesture of hospitality extended to those entering the ship’s decks not from the outside but from the seclusion of their sleep. And the pouring and serving of that coffee—­from the order to make it, through the order in which it was served, to the manner in which it was extended and received—­mapped the routes of authority and relationships of hierarchy within the crew. I was the cook, and therefore responsible for the coffee and answerable to the captain (in principle) and to the owner (in practice) regarding all matters culinary, but I was also a deckhand subordinate to the bosun. By insisting that I make coffee, the bosun marked his authority not only to me (though both he and Hajj did so), but to the owner as well. And since Zu Nino received

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his cup together with everyone on the aft deck, the coffee, served and drunk, clarified that above the bosun stood the captain, not his brother-­in-­law the owner. In front of that hierarchy, Zu Nino tried and failed to connect the coffee not to rights extended, but rather to labor performed and accounts balanced, and showed his wish to call rounds of coffee on and off according to his judgment of that balance. After everyone had gulped or sipped their coffee, all was more or less ready for the net. Hajj and I were standing on one side of the working table, while the other two deckhands, Montassar and Fathi, were on the other side. Montassar was leaning against the table that held the stainless steel fish scale on the port side, and Fathi was trying to achieve a similar resting state by leaning with his hand on one of the hooks that were used to hold the weather gear. But because the ship was rolling, he kept stumbling and, looking resentful, he went back to holding that hook. Both of them seemed to be doing their best to fall back asleep and ignore the joking homoerotic gestures that Paolo, the chief mechanic, who sat in front of the hydraulic drum that controlled the towing cables, was making at them. A minute or so later, Gianni, the bosun, came out of the cabin and, turning to his two nephews, said to them as he walked past them toward the aft deck: “What are you standing here like bitches? Come on, get to work!” “Two good-­for-­nothings, this couple,” Hajj told me, still half asleep. “They are only here because he is their uncle. And he is afraid that they will shame him in front of the owner.” The bosun started directing the hauling out of the net. He first went around the deck examining the towing gear, especially the “doors”—­large steel plates that kept the net open underwater while trawling, and which were attached to the ship’s side when the gear was onboard. These doors were several hundred pounds of rocking steel menace, the first thing they warned you to keep your hands away from when you stood on the aft deck. The bosun then raised his head as if he were looking at someone standing above us on the backward-­facing bridge terrace. Seconds later, the ship dropped its speed to a minimum. The bosun then took out a whistle that had been hidden under his shirt and, winking at me, blew a short, laconic tone. His nephews Montassar and Fathi slowly left their corner and came to stand by the net that was organized in a zigzag shape on the deck behind the hydraulic drum. A second whistle, and they each grabbed the towing cable and clicked the heavy shackles that were connected to it to the cables coming from the drum. At that point, Hajj rose and, releasing a sigh, went to his position by the drum. The bosun did the same, and the two young fishers went to stand behind the drum. A third whistle, and the bosun with his two nephews dragged the

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Figure 10.  The bosun Abderrahman (right, with whistle in mouth) and Zu Nino

end of the trawling net to the edge of the deck. Everything was almost ready. Zu Nino then came astern and looked at the bosun as he was checking that the bottom of the sack was tied properly. There is a simple knot that closes the net into a sack and which should be easy enough to open when the sack was to be emptied onboard. This knot was therefore the bosun’s nightmare: if, after four hours of towing, the net was hauled in only to reveal that nothing had been caught because the knot had loosened, not many captains would resist the temptation of throwing their chief fishers overboard with the net on the following run “to make sure that the knot is tight.” Then, with a slight push, the bosun tipped the sack’s end overboard, and the net started to run quickly into the sea, clearing the zigzag that filled the entire deck. Once the net was all out, its cables flapped hard against the drum. The whip was so strong that all the tiny algae, fish parts, and dust that were caught in the net sprayed all of us like a smelly rain. Then a sequence of whistles, shackle-­snapping, and hydraulic drum clutching took place, at the end of which the doors detached from their position, banged against the ship’s hull, and then disappeared into the sea, pulling behind them the towing cables. Fathi then shoved a broom in my hand and gestured toward the debris of algae and fish parts that covered the deck. The broom—­given and received—­declared my status on the aft deck. I was the last in the pecking order. By passing the threshold between the cabin and the kitchen on

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the one hand and the aft deck on the other, I moved from that part of the ship in which I was the cook—­where tastes, requests, favors, and care were being administered—­to the deck, where I was expected to receive instructions from everyone, including the deckhand who had joined the crew just a couple of weeks before me. “Make sure not to get your head in the cables!” Hajj shouted as I walked astern under the cables. With my first deck task completed, I looked up and saw that everyone had gone without my noticing. I returned the broom to its place and walked inside. I found Hajj taking off his boots in our cabin, and the bosun, sitting again on the edge of his room smoking a cigarette, who stopped me as I passed by him. “Here, take this,” he said, and handed me a ten-­pack carton of Diana cigarettes, the same kind that I had seen fishers smoke constantly in the port. “We get one every week or so,” he said. I thanked him for the cigarettes, and went to our cabin. “Every five days, not every week,” Hajj told me quietly as I climbed onto my bunk. “The captain tries to scam us out of what we justly deserve. I don’t smoke, but I want my share so I could give it as gifts, but the captain wouldn’t give it to me. I bet he smokes all of it by himself. Have you ever seen him without a cigarette? Bastards—­both of them.” “Both of them” meant the owner and the captain. In other circumstances they represented two different kinds of authority, to juggle, manage, perhaps even pit against each other. But the cigarettes—­every seafarer’s lawful right—­ marked how one’s rights turned malleable between the land where they had originated and the sea where they were supposed to be granted. To finish one’s allowance of cigarettes in five days, one needed to smoke two packs, or forty cigarettes, a day. Since as deckhands we were supposed to sort for most of our waking time—­with both hands—­smoking opportunities were limited to the time spent drinking coffee in wait for the hauling of each net, about seven times a day, and to the three mealtimes. Even if one smoked two cigarettes each time, this would still bring the daily total only to twenty cigarettes or one pack. To finish one’s allowance, one needed to take smoking breaks during the sorting astern. The lower one’s rank in the pecking order was, the less positively those breaks were viewed. All this meant that most crewmembers did not complain if they did not receive their ten-­pack carton every five days at sea. Whatever they did not smoke onboard ended up being consumed ashore, given as gifts, or sold in the old port, either by them or by their captains or owners, for below-­market prices. The bone of contention was not the seafarers’ right to smoke as many subsidized cigarettes as they wanted—­a number limited by the labor routine—­but rather the channeling of the profits from the unsmoked cigarettes. The owner and captain regarded themselves as responsible for dispensing cigarettes to all

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those in need of them at sea, not for handing over all the cigarettes they had received to the people for whom they were intended. That Hajj never got to see his deserved cartons of cigarettes meant that the relationship between crewmembers on the one hand and the captain and the owner on the other was framed not through the unionized labor relations that had secured the seafarers’ right, but through the captain’s redistributive view of onboard relations, which made him subvert this right, at least when it came to cigarettes. Once I was in bed, I opened my computer and started to write my field notes. Hajj, who heard the clicking noise with his eyes already shut, told me to go to sleep. “In four hours we are hauling in the net, and then the real work starts. Rest while you can.” So, after a few stenographic lines, I closed the computer and then my eyes. Squatting, Sitting, and the Onboard Pecking Order: Sorting the Fish Four hours or so later, the time came to haul in the net and see what it had scraped from the seabed. I must have been partly awake, because I heard the motor speed dropping to minimum, and someone descending from the bridge. Another minute passed by, and I heard the mechanical noise of the veriscello turning and picking up the cable. Then Zu Nino came down and went around the cabins to wake the bosun and all of us in the front cabin. The length of the cables that tow the net are so long, that it can take up to half an hour from when the veriscello is turned on to when the crew is actually needed for the work astern. This made for a long sequence of interactions in which every person of the four awakened to work astern sat up in his bunk, turned to wake another one up, and then fell asleep again, only to be awakened himself several moments later. Everyone slowly made their way astern, put on long blue industrial aprons, and waited for the end of the cables to get to the ship. I made coffee and took the first cup upstairs to the captain, who greeted me with the same clearing of the throat as four hours earlier, when I had handed him his first coffee. I then descended from the bridge to the aft deck and gave everyone else their coffee. When the cables drew near, Montassar, Fathi, and I approached the two doors. We disconnected the cables from the doors and connected them to the cables coming from the veriscello. The bosun did not miss the opportunity to chastise his nephew Fathi for getting my help, and released a curse in his direction. But since the sea was rough and the ship was rolling and pitching, Fathi was too busy stabilizing himself to attempt a response. Once the drum started to pull on the net gear itself, Gianni and Zu Nino approached

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the transom, and waited for the sack to float behind the ship. Then, with a last pull on the veriscello, the sack climbed above the transom and landed on deck with a splash. Montassar reached for a hooked line that was tied to the starboard deck, released it, and wrapped it around the net’s neck. Meanwhile, Gianni released the knot that had been holding the net closed, and once both actions were complete, Hajj used the veriscello to pull on that same hooked line. The sack was pulled upwards, and its entire contents—­what had been scooped by the net on the seabed for the last four hours—­spread on the aft deck. Zu Nino then turned forward and looked up to the bridge terrace. With a discontented look on his face, he seemed to be communicating with someone there. Since everyone was on deck (except for the second mechanic, Salvatore, who was asleep), I realized that Zu Nino was talking to the captain, who, as he stood above us on the bridge’s aft terrace, was hidden from the entire crew. Seconds later, the ship’s speed picked up, and we all went to work. Gianni and one of his nephews prepared the net for another cala while Hajj, Montassar, and I prepared the deck for sorting the heap of mud and marine animals that was in front of us. The first thing Montassar did was to take a high pressure seawater hose and stick its end into the pile. The pile then started to bleed muddy water, which with the rolling and pitching of the ship spread in little streams all over the aft deck. In this manifold of muddy streams, every­ one was running around. When I asked Hajj why the sudden change in pace, he told me that whatever we managed to do before rolling the next net out was our “pure profit.” The day was punctuated by hauling nets in and out, separated by the duration of each “run.” Once a net was opened on deck, it took about two hours to sort and organize it. These two hours usually started only after we had rolled the net out again, and would therefore come out of the four hours until the next time we were called to work astern. At times, however, some time passed between the hauling in of the net and the captain’s order to drop the speed and roll out the next net. During that period—­ anything between five minutes and an hour—­we could start sorting the pile that was waiting for us. Just as Hajj finished explaining this sleeping economy, the speed dropped to a minimum again, and we all cleared the deck and prepared for rolling the net out. At that point, the bosun looked at me and shouted “Luscio! Fai caffè!” While everyone was preparing for sorting, I went to make coffee. When I came back, the net was already released, and the ship headed south. Fathi was shoveling overboard what seemed like a mountain of small bluefish, while all the others started moving around quickly. When I asked Hajj why those fish, which made a good part of the pile, were thrown

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overboard, he told me that they had no commercial value in Mazara, so that there was no point in collecting and freezing them. Meanwhile, Montassar and Fathi released a wooden table that had been attached to the starboard side, and arranged it halfway between the veriscello and the low platform at the back of the aft deck. Each of them grabbed a shovel and started transferring about a quarter of the pile to the table. Seconds later, Zu Nino, the bosun, and the chief mechanic grabbed small stools and sat in front of that table. Fathi arranged his stool at the back of the table and went to bring large baskets, which he arranged around it. Montassar took a smaller stool and set it on the platform. He then arranged several other baskets around the platform, for the different sizes and species of seafood. Then Hajj came and everyone sat down in their place. When Montassar saw I was looking for a place to sit, he pushed some baskets to make room for me and told me to sit down in front of the platform on a small stool he put on its side. Everyone had two pieces of wood next to them, which they used to scoop a small portion of the pile closer to them. They would then put the wood aside and start picking specific items and tossing them each toward one of the baskets. I sat down, and Hajj started explaining to me the drill: there were four baskets for shrimp, two for prawn, another one for calamari, and another one for octopus and other kinds of fish. Our job was to make the big pile in front of us disappear as quickly as possible by sorting it piece by piece either to one of the baskets or into the sea. The quicker we did it, the earlier we would go to sleep. I took a quick look at all the baskets, stared at the pile, took one of Hajj’s wooden pieces, and made myself a small pile of my own. After an hour of sorting, there was almost nothing left in either pile. The first to acknowledge it were the chief mechanic, who left the sorting for the motor room, and the bosun, who lit a cigarette and started to sort with only one hand. Zu Nino, perhaps to show his commitment or to set an example, was sorting faster while teasing Hajj into a competition: “We are going to be done before you guys!” Hajj raised his head toward the owner and, supported by Montassar’s pointing at me, replied: “You are four and we are three, and we have Luscio!” Minutes later, people were rapidly picking the last big shrimps or prawns. Then everyone rose and started to organize the deck. Montassar and Fathi pushed and dragged the baskets toward Hajj, who was washing them separately and moving them on to Gianni, the bosun: the shrimp after he had submerged them in a big bucket of medicinali (the chemical powder that prevents the blackening of crustaceans), and the rest directly.11 The bosun took each type of clean catch and divided them into two kilogram trays. He then weighed the kilogram trays to make sure they contained the right amount. The trays were handed to Paolo, the chief mechanic,

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Figure 11.  Montassar arranges the shrimp in their trays.

who organized them according to their type: shrimp trays received another splash of the powder, while other types were organized according to the merchants’ requirements. Prawns, for example—­which, being the most resilient of seafood, were still alive—­were supposed to be ordered in rows of five or ten items, depending on their size. And, since some prawns in every tray were doing their best to climb out—­moving their claws and twisting their backs—­ some poisonous powder was applied to pacify them. Montassar, Fathi, and I first cleaned the aft deck, cleaning being the lowest of menial onboard tasks. We then moved to help the others in orga­ nizing the shrimp. Here came another delicate chore. The four size categories of shrimp, which ranged in price from five to twenty-­five euros per kilo, needed to be ordered in their trays according to category, which was marked by organizing the pattern of the first layer of the items in the tray. This, it was explained to me, facilitated the examination of the packed catch by the merchants along the commercial chain. Our job was thus to take a tray at a time, skim about fifteen items off the top (“the biggest, most beautiful ones!”) and then reorganize them as quickly and neatly as we could. Once ordered, each pair of these plastic trays would go onto a ragged wooden one and be placed on deck. And, since that was the only part of the scartare that took place ahead of the veriscello, the captain heard when the organizing

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work started, and paid us a visit. After watching me battle with a couple of trays, he moved me aside and, without a word, showed me how to do it. We were then surrounded by several dozens of wooden trays filled with expiring marine creatures. Now it was time to stow them inside the freezing chamber. Hajj and the bosun went into their cabins and came back dressed in alpine suits and wearing subzero working gloves. As they descended into the freezing compartment, Montassar, Fathi, and I formed a chain of hands and started to pass the wooden trays to Hajj, who organized them in the –­40°C deep freeze. Once all the trays were inside, Hajj, Montassar, Fathi, and I went inside the cabin and disappeared into our bunks. I took off my boots, climbed onto my bunk, and opened my computer. “Get some sleep.” Hajj told me with his eyes closed. “In an hour or so we wake up for the next net.”

Motors of Expansion The choreography of onboard life staged our movements and actions according to the various frames for our hours and our days. By moving astern from one’s bunk to the working deck, or from the dining table to the bridge, one passed between realms and frames of action. One’s days unfolded in a chain of such movements, to each crewmember his own. The deckhands among us attained scant control over our movements or their pace. We were the sorting party of motorized trawling’s first and foremost output: frozen cartons of marine creatures, to be pulled from the seabed along the North African fishing banks and consumed somewhere in Europe. Our days were governed by a labor process that contained an almost limitless expansive potential—­spatially in trawling routes, and temporally in each voyage’s duration and round-­the-­clock work. In the incessant onboard sorting routine, all that remained for us was a mostly personal attempt to pull at these realms of action and make them overlap. One way to do so was to secure favors and treatments surrounding the aft deck routine. These came in the form of tokens—­measured vessels of meaning—­which were versed time and again. Coffee and cigarettes, though usually consumed together, signified different frames for onboard action: labor relations, kindred reciprocity, or redistributive operation, differently so for each of the sides involved. People used them to make sense of their lives and work onboard. As a result, they dramatized the things and moments that, once charged with such meanings, became the bone of contention. The kind of motorized seabed trawling that had dawned on Mazara during the first decades of the twentieth century shaped the spatial and social

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dynamics onboard the Naumachos as much as in Mazara’s political scene. When one was at sea, trawling stretched throughout the onboard working day. Ashore, it charged two emergent classes of owners and captains with social mobility and spatial thirst. The shipowners’ economic rise paralleled their growing social visibility in the town’s social scene. Previously, and as early as anyone in town was willing to remember, the landed borghesia and peasants treated fishers as a group apart. As the saying went in town, “There are two ‘races’ [or sorts of people] in Mazara: Mazaresi and fishers.” Fishers, whether they were deckhands or captains, were considered social untouchables and noneligible bachelors (Carlestål 2005), let alone candidates for participation in the political arena. The situation changed with the arrival of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno and government investment in the fisheries. Through their actions in and gains from fishing, shipowners started to overcome their local exclusion and enter all aspects of local life. Zu Nino’s age group—­those born around the mid-­1930s—­was the first to occupy not only the fleet’s decks but also its accounting and administration offices. This rapid change followed (and was apparent in) the wealth they poured into town, their control of the fleet’s operation, their growing role in local party politics, their privileged access to funding and the politicians from Rome and Palermo who dispensed it, and their spatially expansive modernizing agenda. Consequently, the members of this up-­and-­coming class of shipowners turned the sea and the fleet into the main stakes in the local political game, and began to identify their own social mobility with the spatial mobility of their vessels. Through their expanding operation, the fleet’s vessels formed scaling devices of sorts. Ashore as much as at sea, those who controlled the devices attained significant power over the scene. The struggle over control of the fleet revolved around the same dilemma that motivated onboard social dy­ namics—­the framing of the social relations that motorized trawling shaped. Both at sea and ashore, however, “labor” was ultimately overshadowed by its two alternatives—­patronage and family—­as a frame for social relations. Labor seldom appeared as “labor relations,” more rarely still as “class conflict.” Without the institutions and the gestures that would stabilize labor as such, it often seemed, and was called, “slavery.”

FOUR

Fish and Bait

Breakfast, Panini, and the Onboard Favor Economy In the elaborate input-­output mechanism onboard the Naumachos, I occupied a privileged position, for in addition to my role as deckhand, I had boarded the ship as its cook. More accurately perhaps, when we set sail, I started what was partly my role as the ship’s cook and partly my on-­the-­job-­ training to become such a cook. That is so because it was clear to everyone that I had no idea of what exactly was required of the ship’s cook. I did not keep it a secret that my reason for joining the voyage had to do with my research. But that reason did not count for much onboard, where my time and labor, as that of everyone else, was solely dedicated to the voyage’s ultimate goal—­to fill the ship’s hold with seafood. My culinary education was initially entrusted to Hajj. Since the first night—­when he sent me to the freezer (or la stiva, the hold) to fetch meat for the following day’s lunch—­Hajj taught me what to do and how to do it, and did his best to protect me from the owner’s wrath and the crew’s complaints. Already, as we were motoring away from Mazara, Hajj gave me my first instructions about cooking preparation for each meal. The ship’s schedule never really ends during fishing, but daily life could be said to start each morning at around 5 a.m., when the deckhands are called astern to haul in and then sort the last net of the night. “You have to take meat out every evening after you are done with dinner.” Even before dinner was explained to me, it already served as a marker of time. There were plastic supermarket bags in the front part of the freezer containing five kinds of meat: pollo (chicken, the minority); brodo (broth), which was beef cut into big chunks; bistecche, thin slices of frying beef; arrosto (roast), very similar to the brodo, but cut into smaller chunks; and salsicce, or pork sausages. Hajj continued:

90 / Chapter Four Other than that, you take out bread: one loaf for the meals and nine panini [buns] for the morning colazione [breakfast], which go with two 120-­gram tuna cans or three 80-­gram ones, and two tomatoes. I don’t eat the tomato. The owner buys slices of cheese for me, so when you prepare the colazione for ev­ eryone, make one with only olive oil and put it on the little shelf next to my bed abasciaprua [literally “in the below-­ahead,” referring to our deckhands’ cabin].

This was my first encounter with what turned out to be the most meaningful aspect of life onboard for all parties concerned: food, and the negotiations—­ sometime private, sometimes public, and mostly contentious—­over its consumption. Hajj’s cheese slices marked a special onboard treatment of sorts, something that continuously came up as the voyage unfolded. My second encounter with such issues did not take long to occur. After a relatively long night’s sleep in my bunk—­the upper portside one in the front cabin—­I had to prepare breakfast. At 6 a.m. of our first morning at sea, while everyone was still asleep as we headed down to the fishing banks with the trawling nets still secured to the deck, Zu Nino woke me up. “Ohè Luscio, were you asleep? We have to prepare breakfast!” I jumped out of my bunk to the floor so that I would not wake Hajj (who was sleeping on the bunk below me), while Zu Nino carried on with his instructions: “ Allora, make sure you use only 240 grams of tuna. We have to sail with these provisions for I don’t know how long, and we haven’t even started working yet.” While following Zu Nino’s orders meticulously, I noticed Salvatore, the secondo motorista (second mechanic), coming down from the bridge to the kitchen. He took a bun from the pile I was using to prepare sandwiches, opened a new tuna can, emptied it into his bun, and winked at me. I asked him whether I should open a new can. He smiled and said, “If we run out of tuna, we go and get more.” Salvatore’s latitude with the tuna stemmed from his relationship with the owner, and was shaped by the role he was supposed to perform beyond his duty. A full crew is comprised of a captain, two mechanics, a helmsperson (timoniere), a bosun, and deckhands. Two principles govern the shape of the crew and their daily schedule: the need for deckhands for the work astern, and the need to keep the two aspects of the ship’s operation going continuously: propulsion and navigation. Unlike the “marò” (mariners) and their bosun—­whose fishing work is conducted around the clock and determines their sleeping, eating, and deck chores—­the captain, motorists, and helmsperson live a different routine. Since at any given moment there should be two people on shift—­one at the bridge to attend to the navigation, and the other to attend to the engine—­two people should formally spend

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the whole night awake, and the ship’s safety and proper operation are much dependent on their being quite awake every night, all night long. Both persons thus spend their time either on-­or off-­shift, and are obliged to sleep for at least six straight hours a day, something the deckhands envy. Both of them also receive more than a fisher’s part of the voyage’s profits. Owners thus do their best to forgo one of these posts in the crew. Among the two, a mechanic is more indispensable, for social as well as technical reasons. Technically, the mechanical skills require training, whereas holding a night shift is something most captains could teach a fisher in a matter of several nights at sea. Furthermore, a captain who is deprived of his timoniere can always appoint someone from the crew to take the watch when he is asleep; whereas a chief mechanic needs his “second” for any unforeseen malfunction. Since the second mechanic is usually awake at night anyway, he can take the night shift at the bridge as well, and the owner can drop the helms­ person’s role and save his part. The Naumachos went to sea without a helmsperson. “The captain’s nephew used to sail with us, but now he’s gone,” Hajj told me. This did not seem odd to him. Everyone considered any line of work other than fishing preferable. Without a helmsperson, the captain could be replaced at night by the owner, who had no fixed role on board. This could have been the semi-­formal solution to the problem of the night shift. But, as everyone onboard knew, Zu Nino was old and not in the best of health, so the night shift would not remain his responsibility for long. Yet for Salvatore to take the night shift would mean a reduction in his working conditions. Instead of dozing off in front of the television in the living room and rising occasionally to check on the engine, he would be bound to the bridge and to the responsibilities it entailed. An informal solution was thus to be found for a formal problem: a favor for a navigational necessity. Salvatore was also the personal solution for another problem on the voyage. As it gradually became clear to me, no one really trusted my cooking skills. Anyone could whip up a meal every now and then, but not everyone could be asked by the owner to do so, let alone on a regular basis, for more than a month at sea. Since Salvatore was awake anyway for long periods of time, and since he was not required to work astern in sorting the catch with us, he was also the owner’s buffer-­cook. He could be called to replace me when I was too busy sorting the catch, too unskilled for a specific meal, or, because I had clearly failed to produce a certain meal, there was no way for the captain to entrust me with the preparation of the next one. All this meant that Salvatore was the ship’s “joker card,” and more importantly, that he would be asked to act as such on a personal basis, as a favor, by Zu Nino or by

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his “head of department,” the chief mechanic. This favor gave Salvatore some latitude with the tuna cans and, as we shall see later, not only with that. Yet this latitude was not acknowledged publicly. Short of being a secret (very few of those could survive in such tight quarters), it functioned in the relationship between the specific owner-­helmsperson dyad on the one hand and the more general owner-­crew relationship on the other. Various crewmembers had things they wanted and received from the owner on a personal basis: a higher payment, a container of fuel for their family car every now and then, an extra carton of fish, and so forth. This web of personal relationships presented each fisher with an alternative framing of life onboard: interpersonal patron-­client against more general class relations. Everyone was, however, still asleep, and the fishing routine had not yet exhausted us. There would be time to want favors, to ask for them, and to give them, always at an implicit price. The expansive labor process in motorized trawling structured onboard life and work, but the framing of it as class relations was anything but established. The flow of favors emphasized patronage as an alternative frame and patron-­client as a competing form of relations, both onboard and in the fleet’s growth. While anything could turn into an emblem of favors and the relationships they postulate or reaffirm, the central token for patronage in and around the fleet has historically been seafood. Different kinds of seafood traveled along charted routes and assumed different roles and meanings, shaping social relations, favor economies, clandestine gains, and fishers’ outlooks in their wake. The sorting for fish astern turns into a ritual of sorts, which initiates seafood’s diverging paths. Of the content of each hauled-­in net, some two-­thirds is thrown overboard, returning to the seabed usually already dead or heavily impaired. The items in the remainder of the catch—­chosen to embark on their life as goods—­part ways with each other at that moment. Some items end up at the local fresh seafood market, while some are shipped to Barcelona, Paris, and Berlin, following the paths of a changing global culinary field (Bestor 2001). The lesser items are given as gifts to fishers’ friends, kin, and patrons in town. Finally, the most exquisite items (lobsters and exquisite or exceptionally large fish) have since the Sixties been carried personally by designated persons all the way to Italy’s leading political figures, as signs of the shipowners’ gratitude to their patrons and, hopefully, as reminders of the patrons’ obligation. In a way, this final group of exquisite items turned into scaling devices in the hands of shipowners. Through the act of giving them to people in high places, these rising shipowners projected patronage outwards from Mazara.

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In the process, they personified the politico-­economic interests and the southbound drive that conditioned the fleet’s operation. They increased their local political influence through the personal patron-­client relations they formed beyond the local political scene. These items sketch the web of patronage that grew together with the fleet’s expansion; a web that intensified the technological, politico-­economic, and spatial processes that conditioned this expansion. Patronage Reconsidered Patronage once occupied a distinct place in Mediterraneanist anthropology. Scholars used patronage to define the Mediterranean in opposition to an image of European modernity, as they have done with similar issues like local patriotism (or campanilismo; Palumbo 2003). In these cases, scholars examined the social structure of political action around the Mediterranean as an ancient obstacle in modernity’s path—­the spread and reach of state institutions and national hegemony—­or as reactions to these trends, which subject groups experienced as external infringements on their local autonomies. The opposition between Mediterranean and modern/European/”our” politics was explicitly phrased at the outset (Gellner 1977, 1; original italics): The kind of patronage which does concern us is a form of power. In part, it intrigues us because we disapprove of it. Why? It offends both our egalitarianism and our universalism. Patrons and clients are generally unequal. Patronage relations are highly specific. They fail to illustrate the principle that like cases should be treated alike.

Though Gellner’s words hardly represent the divergent understanding of patronage in the volume that his essay introduces, they crystallize the effects of Cold War international politics on academic interest—­interest that was mainly, but not only, British and American—­in the area (J. Schneider 2012). This interest in the Mediterranean weaved together several analytical currents that had little to do with the region itself. Some works analyzed dyadic patron-­ client relations as instrumental “lop-­sided friendship” between peasants and their patrons (Pitt-­Rivers 1971, 140; Wolf 1966). Others treated patronage structurally as a gap-­filling mediation between communal and national scales of politics (Silverman 1965). Finally, some works viewed patronage as a reciprocal and asymmetrical relation of influence, exchange, and protection, “a self-­perpetuating system of belief and action grounded in the society’s value system” (Boissevain 1966, 30).1

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The subsequent shift from studies of local moral codes and dyadic relations to national politics and party machineries ended patronage’s Mediterraneanist career. Once patronage was examined not as an antimodern and unequal dyadic relationship, but as the elementary form of culturally perceived networks of mediation, it was shown to stretch between regional and national bureaucracies and the rural communities under their jurisdiction (J. Schneider and Schneider 1976; Gribaudi 1980). In other words, unlike the honor and shame perspective, which persisted as a culturalist emblem of Mediterranean unity, patronage turned from a delineator of “nonmodern” places and peoples into a geographically unbound dimension of sociopolitical action (Gilmore 1982, 194). If the webs of relations that stretched from modernizing political projects and social forces to those places, people, and societies deemed Mediterranean, then both a Mediterranean modernity and a modern Mediterranean became possible. Perhaps because of that, anthropologists’ search for the Mediterranean continued elsewhere, and the analytical questions that had once gripped social anthropology of patronage remained unanswered (Waterbury 1977). Both these analytical questions and these points of agreement bear on the role of patronage and patron-­client relations aboard the Naumachos and in the Mazara fleet’s growth and operation. People in and around Mazara referred constantly to patronage and used its related terms to describe, promote, or decry their social situation. Talk of patrons and patronage, clients and clientelism, abounded in the town’s political history. Yet these terms’ meanings, as well as the strategies, practices, and the institutions they denoted, changed with the fleet’s growth and the town’s national and transnational trajectory. As this trajectory unfolds, we should bear in mind several distinctions. In what follows, patron-­client relations denote in their elementary form asymmetrical relations of enduring obligation between persons; they involve patrons’ discretionary access to resources or goods, which they control and dispense (or are asked to dispense) to their clients. The patron’s control does not have to cover all aspects of life; it can be limited to the realm of social life that pertains to the resources in question. Such relations can be promoted by either patron or client, and may be perceived and justified differently by the parties concerned. In either case, patronage does not exhaust social life as a system (Elyachar 2010). It is, rather, one of several possible idioms—­along with antagonistic class relations and familial reciprocity—­ that people invoke to frame action and shape social relations. Patronage in Mazara extended beyond its individual dyadic instances, as well as beyond any gap-­filling role that its patrons were supposed to perform

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in mediating between “local” and “national” scales. In political-­economic terms, patronage depended on patrons’ relative control over the resources in question, and on the stratification it perpetuated. In turn, both control and stratification depended on “the cementing of ties” between those patrons, who had “a common interest (and structural position) in excluding favour seekers and keeping them dependent, and incidentally making sure that everyone thinks in terms of ‘gaps’ which these big men so providentially fill” (Gilsenan 1977, 182; original italics). In other words, Mazara’s shipowners thus depended on their success in framing their evolving relations with their subordinates not as class antagonism but as interpersonal relations of asymmetrical obligation. This is not to suggest that shipowners’ control over the fleet depended on their discursive dexterity alone (Scott 1985, 40). Their project included the use or threat of force to secure others’ compliance. But even the use of force requires framing to attain its meaning and effect, to yield power. Patronage was only one of several frames available in the debates over the shape and direction of social relations at sea and in town. When framed as class relations, labor in the fleet stood the risk of appearing as exploitation or even slavery. Shipowners’ political-­economic ascendance depended on convincing their peers, their workers, and their surrounding community that they should understand social relations—­and the course that Mazara and its fleet were taking more broadly—­as patronage, and act accordingly. If the shipowners’ project initially framed patronage and class relations as mutually exclusive, in other cases and moments these frames appeared as complementary or overlapping. Fish—­the moveable emblems that signified these relations of enduring obligation and scaled their reach—­came from the sea, where trawlers dredged them before sending them on their diverging paths. The Diverging Paths of Dead Fish During one of the voyage’s first days, when we had just opened the net onboard and everyone prepared the aft deck for the next two hours or so of sorting work, I noticed that Montassar and Fathi—­the bosun’s two nephews—­ were rapidly going through the pile collecting fish of a kind that I did not recognize. These fish did not seem to belong to any of the species we have been sorting until that point. Some of them looked like baby sharks, while others were red thorny fish. Once we were all squatting and sorting, my hands reached for a fish that seemed to resemble the red thorny ones, so I asked Hajj where to put it. “These go to the bosun. Put it aside and Montassar will take it later.” Why? “He sells them for his own account [per conto suo].

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His nephews collect them for him. Here, you see this kind?” Hajj said while lifting a fish that resembled a sardine, only paler and with bulging eyes, “I collect these.” As it turned out, apart from the short list of commercial species (Mediterranean cod [merluzzo], red mullet [triglia], and the rock fish we had not yet encountered, as Hajj told me), many other species did not interest the big merchants but could still be of use to the fishers themselves, who used them as gifts, favors, exchangeable items, or commodities sold to local fishmongers in Mazara. Every fisher collected some of these species during the regular sorting procedure. After the sorting was over, each person would take the fish he had collected, wash and clean them (gutting, scaling, and skinning them, depending on the type), and pack them into the same trays that would go into the freezing chamber in the ship’s hold. Montassar picked the tiny squids (capucini), Fathi the red ugly fish (luvari or uvari), and Hajj the baby sharks (rugno and palumbo), attarine (“kittens”), and other types. Since I had shown interest in the mackerel and other bluefish we were tossing overboard (pesce povero, “poor fish”), Hajj asked me: Do you want to make your own cassetta of sauri [small tray of “mackerel lizard”]? I will make one for myself, but the others don’t like them. Don’t you want to prepare a cassetta for Mario [your landlord]? You can have about one carton for yourself, but a bit more if you want. Some fish, I am the only one who picks them. Others, it’s whoever sees them first.”

Hajj’s short explanation revealed the multiple logics of acquisition and justification at play in the sorting procedure. The core of this differentiation was an operation called nettare pesce [to clean fish], and the institution that regulated its functioning, a cooperativa: “There is the fish that goes to the ship, and there is the cooperative. It is a habitual name [nome di usanza] that refers to the fish that we are all collecting [and] that then go to all of us.” The term “cooperative” stems from the days in which such institutions actually existed in the fleet, when groups of fishers belonged to producers’ associations, usually established during the days of agrarian or otherwise pro-­labor reforms (Arrighi and Piselli 1987). Though these cooperatives had been established with Communists’ support of fishers’ self-­organization, many of them were later revealed as shipowners’ scams: they would get several of their employees to present themselves as a group, receive the practically free vessel under their employees’ names, and then sell it five years later, usually to themselves. Of those cooperatives that once existed, none has remained, but the the term

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Figure 12.  Hajj cleans fish for the cooperativa.

“cooperative” has been carried into the present, together with the doubts it once conjured about exploitation masquerading as reciprocal cooperation. The veiling effect of the term “cooperative” extended even further. The per­ sonal pronoun “us” in Hajj’s “all of us” denoted more than the nine persons onboard. It also included the owner, his son, and the ship’s usual merchant; a total of twelve persons (the owner was counted twice, as a member of the crew and as the owner). At the end of the voyage, the trays of a given category in the cooperativa cartons would be divided into twelve parts. If there were fewer than twelve trays of a given category, they would go to the capi servizi—­that is, to everybody but the deckhands: “For example, if there will be only four vaschette [two-­kilogram trays] of something, say baby squid, it will go only to the main people.” The cooperativa produced twelve cartons, each one marked with the name of its future recipient. These cartons grew fuller as the voyage proceeded, and the difference in content between the various cartons denoted the difference between these cartons’ recipients along two axes: their position in the ship’s operation onboard and ashore, and their personal specific relationship with the bosun, who controlled what actually went into each carton. The delicate balance between these two axes depended on the assumption that no one would compare his own carton with any other.

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Beyond the cooperativa, “cleaning fish” denoted another social labor of categorization, as Hajj explained: Now, there is the fish that shipowner wants, or the captain, but others have to prepare it for them, since they are not there to do the job. For example, crabs, which the owner wants. The bosun has his nephews pick them up and put them aside when we are working.

Hajj called this preparing of fish for one’s superiors being a ruffiano [sycophant], or practicing ruffinare [bootlicking] (not to be confused with the En­ glish word “ruffian,” meaning thug or scoundrel). This term often came up when anyone made accusatory characterizations of others onboard. Based on an assumption that fishers were honorable and independent individuals, any giving gesture toward one’s professional superiors was taken as obsequious flattery or self-­seeking servility. For example, a second mechanic who cooked his chief mechanic’s favorite dish would be a ruffiano; spending time in the bridge with the captain beyond what one’s duty called for was ruffinare. And since it was always assumed that hidden goals motivated any actions beyond the call of duty, any accusation of such sycophancy was accompanied by assumptions about the desired return the bootlicker probably had in mind: a bonus, a leave, a promotion, or just the overlooking of his vices or misdeeds. When I asked Hajj if he had ever spent much time in the bridge, he replied that he did not go upstairs “to bootlick.” I have a family! I have my respect to maintain. My father was a much respected man, and he had gentlemen as his friends. He chose his friends. Now, I can’t [choose my friends]. For me it’s enough that you don’t do anything bad to me and you are my friend. Even if you steal, but not from me, I don’t care. As long as you don’t hurt me.

In other words, to be called “ruffiano” was an accusation of misplaced clientelism. One was being accused of treating someone else as one’s patron when one should have treated them otherwise, mostly as a boss: a relationship of redistributive obligation rather than of disinterested exchange. This accusation in fact contained two distinct if connected blames: the dishonor of sycophancy and the mixing of categories between class relations and patronage. The two accusations were connected because gestures that otherwise would have seemed less dishonorable were flagged because their grounds were being questioned. Employees or laborers should not do to their capitalist owners what clients to do their patrons; when they do, they are bootlickers.

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Accusations of bootlicking did not entail a total objection to patronage in favor of class relations, but a distinction between good and bad clientelism; not a general abhorrence of asymmetrical, personalized redistribution, but of those concrete cases in which it was misplaced. Such accusations targeted not patronage in itself, but rather the relationship between the redistribution it shaped and class-­based exchange. This point applied more generally. The two institutionalized practices that governed the trajectories of the noncommercial catch—­“the cooperative” and “cleaning fish”—­encrypted the onboard framing of the relationship between class relations and its two alternatives. The “cooperative” emblematized a moment of exploitation as false cooperation, whereas “cleaning fish” marked the risk in mistaking exploitation as a client’s obligation. The fish that did not enter the list of cooperativa species were “up for grabs.” The decision as to which fish could be picked or “touched” was the bosun’s prerogative. This decision changed according to whether the owner was onboard or not. The lower the quality of the fish and the commercial interest in it, the greater the probability that it could be picked up by any of the deckhands to be sold in Mazara, stored for personal consumption, or used as a gift. “You pick these fish at the same time that you are sorting the pile. And you can prepare them for the freezer either when everyone has gone to sleep or while we are sorting everything else,” Hajj told me, looking to see if the owner was observing us. “For the attarine [“kittens,” so called for their big eyes], you only need to pluck off their heads and they are ready to go into the tray.” As soon as the sea creatures hit the deck in a pile, their paths started to diverge along a stratified set of categories. These categories distinguished between fish as they did between persons. Fish of higher value were reserved for purposes and persons of higher worth. That every fisher prepared his own packs was thus conditioned twice: by the identity of the fish and by the identity of the fisher. This was so, first, because the bosun could decide whether a kind of fish that someone else was collecting should go for the cooperative; and second, because the time each person took to clean and build his own personal collection could come either out of the joint effort astern or out of that person’s free time. Everyone had to choose between sacrificing their sleeping time for this side profit and trying to complete the cleaning and packing of their personal catch during the communal work—­that is, before the end of the sorting round. This decision depended, as did several others, on one’s position and role within the sorting operation, as well as on the bosun’s will and ability to police each fisher’s actions during the communal sorting periods. Hajj told me proudly that because he occupied the washing

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stand during the cleaning phase, he could quickly wash his own catch: “For the palumbi, I can skin and gut them in five minutes. I don’t smoke, so I can be in bed before the rest of you. The bigger ones go to the capopesca, but I can have these [small ones].” The two nephews often tried to do the same and prepare their collections while everyone was cleaning and packing the catch. When the bosun caught them he shouted at them, saying that he would send them back to their parents—­his siblings—­back in Tunisia. The Leviathan’s Belly This phase in the diverging pathways of the fish was still more or less overt. The next phase—­when after the night’s last net run, trays of frozen fish were packed in cartons of six trays each—­completed the onboard commodification and sealed each tray’s fate, this time more covertly than not. For example, on the night after Hajj explained to me the sorting system, there were four nets. The first sorting round was over before dinner. An hour later we were called astern again for another net. For the third night net four hours later Salvatore, who took the night mechanic shift, woke us up. The captain and the chief mechanic were asleep, and Zu Nino held the bridge shift. We had one person less for the whole operation, which accordingly took a bit longer. After sleeping an hour or so, we woke up at about four in the morning for the night’s last net. After we finished sorting and packing that catch, Hajj, Montassar, Fathi, and the bosun went forward and came back dressed for the stiva: the freezing chamber complex into which you descended from the hatch at the left of the entrance from the aft deck to the main cabin. As he was going down the ladder, Hajj handed me a sack with some panini and told me to warm them up in the oven: “That’s for breakfast. And remember, no tuna on mine!” I took the sack to the kitchen and started preparing breakfast, together with a plastic bag of frozen meat, which I had forgotten to take out after dinner. “Oh! Where is your head!? You are already tired? We are only two days at sea!” Ten minutes later, Montassar called me from the entrance to the freezer. As I came and stood above the entrance, I could see Hajj taking the wooden trays with the pairs of frozen trays out of the –­40 °C freezer and handing them over to the two cousins. They each in turn took each tray, put it in a thick nylon bag, and inserted it in one of the several open cartons they had between them. Each time a carton was filled with six trays, they handed it over to their uncle the bosun, who then closed the carton, sealed it, and wrote its contents on its back. My task, as Montassar explained to me, was to take the empty wooden trays that were piling up at the entrance to the stiva

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Figure 13.  Montassar (left) and Fathi (right) pack two-­kilogram trays into the cartons at the end of the dawn net while Hajj works inside the overnight –­40°C freezing chamber.

and organize them under the working table, just in front of the verricello on the aft deck. Then, once the packing was finished, I was supposed to go into the stiva and help in the stowing of all the cartons inside the –­20°C freezer in back, where they would remain until they were shipped to Mazara. This process took some time, and for an important reason. Since we had not fished exactly six trays of each commercial category that day, not all cartons were sealed at the end of that morning’s packing procedure. Those still open were put aside, where Hajj and the bosun were “organizing them,” while the rest of us went upstairs for breakfast. “That’s why I don’t want to be the cook,” Hajj told me after he and the bosun had joined us. The cartons I had seen open were the source of an income easily equal to a fisher’s part of the voyage’s total earning (nowadays, around five hundred euros a month). That is the case because there was no real control by either the owner or the captain of the exact number of two-­kilogram trays that did not go into sealed cartons every morning. In principle, most of these trays were supposed to go into cartons that would be sealed in the coming days for vending, once there were enough trays to complete them. In reality, however, only some of those freestanding frozen trays made their way to the cartons of the “cooperative.” Other trays went into the personal cartonsof the bosun and of those whom he wanted to please.

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Figure 14.  The bosun packs and seals twelve-­kilogram cartons inside the long-­term –­20°C freezing chamber.

The front freezer thus contained four kinds of cartons: sealed commercial ones, cooperative ones, personal ones, and temporarily unsealed ones. Yet only the bosun and Hajj knew exactly what went into these cartons at the moment of packing. The owner could in principle stand over his bosun’s head during the packing and sealing. He could also open the personal cartons during the voyage or at the end of it, to see whether a carton that was supposed to hold low-­quality fish actually contained large shrimp. But if such an audit were performed openly, it would probably end the relationship between the owner and his bosun (on either side, depending on the outcome of the audit). As Hajj explained to me, the owner could go to the stiva when everyone was asleep and check it out. He would have to open the closed cartons and check their contents. But owners assume that their fishers skim from the catch, just as fishers assume that their shipowners skim from the proceedings. Consequentially, each side’s task is not necessarily to catch the other red-­handed, but rather to estimate and improve the balance between what they gain by their own cheating and what they lose from the other side’s similar practice. Hajj’s insistence on safeguarding his role in the early morning boxing of the merchandise represented weathered fishers’ strategies in navigating a long-­standing predicament. In the fleet’s remunerating practice, the profits

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from a catch are divided three times a year among the crew according to the “parts” system (spartuta, alla parte): a simple fisher gets one part, the bosun and the mechanic each get one and-­a-­half to two parts, and the captain anything from two and-­a-­half to four parts. Now, any fisher can tell you that no shipowner discloses the true proceeds at the time of the spartuta. It has always been that way, they will say, referring to the years of the fleet’s expansion. Even though fishers knew at the time that they were not receiving a real and accurate portion of the profit, everyone was in favor of this kind of division of income. As the son of a famous captain who had worked as a leftist unionist and political organizer in the Seventies and Eighties explained it: At the time everyone used to steal [si fregavano tutti]. Nobody cared. A conduct that might have been ethically questionable [eticamente discutibile] was socially accepted. It was taken for granted that the owner would cheat [his fisher] about the proceeds,that the captain would be in some way involved in it with the owner, that the owner would give him a few more parts. It was taken for granted that the mechanic would necessarily take home a bit of fuel; to this day, motorists go home with a fuel drum. [It was taken for granted] that the cook, while going to do the shopping for the ship, would send home a van with provisions. Onboard it was taken for granted that fishers would steal from the catch secretly [si fregava alla mucciune]. But it is clear that in such a situation, those who had more would steal more. That’s why there was no control. The catch would be sold by the owner to the merchant and only they would know the prices. . . . These were years of growth and expectations. . . . often a family would have not one but two or three children working in the fleet from the age of twelve, thirteen years, first illegally and then with their logbook [libretto]. But the cake was large enough for everyone to be scammed by the owners and still get out of the poverty of the Fifties. At the time, we accepted it.

If the “parts system” codified the class-­relations-­based division of profit between owners and fishers in various roles, the “everybody steals” explanation complicated this framing of the social order. Everybody skimmed off the proceedings as they could, and the bigger they were, the more they could skim (cf. Scott 1985, 267). Since everybody assumed that this was the case, the parts system both overtly shaped social order and was implicitly understood to not exhaust the relations between owner and crew. Moreover, since the gradation of skimming paralleled the power hierarchy, the parts/ skimming practice added a redistributive layer to the owner-­crew exchange relationship. Fishers explained and really justified this general conduct by

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saying that every owner needed “to have money in his pocket,” for which he needed to skim from the proceedings and therefore to lie to the crew on a regular basis. But why did owners need that “money in pocket”? The answer to this question goes to the heart of labor relations in the fleet. Perhaps more importantly, it connects these relations and the way they are framed to the fleet’s southward expansion and the tensions it triggered. Since the mid-­1950s, North African postcolonial states began to assert their sovereignty and counteract Mazarese transgressions. Owners goaded their captains to fish where the catch was more abundant, and captains who went to fish a mucciune—­that is, in the territorial and economic waters of other coun­tries—­received bonuses for their successful transgressions. Captains thus gained threefold from fishing “inside the zone”: the catch would be larger, their part of the profit would increase, and a bonus was also a possibility. In Mazara, the habit of fishing in Tunisian waters is still called “stealing fish [rubare pesce].” The fleet’s penchant for the North African fishing banks, however, carried its risks. Some trawlers that went “stealing fish” ended up being seized by North African coast guards. Specifically after Tunisian independence in 1956, Tunisian patrol vessels started to enforce the country’s sovereignty in its territorial waters, as well as off its southeastern coast, where already in 1951 the country’s fishing zone had been extended up to the contiguous fifty-­meter depth line (Messina 1994, 49). This decision incorporated vast areas east of the Tunisian coastline, between La Chebba and the Libyan-­ Tunisian border into the exclusively Tunisian fishing zone. In town, as well as in newspapers, this recurring scene is known as the Fish War (la Guerra del Pesce).” As the Sicilian fleet grew larger, stronger, and its reach extended further south, the seizures of Mazarese trawlers intensified, thus begetting a parallel intensification of the connections between politics, clientelism, and the fleet’s spatially expansive labor process. The owners’ justification for cheating their crewmembers came, in other words, from the fleet’s southbound expansion. The expansion brought about occasional seizures, which required owners to pay fines or pay off officials in Italy or Tunisia for the release of their trawlers. People in the fleet used owners’ need to procure money for this purpose to explain why owners ”stole” from their crewmembers and why the latter did their best to return the favor. It was time for breakfast, so Hajj and I had some time to talk before we had to head back to our bunks for the hour or so until the next sorting round. Hajj asked me if I had put his panino next to his bunk, and after learning that I had done so, he went there. I handed Montassar, Fathi, and the capopesca their panini, and joined Hajj. He then resumed the story of

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the diverging paths of our frozen dead fish. “Thirty years ago, when we were new in Mazara, that’s how we used to make friends. You would take the frozen fish you had collected and give a tray here, a tray there: to the barman at the café, to your landlord, to a couple of neighbors.” The Tunisians who had come to work in the fleet had learned to how “make friends” from the Sicilian fishers who, as the fleet grew larger and the voyages longer, needed to maintain previously quotidian relationships by transforming them into monthly gestures of generosity—­their generosity, that is. Hajj continued, “Don’t you want to make Mario [your landlord] happy? He would gladly take some trays from you. But I am not sure he would be happy to take the pesce povero [“poor” fish, mainly mackerel]. This you should keep for yourself. Now we don’t need to make friends any more. We are older and we have our families with us. Five, six trays—­sure, always—­but the rest I sell. I can get five euros for a tray of clean attarine. You will not find them in the supermarket, but there are some people in Mazara who like them more than red mullet! I love them. Besides, if I leave two, three cartons of fish at home before I go out to sea for a month, my wife does not have to spend money on buying meat. And I am ‘a small fish.’ You should see how many cartons the bosun takes with him after a month at sea. He probably makes more money than the owner. And that’s before the money he gets from the fish they sell in Lampedusa behind the owner’s back.” “Which fish?” “You will see. That’s why we are always the first in Lampedusa when there is bad weather. The captain goes in first so that we will be closest to the pier, and they sell fresh fish for cash. They have an arrangement with a fishmonger there. The captain has this organized with the bosun and the chief mechanic. That’s why they keep ‘bootlicking’ him.” Lampedusa On our first Saturday at sea, almost a week after our departure from Mazara, Zu Nino did not come astern to sort fish with us. Hajj said that he was probably tired from taking the night shift at the bridge, but he also said that Zu Nino had health problems and would not keep up the daily routine for long. “I don’t have any more air,” Hajj added, meaning that he was suffocating. “I can’t do it anymore. This work is not for a man.” Before dinner the next day, the net we hauled in was almost empty, and the bosun turned to look at the captain on the balcony, whom we could not see. After they discussed something, probably the scant net, the bosun told us to move the net aside and start sorting the fish. The ship’s speed went to maximum and we seemed

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to be going south. Once the net was sorted and dinner consumed, the ship’s speed dropped again, and we hauled out the net for another run. Hajj told me that we were getting closer to Lampedusa. The next net, around midnight, was also meager. The wind was picking up and the sea became quite agitated. Once again we did not haul the net out and just stashed it out of our way before starting to sort the catch, which took us only an hour or so. When I went to make coffee for everyone, Salvatore, the second mechanic, who was operating the verricello, said to me, “Andiamo in banco [We are going to the fish banks].” I did not know then what banco meant, and had not noticed it before he told me, but the ship was indeed going full speed toward Lampedusa, with the two steel spreaders tied and banging against the ship’s hull. There was a tone of certainty in his voice, which is why I was surprised when Hajj said to me several minutes later when I came back astern with the coffee: “Maybe, maybe, we are going to Lampedusa. Today is Sunday. Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, we go to Lampedusa.” I told him that Salvatore had just told me differently, and he explained to me that we would know who was right according to whether or not we would change the net gear. What did that mean? “There is the net for the depth [del fondo] and there is another net for the bank [del banco]. You will see.” In the end, neither explanation was right. When we were done with the sorting, the ship’s speed dropped, and I saw that we were really close to the island. I saw that the ship’s two vertical red lights were on, a sign I recognized to mean that we were “out of control,” or adrift. I imagined that meant that we were about to pass the night adrift next to the island. When I took my phone to the bridge to call my parents, Montassar came and told me that we had to work. When I came astern, Hajj, the bosun, and his two cousins were all cleaning the net from the algae and dead fish parts. I asked Hajj if we were changing the net. He told me that because of the bad weather, we would pass the whole night hiding behind the island. “Tonight you have all night to write!” he said. Later in the cabin I asked him why the question of what was going on that night was a matter of speculation. Why was it a secret? He replied that everything on board was a secret: “The only thing a deckhand knows is that when they wake him up for sorting he goes there, and when they call him for a meal he eats.” That was all. The chief mechanic, Paolo, who was still around when I went to prepare the next day’s lunch, had more to say about this. The way he explained it, the conditions of life onboard—­ with the storms and the constant uncertainties—­made it futile to tell the crew what was about to happen, because most of the time it would never end up happening. There was, however, one person besides the captain and the owner who did know what was going on. After every net opened on deck,

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Figure 15.  The captain, on the upper deck, watches Montassar prepare the trawling gear on the aft deck below.

the captain would stand on the terrace overlooking the aft deck and give his orders to the bosun. This communication of gestures escaped the rest of us, because we could not see the captain from where we stood. In a way similar to the power relations on the quarterdeck onboard British Navy ships like the Bounty, the power relations on board the Naumachos were performed through the contradistinction between the upper deck, from which the captain governed the ship, and the working deck below it. But here the spatial shaping of authority did not unfold through the “theatre of power” of the quarterdeck (Dening 1992, 19). Here the captain’s power became apparent because its exercise was never disclosed to the deckhands. We assumed that some decision was being taken, but no exhibition of either the decision or the orders it entailed was revealed until we would be called to follow them. “Ignorance, like knowledge, has a political geography” (Proctor 2008, 6). To that I would add that it has a spatial sociology rather than a strictly geographical one (Simmel 1906; Piliavsky 2011).The chief mechanic and the bosun frequented the bridge often enough to get clues as to what was going to happen, but in sharing this information with us, they would have given away their relative advantage in the structure of ignorance that both represented onboard power relations and enforced them. In this play of secrecy and ignorance, Lampedusa played an important

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role. Everyone knew that every week or so we were supposed to enter the island’s harbor to send the cartons of product back to Mazara, but no one knew exactly when. When the weekend was drawing near, those among us who did not know when we would enter the island were busy speculating about it. Entering the port would mean a telephone call, a short walk on the stable pier, or even a hot drink from the vending machines on the quay. Most of all, going to Lampedusa was the only periodic break from the endless sorting of the catch, if only for several hours. On Sunday we entered the port of  Lampedusa. I received the good news when we were sorting the catch. The news, however, seemed to make people more contemplative about their predicaments. The bosun told me that he would disembark (sbarcare) once we got to port: “I can’t take it anymore, I am fed up.” I was not sure why he was telling me that, or how serious he was, but later, when he was still with us as we left the island, I concluded that he had been just talking. We entered port immediately after sorting the catch. When the ship was only a mile or so from the port, we suddenly noticed the change in speed and in scenery. Even the captain came to help astern, shouting “ Amonin’! [Let’s go!]” Once we were next to the pier, we ran around to tie the ship. Then the refrigerating truck parked alongside the ship, and we began moving the cartons from the ship’s hold to the truck. I was standing on the pier next to the opening in the ship’s port side. Montassar lifted the cartons of frozen seafood to the deck and handed them over to Fathi, who passed them over to me, and I put them on the truck. Since I was standing on the pier, I was able to follow the interaction between the captain, the owner, and the truck driver. Zu Nino made sure that the driver knew exactly which cartons were ours, and sent the bosun to count the cartons in the truck. After some cartons were already in the truck, Zu Nino discovered that no one was writing down which cartons had already been passed. He sent me to read the writing on each of the cartons to him, but then the list he had did not fit the one Paolo was making onboard. The captain then took over the counting, and by the time we finished loading the truck, the cartons had been counted four times. At the end there was only one open carton on the pier. Zu Nino, who was standing onboard close to the pier, told the driver to take it, which probably meant he could keep it. The driver thanked him and turned slightly to look at the bridge. The captain, who was standing practically right above the owner—­his brother-­in-­law—­was talking to the driver about something the driver was supposed to hand over to the captain; all that in hand gestures and a low voice, so that Zu Nino who was standing right beneath him, would not hear it. That night, when we were heading out to sea, Hajj told me that the driver was the one buying fish from the captain “a mucciune [under the table,

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in a hidden way]” every time they entered Lampedusa without the owner. As we were leaving Lampedusa, Hajj asked me how I was doing. I replied that it was very hard. He told me that I should try to become the ship’s night watch, but that I should take care, since the owner and captain were “exploiters” and would probably want me to work as both night watch and cook. An intricate biographical road map thus determined the careers that various sea creatures pursued from the moment they landed on deck. On board, this road map was determined by various conditions along the way: seafood prices in Milan and Rome, the owner’s presence onboard as well as his vigilance, formal freezing and packing procedures and the informal ways to contravene and benefit from them, the bosun’s willingness to allow one of us to pick a certain species for himself (always calculated against what profit either he or the ship could make out of the same fish), the economy of favors and bootlicking that determined who prepared which special trays of fish for whom, and one’s willingness or ability to take ten minutes out of the hour or so one had to sleep before everyone was awakened for the next net run. That bluefish of most kinds and sizes (sardines, mackerels, and the like) could not be given as gifts in Mazara clarified something about what the growth of the town’s trawling fleet since the late Fifties had done to local taste distinctions. Fresh sardines, for example, are considered a delicacy in adjacent towns like Sciacca and Trapani. But though many Mazarese consume such bluefish for their low price, and would admit that they are delicious when fried, stuffed, or grilled, depending on the season, they do not consider them precious seafood. When gift-­giving is the mode of circulation or festivity the mode of consumption, Mazarese, conspicuous consumers as they are, prefer to stick to seafood species more highly considered in town: red shrimp, red mullet, or prawns, and the larger the better. All three of those species became available for fishing, transporting, and mass consumption only with the advent since the Fifties of motorized trawling, onboard refrigeration, and chemical preservation (the “powder” we sprayed on the merchandise). Consequently, people from adjacent towns do not share the hierarchy of taste that Mazarese so vehemently espouse. But since Mazarese trawlers comprise the majority of fishing vessels in the channel, if you are a bluefish swimming there, chances are that you will be scooped by a Mazarese trawling net, hauled onboard and, after dying on deck, be tossed overboard. The lion’s share of the catch, sold in a telephone call by the owner to the merchant while the ship was still at sea, would be then destined for Barcelona, Frankfurt, or Milan (the three end destinations Mazarese kept mentioning). The rest of the fish, once stored in our personal cartons, would travel

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Figure 16.  Montassar (on the upper bunk) and Fathi in the deckhands’ cabin

according to fishers’ personal familial or social obligations, the favors they owed or needed to reciprocate, and the prices local fishmongers would pay for the varied collections of trays one brought back from sea. “Did you notice that many Mazaresi have a big ice-­cream freezer at home?” Hajj said. “Mario has one. I have seen him organizing it many times. It’s like their fish bank [the financial institution, not the seabed]. That way, the gifts they get in Sep­ tember they can cook for Christmas. September is when we catch nice big red shrimp, and Mazaresi love eating them for Christmas. They collect them for weddings too.” Montassar, who entered the cabin while Hajj was talking, seemed to follow our conversation, which took place partly in Tunisian and partly in Sicilian. In acknowledging this, Hajj asked him if he was engaged to be married. Montassar, who did not speak Sicilian, or preferred to be so taken, responded: “Ma zilt. Eh, diffiscile diffiscile”—­thus starting in Tunisian (“I haven’t yet [been engaged]”) and switching to his imitation of how Mazaresi spoke (“It’s hard, it’s hard”). Perhaps to assuage Montassar’s sorrows, Hajj told us the story about how his friend from the naval academy in Tunisia had found a wife after working in Mazara for several years: Until then he had been against marriage, but then he changed his mind. Five years earlier his sister had suggested a girl to him and he had said no since

Fish and Bait  /  111 he had not even seen her [gesturing to the face and the body but, I thought, denoting more than that]. Then he decided to marry and ended up marrying the [girl’s] sister. That’s destiny. It’s hard to be a mariner. We are not there, and people don’t know we exist. The sea: you who go in it are absent, and when you go out you are reborn.

Hajj then said I should write down that last phrase, and that it was a popular one. What did it mean? “That when you go to sea you are as if you did not exist, and when you come back it is as if you were reborn.” But, I asked him, the words for going in and out were reversed, no? It said that when you went inside you became absent, not when you went out to sea. Both in Tunisian and in Sicilian, the verb seafarers used for going to fish was “to go out.” “That’s the way the phrase goes,” said Hajj. “We go in the sea; that’s where we pass our lives.” The saying was used in various contexts, usually when landlubbers warned their interlocutors of the dangers in going to sea. As such, it represented the view of the sea from the social ambience along its shores, making seagoing into a rite of passage. On the lips of a fisher, it thus encapsulated his predicament in the onshore social world as the one who lived where most people did not habitually enter. For the Tunisian fishers who worked in Sicily, the phrase became doubly true: they left Tunisia through the channel to work in Sicily, and then continuously left Sicily to work in the same channel. Lacking the basic social conditions of portside matrimonial or other strategies, they had to maintain their social relations with periodic trays of frozen fish. For other, more complicated tasks, they depended on the advice, connections, and willingness of their landed kin or friends. But in the choice of directional verbs it contained, this phrase denoted more than that predicament. It was as if in saying that they went in and out of the sea, rather than into the port and its social world, they upheld their spatiosocial distance, perhaps in a combination of pride and sadness. “Remind me to go to the Bar Rivoli, on the road to the new port, when we return to Mazara,” Hajj told me. I used to go there all the time when I was younger and single. The bar owner comes from a family that came back from Tunisia, and one of his sons is a great friend of mine. I don’t go there anymore because he always gives me coffee for free, and then I need to bring him fish the next day. They say in Mazara: ‘He who treats you nicely, bring him fish!’ It’s not as if we Tunisians have other things to give them. I will take you there to meet him. But the first time we go, I will not tell him that you are a researcher, because then he would think that I came only because of you.

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Hajj then went to sleep, saying that we shouldn’t talk too much in our cabin, “because the owner is asleep in the next cabin, and the noise can wake him up.”

Fish for Friends “Not Even Saints Can Resist a Two-­Kilogram Lobster” The diverging paths of seafood shaped social relations and seafarers’ outlooks beyond the decks of the Naumachos. Among the fleet’s various types of catch, exquisite items served as portable emblems of the obligation that patron-­client relations entailed. By following the paths of these fish from Mazara to Palermo and Rome, we will see how shipowners used them as devices to scale up their interpersonal relations. The tracks of these fish chart the effects of the fleet’s expansion on Mazarese history, as well as on the formation of the central Mediterranean as a transnational constellation. During the years of the fleet’s growth, rising shipowners used such exquisite fish to mark, forge, and reinforce bonds of obligation with rising politicians through the fruits of their investment and the signs of their unique success. Perhaps the most famous example of such a relationship between a rising politician and a rising shipowner is of Aristide Gunnella and Ignazio Giacalone. Gunnella, of Mazarese origins, has been a national politician, whose stellar career paralleled that of the rapid growth of the Mazara fleet. In the early Sixties, Gunnella began an administrative and political career in which he would hold several undersecretary positions and become the minister (without portfolio) of regional affairs in several Christian Democratic (DC) national governments in the turbulent late Seventies. Giacalone is the shipowner who joined the Italian Republican Party (PRI) in the Sixties—­lu cumminnaturi, or “the man of the sea.” Both Giacalone and Gunnella rose to power and prominence from the Sixties to the Eighties. Their relationship, as well as that between them and more prominent figures, needed constant maintenance. As they rose to prominence, this maintenance work created wealth but also required attention they could no longer afford. Thus there arose a social category: the politician’s referente, or “man in town.” Gunnella’s “man in town” was Giuseppe Ferro, the administrative secretary of the PRI section in Mazara, who was said to be connected to Gunnella in “unshakable bonds of friendship.”2 As one ex-­party functionary of the PRI told me: “Ferro was a person who could neither read nor write. But he could “wrap things up.” He was Gunnella’s right hand. He satisfied the needs, let’s say, the various needs that a member of parliament may have—­OK? I don’t know how

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to make you understand. For example, you need to send Christmas gifts to Rome, to Andreotti, Craxi, Forlani [ex-­prime ministers and holders of various ministerial positions from the DC and PRI] . . . fish, things. So he would be responsible for that. He would go to Rome, give [the gifts] personally; he was the regional factotum [do-­all].” “So he was no organizer?” “Why, he was a perfect organizer! He could collect votes, he knew how to express himself, but personally, he could not expose himself politically . . . His son-­in-­law was the mayor later. They killed him. I am not sure why.” “And the politicians would visit Mazara?” “Yes, everyone came regularly to Mazara. Not only politicians. Generals, admirals . . .” “To do what?” “First, you have to know this: I can assert with mathematical certainty that not even saints can resist a two-­kilogram lobster [non c’è santo che tenga].” At that point in our discussion, I released a short laugh, because I appreciated the power of the image rather than out of amusement. My laughter perplexed the retired functionary: “This makes you laugh? There’s nothing to laugh about! When these people would go home with this exquisite fish that came from Mazara, four-­ kilogram lobsters, five-­kilogram gilthead bream . . . that were sent to Rome still fresh—­in twelve hours!—­these people would lose their senses. This is the true sign of power! “Having at one’s disposal this type of delicacies, which, naturally, they would not eat by themselves. Because with this thing in their hands, okay, they would invite their friends to show off that they were powerful because they could afford these delicacies. “ A four kilogram bream? ! These fish are exceptionally beautiful and exceptionally delicious! These fish can’t land on the table of just anyone. I can’t buy such a fish, because at the moment that it is caught, it is already assigned. . . . This may seem paradoxical to you, but a shipowner told me once: ‘We, with our fish, can corrupt whomever we want in Italy, from the President of the Republic to the last post office employee in town.’  ” Similar stories circulate in Mazara about other prominent shipowners. A shipowner’s factotum would be ready to pick up the occasional exquisite item from the port, take it with him on the next Palermo-­Rome flight, and hand it personally to the person in question. Lobsters and other seafood delicacies thus became operational emblems of the connections they reinforced each time they passed hands. As charged gifts, these “exquisite delicacies” did

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not only entail an obligation—­though such reciprocity was always present; hence the mention of the ability to “corrupt” anyone in Italy. Rather, their consumption by the politician in question was to be a conspicuous one, in a way that indexed to the politician’s friends the connections that had provided him with these emblems. Much like Mwuali and Soulava of the Kula ring of the western Pacific, these objects were emblems of their context, not monetary abstractions from it (Munn 1986). Many people in Mazara give fish as gifts. The specific types of fish they give, their intended recipients, and the relationships that the gifts initiate or maintain vary significantly, and in ways that are related to each other. While all forms of fish-­gifting project reciprocity onto the intended relationship, some of them also signify a dimension of redistribution and its related idiom: patronage. Each act of giving differently emblematized this combination of reciprocal shared interest and redistributive asymmetry. The fish that Hajj and his fellow Tunisian migrant workers learned how to give “to make friends” were offered as favors in return for others along a relatively bounded, or leveled social hierarchy, which the idiom of reciprocity could encompass. In contrast to the fish that fishers gave as gifts upon their return to Mazara, the lobsters and other delicacies that shipowners sent to Rome and Palermo climbed up a much steeper social hierarchy. In the process, these items emblematized the redistributive dimensions of relationships, obligations, and expectations. Whenever the giving of these items succeeded (and we should not assume that it always did), they served their givers in scaling up their operation and their reach. “Bringing Good and Bad Weather”: Mazara and the PRI in the Sixties The relationship between fleet’s expansive labor process and social relations distinguished the patronage between people like Gunnella and Giacalone from other forms of patronage where the patron was a politician and the client an industrialist. First, in this relationship the client dealt in expansive navigation. Second, the client often turned from a fisher to a shipowner through his relationship with the patron. Finally, the political patron’s rise to power occurred thanks to connections with shipowners, whom he helped to become so. In other words, the specific craft of the industrial client in ques­ tion spun the patron-­client relation in a unique way: toward increased engagement with the sea’s southern shore. The elementary building block of such interpersonal connections bound a rising politician in search of votes and clout to a fisher or a shipowner in search of funding. Such patron-­client relations informed the shape the

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Mazara fleet took in its initial phases. The first phase of the fleet’s expansion harnessed industrial development funding into the expansion of the fleet and the size of its vessels. After World War II, and especially since the Sixties, the Mazara fleet saw increasing funding from the regional government of Sicily, which gained its own autonomy in 1946 and subsequently underwent massive agrarian reforms and governmental intervention through the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno.3 The political-­economic shape of development was affected by political coalitions in Palermo, which were often formed across national party lines. In this practice, known as Milazzismo,4 Sicilian politicians and other “mediator-­entrepreneurs” were able to spread their connections, investments, and influence across political lines and administrative levels, interlacing electoral politics, state funds, business ventures, and various forms of power.5 In other words, Milazzismo gave local politicians and businesspersons a political-­economic autonomy both from national agendas and from the strictly electoral rules of the political game. This autonomy in turn made la regione Siciliana and its financing institutions into major sites for the circular transformations between electoral power, interpersonal connections, state funding, and profits (Gribaudi 1980, 99). Shipowners, who enjoyed the financial fruits of this patronage, promoted it in town as a morally sound and crucial basis for the future of the fleet and the town. Yet not everyone shared this positive moral view of patronage. In 1976, one of the minority reports in the Anti-­Mafia Commission focused exactly on this kind of connection between shipowners and political power (Niccolai 1972, 1099): Every aspect of Sicilian life is mercilessly controlled. Mazara del Vallo: everything is under control: fish, fuel, water, the funding from the Cassa del Mezzogiorno [sic], the permissions to fish in Tunisian [territorial] waters, the ransom [for the release] of seized fishing vessels [by Tunisia]. In Mazara del Vallo it’s not the state that commands, but the Association of Free Shipowners. It brings good and bad weather. In Mafia style [Fa il bello e il cattivo tempo. Mafiosamente].

This condemnation of local politics in Mazara del Vallo was directed at three related elements: the Mazarese branch of the PRI, Aristide Gunnella, and the Association of Free Fishing Shipowners (ALAP), which under Ignazio Giacalone was said to “make the still waters move.”6 The PRI provided the electoral home and clearinghouse for the relations between people like Gunnella and Giacalone. Gunnella, whose name decorates the title of the minority report section in which Mazara is mentioned:

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“L’Ente Minario [Siciliano, EMS] e Aristide Gunnella,” was not the only politician to channel funds and connections to Mazara after Operazione Milazzo. Nor was he the sole mediator between local fisheries development and regional and national politics. Yet the kind of connections he helped forge were both of extreme local importance and generally instructive for our story. Beyond his position at the nodal public institutions and companies, Gunnella’s political power was based on his ability to “bring in” votes in Sicily. This national reputation won him the nicknames “the pupil of La Malfa” (Ugo La Malfa being the leader of the PRI in those years; Cavallaro 1993), the “PRI viceroy,” “ras” (a Sicilian appropriation of the Arabic word for “head,” used to mean “chief”  ’),” “padre padrone,” and “king of the republicans in Sicily.” Over the years, various public accusations of Mafia collusion were directed at Gunnella, culminating in his interrogation by the Commissione Antimafia in March 1971, which produced the “good and bad weather” report quoted above.7 Gunnella maintained clients in several provinces in western Sicily.8 In Mazara he is known as the man responsible for the first phase of the connection between shipowners and politicians, which would become so crucial in the town’s history. The third target of the “good and bad weather” report in Mazara was the Association of Free Fishing Shipowners. The association’s president was Ignazio Giacalone, whose son is Gunnella’s godson (Borsellino 1991, 3). The relationship between Giacalone and Gunnella is one of the most famous examples of patron-­client relations in town. Such relations turned fishers—­ some, but not all—­into shipowners, and secured local support for aspiring politicians in their rise to power at the regional and national levels. It was, however, the relationship that formed its elements, rather than vice versa. Many of the people who received funding to build or buy trawlers would never have had the economic capacity to do so by themselves. As one retired captain explained it: Shipowners have never risked anything of their own, zero. They were given ships [and it was] always through public funding. And if 60 percent, 70 percent of the sum was a grant, the remainder was a loan that was very comfortably spread. . . . Beyond that, the [construction] projects were exaggerated. If you needed, let’s say, a million lire to build your ship, you would ask for 1,200, 1,300, and the rest you would use to pay for the costs they [the regional government] wouldn’t fund.

In return for funding, new or old shipowners needed to give their and their relatives’ votes to the politicians who had facilitated the funding. Shipown-

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ers would also organize the comizi (election rallies) in town, bring the fish for the memorable barbecues in these comizi, and give their general and unlimited disponibilità (availability, willingness to help). Because of its paradigmatic status, the connection between Gunnella and Giacalone furnishes many stories in town, which vary in their moral judgment according to the political and personal affiliation of the narrator. A retired politics aficionado who, though he never owned a ship, enjoyed some political clout in the early days of the fleet, told me this story: “At the time, with the phase of Gunnella who got Ugo La Malfa elected with our help, Ignazio the Greek was zero. He was nothing.” “But how does one do it?” “Nothing he was! Although, through this politics, he shaped himself, practically, they got eight seats . . . [and] Ignazio becomes a certain force. [My friend and I] we were a force as well.” “Aristide Gunnella, what did he do?” “Gunnella? When this poor fellow used to send money, this poor thing, through Gunnella they built the factories in Mazara Due [the industrial quarter on the outer side of the state road], factories of fish, which were then closed.” “Why?” “Because it was a regional thing. The region [of Sicily] didn’t want them anymore. And they were shut down.” In this narrative, the shipowner comes across as a parasite on the connection between the important politician and “the people”: local organizers help politicians get elected; the latter, bound by their sense of obligation, facilitate local development. The town’s political allegiance is returned through redistributive favor; at the end the involved organizers rise politically and economically, and the plants close down. A seasoned ex-­communist intellectual had a more detailed and personal, if apologetic, version of the story: “Gunnella . . . is the viceroy of Sicily for the PRI . . . and meanwhile the PRI around Palermo and Trapani has a strong electoral pool.” “How come?” “Clientelism. Gunnella, who is an extremely intelligent person [ . . . ] my old friend from the [Communist] party accused the PSI of not accepting Gunnella the father. That way, Aristide would have been born a socialist. I have great esteem for the son [Aristide. . . . He] went into politics and became the pupil of La Malfa. La Malfa had a half-­witted son, Giorgio, half idiot. Gunnella, who became the father’s pupil, used to go to their house a lot, and Giorgetto was there, a youngster, and he began to be jealous because he saw

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that Ugo had this predilection toward Aristide. He felt neglected, not as a son but as a political entity. And this jealousy turned into hatred. [ . . . ] Gunnella even ended up in jail. He did several months in jail for questions of . . . in Sicily many political people sooner or later enter in contact . . . in connection with a mafioso element.” “What does it mean? How does one do it?” “A politician in Sicily manages power.” “Every politician manages power.” “But in Sicily every politician manages power in a manner different than that of, from what I know of it, an American or English [politician]. He manages it through favoritisms, friendships [ . . . ] some [people] become illicit collaborators with the Mafia, and Gunnella at a certain point was accused of being connected to the Mafia. He underwent several trials, et cetera, but as far as I know, he came out of it acquitted, owing to insufficiency of I don’t know what. When the mother was still alive, he would come every once in a while to Mazara. Meanwhile, the PRI would keep tipping the balance [in the political stalemate between left and right, “è diventato l’ago della bilancia”]. It gave the DC the majority [ . . . ]. “Gunnella told me: ‘  There are thirteen of us who run the country, thirteen people between members of the house and senators.’ And Gunnella was the one who practically managed all the state firms, everything. [. . .] What Mazara became for him, it’s like if I were to have a little lot of land in Umbria. He managed all the power from Palermo. There was a pool of votes—­twenty, thirty thousand votes.” Whether narrators lament the overly important role of shipowners in a town’s growth, or lament the “unfortunate necessities” of Sicilian politicians, their interpretation of the role of patronage remains the same. From its earliest phases, the growth of Mazara and its fleet was conditioned by the kind of political-­economic network at the nodes of which people like Gunnella and Ignazio Giacalone operated. They and their like wove this web with fish. In some cases, the relationship between a shipowner and rising politician and a prominent politician became yet more complex by kinship and godparenthood. The most famous example among the shipowners was, however, Francesco Paolo Lisma, who affiliated himself with the DC. When he had his firstborn son, he chose as the newborn’s godfather one of the leaders of the DC in the province of Trapani. The owner’s second son was baptized by Giulio Andreotti (several times Italy’s prime minister, and the main figure in the country’s politics in the second half of the twentieth century) during the latter’s political ascent. As one retired local politician put it: “Lisma, when he had his first stroke, after only eight hours Andreotti

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came with a helicopter to visit [him]. He [Lisma] was still in the hospital, and that one [Andreotti] grabbed a helicopter in Rome and brought himself directly to Mazara. Who is this person—­Lisma?! Practically, Lisma used to send all those things to Rome and then he had all the doors open for whatever [he needed]. Funding. . . .” “So the connection was: ‘I send you fish and you love me back?’ ” “Yes, exactly.” In another case, when the head of the DC in Palermo married off his daughter in the early Seventies, another shipowner from town was reported to have told him, “Ci penso io [I will take care of it],” after which he personally catered the whole wedding with fresh, exquisite seafood. “I know, because I loaded the trucks here and unloaded them in the guy’s villa!” a Mazarese who used to work for the shipowner told me. “You had in that truck tray after tray of red shrimp the size of your palms!” The most distinguished route a fish or crustacean from the bottom of the Mediterranean could make would bring it to the doorsteps and kitchens of Italy’s eminent persons. By sending it, the shipowner in question would not so much create a redistributive relationship as reinforce it. Once communally consumed, the fish would turn into an emblem of the host’s power. The power signified did not entail one’s ministerial position or abstract electoral success. Seafood—­offered and consumed—­indexed the kind of trawler that had caught it, the expanding zone of these trawlers’ fleet, the funds channeled to construct these trawlers, and the personal relationships and electoral potential that was forged through that channeling act. Mazarese shipowners are not the only entrepreneurs in Sicily, Italy, or the entire world who used emblems of their specific lines of work to befriend and oblige their patrons or the powers that be. This book is a history neither of post–­World War II Sicilian clientelism nor of fishing per se, but of the maritime constellation in which both played key roles. To see exactly how connections like those between Gunnella and Giacalone or between Lisma and Andreotti accelerated the fleet’s growth, shaped local politics, and conditioned the town’s fate, we need to see when and how shipowners and Mazarese politicians turned to their connections in Rome and Palermo. In short, we need to turn to the Fish War. The Use of Patrons during the Fish War The elementary event of what was known as the Fish War unfolded in the aftermath of a seizure or shooting at sea. Once Tunisia became independent of France in 1956, its coast guard began to enforce its maritime sovereignty

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by chasing, seizing, and occasionally shooting at Mazarese trawlers fishing in Tunisian territorial waters. Although Mazarese fishers themselves call this practice “stealing fish [rubare pesce],” the official Mazarese position denied the accusations of territorial infringement and claimed that such seizures were “acts of [Tunisian] piracy . . . in international waters.”9 The disputes between Mazarese ships and Tunisia as well as other North African countries, have become known as the Fish War [Guerra del Pesce], which continued throughout the Eighties and is still mentioned in the sporadic seizures that take place to this day.10 These decades of clashes at sea were punctuated by the signing and expiring of bilateral fishing agreements between Italy and Tunisia.11 But the Fish War’s most intense period was from the Seventies to the Eighties, during which time nearly 450 Mazaresi trawlers were seized, spending on average fifty days in custody. Each seizure triggered a chain of actions in Mazara, and from it to Palermo and Rome. Usually, the Capitaneria di Porto would receive a notification about the seizure and notify the owners of the trawlers in question, as well as any number of political and/or officials in town. At the same time, a telegram would be issued from the Capitaneria to the general staff of the Italian navy; to the ministers of the merchant fleet, of foreign affairs, and of defense; and, in apposite cases, to the prime minister. After having learned that his ship had been seized, the shipowner would call “his politician,” often the same one who had helped him fund the building or buying of the ship, and for whom he had promised to help with votes come election day. The bigger the shipowner or the more ships seized at the same time, the wider and faster the mobilization project that the political forces in town initiated. In the words of one octogenarian boat owner: When at the time a seizure would take place, how shall we say, there started a kind of protocol that activated all connections: prefect, president of the region [of Sicily]. . . . First [we had to go to] the minister of the merchant fleet [marina mercantile]. However, the solution would be through the foreign minister. He was therefore the interlocutor from the point of view of solving our problems. The region . . . everyone would support our action, but the interlocutor was the foreign minister. Later, when the foreign minister . . . blathered [babbiava, chiacchierava], we would go directly to the president of the republic!12

The shipowner who told me this story seemed proud of the ease with which he and his friends could cut through the entire national political pyramid and reach the Italian head of state. But his story contains more than brag-

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ging about being able to call the Presidential Palace. It points to all the connections that sustained the feasibility of such calls. The activation of the “protocol” he mentions—­a recurring event in the local memory in town—­ depended on the constant maintenance that people like Giuseppe Ferro—­ the fish couriers—­performed. The patronage between politicians and owners of various and changing prominence spanned all shades of legality. These relationships also varied in the level of exposure or concealment they enjoyed, differently so in places like the Mazara, Trapani, Palermo, and Rome. On the political stage of the Mazara city council, such patronage was put on display, always partly as codified bragging or allusive condemnation, or intimating a call for action (Piliavsky 2011; Shryock 2004). In any case, it was clear to the council members and the audience that the laws of political economy exhausted neither the development path of the Mazara fleet nor the particular fortunes of any of its shipowners. On the council floor as much as in conversations around town, celebrations and accusations of patronage and clientelism served as a frame that speakers offered—­distinct from class relations and at times combined with them—­for social action. The great promoters of patronage as a municipal strategy came from the ranks of the local PRI, “the party of the fleet, “the party of progress”—­the party of Aristide Gunnella and Ignazio Giacalone. The strategy included neither transparency nor sharing the fruits of this national patronage with all other parties. In the Seventies, for example, Gunnella participated, together with council members Celere and Giacalone, in a close meeting with the mayor—­a DC member at the time—­to discuss how to make some national projects arrive in Mazara rather than in other Sicilian towns. In a subsequent council session, a Communist opposition member accused the municipal administration of corruption. The administration, the PCI member demanded, “should worry only about submitting requests and ask for things according to the law, without leaving the fate of Mazara to be entrusted at the hands of some political exponent like MP Gunnella.”13 In response, Celere declared that such initiatives, beyond being normal, should be applauded, as they attempt to commit the parliamentary representative to exploiting his particular political office in the governing authorities. This is, in fact, the procedure that everyone, specifically the administrations in the North, follows: the [electoral] base refers problems to the MP, who makes sure to sensitize the authorities on a political level, in order to find a solution to the problems.14

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More than a defense of patronage, this response celebrated it—­not as a self-­ excusing “this is how we do things around here,” but, on the contrary, as the way the administration works “in the North.” Mazarese PRI members asked the council to count on their personal connections with prominent and/or rising politicians, and to trust them to use these connections to the town’s benefit rather than their own. Whenever Italian policy was at fault, it was the Mazara council’s duty “to remedy it.”15 Giacalone and the PRI thus tried to turn the council into the theater of international policy and politics: a stage of sorts, in which personal relations with both Rome and Tunis would be deployed to the town’s benefit. The kind of relationship projected both upwards and downwards resembled at times the ideology of patronal redistribution, and at others that of familial solidarity. The routes of different kinds of seafood charted the relationships and obligations they entailed from onboard the fleet’s trawlers to Mazara, Sicily, and Italy. Patronage served Mazarese fishers and shipowners in forging interpersonal relations with persons whose specific favors or more general obligation they sought. In the fleet’s history, these favors gained importance as more ships were funded, constructed, and seized for illegal fishing. The alternating combination of class, patronage, and family framed action beyond the fleet and the town. During those years, these frames were gradually projected southwards towards the sea and the relationships that Mazarese politicians and fishers conceived and constructed with persons and societies on the other shore. Already in 1971, the DC coalition, with the PRI and two socialist parties, and with Ignazio Giacalone as its deputy mayor, signed a twinning agreement with the Tunisian fishing town Mahdia, “an important welding of the social-­economic context of the two seaside peoples.”16 The agreement raised Republicans’ clout locally, most of all because Mahdia’s mayor was Mohamed Masmoudi, Tunisia’s foreign minister and the main interlocutor in Italian fisheries contracts and trawler-­releasing negotiations.17 Indeed, relationships with Tunisia had been damaged since 1967 by Tunisians’ seizures of trawlers. Yet, for the mayor, the remedy for this predicament was already underway, owing to “the development of diplomatic and then of personal relations” with people from Tunisia. After all, Italy and Tunisia were “two seaside Mediterranean peoples connected by historical events [that are] dense with glory.”18 Mazara seemed to be boarding that “boat of its future,” though that boat was making its way in a choppy sea.

FIVE

One Big Family

Quantifying Care During the first week of the fishing voyage, everyone assumed my ignorance regarding all practical matters both in the kitchen and astern. Hajj and the others seemed to enjoy my stories about my time in the navy, and my En­ glish came in handy every now and then when we needed to avoid collision with merchant ships. The captain was also happy to ask my help with the navigation instruments and computer. But regarding my two main posi­ tions onboard—­the aft deck and the kitchen—­everybody treated me as if I were a landlubbing toddler. On deck, every tying or coiling of a line was followed by an explanation, a correction, and—­when I failed to contain my resentment or frustration at my injured seafarer’s ego—­an argument. As for cooking, maybe I was less wedded to my cooking skills than to my sailing persona, or perhaps I was able to muster a more relativist spirit in the kitchen than on deck. Either way, I was therefore able to subject myself more willingly to my culinary apprenticeship and gain a glimpse into the meaning and function of food onboard. My apprenticeship began already on the voyage’s first morning, less than twelve hours after we took to sea. Not more than twenty minutes after we were sent to our bunks after hauling the first net out, Zu Nino showed up at the entrance to our deckhand’s cabin and woke me up. “O Lucio! Sleeping? No time for sleeping. What are we having for lunch?” He said, and walked out. I jumped out of my bunk, put my shoes on, and joined him in the kitchen. Zu Nino then continued: Normally you should do this when you make the panini during the first net, but today it’s okay. For pranzo [lunch] you first make the salsa rossa [red sauce]. That’s the only thing that the captain eats, and you should make it the way he

124 / Chapter Five likes it. You take two bottles of salsa from the cabinet next to the motorists’ cabin and put it in a small pot. Make sure to wash the bottles with a bit of water and then empty them into the pot. You add one potato, one garlic clove, half an onion, and a bit of parsley.

While Zu Nino was preparing the salsa, I noticed that he did not fry any of the ingredients, but added them directly to the sauce that was already in the pot. “It has to boil about forty minutes, until the potato is ready.” I asked him why they put the onion and garlic in without frying them for a bit. “That’s the way!” he replied. “You take spaghetti from the same cabinet, but that’s later.” When I asked Hajj about it later, he said, “We can’t eat fried food because we all have the gastrida [stomach acidity]. You are young, and besides, with the work around the clock, our stomachs can’t take it that much any more.” Apart from the pasta, the pranzo contains a meat dish, and at least one other secondo. Now, “second” refers originally to the dish that follows the pasta, and that is always the meat; other dishes that are served with it are contorni (side dishes). But, as with the inflationary attitude to coffee onboard, it is as if the sense of a numerical abundance of many secondi trumped the shoreside categorization. It was not the order of the meal that mattered, but the ability to count how many dishes one was offered. The package of meat I had taken out of the freezer that morning was brodo, large meat pieces used for “broth” or boiling. Zu Nino told me to prepare it by putting the partially defrosted meat in boiling water and cooking it with not much else until it was ready. How long? “It takes a long while to cook meat.” I assumed I should not fry the meat before boiling it for the same digestive reason. “And at the end you need to add olive oil. Make sure to add olive oil to the salsa when it is done too.” How much? “A lot of it.” Knives and Subjects After he finished demonstrating the pranzo drill, Zu Nino went up to the bridge, but not before telling me also to prepare potatoes in the oven. “You know how to make potatoes, right?” The potatoes were stored together with the rest of the vegetables and fruits in the refrigerator room to the left of the entrance. I went there, took out about fifteen potatoes, and came back to the kitchen to look for a peeler. After five minutes or so, I gave up and went to wake Hajj so that I could ask him where they hid their utensils. “We don’t use those. Use the knife!” And where was the knife? “What do you mean, ‘where?’ Use your knife.” When I told him I had none, he looked

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at me for a second, and then asked me how I could have boarded the ship without a knife. Baffled, I replied that I had brought everything he had told me to bring: two pairs of boots, four pairs of gloves (a couple of deck gloves and another couple for the freezing chamber), and a weather suit; but no one had told me anything about a knife. He then got out of bed, went into the storage chamber adjacent to our cabin, and came out with a standard, blue one-­blade jackknife, which had a the name of a fishing gear store en­ graved on it. “Work with this. And don’t lose it. The bosun doesn’t like to give them away!” he told me as we went into the kitchen. Hajj asked me to take out a large oven tray and oil it. Then, with the oiled tray in front of him, he told me to add some more oil. He took a potato, peeled it, and cut it into small pieces, which he dropped into the tray. Once all the potatoes were peeled and cut, he took the bottle of olive oil, poured a bit more on top, shook the tray, put it in the oven, set the temperature, and went back to sleep. “Put water for the pasta, and make sure the potatoes don’t burn!” With the potatoes in the oven and the salsa still cooking (the potato inside the salsa was still a bit hard), I took my computer and sat down at the dining table in the saletta to write (this being the voyage’s first net, we still had no fish to sort). An hour or so later, Zu Nino descended again from the bridge, and came to overlook the final preparations for lunch. “Take this fork! You see it? This one belongs to the captain,” he said, pointing to a fork that had one of its teeth bent upward. “Put it at the top of the table, next to the television. That’s where the captain sits.” The rest was more straight­ forward: disposable plastic plates and cups, together with one family-­size soft drink bottle, went in a wooden box at the center of the table. When I was looking for the knives where the forks and tablespoons were, Zu Nino told me that they carried none. “Everyone uses his own knife.” Now for the meat: “You drain the water out of the pot, move the meat to a tray, and add olive oil.” As I was following his orders, Zu Nino looked over my shoulder to see how much oil I was adding and, once I finished garnishing the meat, he took the bottle of oil from my hands, added some more and turned to the boiling pasta pot. “Get me a pack of spaghetti and add it to the water.” I opened the spaghetti pack and was about to empty its entire contents into the water, when he took it from my hands, crying “What the hell are you doing?!” And, while pushing me aside, he took the spaghetti, broke them in half while they were still in the pack, and dropped it into the pot. After telling me to bring bread from the freezing chamber and show­ ing me how to dress a fennel salad (“Add oil”), Zu Nino sent me to wake everyone up for lunch. A couple of minutes later, people trickled into the saletta. First came Hajj, who examined the meat tray and said: “Olio mettisti?

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Figure 17.  The dining hall before lunch

[Did you add oil?]” Then came the two mechanics who, one after the other, checked the pasta sauce, growled, switched to the meat, and asked me: “Olio mettisti?” Then came the bosun, who grabbed a fennel piece and, while sa­ voring it, said: “O Luscio! There’s no oil in the salad. Put some oil in it!” With the pasta almost ready, Zu Nino left the kitchen, went back to the staircase, and shouted with his head half turned toward the bridge, “A mangiaaa-­ré! [Let’s e-­e-­eat!]” with the last syllable in a high-­pitched voice. The captain came down a minute later and sat down without a word. To the captain’s left sat the bosun, then Zu Nino, with Hajj and me at the end of the table. Zu Nino chose to sit closer to us than to the captain, Hajj told me, both to make sure that everyone knew he was not the captain of this voyage, and “to be like one of us.” Zu Nino then mixed the pasta with the salsa and started dividing it into plates, which I handed to people around the table: the captain at the head, the chief mechanic to his right, then his second me­ chanic and all four deckhands. While people were receiving and eating their spaghetti, the two mechanics reached for clean plates and started eating the secondi while the bosun made remarks at one of them. I asked Zu Nino if we should keep some pasta for them. “They are motoristi. They don’t eat pasta. I will explain to you later.” Ten minutes into the meal, the captain got up and walked toward the kitchen with his half-­empty plate in his right hand and the fork in the other.

One Big Family  /  127

Hardly breaking his stride, he dropped the plate into the garbage can in front of the refrigerator, dropped the fork in the sink, grabbed an orange from the tray next to the sink, and disappeared upstairs. Several minutes later, everyone else followed suit, and I started cleaning up. While I was stowing the olive oil and other ingredients in the cupboards, Hajj came in on his way to his bunk. I flooded him with the many questions that I had in mind: How come they did not have any cutting knives in the kitchen? Why was no one talking over lunch? Didn’t they use cutlery knives for eating? Why had we just finished half a liter of oil on garnishing alone in one meal? Why did the motoristi not eat pasta? And why did they boil the meat for two hours? “Oh! How many questions you have already! We don’t talk now. Fin­ ish up and go to sleep. We wake up in a bit and start working.” Scales of Subsistence It took a while for Hajj to complete his exegesis of food and its role on­ board, but one thing immediately became clear. Onboard the Naumachos, food served everyone in framing and contesting life and work. By that time, I had already seen how people used breakfast panini, coffee, and cigarettes as tokens for specific frames of action in the struggle over onboard social relations. Panini, which were consumed privately (as much as onboard space allowed for it), took the form of whatever personal favors or resources each crewmember secured for himself—­a slice of cheese, the extra tuna top­ ping, or the Tunisian Harissa spicy condiment that the Tunisian cousins had brought with them from back home. Coffee rounds, with their contested timing and frequency and their hierarchical dispensing, punctuated our daily life, coming as they always did before, during, or at the end of sort­ ing rounds astern. Coffee thus emblematized the relationship between the bosun’s and the owner’s authority, that is, the tensions between their respec­ tive relationship to the captain and the rest of the crew. Cigarettes, which the captain gave us once a week or so, and which we smoked as frequently as the work and the owner’s castigation that we “sort with both hands” per­ mitted, staged the tensions between the offshore reach of unionized labor rights and the redistributive patronal relations that the captain and owner asserted at sea. Yet the richest opportunities for staging social relations came twice daily, during lunch and dinner. The relative complexity of the two main meals—­multiple dishes, relatively elaborate preparation, and potential com­ mensality—­amplified and refracted the semiotic potential of food. As the only aspect of our daily routine that was open to some consideration or

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debate, lunch and dinner turned food into the most available—­because it was malleable—­token of social relations. By turning the stuff of subsistence into tokens of wider idioms, people intensified not only foodstuff’s mean­ ing but its manipulation and circulation as well. As a result, this double in­ tensification conditioned the struggle over these edible emblems’ meaning and use. Beyond their relative articulate structure, another specificity of the two main meals distinguished it from other consumable emblems of onboard social relations. These meals were the only daily times when the crew met for a purpose other than sorting the catch. Because of their communal con­ sumption, lunch and dinner turned into a quotidian stage for the open strug­ gle over another aspect of onboard social relations: the collective relation­ ship between the owner and his crew as a whole, and the various alternative shapes for that whole. Attention to the rich semiotic medium that food per­ mits for staging social relations has been one of the pillars of anthropology.1 Onboard the Naumachos, this rich signifying potential took a specific shape: as the stuff of subsistence, food marked the relationship between the party to be sustained and those responsible for sustaining it. As in other cases (Carsten 1989), the obligation that this relationship entailed took the shape of familial reciprocity. In other words, commensality gave food a key role in relating subsistence and grouping. This collective dimension made the meals into a particular kind of emblem, which signified a specific frame for social relations: care, reciprocity, and the idioms of familiarity and kinship that people used to inform and promote them. As with other things onboard, this was only one of the alternative frames that people invoked. Family and its related terms and elements has exemplified the troubled route anthropology has charted through the Mediterranean. To understand that, we need to put it in relation with its conceptual partner, kinship. On the one hand, families, households, and kinship structures around the Med­ iterranean seemed to anthropologists less ubiquitous or all-­encompassing than in the places for which anthropology had been previously famous. On the other hand, when this flexibility invited a comparison between family structures in the Mediterranean and northwestern Europe, the conclusion was often that the importance of the family in the Mediterranean was higher and, by deduction, that this had to do with the region’s late or incomplete encounter with modernity (Péristiany 1966). Most famously perhaps, in his study of what he called “amoral familism,” Edward Banfield attributed southern Italian poverty and “backwardness” to a cultural ethos of maxi­ mizing short-­run advantages of the nuclear family and assuming that all others do the same (1958). As John Davis has put it: “It seems that many

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ethnographers have emphasised ‘the importance of the family’ in Mediter­ ranean societies taking their own society, even their own family life, as the standard of comparison” (J. Davis 1977, 167–­68). In the chronicles of Maz­ ara and the Channel of Sicily, both family and kinship have appeared as frames that people use to inform social relations. The distinction between the two is of both scope and intensity: as people in and around Mazara have frequently used it, family relates to that tighter circle among one’s kin—­ classically, parents, siblings, children, and possibly spouses—­from whom one may expect moral obligation of reciprocity and solidarity. Kin who are more distant or differently removed do not necessarily confront the same obligation. The family and kinship frames were among several other pos­ sible frames—­class solidarity, patronal allegiance, and so forth—­and the relationship between these various frames ranged from mutual exclusivity to reinforcement. As we proceed, this basic distinction between family and kinship will develop as we learn more about how Tunisians and Sicilians have used it differently in our story. For now, let us remember that when people relate to each other as if they were members of the same “family,” they frame their relations as familial reciprocity and solidarity, and imply the moral obligation to act accordingly. Anthropologies of food have examined these grouping dynamics of com­mensality in closed quarters. Yet the same dynamics have operated at a much vaster scale. As much as food entwines subsistence and relatedness at interpersonal scales, so does the stuff of national and international subsis­ tence—­energy resources and the infrastructures constructed to convey them across borders. At both scales, charging emblems with such meanings might have suited one side’s project, but it hardly exhausted the process. It is to that process that we turn now. Olive Oil, or the Inflated Denominator of Abstract Value An hour or so after the meal was over, Zu Nino came down and went around the cabins to wake the bosun and all of us in the front cabin. I made coffee, took the first cup upstairs to the captain, who greeted me with the same clearing of the throat, after which I came astern and gave everyone else their coffee as well. When I got to Hajj, he told me that for now I should learn how things worked—­we were still, after all, on our first day at sea—­and that I would get the hang of it later. I told him, somewhat resentfully, that I had understood how to do things, but was baffled by why they did them that way. “The kitchen does not look the way it used to when we had a cook, a real cook,” he said.

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The culinary predicament was true not only for the Naumachos. The Mazara fleet used to have cooks, Sicilians most of them, who were trained, designated, and acknowledged as such. “The cook used to be a head of a de­ partment!” The bosun told me later. The cook used to come on board with his own cooking tools, knives most of all. He wouldn’t have anyone telling him what to cook or how to cook it. He used to do the shopping himself, so that he would know what was there and what was missing. Cooks would threaten their captains and owners that they would “disembark in Lampe­ dusa” if they did not get the ingredients they needed. “The cook used to take care of us. And he would also sleep at night.” A captain who would wake his cook up to sort the catch with the deckhands at night risked the quality of his own food. As the old Sicilian cooks started to retire, no one wanted to take their places as ship’s designated cooks. As Hajj explained it, “We older Tunisians can cook, and when there is a voyage with no specific cook, then we take turns cooking. But none of us wants to become the cook. It makes you dizzy [ti fa girare la testa], and you lose your position in the stiva,” where the bosun reigns over the fate of seafood cartons and personal incomes. With the pro­ fessional cooks gone, the food that landed on everyone’s plate signified the owner’s role in commensality even more directly, since no professional per­ son mediated between the owner’s bottom line and the crew’s bellies. In our specific voyage this role was doubled, since the owner was sailing with us and overseeing my cooking. The hand that served everyone’s food and the hand that was ordering them around the deck and handing them their paychecks at the voyage’s end were one and the same. He was there to con­ front their demands to be treated generously, as well as their complaints when things did not seem so. In this inherent contradiction, Zu Nino’s role resembled those of Captain Cook in his voyages and of Bligh on the Bounty, both of whom were captains and pursers at the same time: “The altruism expected of a captain glimmered lowly behind the parsimony anticipated of a purser. . . . When it came to captains who were also pursers, sailor’s stom­ achs were also spaces of power” (Dening 1992, 22–­23). Hajj’s story about the disappearance of the fleet’s cooks explained why crewmembers related their meals to their owners’ moral obligation more directly. Yet it did not solve my quandary about the olive oil. I swore to Hajj that at that one meal I used seven times more olive oil than in any recipe—­ written or passed down—­I have ever encountered in Tunisian or Sicilian cuisines, in Mazara, Tunisia, or elsewhere for that matter. “We Arabs love ol­ ive oil,” he replied. But what about the Sicilians? “They are like us. Olive oil adds a lot.” Hajj was right in the predilection toward olive oil that Sicilians

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and Tunisians shared. Yet we were still consuming much more than what seemed the average quantities ashore on either side of the channel.2 No one seemed to share my bafflement regarding the crew’s consumption of olive oil. But as lunches, dinners, nets, and coffee rounds went by, something about the way in which the crew and the owner treated this liquid meal staple made it seem like a vessel for more than the taste and the calories it carried. Everything took place as if olive oil was the quantifiable index of the shipowner’s care. Both on this specific voyage and more generally, olive oil played a spe­ cial role in the alimentation structure. Unlike other ingredients, it could be added to almost any dish: abundance of meat was generally valued, but could not deviate much either above or below one serving a day. Vegetables and other fresh ingredients were expected to be provided for the duration of the voyage. But the decision to buy more of those ingredients took place outside the cooking/serving/eating situation: a shipowner either enabled his crew to buy more ingredients or not. Contrary to these ingredients, ol­ ive oil was in principle used in almost every dish, and it could be added in quantities beyond any (either Tunisian or Sicilian) culinary regime. Subse­ quently, olive oil could be detached from its strict position (already satu­ rated with meaning) within culinary practice, and function as an implicit vessel of meaning of another more particular sort (Meneley 2004; Horden and Purcell 2000, 218; Algazi 2005, 235–­36). Any pouring of olive oil, mostly at the end of the preparation procedure, functioned as a quantum of care—­ the owner’s care. In this olive oil resembled sugar for sweetness, money for economic value, and the Eucharist for grace and devotion (Mintz 1986; Sim­ mel 2004; Rubin 1991; Smail, Stiner, and Earle 2011). Like them, olive oil transformed into an abundant enough, abstract enough, and syntagmatically liberated enough vessel (and denominator) of an element central to its realm of value. For olive oil, that value was care—­specifically, how much of it one felt that one was receiving from one’s shipowner. Moreover, as with money, sugar, or the Eucharist, this elevation of olive oil to the level of the pure de­ nominator of the value in question made it undergo inflation: olive oil was added to almost every dish that landed on the ship’s dining table, adding up to half a cup of olive oil per person per day. The Naumachos had left Mazara with forty one-­liter bottles of olive oil, and when we entered Mazara after thirty-­seven days at sea, four bottles were left.3 Coffee had a similar yet structurally different position in the alimentary regime onboard. Its consumption could be increased, but only through a relegation of someone to perform this increment: someone had to be sent to make the coffee. And, as in many other hierarchical situations, the sender,

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the person sent, the chore, and its product informed both each other and the institutional context in which they operated. In the old days a cook would make coffee while awake, but no bosun in his right mind would wake up the cook for the sole purpose of making coffee for the four fishers who had been awakened to sort another net astern (more correctly, such things could happen, but they would be immediately taken as insults, with the subsequent culinary retribution).4 Furthermore, since both the bosun and the cook used to belong to a similar status as heads of departments, if the bosun sent the cook to make coffee too often, it would be taken as “bossing the cook around” (bossing me around was not taken as an infrac­ tion of any sort). In a related way, a cook could make coffee for the captain or the owner (when the latter was on board) as a show of gratitude, respect, or bootlicking, depending on the interpreter’s perspective. Nowadays, when the traditionally respected role of the cook is performed by ordinary deckhands, all sorts of new liberties appear in this hierarchical structure. Cooks are now primarily deckhands, and as such they depend on the good will of the bosun. Cooks who come for only one voyage (as I did), are even less prone to claim any institutional independence upon which they would resist or protest their bosun’s order of a round of coffee. For the bosun this was all the better, since now both his benevolence and stature within the onboard hierarchy could be asserted every time he sent me to make coffee. He would be the bosun who took care of his crew. Therefore, coffee too denominated care through quantifiable abundance. But this de­ nomination took place through a recurring move; the move deflated the fetish that forged the seemingly necessary connection between the liquid and what it stood for (”more olive oil in my dish” equaled “I am better taken care of by my owner”), and it also turned it into an emblem of the ever-­negotiated onboard hierarchy. As we shall see later, such denominators of care and respect can become the bone of contention. Against the care that coffee and olive oil signified stood the crewmem­ bers’ personal knives. Forks other than the captain’s could exchange hands, but knives could not. Persons’ boundaries were thus defined not through the limits on material contact in the utensil’s operation (forks changed hands continuously), but in the wider grounds for the meaning of food and eating on board. If coffee and olive oil signified the streams of sociality—­ familial in the case of olive oil and hierarchical in the case of coffee—­knives signified the persons through which these streams flowed. Moreover, these markers of personhood required maintenance. Since knives were used so often, during meals but also to perform anything on deck, they needed to be sharpened constantly. The whetstone used for sharpening everybody’s

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knives was guarded by the bosun. He controlled the means of sharpening—­ that is, maintaining—­each fisher’s personhood, and he made a point of administering it as a personal favor. At that point, I was not sure yet why being taken care of or appearing as a self-­sustaining person was so thickly signified, or why food seemed the main way in which such signification took place. I told myself that I should insist that Hajj explain more of it to me, but it was already time for hauling the net and sorting the catch, and when we finished working astern, we hurried to our bunks to get as much rest as we could until we were called astern once more. When they woke us up for the next net, Zu Nino called me to the kitchen to prepare dinner. On his way astern, Hajj told me: “To be a good cook, you need to finish here quickly and head astern to help us.” Since dinner lacked a designated meat dish, the culinary categories carried less importance. The main dish comprised of a stew of peas, chickpeas, lentils, or beans. What­ ever legumes were used, they were first boiled for a couple of hours until the water reduced to something slightly denser than soup, and then served with a small round pasta. The rest of the meal included the same secondi rule: the more, the better. Once all ingredients were already in the pot, I went astern for the sorting. A Contested Commensality If coffee rounds astern and the taste of olive oil during meals paced the onboard routine, other dimensions of food and its consumption served as celebratory markers of a break in this routine. Traditionally, cooks prepared two special dishes on Saturdays and Sundays, so considered for their elabo­ rate preparation and the respect they hold in Mazarese cuisine ashore: pizza for Saturday dinners, and pasta al forno (“pasta in the oven”) for lunches on Sundays. But here too, the weekly markers disappeared together with the designated cooks who had known how to make them and had the time to do so. In their place, the preparation of extraordinary dishes turned into ad hoc gestures. As in other cases, people framed these gestures either as boot­ licking or as signs of benevolence and abundance: clientelistic ruffianismo or fatherly care. Zu Nino was doing his best to convince the crew that, when it came to food, he treated them as a father would his children. One morning, toward the end of our second week at sea, just before we were supposed to be called for the next net, Zu Nino appeared at the deckhands’ cabin. “Did you cook the salsa? Is it ready? You forgot. That’s ok. I will take care of that.” Zu Nino seemed to show me both the workings of the daily cooking schedule

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and that he was benevolent about it. As Zu Nino walked out and into the kitchen, Hajj opened his eyes and told me that the owner was trying to be “our dad.” He is nice to you, but he is a bastard like everyone else. Perhaps it’s because he saw that Mario [your landlord] was your patroon, so you are not like us Tunisians. I get along with him. I have been sailing with this family for almost thirty years now. But when they can, they cheat you.

Hajj’s explanation spelled out the Mazarese version about the causal re­ lationship between patronage (“patroon,” pronounced in Tunisian, where it often means “boss”) and family (“dad”) as frames of actions. Mario, my landlord and the person everybody in Mazara knew was responsible for me back home, was in this frame my patron. That’s why Hajj directed me to give Mario some fish when we got back; that’s why Mario made sure to see who my shipowner was and that my shipowner would see and recognize him. Whereas both patronage and family served as frames for actions—­symbolic grounds for framing and constructing social relationships—­in Mazara it seemed clear that the gap between family and “family” was wider than the one between patronage and “patronage.” In other words, you knew who your family members were, and you could act towards a wider set of people as if  you were their mother, father, son, daughter, nephew, and so forth. But the gesture would be marked as an attempt to frame the relationship in that way, not as an uncontested element of the relationship itself (Campbell 1964). On the other hand, patronage, which people saw as something tak­ ing place during one’s lifetime rather than at its extremities, was taken to be made by the people who were performing it as such. Often, patronage included familial or otherwise kinship-­related idioms (as when shipowners made politicians their sons’ godfathers). But, as we have seen in the last chap­ ter, one became a padrone by being asked to serve as padrino, not as padre.5 Accusations of misplaced obligation, of “trying to be ‘dad,’ ” fit the family frame better than the patronage frame, because the distinction between try­ ing to be someone’s family member and actually being so was clearer than its parallel regarding patronage.6 Finally, there was another distinction here between patronage and family. The “dad-­children” metaphor here implied a one-­to-­many relationship. Zu Nino would be the father, and the entire crew would be his children. It implied obligation and generosity in the generalized relationship between owner and crew, not regarding any specific relationship between one crewmember and the owner. For the discriminating effects such relationships required, patronage did the trick.

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Later that morning, Hajj told me that we were getting close to Lampe­ dusa again. When the work was done, no one went to bed. When I climbed to see what was going on, everyone was pulling out their cellular phones and, each person according to the network he used, went to different cor­ ners around the bridge and its terrace. My network, it turned out, did not work well from that distance to Lampedusa. When I came downstairs, Hajj called me to help him with deciphering the numbers on a recharge card he had bought back in Mazara. His phone for calling home had an account he needed to recharge every voyage. It was one of those cards that had the secret code covered with a coating that you needed to scratch off, with a coin usu­ ally. “I made a stupid mistake.” He lamented, “I used my jackknife to scratch the coating and now the numbers are lost. I just sharpened it.” I could not read the numbers for him, and it meant that he was unable to talk with his family at length. I could not resist thinking that the knives they were all using—­these sharp extensions of everyone’s masculinities—­had just pre­ vented Hajj from talking with his family. But it seemed to me that my ideas about the tensions between family life and maritime masculinity were not what he needed to hear at that moment, so I kept my thoughts to myself. Later, over the preparations for lunch, Zu Nino sent me to the fridge to bring a “lattuga [lettuce].” Since I knew only the word insalata for lettuce, and did not make the connection, Zu Nino asked me how I expected to be the cook if even the words for vegetables were new to me. When both of us were back to sort the fish with the others, he kept shouting “lattuga, lat­ tuga, lattuga!” for several minutes. The bosun used the opportunity to shed his authority over me and told me not to mind the boss: “Don’t worry, he is crazy.” For my incompetence I was kicked out of the kitchen, and in my place, Salvatore made stuffed shrimp (gamberi chini) for lunch, a dish that qualified as a specialty. For a short while, everyone treated lunch as a feast. When we were eating, Zu Nino asked me if I had ever eaten anything like that: “These things exist only in Mazara!” The next day, our second Saturday at sea, the owner did not come astern to sort fish with us. While we were sorting one of the nets, Hajj said that he was probably tired from taking the night shift at the bridge, but he also said that Zu Nino had health problems, and that he would not keep up the daily routine for long. Hajj added that Zu Nino had told him he would buy a recharging card for his phone. That day, the net just before lunch was a large one. We started to sort the catch as usual, but then everybody but the deckhands disappeared from the aft deck. Once we noticed it, Hajj, Bennur, Montassar, and I moved the table backward, closer to the large pile, and started to work around it. Perhaps because we enjoyed working with our

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backs straight for a change or because we all saw that the pile was large and the sorters few, we worked very fast. After an hour or so, Paolo passed by, watched for a short while, and then took one of the plastic fish crates and put it on his shoulder like a video camera. Hajj seemed annoyed by the little play, and asked Paolo to stop playing around. “I am shooting a film for the Companìa Film Blù!” Paolo replied, and went back to his business elsewhere. Then it turned out that Salvatore and Zu Nino were missing from the sorting because they were cooking another “special dish” for lunch: stuffed prawns. “You cut each prawn along its back from the head to the tail, and then you stuff it with mollica [the mixture of fresh breadcrumbs, parsley, olive oil, garlic, and grated parmigiano cheese],” Salvatore explained to me when I went inside to see what was going on in the kitchen. I had a glimpse of the value of the catch and the dish when Zu Nino served us the prawns himself, counting the items carefully to make sure that everyone would get exactly eight pieces. Zu Nino not only served the dish himself, but added that he had promised us this treat and that now he was delivering on his promise. Yet, this time around, no one seemed too impressed by the gesture of generosity. Everyone just ate their prawns quietly and then went to sleep as fast as they could. At the end of the meal, when only Salvatore, Fathi, the owner, and I remained at the table, Zu Nino was probably still trying to charge the moment with some festivity. He told me to ask Hajj where he had stashed the amaro liquor bottle. So I did, and we opened the bottle, but no one other than Salvatore, the bosun, and Zu Nino wanted a sip. Zu Nino tried to make the toasting “cheers” gesture, but I seemed to be the only one to respond. The rest just emptied their cups and then the company dis­ persed, not before the bosun took one cup to the captain at the bridge. For Zu Nino, it seemed, even the archetypal liquid of social effervescence and paternal largesse did not do the job (Dening 1992, 120). There seemed to be several dimensions of the short-­lived festivity of the stuffed shrimp and the owner’s failed attempt to repeat it with the stuffed prawns. First, we were eating from the ship’s catch, not from the frozen ingredients. Yet, as I came to learn later, the occasional batch of shrimp—­ simply boiled or sautéed—­was always an acceptable possibility as a main course for dinner, as long as the items chosen were not too valuable. Sec­ ond, the stuffing recipe was the most elaborate, and was pronounced by everyone as the most exquisite dish onboard. In these two specific instances, Zu Nino did his best to own the feast as the benevolent paternal provider. This delicacy required time, willingness, and resources. At the table, Zu Nino framed the willingness and the generosity it implied as his. Yet at least two

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alternative interpretations emerged. When I was cleaning up after the meal, I remembered that in the previous several days the bosun had given me several prawns after each net and told me to add them to a tray he had put in the kitchen freezer. But when he did so, he made it a gesture of a bosun to his subordinate, who was also the cook, as if he were saying: “I am tak­ ing care of you, giving you good ingredients to cook, so that you would do a better job and make everyone happy.” At the same time, Hajj provided his own take on the causes of the “feast” that had just ended: “Salvatore is cooking for the pleasure of his master, the chief mechanic, who doesn’t eat pasta. He’s a ruffiano.” I was not sure why the owner had tried to make lunch into a celebration or why the crowd was not responsive. Then, after the sunset net and dinner, Hajj told me, “Maybe, maybe, maybe, we are going to Lampedusa tonight.” I asked him how he knew that, but he said it was just a thought. Going to Lampedusa was not something that we needed to celebrate in advance. Af­ ter all, it was in itself a welcome break in the working routine, so the mood would have lifted anyway. Rather, as it turned out, we were heading toward Lampedusa only in order to work on the shallow fishing banks that sur­ rounded the island. This was already something that needed some morale management. Trawling “on the bank” happens mainly at night, when the ship drags its net on top of the rocky coral tables. Rather than the species that trawlers seek in the routes of profound depth, here the supposed catch is of fish and seafood that live closer to the sea level and that are mainly sold fresh. Why then did this require a morale-­lifting action? Because fishing “on the bank” unfolded in periods of half an hour to an hour and-­a-­half, which meant that none of the deckhands got to close their eyes for more than twenty minutes at a time. Moreover, the pile that the net released onboard was about 65 to 80 percent rocks, coral, and debris, which we sifted with short-­andled rakes to find the desired items. Nights on the bank thus entailed working around the clock, bending over the pile of rocks and seafood, plowing through the pile with one hand, and collecting the occasional item with the other. Since this was a much harder and faster job than the usual sorting of seabed nets, it was duly relegated to the deckhands, with the occasional help of Salva­ tore, when he was not tending to the ship’s navigation and motor. And because the huge pile should be sorted in manageable quantities at a time, we shoveled a hundred kilograms of the pile onto the working table every several minutes, and then shoveled all the debris that was sifted aside back into the sea. As it turned out, my sorting skills did not quite cut it. Nor was I able to distinguish among the several types of red mullet, which to me

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seemed identical. So, in order to expedite the operation, I took over the shovel and became the ship’s schlepper. In switching to fishing on the bank, the social divisions among the crew deepened. The deckhands, who stayed awake virtually throughout the night, seemed on the next morning less inclined to show any camaraderie toward the mechanics, who slept as they would on any other night. On the other hand, as Hajj explained it to me, fishing on the bank was a change, a break in the endless sorting of piles of muddy shrimp. As we approached the end of the voyage’s second week, any change was welcome. A Less Than General Reciprocity As the days passed, food increasingly seemed to be on everybody’s mind. One of the ways in which this took place was in the decision about what to cook, and for whose palate. On the one hand, Zu Nino’s attempts to please his crew by showing them his paternal care ran aground. This is how I put it in my field notes early on in the voyage: No one says “thanks.” No one says anything while we are eating. When either lunch or dinner is served, it happens mostly right after we finished working on the net or when we are waking people up. [ . . . ] Once the captain finishes eating and disappears upstairs, and also the owner, there is a chance that the crew will talk a bit—­mainly [the bosun] and [the chief mechanic]. Hajj can join in, but no more.

Looking back, it seems that while the owner was trying to provide abundant food for commensality to show his benevolence and paternal care, the crew waited until he left the saletta for whatever sense of communion the short postcommensality phase enabled. On the other hand, more people tried to appear generous, though along personal and specific, not generalized, lines. As a result, while the meals turned into scenes of contested commensality, the preceding backstage prep­ arations and the discussions after the meals framed food as an ingredient of patronage. In this setup, Zu Nino tried to win over the crew collectively as their providential father, and individually as the discriminating patron of each of them separately. I was starting to get into the rhythm of the cooking-­ and-­sorting routine: taking the ingredients for each meal out of the stiva before going to bed; cooking the salsa rossa after the last night net; preparing the potatoes and meat for lunch. I also learned how to disappear from the sorting work for durations of time long enough for me to cook away from

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the work astern and short enough not to upset those still working there. Since our departure from port, no deckhand had gotten more than an hour and a half of continuous sleep. Our days were broken into chains of four-­ hour periods, during each of which we managed to sleep just until we were called for the next net. One day, Hajj told me that we would have red mullet for dinner. I asked him how we would do that, and he replied that “putting aside some mullet is not a problem.” He had prepared a two-­kilogram tray of mullet for me to clean, which I did, and then cooked it in the oven. People seemed pleased with the dish, and after dinner, when I was gutting some more fish for the next day at the cleaning table astern, the bosun joined me and started clean­ ing a big ground shark (palumbo). He told me that it was not a problem to take a tray of medium-­sized prawn or shrimp for supper (he showed me the size he had in mind as he was describing it). There was no problem as long as it was done quietly, a point he expressed by putting his index finger to his lips. Once he was gone, Montassar passed by and added some more fish to the tray I was cleaning. As he gave me the fish, Montassar, who understood some Sicilian but hardly spoke it, and usually spoke to me in Tunisian, told me, in a combination of English and Italian: “No problem, mangia [eat]!” There was something theatrical and ironizing in the way he said it, exagger­ ating the tone and lowering his voice. It was as if he was distancing himself from the gesture, which had probably been ordered by his uncle, the bosun. During the voyage’s first days, I had already learned that the captain liked only pasta in red sauce. But since the captain never uttered a word and any prolonged social interaction with him was out of the question, I had some leeway with that. Moreover, since food had become the main vessel for la­ ment and contestation between the owner and the crew, the captain was not any part of the tension. On top of that, Zu Nino, who seemed more ill and tired by the day, now expressed his worry that if he could no longer guide my cooking, the ship would be in shambles. At times this expression made Hajj approach me and quiz me as to the following meal’s content and prep­ aration sequence. At others, Zu Nino’s lament made Salvatore take control of the cooking, the advantage in the latter case being that it helped “the kitchen” indulge the particularities of the mechanics’ palates. For the mechanics, red sauce was out of the question. For one of the din­ ners during the following days, Salvatore and Zu Nino prepared pasta with butter, boiled octopus, and steam-­boiled chard. Yet over dinner, Paolo—­ the main customer—­did not touch any of it. “Did you see the [chief   ] me­ chanic?” Hajj asked me after dinner had been over, “Zu Nino pampers him, but he still wouldn’t eat a thing.” A couple of days later, lunch drew some

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complaints from the mechanics. “They are extremely delicate with food!” Zu Nino told me at the bridge when I brought him and the captain their coffee. “It’s an identity thing.” “Identity?” “Yes, sure! Have you ever seen them eat pasta?” “No.” “There you go! And for the second dishes, we eat potatoes, broccoli, all these things. But they—­nothing! It’s because they are mechanics. It’s not only here; on all the ships, it’s like this! Have you ever seen a mechanic eat red pasta? That’s the way they are.” “Why?” “Because they are mechanics. They are of a different breed [or “race,” razza]. They don’t want to eat anything. Pasta, no. Red sauce, no! They have to be different. How can you deal with that? As Zu Nino failed to group the crew as a collective through a commensal­ ity over which he would reside, the same meals appeared as tokens of dif­ ference, identity, and division. If the mechanics were the first to receive the owner’s ire—­as a middle class of sorts, whom he did his best to indulge—­ other divisions did not take long to emerge. Several days later, the crew’s refusal to express their culinary gratitude started to take its toll on the owner. Whereas the two meals needed to be served regularly, the coffee rounds permitted some latitude for dramatic confrontation. Every round of coffee that the bosun ordered elicited some complaint or curse from the owner, who would nonetheless drink the cof­ fee I was serving him. One day, as he was reaching for the plastic cup, he released a sigh and said: “Fuck, the coffee you serve is coming out of our nostrils.” Then, during one of the nights we spent “on the bank,” the bosun kept sending me to make coffee during each net, totaling four rounds from dusk till dawn. Each time I served coffee, I brought the first cup to the bridge. When the captain was on shift, he received his cup with the usual throat clearing gesture and said nothing. Then, during the dog shift, when the owner was at the helm, he ordered me not to serve any more coffee: No more than four times a day. You have studied, you are intelligent. We are Christians! Not asses! We can’t drink coffee that frequently! You can’t fool people! You are Israeli. These Tunisians are a shitty breed. Listen to me, you give them to eat, and you give them and you give them, and nothing!

Zu Nino’s diatribe combined the identity/religion/nationality distinc­ tion with a deeper form of discriminating categorization. In Sicily, like in

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other places in southern Italy, the term “Christian” denotes “a person,” and has a double meaning. First, it denotes “a man” as in the oft-­used expres­ sion “Taliya stu cristianu! [Look at this guy!]” Second, it means “a man” (and the gender specificity here is important) who is worthy of being called so; perhaps akin to the Aristotelian teleological notion of “a man.” Hence the opposite of cristiano in this second sense is either Turco or asino [ass, donkey]. This becomes clear when people use the opposed terms together, as in the expression “Siamo cristiani o siamo turchi? [Are we men or are we Turks?]” This conflation of the generic and superlative term for “a man” with the religious self-­identifier is used in a similar way by Tunisians, who for denoting “a man” use the word for servant or slave, ‘abd; “the group” is similarly the plural “l’abaad,” of which the opposite is often “yahoodi,” Jew or Jewish. The reference here is to people’s being servants of God, and more specifically, those who should attempt to imitate the prophet Mohamed in their demeanor. Anybody growing up in Israel would be familiar with similar usages of the term “Jew” (“yehudi”) in Hebrew, and before that “a yidd” in Yiddish. In order to give more power to a statement, one can say “as a smart Jew said once”; in pointing affectionately or respectably to an old person, one can say “Look at this old Jew.”7 Here too, the denigrating opposite category is “Arab.” I do not think Zu Nino was aware of these Sicilian-­Israeli-­Tunisian simi­ larities; he was probably appealing to what he assumed would be my anti-­ Arab impulse. Either way—­and as with the mechanics and the pasta—­Zu Nino scaled up the situational question of how much coffee we should drink to the level at which a group’s shared characteristic explained to him their culinary predilections. Thus two forms of reciprocity, care, and group­ ing crossed each other: that of the ship, which the owner did his best to build to his own interests (which he tried to make us see as our own), and that of the group identity he summoned to explain why people were not following his lead. When I came down to give everybody else their coffee cups, I told Hajj about what had happened at the bridge (as I had done before). “Aren’t we paying for the food ourselves? It comes off the ship’s expenses,” he replied. Hajj seemed neither perturbed nor surprised by the personal and scathing reaction of the owner. Rather, he judged the coffee as an item in a calculus of expenses for which, he implied, they were all paying; or at least that was how it should have been. It is as if he were saying that there was nothing personal about the coffee. They were working at sea, according to a contract that had the voyage’s expenses incorporated into the accounts before the gains were split, according to the “parts system;” there should be nothing more to that.

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Onboard the Naumachos, the meaning of family and class was neither obvious nor fixed. It took its shape through the owner’s and the crew’s at­ tempts to make certain things, times, and places onboard stand for family or labor, and by so doing, to frame the wider context of our life and work. If class and family seemed at times mutually exclusive, this contradistinc­ tion came out of the use people were making of family and class to frame onboard life, not any of these categories’ essential elements (J. Davis 1977, 153; Herzfeld 1985a). Since our departure from port, the owner had tried to frame the entire ship as a family. The paternal generosity he tried to show twice a day in the dining hall was supposed to shed its altruistic and recip­ rocal light on the labor astern during the rest of the day, and make us “sort with both hands” for a cause he wished we would all regard as common. The owner’s attempts helped everyone charge food with meanings of care, altruism, and reciprocity. But because these values played out in relation to the work astern—­a work the crew treated as “modern slavery”—­food be­ came a test, not a proof, of the owner’s care. Food thus became the most meaningful way to judge that care as lacking, and the owner as stingy and exploiting. For Zu Nino, the dining hall was the site at which to frame the ship as family, and the aft deck was where that family framing should make people work hard. For the crew, the aft deck was where we were working too hard for too long, and not for our own gain; and the dining hall was where we should have been compensated for it, though no amount of food or ol­ ive oil seemed to deliver that gratification. This spatial contradiction turned the dining hall and the aft deck into the bipolar stages of opposing fram­ ing. Over meals, the owner offered “family” and received a “class” response; astern, the crew claimed “family” and were answered by the owner’s “class.” If the relational tension between family and class played out spatially, both the owner and the crew navigated it through personal attempts to se­ cure favors, treatments, and the minute improvement they might have of­ fered for one’s time at sea. Those came in the shape of quantifiable vessels of meaning—­a special dish to please one’s palate, versed time and again to sig­ nify that one was taken care of personally, exceptionally, by the owner or by his head of department—­or that one should expect such future treatment. All in all, the tensions over food got stormier by the day. During our third week at sea, I already felt comfortable enough to suggest to the owner that I prepare certain things for dinner, which contained more flexibility and fre­ quently included something from the daily catch. One afternoon I climbed to the bridge to ask Zu Nino whether we should boil prawns for dinner. He got angry and started shouting, complaining that we had made the same thing the other day with merluzzi, and at the end no one touched it but him,

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Hajj, and me. The captain tried to calm him down, but he would have none of it: “Assassins, all of them!”

Cousinage for Fraternity If, onboard the Naumachos, food turned into the emblem of social rela­ tions, in the chronicles of the central Mediterranean, the stuff of subsistence at a vaster scale turned into a movable emblem for transnational political relations. Like Zu Nino, rising shipowners, intellectuals, and politicians in the Mazara political scene sought to charge the materials necessary for sub­ sistence and the infrastructures built to convey them—­natural gas, in this case—­with idioms of kinship and family, and then tried to mobilize them for their respective political projects. As with onboard life, charging the em­ blem only set the game afoot. What does commensality and food sharing have to do with oil poli­ tics? The intimate obligations of providing subsistence for one’s family may seem worlds apart from the cynical geopolitics that animate the flows of oil, natural gas, and the like. Nevertheless, at both scales people turn the materials necessary for subsistence and the infrastructures built to convey them into emblems of the relationship between providers, provisions, and those provided for. The seeming incompatibility between these two kinds of subsistence—­domestic and civilizational—­includes two distinguishable ele­ ments. The first is the use of terms of relatedness as metaphor (or frame) for relations other that what the literal terms signify, as when I call you my sister or my brother (often in the familiarizing shortened form: sis, bro, fra’, and so forth) though you are not. The second is the use of terms of relatedness at a scale and between entities larger than what the terms usually invoke, as when two municipal administrations forge “twinning” agreement between their cities, when people call their states “brothers,” “sisters,” or “friends,” or when they declare this or that state as belonging to (or excluded from) “the family of nations.” While many of these terms draw from the realm of familiarity and relatedness, what they all share is the scaled-­up reference of the idiom of social relations, not any specific meaning of the idiom. Like the exquisite fish that scaled up patronage, so can idioms of related­ ness travel far and wide. Yet the way in which people deployed such idioms transnationally to scale up their “here” and their “now” distinguishes both their use as scaling devices and the kind of claims on people, relations, and space, which they could make with them. Exquisite fish expanded the reach of interpersonal relations while maintaining their interpersonal elementary link. In contrast, the scaling up of idioms of familiarity and relatedness

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Figure 18.  Relief above the main entrance to the cathedral in Mazara

across the Channel of Sicily depended on applying them to relationships farther away from where we are used to find them, and on vaster, more varied scales. Many people in Mazara—­from town, Tunisia, or farther afield—­shared Zu Nino’s penchant for familial projection. In the time that I spent in Mazara before boarding the Naumachos, people explained to me whom I should call my cousin and whom my compare (“co-­parent,” the godfather of one’s child or the father of one’s godchild), and what kind or intensity of respect I could express by using which word for uncle and in which lan­ guage. Yet one event brought home to me the wider reach of these terms’ distinguishing capacities. In the autumn of 2008, clerics, theologians, and academics from the entire Mediterranean rim convened in Mazara followed for the inaugural conference of the Mediterranean Center for Intercultural Studies (CEMSI), a joint initiative of the local bishopric and the provincial government. During the conference, which was dedicated to the question of interfaith peace in the Mediterranean, the participants walked to the town’s cathedral for a mass for peace. At the entrance to the cathedral, the bishop of Mazara—­a cofounder of CEMSI—­stopped the group to point out to them the relief above the main door, which depicted the Norman Count Roger I trampling with his horse over a “Saracen” as an emblem of the end of Mus­ lim rule of Sicily.

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During one of the conference’s sessions, Slimane Zeghidour, an Algerian intellectual and journalist living in France, recalled the relief above the Ca­ thedral’s entrance: “The image is violent, violent, but it shows that the two shores [of the Mediterranean] have always lived together and with conflicts. But who doesn’t have conflicts? [ . . . ] There are always conflicts but conflict is intimacy. . . .” Zeghidour’s observation was meant as more than a plati­ tude: The intimacy he referred to resided in a deeply shared past. This shared past was important not because it was peaceful, but because it made Medi­ terranean Christians and Muslims into “cousins”: As you know, family disputes are the most ferocious and the most violent [. . .] We should not view [the Arab-­Islamic world] as a foreign, hostile, mysterious, and enigmatic world. We have to strive to remember [that regarding the Arab world. . . .] We have in front of us cousins, cousins with whom we have had disputes and with whom we’ve lost touch; but they are true cousins, persons of the same family. . . .8

By applying cousinage to Mediterranean history, Zeghidour created a graded scheme of structural distance, in a way that identified the structural source of the current divisiveness: “a certain discourse, especially that of American evangelists” has made “some Muslim Arabs see their Christian compatri­ ots as strangers” and “consider Christianity as something totally foreign.” The shared origin of the three monotheistic religions did not make all their believers brothers but, rather, kin. The Mediterraneans among them were closer to each other than to “American evangelists.” And those distant relatives—­Christian but not Catholic and farther afield—­were the source of the present political predicament, as distant cousins often are. The political solution thus lay in “reminding” Mediterranean Christians and Muslims, south Europeans and North Africans, that they were “true cousins.” It was exactly this point that the next speaker misunderstood. Professor Anna Paola Tantucci, the president of the Italian chapter of the World Association for the School as an Instrument of Peace, was discussing the importance of human rights for “sustainable globalization.” A minute into her talk, Tantucci referred to Zeghidour’s intervention, which, as she said, had “invoked the fact that we—­Christians and the Arab world—­should feel ourselves cousins.” I would take it a step further: We should be as brothers [. . .  .] Of the three ide­ als of the French revolution—­equality, liberty, and fraternity—­the first two are

146 / Chapter Five more or less accomplished, whereas fraternity is totally disregarded. Instead [ . . . ] the founding of the universality of human rights on fraternity, which excludes races and all that which does not exist in reality—­we are brothers on the same land, on the same planet—­is what we should inculcate in our youth.

By preferring global fraternity to Mediterranean cousinage, Tantucci’s re­ mark points to a wider issue in academic understandings of transnational­ ism. For it reveals the assumption that the only kinship idiom applicable to transnational situations is fraternity, in one of its two forms: in existing “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991, 6–­7), and in the project of creat­ ing the global realm of fraternal “human rights” (Dworkin 1986, 206). In both cases, all the group’s members are declared to be “born free and equal” and urged to “act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Fraternity is the only kinship term that has survived the rise of academic interest in transnationalism, making “imagined communities” the imagi­ nary building blocks of a world turned global. As a result, nationalism, that “new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together,” is still assumed to have driven a “harsh wedge between cosmology and his­ tory” (Anderson 1991, 36). The political potential that fraternity holds as a kinship metaphor for political relations well predates the French Revolu­ tion. Among all the popular kinship categories (cousins, in-­laws, milk-­kin, godparents, etc.), fraternity postulates the closest, strictest, most equal bond. In European, Middle Eastern, and North African imaginations, brothers are supposed to be similar, close, equal, and so forth, and should beware of divisive competition, or so go various ideologies of fraternity (Sahlins 2011). This strictness is the source of its ubiquity as a vehicle of political mobiliza­ tion; invocations of fraternity entail a binary, situational, flattening view of the social world, and produce either reifying exclusions or no divisions at all. Most famously, in tribal feuds, however people describe their relation­ ship, they call each other “brothers” when the time comes to bear arms. But the call is made (and taken) as a situational mobilizing gesture, not a description of political relations (Dresch 1986, 311; Shryock 1997, 77). Nationalism’s fraternal mold for transnational relations turned this mobilizing framing into a prescriptive ideology: in Tantucci’s words, “we should be as brothers.” But this mold actually resembles kinship in the Mid­ dle East: “ ’Extraverted systems’ speak a language of introversion” (Dresch 1998, 125). As nation-­states find themselves obliged to forge binding unions across their borders—­bridges, pipelines, supranational institutions, and so forth—­they discuss such infrastructural projects of “concrete transnational­ ism” as “transnational sister-­and brotherhood” (Löfgren 2004, 63). This

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rhetoric of sameness suppresses difference and moves it from the realm of political action to that of cultural tolerance: We should act as if we were brothers (not siblings or sisters), and tolerate all that which reminds us that we are not. This is not the case with cousins. Cousinage does not impose identicality or amity on the cousined parties, but rather allows them to be both some­ what different and even in conflict with each other, while still related, in ways that maintain and distinguish overlapping sociopolitical fields (Tillion 1983). This potential derives from the structural differences between broth­ erhood and cousinage as idioms for social relations, which play out when both terms are applied as metaphors to transnational politics. Cousinage introduces graded difference as well as varying scales of proximity and the potential segmentation they enable. It permits lateral connections or affinity (cousins can and are sometimes expected to marry). Finally, it introduces crossness, when such connections occur across difference (as when cross-­ cousins marry). Parallel cousinage—­e.g., children descended from brothers or from sisters—­extends brotherhood (or sisterhood) in scale, because par­ allel cousins’ relation remains, in a way, within the family line. Contrary to that, cross-­cousins—­respective children of a brother and a sister—­relate to each other through a union and exchange between two family lines: they are “united by that which divides them, linked by that which separates them” (Viveiros de Castro 2004, 19). Herein resides the power of cousinage over fraternity as a metaphor in the making of transnational constellations. Cousinage makes a wider world. As an idiom for political relations, cous­ inage permits varying degrees and kinds of difference, familiarity, misunder­ standing, and structural distance. And since cousinage parses the world differ­ ently across the Mediterranean, difference in practice further complicates the way in which the politics of relationship across difference unfolds. Sicilians and Tunisians use cousinage terms in different ways. When you walk along the quays of the new port in Mazara, you can hear Sicilian fishers call to each other, “Ciao cugì!” This truncated form of “cousin” does not distinguish be­ tween cross-­and parallel cousins. Nor should it in Sicily where, as in other parts of the northwestern Mediterranean, crossness among one’s cousins is not marked (J. Davis 1977, 197), and where, especially in Sicily, fraternity is distinguished from the three “dangerous Cs: cugini, cognati, e cumpari” (cous­ ins, brothers-­in-­law, and co-­parents [one’s children’s godparents]). Tunisians, on the other hand, distinguish between a person’s paternal and maternal un­ cles and aunts (‘amm[ah], kha¯l[ah]). As metaphors, both terms imply respect, while the latter adds difference and may reduce obligation. This distinction is felt annually by Tunisian youth who spend most of their summers with

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their maternal relatives in Tunisia and consequently need to navigate these patrilocal and patrilineal familial contexts against the grain (Ben-­Yehoyada 2011b, 395). The distinction plays out also in the avuncular term of respect: Tunisians in Mazara used to call the head of the political cell of the pre-­2010 Tunisian ruling party, who was known to report on them to the government, “khāl.” In framing transnational political relations, such differences may be de­ fined according to ideologies of identity and sameness: religious, linguistic, ethnic, national, or other. As among kin, both distance (grade) and differ­ ence (crossness) shape the contours of potential interaction: be it affinity or conflict (Dresch 1998, 121). Calling someone “cousin” can serve as a dis­ tancing gesture, which nevertheless affirms a shared context. Israelis often call Arabs “our cousins,” (who in turn call Jews “our paternal cousins”) as did the English in the century following 1776 when they called their trans­ atlantic ex-­compatriots “our American cousins.” In both cases, “cousins” re­ ceives its meaning from its contrast with “brothers,” for which the nation is the yardstick. These differences between Sicilians and Tunisians—­or, more generally, between kinship idioms that mark crossness and those that do not—­might seem insurmountable. Yet, as we shall see, as long as both sides cast each other as eligible candidates for transnational affinity—­politically marriageable, as it were—­the structural similarities and differences in the parties’ alliance and affinity strategies shape the course that events take. One might argue that such pronouncements about kinship and affinity among the nations are nothing but political rhetoric. Yet the use of these idioms de­ rives its meaning from their relationship to others (especially brotherhood), be it in political speeches, intellectual discourse, or quayside discussions over the morning’s coffee. The difference between fraternity and cousinage marks in many ways the dilemma of cross-­Mediterranean relations as it has unfolded in Mazara. Most importantly, the alternative that cousinage offers to fraternity is based on the fact that it incorporates specificity and difference into the metaphor for political relations, rather than extracting them out of the elementary building block of transnational relations. Postcolonial Matrimonial Strategies Mazarese were not alone in using terms of relatedness onto their trans­ national relations. Various Italian and Tunisian as well as West European and North African actors projected idioms of kinship and family onto the provision of energy on a transnational scale—­that is, on the relationships they sought to forge between providers, provisions, and those provided for.

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Moreover, as onboard the Naumachos, so on various political stages in and around the Channel of Sicily, familial idioms encountered others, like those of patronage and class, which other actors scaled up to frame the emerging transnational situation. As a result, social interaction revolved around the contest over alternative frames for political relations. In both cases, people did not just pronounce abstract visions about social relations, but anchored them to things that came to signify these alternative frames. Since the late Sixties these frames have been gradually projected southward toward the Mediterranean and relationships across it. On October 29, 1973, Mazara del Vallo was in a festive mood. The 1973 Israeli-­Arab War had ended four days earlier, and the oil embargo that OPEC had declared during the war promised a grim immediate future for European countries. But in the previous weeks, the Italian and Algerian national energy companies had signed an agreement for the construction of the Transmed, a trans-­Mediterranean methane pipeline to run between the two countries. The immediate cause of local excitement resided in the fact that the pipeline, which the mayor called “the most important gas pipeline in the world,” was planned to pass through Mazara’s municipal territory.9 In the following de­ cade the pipeline claimed center stage in local, national, and international debates about the future of Sicilian-­Tunisian, Italian–­North African, and European-­African relations; specifically, the pipeline accelerated discussions of Italy’s Mediterranean regional policy on both sides of the sea. The Transmed pipeline represented much more than the supply of energy from the South to the North. It emblematized new possibilities of transna­ tional political relations, and did so differently at each of the political scales. Familial and kinship framings played a central role in the reemergence of the Mediterranean scale on the Italian political horizon. In a way, the pipe­ line turned into a scaling device that captured these idioms of relatedness and projected them transnationally. As events unfolded, Italians and Tuni­ sians perceived each other as related, and staged the trans-­Mediterranean in­ frastructural project as a European-­African (cross-­cousin) marriage of sorts. Both sides used idioms of kinship and affinity across difference and multiple scales to form their transnational political relations across the Mediterranean. As a result, the modularity, specificity, historical depth, and incorporation of relationship across difference, which such idioms offered, played a role in a segmentary process of region formation in the central Mediterranean. The Algerian-­Italian declaration articulated and materialized Italian at­ tention to the Mediterranean. It did not initiate it. In the aftermath of  World War II the Mediterranean occupied an ambivalent place in Italian politics. On the one hand, the most recent legacy of Mediterraneanist imaginary stemmed

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Figure 19.  The Transmed pipeline. Drawing by Angelos Qlos.

from fascist pronouncements about the need to colonize the Mediterra­ nean’s southern shore as Italy’s “fourth shore” (Ben-­Ghiat 2001, 123–­24; Dou­ manis 1997). On the other hand, the Mediterranean offered Italian poli­ tics both a zone of action and a host of historical moments of interaction (Bono 2008). During the Fifties, Italian politicians, cultural entrepreneurs, and businessmen used these resources, attributing varying meanings and degrees of concreteness to them (Grange 1994; Pizzigallo 2012; Viscomi 2016). For example, prominent Christian Democrats like Giorgio La Pira promoted dialogue among the “metaphysical civilizations” of the “triple family of Abraham,” rebaptizing the Mediterranean as “this great Sea of Tiberias” (La Pira 2006). These reformulations went in tandem with the Italian energy policies that sought an independent position towards oil pro­ ducing countries (Luciani and Fodella 1981). Nevertheless, throughout the 1960s, “Italian contribution to the Mediterranean [was] more the outcome of strong economic and commercial ties than of any specific Mediterranean Italian policy formulated by the Italian government” (Silvestri and Albioni 1972, 507). The Mazara fleet played a role in the rise of Mediterraneanist allusions in Italian politics since the late Sixties. Two historical chains of events structured that role and the competing Mediterraneanist imageries people

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used to frame it and social relations in the wider sea: on the one hand, the Fish War with Tunisia, and on the other hand, the construction of a trans-­ Mediterranean natural gas pipeline (Transmed) that was to connect North Africa and Europe. Together, these two threads in the continuous cross-­ maritime interaction pumped new energy into the old geopolitical imag­ ination of the Mediterranean and shaped the central Mediterranean as a spatiotemporal field of political action. And nowhere was this clearer than in Mazara. These two threads of events began to intertwine during the 1973 oil crisis and the strikes in the fleet and in the viticulture sector. The 1973 crisis and the austerity measures that the national government promoted in the oil and energy sectors (F 1974) continued beyond the strike in the fleet, which ended during the first days of 1974 when the owners decided to send their trawlers to sea after the New Year’s holiday. For our story, the 1973 oil crisis and the discussions about it in Mazara are important because it was during the crisis that the local Republicans and Communists fully articu­ lated the relations between the town’s futures and the regional category that captured these scales: the Mediterranean. The pipeline claimed center stage in national and international debates about the future of Sicilian-­Tunisian, Italian-­North African, and European-­ African relations. Specifically, the pipeline accelerated discussions of Italy’s Mediterranean regional policy on both sides of the sea. On the northern side of the Channel of Sicily, when neocolonial projects replaced colonial domi­ nation, southern European states were literally better positioned than their richer northern neighbors for new kinds of connections with independent African nations; not because of any industrial strength or previous colonial domination, but because they were located between excolonizing industrial centers and recently decolonized energy suppliers. The Italian National Oil and Gas Authority (ENI) and its omnipotent postwar leader, Enrico Mattei (d. 1962), had since the late Fifties promoted Italian autonomy from major Western powers and oil companies in the international oil market, especially in relation to postcolonial Arab countries (Perrone 1995). The Transmed project offered to materialize this vision by forging a durable connection between Algeria and Italy. This activism became more important during the Arab oil embargo, since it allowed Italy a role independent of that of most Western powers (Licklider 1988). The Transmed pipeline furthered Mattei’s vision because it forged a much more durable connection between Algeria and Italy, and secured the latter’s international prominence (Victor, Jaffe, and Hayes 2006). From a Sicilian perspective, different interests shaped a similar quest for autonomy. As Italy’s energy policy sought to use its proximity to North

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Africa for its position within Europe, so did Sicilian energy policy seek to use its own geographic position for breaking from the national monopoly of ENI.10 In both cases—­national autonomy in a supranational hierarchy or subnational independence in a national hierarchy—­potential cross-­channel affinity promised room for geopolitical maneuver. In this context, the pipe­ line’s proposed path—­physically binding together Algeria and Italy as it passed through Tunisia and Sicily—­reignited some Italians’ Mediterranean­ ist geopolitical imagination. On the other side of the Mediterranean, the gradual turn from anticolo­ nial struggles to state nationalism in Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya shaped each of these countries’ positions regarding its resources, as well as whether and how Europeans should access them (Burke 1998).11 Since the pipeline was to pass from Algeria through Tunisia and Sicily to northern Italy, its plan­ ning wove these various positions. From an Algerian perspective, natural gas became the life liquid of the new nation. Shortly after Algerian inde­ pendence in 1962, natural energy resources became a key emblem of post-­ colonial Algerian self-­assertion in its relations with France. Throughout the Sixties, Algerian politicians called oil and gas an Algerian “heritage,” “patri­ mony,” and “source of life.” The successful extraction and marketing of gas and oil affirmed that “the blood of free men, the blood of our martyrs, was not shed in vain.”12 The more aggressive elements of such discourse—­the rhetoric of blood and martyrdom—­were initially directed against France, which Algerian politicians accused of trying to turn the Mediterranean from “a sea of peace” into a “French Sea,”13 echoing a century-­long French Medi­ terraneanist discourse (P. A. Silverstein 2002). Yet Algerian rhetoric also in­ cluded the notion of regional bonds and transnational sharing of resources: Algeria, it was declared, would “share its mineral resources with countries that [were] bound to it by destiny.”14 Italy—­geographically near, and with no colonial taints on its relationship with Algeria—­became an eligible can­ didate for the binding relations of the kind that Algerian politicians had in mind, and which the pipeline emblematized. Furthermore, according to ENI’s independent international politics of parity with oil-­producing countries, The Italian and the Algerian partners (Algeria’s national oil and gas company, SONATRACH) were each meant to own a half of the joint company (Hayes 2004). Tunisian pronouncements about the pipeline spread across the semantic spectrum of Italian and Algerian phrasings. Tunisian officials combined the technical and the organicist references, calling the pipeline “a Mediterra­ nean artery,” “a chain link between Europe, the Arab World, and Africa” and declaring that the project would “constitute an almost organic link in the

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great construction of Europe-­Arab World and Europe-­Africa . . . underlining the complementarity and solidarity of the Arab community and the Euro­ pean Community.”15 One might doubt such pronouncements as mere po­ litical rhetoric, which most Algerians and Tunisians might have not shared. Yet the question is not the sincerity or spread of these pronouncements, but the significance they received in relation to alternative frames: declara­ tions of brotherhood, friendship, mutual interests, and so forth. In those years, especially around the 1973 war and oil crisis, Tunisian officials and their Arab counterparts were frequently referring to each other and to their peoples as brothers (or sisters, depending on the gender of the noun in question). In this reaffirmed fraternal bond, the Tunisian foreign minis­ ter, Mohamed Masmoudi, declared that oil, “which had once been a factor of discord, has become an instrument of rapprochement, mutual support, and understanding.”16 The pipeline was to pump the essence of Algerian nationality, aided by Tunisian-­Algerian pan-­Arab brotherhood, across the sea and the difference it marked between the two “communities,” as a bond of affinity across difference. If, in this imaginary, oil became the essence of Arab brotherhood, granting it to Europe meant passing the substance of family across family lines. Masmoudi, ever the promoter of pan-­Arab unity, smoothed this boundary by reminding everyone that Tunisians and Maza­ resi were not so distinct after all. The idioms that informed the transnational political imagination on both sides of the Channel of Sicily were those of kinship and marriage: Italians and North Africans perceived each other as related across the difference and the sea that separated them. They might have a shared point of cultural ancestry—­Abrahamic monotheism (La Pira 2006)—­but that shared origin was too distant in the past and too inclusive in the present to entail any political prescriptions. As we have seen, the more recent medieval past of Arab and Arab Norman Sicily offered a more tangible and resonant repertoire of relationships. Sicilians and Tunisians were forging a bond not of brotherhood but of affinity. Present-­day Sicilians and Tunisians cast themselves as descendants of their respective medieval predecessors. Through that past connection, they relate to each other. In this script, the pipeline became the renewed bond of European-­African affinity. Scaling Up Affinity In Mazara, the kind of connections that Masmoudi was drawing between the pipeline project and the 1973 Arab-­Israeli war—­between the Sicilian-­ Tunisian relationship and the wider international context of the oil em­ bargo and “peace in the Mediterranean”—­supported some politicians’

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views about how to connect the local, national, and international scales of political action. The question of the Mediterranean initially emerged in Mazara, as else­ where in Italy, a decade or so earlier. In Mazara of the Sixties, the Mediter­ ranean appeared most frequently in the Fish War in the Channel of Sicily and in the fishing agreements with Tunisia.17 At the same time, the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno and the economic boom of the Sixties both offered various infrastructure projects that kindled people’s geopolitical imagination: The national government planned for a highway that would connect Messina to Palermo and Western Sicily and an industrial port in Mazara. Following the devastating 1968 earthquake that in the Vale del Belice, immediately to the east of Mazara (Dolci 1974), several aid projects included Mazara, which al­ ready had the economic force to host the refugees from the affected zone.18 It was in that period that the sea—­through the opportunities and tensions that it generated—­started to signify things beyond the narrow affairs of the fleet. As a result, these projects divided the local political scene according to the differing frames for these projects and the relationships they entailed between Mazara, Europe, North Africa, and the Mediterranean they shared. The first issue that divided the Mazara Council was the question of scale itself. On the one hand, several actors from across the political spectrum professed their excitement at the international scope of Mazara’s potential role between Europe and Africa. In the words of the Christian Democrat mayor:19 We the administration, we the majority, we the council, we the citizens, we all have to believe in these things, to pursue them with stubbornness [ . . . ]. Our force has to come from the geographic position of Mazara, which constitutes, as we all know, the closest European place to Africa.

In this view, Mazara stood to gain from the scaling up of its role, which depended on a more Mediterraneanist attention on behalf of the national government. Those Mazarese politicians who held this view sought to use their connections in Rome and Palermo to promote these infrastructural development projects so that Mazara “could perform the wished-­for service of a connection with Africa and become, as in the past [. . .] ‘the pearl of the Mediterranean.’ ”20 The benefits from such projects would “not be limited to Mazara—­which, given its natural position, [would] necessarily have to con­ struct the basis of the aerial, maritime, and submarine bridge that [would] unite Europe with the African continent—­but for the entire province, for

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the region [Sicily], and for the nation.” Yet not everyone shared such grand plans. Members of the “old guard” reprimanded their region-­zealous col­ leagues for dealing with issues outside their realm of responsibility or com­ petence, like “the Atomic Bomb, Vietnam, or fishing in the Mediterranean.”21 In this view, the Mediterranean scale of action was as foreign to Mazara’s horizon as any other item on the “world news” page in Italian newspapers and, accordingly, should remain outside local politician’s concerns. Beyond the question of the appropriate scale for Mazaresi’s horizon, po­ litical actors differed on the idioms that should frame relationships across the sea. Against the background of this skepticism about the Mediterranean, some politicians articulated the connections between the situation and direction of Mazara and its fleet and political events on national and in­ ternational scales. The Mediterranean was the category that captured these scales, but it was not the only available geopolitical category. Interaction be­ tween Italy and Tunisia or Algeria could have been and indeed was framed as Muslim-­Christian, as European-­African, as relations between the “devel­ oped” and the “developing” worlds, and so forth, all with varying degrees of accuracy. Each of these frames offered a different ground for transnational projects of the kind Mazarese politicians had in mind: conflictual, neigh­ borly, familial, patronal, or any combination thereof. Initially, everyone agreed that a pipeline streaming Algerian gas to Italy through Mazara promised a bright future for the Mediterranean and a cen­ tral role for Mazara in it. Historical, natural, and geographical reasons [. . .] make Mazara the connecting link [anello di congiungimento] with the peoples of the third world who possess a great human, economic, and cultural potential, which can be developed to the reciprocal interest of all the peoples of the Mediterranean basin (emphasis added).22

The term “anello di congiungimento” has several possible meanings, which combine in the term’s context. In infrastructural terms, the pipeline and Mazara would unite “peoples.” In evolutionistic terms, Mazara as a “miss­ ing link” would connect the “developed” and the “developing” worlds. Meta­ phorically, the term denoted an emblem of potential revived affinity between Italy and Tunisia, “two Mediterranean sea-­dwelling peoples connected by densely glorious historical events”—­not shared descent but a shared past mo­ ment of connection.23 Together, the term’s three dimensions—­infrastructural, evolutionistic, and affinal—­clarify how, as a historical event, the Transmed

156 / Chapter Five

project offered Mazaresi the opportunity of Tunisian-­Sicilian “kinshipping”: of reaching back to the distant past to inform and then change present politi­ cal relations (Smail and Shryock 2011: 32, 52). Yet the specific shape of this relationship remained ambiguous. The initial news of the pipeline project elevated local discussions about the na­ ture of the Mediterranean and the town’s role in it to a new, more concrete level. In those years, the centrist PRI was the party of progress and of the fleet. Both the DC and the PCI were trying to recruit shipowners into their ranks, but among them only the DC succeeded to some extent in doing so. Without any organic connection to the shipowning class or substantial connection to the ruling parties in Rome, the PCI and its affiliated politi­ cians critiqued any shortcoming of the national government within their own Mediterraneanist vision of transnational class conflict. The seizures at sea and the tensions between Tunisians and Sicilians were the fault of the Northern (national and European) paternalist capitalism. To liberate them­ selves, according to the leftist Mazarese politicians, Sicilians should forge cross-­channel unity (brotherhood) of the oppressed (rather than affinity across difference) with Tunisians and other Mediterraneans against their shared (Italian or European) oppressors. In the words of Rolando Certa, an outspoken member of the left in Mazara from the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP): “Beyond a Southernist [meridionalistica] politics, we need to undertake a Mediterranean one, because Sicily could and should progress through international collaboration.”24 For the left, the sea thus offered a center of gravity that seemed to detach Mazaresi’s lot from the North-­South geographic hierarchy that has domi­ nated Italian politics (J. Schneider 1998). Theirs was unity of the oppressed, not affinity of the related. In other words, the socialist framing of the Medi­ terranean projected class solidarity across the sea in a transnational class conflict it framed between South and North. Ironically, the claim that class fault lines passed to the north of Sicily helped the same leftist politicians agree that parallel class conflicts did not exist in the fleet. In any case, the two visions of transnational class solidarity and affinity across difference paralleled in consciously rejecting the received map of Italian politics. The Transmed project and the Fish War signified the contemporaneous opposite aspects of cross-­Mediterranean connections: peaceful and conflic­ tual. Together, clashes and potential connections made Mazara a prize in the regional and national political game. By the mid-­1970s, the fleet’s growth and its clashes with the Tunisian (and, to a lesser extent, the Libyan) coast guard had turned Mazarese politicians’ and intellectuals’ attention to the sea. The Fish War picked up its pace in those years: between the late 1960s

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and the late 1980s, nearly 450 Mazarese trawlers were seized, spending an average of fifty days in custody. Moreover, Italian-­Tunisian negotiations over the pipeline intensified the rate of clashes and seizures at sea, since the Mazarese trawlers served as the most accessible pawns in inter-­government exchange (Cremasco and Luciani 1985, 28). As events unfolded, each of the main political forces in town framed this promise differently. To some Mazarese politicians, the pipeline became a movable emblem of a possible affinity across difference. After all, Italy and Tunisia were “two sea­ side Mediterranean peoples connected by historical events [that are] dense with glory.”25 The allusion to these ancient “historical events” shifted the axis of the transnational constellation in two ways: it distinguished Italy (through Sicily’s ancient history) from other European countries, and it both facilitated and justified Mazarese-­Tunisian subnational relations. If Tunisia and Sicily shared historical events, they could eliminate the wide structural distance between Sicily and Tunisia (according to the interna­ tional Europe-­Africa view). In this sort of sympathetic magic, the Transmed joined the Mazarese trawlers, which were being seized and ransomed, in the ongoing Fish War. The specific shape of this kinshipping was affinity among the related across difference: two geographically close but developmentally unequal and culturally distinct “peoples” and their “worlds”—­Europe and Africa, which were already related through ancient connections. It was a marriage of sorts between distant if unequal kin. Like olive oil and coffee aboard the Naumachos, so in Mazarese political scene of these years, certain things signified wider idioms, which people tried to manipulate in framing their relations. Moving things and persons (including the Sicilian trawlers’ Tunisian crew members) gradually came to be linked to each other and con­ sequently to signify something else—­transnational political relations in the Channel of Sicily and the political imaginary of the wider Mediterranean. In the early Seventies, this vision of European-­African relations was under stress from a more belligerent version of cross-­channel relations. In Mazara, this pressure began to split the local political scene. The Fish War was gain­ ing momentum and the Italian government had still failed to sign a fishing agreement with Tunisia. Meanwhile, Algerian-­French post-­independence tensions cast a belligerent shadow on the sea. The politicians-­cum-­owners, who through their dominance within the local PRI became the town’s king­ makers (if not yet its mayors), interpreted the contrast between cross-­channel projects and such tensions as an opportunity. In a piece of exemplary scaling up strategizing, Ignazio Giacalone declared in 1970 that Italy’s inadequate foreign policy offered Mazara a distinct role. “Even if the fault should be attributed mostly to the ineffective Italian foreign policy [ . . . ] regarding

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the peoples of the Mediterranean,” the council had a “duty to remedy” this failure.26 That duty entailed forging subnational relations across the channel, which both Mazaresi and Tunisians framed and justified as a rekindling of historical connections that were specific to Sicily and Tunisia and which distinguished both places from their respective wider regions. To fulfill this duty, in 1972 Mazara signed a twinning agreement with Mahdia, a Tunisian fishing town that also happened to be the hometown of Tunisian Foreign Minister Masmoudi. The twinning, declared Mazara’s mayor, represented “an important welding of the socioeconomic context of the two coastal peoples.”27 Relations with Tunisia had been suffering continuously since 1967 because of Tunisia’s seizures of the Mazarese trawlers. But the remedy for this predicament was already underway, owing to “the development of diplomatic and then of personal relations” with people from Tunisia. After all, Italy and Tunisia were “two seaside Mediterranean peoples connected by historical events [that are] dense with glory.”28 For Masmoudi, the pact united his home town with Mazara, the Sicilian town “which also received its name from Arabic: ‘Mazar El Ouali [Mazar of the Governor]’ and where the Arabs have left many traces.”29 While both sides referred to past mo­ ments of connection, Masmoudi specified the power relations in these mo­ ments, citing the “traces” that “Arabs have left” in Mazara, not the opposite. Connecting with Mazara and, by extension, with Italy was justified because of a shared past of such connections. More important, perhaps, was that the upper hand that “Arabs” had had in these connections—­and the “traces” they subsequently left in Sicily—­turned the now Italian island into being somewhat Arab by contiguity, and thus an eligible candidate for receiving the substance of brotherhood. Cousinage in Times of Crisis During the last months of 1973, these different frames for the Mediterranean were articulated against each other according to the political positions and interests the various sides held in Mazara. Developments in three initially unrelated affairs accelerated the discussion of Mazara’s Mediterranean hori­ zon. The first was in regard to the initial announcements by the Italian and Algerian governments of the pipeline’s construction. The second involved the oil crisis following the OPEC embargo. The third—­and the only imme­ diately relevant development even on a local scale—­concerned the strikes in the town’s fleet and its viticulture sectors. The 1973 oil crisis hit Mazara

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as it did any other Italian or European industrial city. At the same time, the crisis offered some Mazaresi a cause for optimism. The fourth Israeli-­Arab War had recently ended, and the oil embargo OPEC had declared during the war promised a grim immediate future for European countries. But late in October, 1973, the town’s Communist mayor announced that in the previ­ ous weeks, the Italian and Algerian national energy companies had signed an initial agreement for the construction of the Transmed. Leftist politicians continued to promote the unity of the oppressed—­ Sicilians, Tunisians, and other southern Mediterraneans—­against their op­ pressors from the North. The fleet and the pipeline project seemed to facili­ tate such a possible regional-­scale class alignment, but neither was in their hands to manipulate. For the local Christian Democrat politicians, whose national party ruled Italy during the 1973 crisis but was in the opposition in town during that time, the projects that Communists and Republicans shared amounted to geopolitical scalar hubris. All DC politicians could of­ fer was their party’s consideration of the stress the oil crisis had exerted on Italy’s energy policy and the kind of Mediterraneanist politics it entailed. Since Italy depended on gas and oil from other Mediterranean countries, Christian Democrat governments shaped their international politics accord­ ingly.30 Local DC members justified the national government’s unpopular austerity actions during the crisis—­raising oil prices and limiting distribu­ tion—­by saying that the crisis had derived from “the embargo established by the Arab people regarding all industrialized nations, following the latter’s position regarding a certain people.” All Mazarese politicians should thus “show an animated spirit, which would demonstrate how all civilized peo­ ples depend on one another, and commit the government to a politics of peace toward all the peoples of the Mediterranean basin and the world.”31 The Mazara fleet’s role in such a strategy was mainly not to interfere with larger national and international goals, rather than to take any leading part in shaping foreign policy. Republicans like Giacalone cared less for leftists’ causes or struggles, but they saw in the crisis a unique opportunity to draw some benefits from the European-­Middle Eastern tensions. Against the tensions between the cores of transnational blocks: “Europe,” “the West,” “the Arab peoples,” “coloniz­ ers” and “colonized,” interpersonal connections and political pacts between Mahdia and Mazara, Tunisia and Sicily, could forge unions across differ­ ence and advance Mazarese interests at the same time. During the crisis, the Republican political strategy seemed to work. They used the fleet’s strike as an extramural proof of their power both in the face of national and Sicilian

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politicians and, later, in the Mazara city council, where they recounted these interactions. In the Republican politicians’ Mediterraneanist project, the “rage” of fishers played a crucial role. Once galvanized, it was supposed to agitate that specter of the Mediterranean over the heads of the council members, but also in Rome and Palermo. This specter, made to dance by the manipulation of ships and fishers, could be used as leverage against Italian and European institutions, hopefully making them veer towards the sea and the connections it offered. Nevertheless, all of these plans, proposals, and imaginations of the new Mediterranean unfolded against the background of the institutional chan­ nels of the Italian state. The latter was supposed to fund all the international infrastructural projects, negotiate fishing agreements with Tunisia, and se­ cure Mazarese trawlers fishing in the channel. Yet the valence of this Mazara-­ Sicily-­Italy relationship had already been reversed as the Italian state, in implementing all this, would now be serving Mazarese Mediterraneanist projects and, ipso facto, facilitating their emerging transnational (rather than international) worldview. This shift in direction foregrounded certain aspects of people’s identi­ ties and relations over others. Onboard the Naumachos, people were poten­ tially—­and could perceive themselves and each other as—­Sicilians against Tunisians, mechanics against deckhands, Muslims against Christians, and so forth, but also as workers against owner (with the captain landing on either side). Similarly, in the fleet’s history, Mazaresi were potentially—­and could perceive themselves as—­Europeans, Italians, Sicilians, Western Sicilians, or Mazaresi. Under each of these categorizations, they would be pitted against non-­Europeans, other nationals, Italians from other regions of Italy, or peo­ ple from other provinces or towns in Sicily (Herzfeld 1985a). Yet, in all these alternative setups, Mazaresi would perceive themselves according to a quasi-­ lineage of civilizational ancestry: European Christianity, Italian nationhood, Sicilian autonomy within either of them, and so forth. Any relationship with people from across the Channel of Sicily would be conceived always through that point in the segmentary structure that relates them to each other. Maza­ resi and Tunisians could only be united through their shared monotheism, and would be divided at any lower level. Yet the Mediterranean past offers a wider repertoire of cross-­channel rela­ tions. Once people conjure it up to frame present relationships, this past can provide an alternative view of transnational relations, one in which people on both sides of the sea relate to each other across difference, not on the basis of identity and similarity. The imaginary of binding connections of the

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kind that the Transmed pipeline enabled offered a model of social relations that contained both parties and the diversity that defined their relationship. The spatial imagery of the Mediterranean that such relationships engender neither encompasses nor unites all “Mediterranean” people. At the most ba­ sic level, that which the Mediterranean comes to stand for unfolds as the spatial dimension of social interaction. The allusions to the ancient Mediter­ ranean here served two connected goals. First, they shaped Sicilian and Italian histories around a Mediterranean kernel of cross-­lateral contacts rather than around a European kernel of linear descent. Second, in a national history so perceived, these allusions gave Mazara a key role in Sicily’s and Italy’s history. Where affinity across difference (Trautmann 2001) shapes the terms of trans­ national engagement, those with the richest pedigree of crossness stand out. Conclusion The Mediterranean was increasingly conjured up in Mazara after the early Seventies, when the affairs and predicament of the town’s fleet and the Transmed pipeline became the council’s “clear and present” issue. By mak­ ing highways, development projects, and tensions with Tunisia “Mediterra­ nean,” some of the council’s members sought to reshuffle other temporal and spatial templates that served at the time for thinking about and acting upon their town. The sea offered a long history that made the undetermined and ambivalent present shine under the light of a brilliant past. The year following the 1973 oil crisis seemed to offer Italian politics momentary latitude for international maneuvering. In Rome, Aldo Moro and Enrico Berlinguer were promoting the “historic compromise” between the DC and the PCI, which was supposed to help Italian politics overcome the constraints of the Cold War (Galli 1978, 436; cf. Gruppi 1977). Moro was also the DC politician who promoted the national energy policy and its related connections with gas-­and oil-­exporting countries like Algeria and Libya. In his conclusion of the Mazara city council’s last session before the 1975 elections, the new DC mayor elaborated this Mediterraneanist atten­ tion with words about the future: A strategy that until today was inserted in the European context will necessar­ ily have to recall all that is taking place on the other side of the Mediterranean. And in this future war it is necessary that the council definitively establish the mode of connection with nearby Africa. This is the commitment, perhaps the overriding one, which the new council will have to undertake [. . .  .] Because

162 / Chapter Five we believe that by now, the development of our Sicily and of our Mazara is linked with this bridgehead that we ourselves constitute with Africa.32

In that regionalist blueprint, occasional seizures served as periodic remind­ ers of the regional societies’ promise and plight alike. In the shipowners’ project, threats of strikes and rumors of pipelines served a signifying role similar to that which food played in Zu Nino’s attempts to manage onboard life. If on the Naumachos food turned into the emblem of onboard life, in the chronicles of the Channel of Sicily Mazarese trawlers and the Transmed pipeline became the movable emblems for political relations across the sea. Yet, like the broom in the hand of the sorcerer’s apprentice in Walt Dis­ ney’s Fantasia, soon the talisman in their hands assumed its own life and stopped obeying its regionalizing master. Both at sea and ashore, charging emblems with frames for the relationships they signified might have shaped one side’s project, but it hardly exhausted the ensuing process. It is to that process that we turn now.

SIX

Pissing Rage

Rage Management One morning, I happened to go astern to piss overboard when I noticed that Paolo, the chief mechanic, was heading there as well, stopping in front of the fish-­washing stand (Hajj’s working stand) to urinate there. When we were both done, he told me that I should not piss overboard: “If you fall overboard in this sea, no one would find you. Do it wherever you want on deck, but don’t lean overboard.” Later, when we were astern sorting another net, I asked Hajj about urinating on deck. “Yes, that’s the way we all do it. You shouldn’t piss overboard because it’s dangerous, so we all piss on deck.” But the place where the chief mechanic was pissing was the deckhands’ working area. This turned out to be a general norm. Everyone pissed on the working place of a department that was not theirs. The mechanics pissed where we washed and cleaned the fish, or where the mooring lines were stowed, while the deckhands pissed on the hydraulic drum. Nevertheless, as Hajj explained to me, the washing stand was washed so many times a day that he did not smell anything. He then continued: I can walk all around the ship with my eyes closed and tell you exactly where I am. Abasciaprua [in the front cabin] there is the smell of our wet clothes and of the farting from when we sleep. Next to the kitchen, there is the smell of the trash can and sometimes of the cooking as well. Then, when you walk by the mechanics’ cabin, there is the strong smell of their shoes, which they leave in front of their door. Then you have the smell of the sacks of medicinali (antiblackening powder) next to the stairs to the bridge. Then, next to the verricello you have the smell of grease and urine. Then, closer to the platform there is the smell of dead fish that are stuck below the platform.

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The bosun, who was sorting at the table, interrupted Hajj to say that we should shut up and sort with both hands. “Fai finta di niente,” Hajj concluded—­ “Pretend that nothing happened,” or “Don’t let on”—­and went back to concentrate on his pile. Now many male small-­craft sailors the world over would gladly elaborate on the sense of freedom they feel when they stand close to the vessel’s edge and urinate into the sea. On vessels where both men and women sail, this practice becomes a clear and pressing marker of gender difference and hierarchy: the freedom to relieve oneself in a standing position and “being as one with nature” being connected to a practice that is associated with males and usually limited to them. Moreover, some male seafarers love to dwell on the discomfort guests experience in front of a crewmember pissing overboard. This particular way of urinating does not derive from any strict practical consideration, nor does the seafaring gender ideology behind it presecribe disposal overboard more broadly: seasick people are usually commanded to vomit into a bucket on deck. So it is clear that this way of urinating serves more than physiological necessity. But, perhaps because the practice carries more gender and status connotations than practical imperatives, many methods of sailing favor the much more mundane, gender-­ egalitarian toilet. Aboard the Naumachos, the crew opted for neither of these two possibilities. It is not that urinating was devoid of any social meaning. A male sailor’s dispensing of his urine did indeed signify him, his urine, and his object. (“That’s marking a territory, like dogs,” as a friend of mine said.) But, rather than personifying some masculine unification with the sea, urinating became an offense of sorts, and a habitual one at that: “Piss on the working place of the other department!” Deckhands pissed on the hydraulic drum, which the mechanics needed to maintain and adjust constantly; in turn, mechanics pissed on the ropes and fish-­cleaning stands, the two things only deckhands touched habitually. Yet none of these potential offenses culminated in conflict. When I wondered about it aloud, Hajj and others told me there was nothing unusual about it. There was “no offense taken.” Less a red flag than a signpost, the smell of urine and other “offensive” odors pervaded the ship. They oriented each crewmember according to his department, status, and role. They gave us the coordinates to the ship’s social space: to each his own. By charting the ship’s space, these odors defined us, providing each of us with ample opportunities to remind ourselves who we were, to which department we belonged, where we were standing, and where we were heading. Urine—­a disposable emblem of masculinity if there ever was one—­charted that space

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through gendered honor. Fai finta di niente—­“Don’t let on” or “Pretend nothing happened”—­was how Hajj concluded his exegesis of space onboard, a response he repeated continuously throughout the voyage, as did others. In the floating incubator of self-­proclaiming proud masculinities that the Naumachos was, everything unfolded as if many potentially offensive acts could take place, because the recipient could always, and often did, revert to behaving as if he had noticed nothing. In this sense, “not letting on” was the opposite of “tolerating.” Tolerance is based on the premise that at least two social groups exist, and that “the mutually exclusive relation between groups [as well as] the balance of power will always remain the same” (Özyürek 2005, 510). Tolerating a counterpart’s actions makes those actions stand for an aspect of the counterpart’s antecedent, emblematic, and durable identity. Contrary to that, “to pretend nothing has happened” entails an acknowledgement of the action (as does ignoring it), but no presumption is made regarding the parties’ identities, let alone their mutually exclusive or permanent nature. In other words, tolerance focuses attention on the persons to tolerate, whereas pretending that nothing has happened draws attention to actions. The advice “not to let on” already marked the potential of rage as a device for mobilizing honor in framing and shaping social relationships, grouping, and space. It was as if this piece of advice acknowledged that once someone enacted rage and invoked honor, everyone knew how they were supposed to comport themselves. In its individual application, it prescribed “letting it go” instead of claiming personal offense, showing rage for it, and demanding that both offense and rage signified the injured honor of the group that the enraged person sought to summon. In most onboard situations, “not letting on” enabled many vituperative gestures by permitting those who were potentially offended to overlook the act that had just taken place. Yet to analyze such a communicative strategy as an antiviolence buffer could make us think that people opted to use it for the sake of preserving a social formation larger than themselves. Indeed, no one aboard formulated such a strategy or its sociable merits into a general rule of conduct. But the functioning of a certain communicative strategy should not make us assume that it was connected, or determined by, a larger social system in which it functioned. Rather, as we shall see, “to pretend that nothing has happened” was advised and enacted as a personal strategy with its limits, conditions, and failings. At certain moments this strategy ceased to work, when the offense was “too much to take” or too obvious to overlook. On such occasions, as in the tense moments before the mutiny on HMS Bounty, the tensions that had been at work in the onboard social structure erupted.

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Together, the ship’s olfactory layout and “not letting on” pointed to the relationship between honor and space. Both aboard the Naumachos and in the chronicles of the channel, honor was a potential frame for social relations, and rage served as the scaling device that emblematized it. Once upon a time, honor defined the space of the Mediterranean. In the heyday of Mediterraneanist anthropology (roughly, the 1960s to the 1980s), honor and shame were taken as the cultural traits that united the various societies around the Mediterranean and justified treating that part of the world as a culture area. As an analytical category in anthropology, honor was fixed at the regional scale: above the various national-­language or dialectical names and the local instances of its observation, and below the universal scale of abstraction—­of prestige, a category claimed to contain no sociocultural specificity (“There is of course no society, anywhere, without prestige.” J. Davis 1977, 89). Honor and shame, as much as hillside villages, became emblems of that Mediterranean and, as a result, of the Mediterranean’s nonmodern and premodern (in the sense of traditional and authentic) parts and dimensions. As such, they were later critiqued (Herzfeld 2005b). When such regionalist generalizations were later dismantled, so was the possibility of reconstructing Mediterranean constellations in modern times. Here I am starting the other way around. Rather than viewing honor as a cultural trait that unites Mediterranean men, I examine how it emerges in concrete interactions—­both onboard and in the Mazara fleet’s history—­ and how, when it so emerges, it shapes both the parties involved and the space they conjure up and claim as their own. To do so, I treat honor not as the attribute of cohesive subjects (e.g., individual males) or of groups (nation-­states, tribes, etc.), but rather as the quality of any given position in segmentary structures.1 In other words, instead of taking cohesive subjects, agents, or groups as preceding interaction, which unfolds as they claim and defend their honor, I examine how social grouping permutes as people call each other to act according to the honor of the grouping they seek to prevail. In this view, quests for honor, declarations that it has been offended, and demands that people feel obligated to correct the wrong constitute both subjects and groups; they neither precede them nor are external to them (Englund 2008, 36). This structural view of the scaling potential of honor to the political economic conditions in the Channel of Sicily echoes Jane Schneider’s analysis of the ecological forces and political conditions underlying “vigilance and virginity” in circum-­Mediterranean societies: “a highly competitive relationship between agricultural and pastoral economies” and “the absence of effective state institutions” (1971, 2–­3). In our case—­Tunisian-­Sicilian

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transnational relations in the second half of the twentieth century—­both the competitive relationship and the lack of effective state institutions played out transnationally, that is, at a Mediterranean scale. This evolving relationship unfolded at sea and across it, through two interweaved threads of events: the Fish War and the Transmed project. The Naumachos staged this relationship at the concrete point of encounter. Our movements across the channel’s symbolic and practical realms connected the ship’s space to its surroundings: between its home port in Mazara and our fishing banks closer to Lampedusa and the Tunisian shore; between Sicily, Italy, and Europe on the one hand and Tunisia, the Maghreb, and Africa on the other. As a result, action aboard the trawler staged the same values these transnational interactions foregrounded, and the relationship they shaped. Personal or shared honor—­to be claimed, offended, or protected—­ provided the theatrical links between the space of the ship and that of the sea and lands around it. The courses that the Naumachos charted moved us between points of exploitation and compensation, between stretches of submission to one’s role in the ship’s hierarchy and fleeting opportunities to forego it all and jump ship. As much as people onboard used rage (or avoided it) to conjure up groups and claim spaces of different, often cross-­cutting scales, so did Mazaresi and Tunisians use rage to conjure the groups whose honor they claimed had been offended and whose space had been transgressed. In other words, by using rage as a scaling device, people framed the events of the Fish War through honor. In the process, they shaped political relations in the emerging channel constellation. Così Fan Tutti Early on in the voyage, at the end of one of the sorting rounds just before lunch, the captain came down for the first time when we were organizing the sorted catch into trays. While observing my meager sorting and ordering capacities, he noticed that there were many gamberi di terza in a tray I had intended as one of gamberi di seconda; there were also many di seconda in the di prima tray. I was committing shrimp adulteration. The captain started shouting at the bosun, and I was promptly sent to cook. At that point, Zu Nino started to examine the ordered trays, and that instigated a whole commotion. I was only able to overhear parts of the dispute, but it was clear that, besides technical discussion of the task of sorting, it included accusations about differences in dexterity among the crew. In the previous days, several people astern had done their best to calibrate

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my lack of categorizing skills. In each of these on-­the-­job-­training moments, the person teaching me would go through my baskets and tell me that I had gotten it wrong. He would then pick several shrimp from the pile in front of me, hold a couple of them in his right palm and another in his left, put them in front of me, and say: “You see? This is seconda, this is prima, and the rest are terza. Now go on sorting!” One labor ideology espoused diligence and precision in making sure that we all sorted the shrimp exactly according to size. The contrary ideology suggested pushing the size chart downward so that smaller shrimp would be included in higher categories, and we would earn more money for more cartons of higher size categories. As it turned out when the captain descended from the bridge, we had all been putting smaller shrimp in trays of larger categories. Not everyone thought, however, that the misdeed was so systematic or deliberate. The chief mechanic was shouting that I had done it—­that is, that I was the only rotten apple—­and that I knew nothing. From what I could overhear, I was growing angrier in the kitchen, but then I heard the bosun talking to the captain in a loud voice until the dispute seemed to calm down. Later, Hajj told me that they counted the number of items in the prima and extra trays to see how many pieces were there (a tray of prima should have 210 pieces and a tray of extra 140). As expected, there were many more, which meant that the shrimp adulteration had occurred across the board. Zu Nino called me astern and shouted at me that we had ruined a week’s worth of work. I nodded and got back to the kitchen, probably because I felt safer there. When he followed me to the kitchen after several minutes (lunch was yet to be served), I asked him how many trays had been wrong, and he replied: “Tutti!” Invested as I was in protecting the scant reputation I had attained, I claimed that if everyone had been wrong it could not have been only me. To that, Zu Nino replied that everyone was to blame. “Don’t be afraid of no one!” he said, and added that he would take care of me. Paolo, the chief mechanic, on the other hand, talked about it throughout the next hour or so, though when we served lunch, the silence was even stricter than usual. The apparent joy with which the chief mechanic had blamed me—­and, by proxy, the rest of the marinai—­created good feelings among us deckhands. After lunch the bosun’s two cousins helped me clear the kitchen, something they had not done before, and Fathi asked me if I could take pictures of him to send to his mother in Tunisia. We then took my camera and he posed in front of the sea for several pictures. During the photo shoot, Fathi asked me if I would go with him to the north, and I replied that I was going to America. I thanked him for his offer and we went downstairs to rest for a bit before the next net. Back in our cabin, I asked Hajj what was going

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on and he said that we had not been working well, and that now we would. I told him that I knew that, but that I wanted to know more about exactly what was going on. He just said that he did not listen when he heard people shouting. “When I hear [these things] I close myself up.” Hajj refused to dwell on the sociological aspects of the situation, and insisted that we should “pretend that nothing had happened.” Grouping and Zu Nino’s patronal attempts to stitch over group bound­ aries pervaded. It was as if the division between mechanics and deckhands, always marked by both sides’ pissing and the mechanics’ fluctuating presence astern to help us deckhands with the sorting work, had suddenly erupted into explicit, frontal accusations. The bosun, who because of his relationship with the captain and the profits he derived from it stood to lose too much from a fight, convinced the captain that he would take responsibility for my training. The owner made sure to reprimand me and the rest of the deckhands astern, but then spread his paternal protection over me when we were alone. That way he could uphold his formal, if somewhat ambiguous, authority (being the owner but not the captain) as well as his personal, informal one. If on the deck’s stage groups formed to claim their shared and group-­defining honor, then the bosun’s and the owner’s offstage patronal strategies drew the boundaries of that play of honor and identity (Shryock 2004). Several hours later, when we were standing next to his little stool between the bathroom and the hydraulic drum, Hajj resumed our discussion about pissing on the platform and onboard space: There is also nowhere to speak on board. You can’t speak when you are in the deckhands’ cabin, because someone is asleep in the bosun’s cabin. You can’t talk in the saletta, because one of the mechanics is asleep. You can’t talk next to the hydraulic drum, because the captain might be asleep in his cabin right above you, and the voice is carried too well, better than the noise of the motor. And we deckhands can’t talk astern, because you are supposed to sort with both hands.

There was no physical problem in speaking and sorting. Yet we needed to look diligent while sorting, and chatting suggested that we were not. The people sorting at the table—­the owner, the bosun, and the mechanics—­ were indeed talking, but their diligence was not under scrutiny. These same persons also spent significant amounts of time at the bridge talking with the captain. Yet for Montassar, Fathi, and me, the bridge remained more or less out of bounds. Hajj was tenured enough for his presence at the bridge to

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be welcome, if he so wished. Yet to mingle with the captain and the others upstairs meant crossing a self-­imposed line between his role as a deckhand and the bridge scene. It might insinuate some hidden agenda or interest. As Hajj kept telling me, he did not want to “behave like a ruffiano.” For us deckhands, the ship took the shape of the spatiotemporal map of our periodic itineraries from the front cabin to the platform and back. These itineraries drew the sensory chart of the ship: the olfactory world and its audial prohibitions. Each day was divided into six or seven nets, in which one moved from the cabin through the maze of odors to sort fish astern for two and-­a-­half hours or so. One would then head back to the cabin for whatever time that remained until the next net. This scheduled route would be interrupted three times a day by another sensory experience: a meal. The two main meals, lunch and dinner, had a potential sociable commensality to them—­but, as we have seen, this potential rarely materialized. Outer Space I: The Cup of Contention Several days later, during our third week at sea, coffee turned again into the bone of contention. One morning, the bosun kept sending me to the kitchen to prepare rounds of coffee, and the owner kept complaining about it every time I served him his cup. Over the sorting of one of the nets I turned to Hajj for advice, but he seemed not to understand what I was saying. I repeated my question, shouting this time, which made him ask me whether I was disappointed or upset with him. “All those years that I spent at sea are now gone. I am condemned to this house arrest. It’s a slave’s work. It’s slavery.” I was probably not in the mood for such existential consider­ ations, because I shot back at Hajj: “You know, you guys hear seventy percent of what people are saying, you listen to fifty percent, and you understand thirty!” Hajj raised his gaze from the pile of fish and looked at me. I agree, but I am not sure the percentages are that. Now you see. At sea, your mind becomes numb, and you are changing. It happens to you too. Tonight, when you write your diary, make sure to describe the changes that you are undergoing here: the mood, the mental capacity.

So I did, but I was still at odds regarding the tensions over the coffee. It seemed that both sides of the dispute were playing out their positions through the coffee rather than disputing the coffee itself. Everybody assumed that the owner would be leaving in the next few days, though no one

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knew exactly when. In our discussions about it in the deckhands’ chamber, the consensus was that since we needed to refuel within a week, we would sail to Sicily and Zu Nino would leave the ship then. This conclusion made several of us hope that we would go to Mazara. Everyone was talking about “an hour or two at home,” perhaps even an entire night. But we knew nothing for sure. It was as if, in this state of uncertainty, the bosun was asserting his authority over the crew by showing the owner that he could control the pace of coffee rounds. Since the owner’s imminent departure would bring more liberty for the bosun, he was perhaps signaling to the owner how things would run once he would be gone. Hajj explained it best: “That owner is a stingy son of a bitch, but a son of a bitch whom I like. Because already after hauling one net he figures you out. That bosun will not get away with his conduct. You’ll see.” On top of the question of the owner’s departure, everyone saw that he was getting increasingly ill. At the end of the third week, he rarely came astern to sort the fish with us, and was sleeping much more than he had done earlier in the voyage. Yet even if Zu Nino’s imminent disembarkation was framed among us deckhands as a result of his health condition, this was not something the crew necessarily appreciated. One of the crew told me: Captains don’t let you go to Lampedusa when you are sick or injured. They just say “go astern!” I have seen people cry from pain. But then the captain comes [to their chamber] and says, “It’s nothing. Go sort the fish!” I have seen people die onboard. But when the captain or the owner has something, we are in Lampedusa right away.

One’s social worth onboard was tied to one’s ability to get off the ship. People like the captain and the owner had justifiable causes to leave the ship, or even to make the ship enter port. Others, like the bosun or the chief mechanic, whose role onboard made them important, could wonder out loud about leaving the ship in order to increase their benefits, but the owner or the captain could always decide to call their bluff. The rest of us were stuck onboard for the duration—­“serving a life sentence,” as one of them called it. The next morning, all hell broke loose. The previous night I had served the owner his coffee in the bridge in one of the several rounds of nocturnal coffee, the tenth that day. “You can’t serve so much coffee!” he told me, and took the cup. A couple of hours later, when we were hauling in the net, the bosun sent me again to make a round of coffee. When I was passing by the owner on my way to the kitchen, he shouted: “No! Don’t make coffee!” I

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looked at the bosun, and returned to my position next to the net. A couple of seconds later, the bosun started to shout at the owner. I could make only parts of it, but the gist of it was that he was fed up. He couldn’t take it anymore. “I am leaving the ship in Lampedusa the next time we enter,” he shouted. The owner shouted back at him, in a tone more self-­justifying than angry, that we could not have so much coffee a day: “We can’t buy coffee here in the middle of the sea!” In response, the bosun started running around the aft deck shouting: “Handicapped, that’s what I am! Handicapped!” After a minute or so, he went to his chamber and slammed the door behind him, where he stayed throughout the following net. Later, Hajj interpreted the situation for me: “What kind of head of department is Abderrahman if he cannot even decide when his deckhands would have coffee?” That was also when the owner sent me to make coffee. When I went around serving that new round, the crew was already sorting a new pile. The bosun passed by me and told me that he would have no more coffee “until we get back to Mazara, as long as the owner is aboard.” “When it’s over, it’s over,” one of the crewmembers told me later. “We are all slaves.” That net and the one that followed were meager, and the sea was getting agitated, so the captain decided to stop fishing and take the ship “to hide” on the lee side of Lampedusa. We spent the night drifting close to the island. The break was much welcome. Everyone got some sleep, and the owner and the bosun were able to avoid each other. The next day, after two more meager nets, we took a course toward Pantelleria, which everyone interpreted as starting our way toward Sicily. We used the voyage northward to replace the trawling net, in case our meager catches had been caused by malfunction. When all of us deckhands were astern assembling the new net, the bosun told us that we were going to refuel not in Mazara but in Porto Empedocle—­an hour and a half ’s drive to the east. We would not be going home. After a long chain of curses, we went back to changing the net, and then managed to catch a couple of hours of sleep before sunrise. Then the captain tried his luck with a couple of other nets around Pantelleria, but these too were disappointing, so we raised the ship’s speed and headed toward the Sicilian shore. After lunch, the owner called me to the bridge and asked me what I was planning to cook for dinner, as he had frequently done. After I told him I did not have any particular idea, he replied: “Tonight we are ordering pizza!” When I told Hajj about the conversation, he asked me: “Perhaps we are going to Mazara?” I told him I doubted that. “Bloody stingy Mazaresi,” he replied. “Even one night at home they would not give us. They are afraid that someone would leave the ship, or that once we saw our wives we would ask for

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some more money ‘on the account.’ ” Then the bosun came and announced that a storm was approaching. The weather was right on time. March had only started two days earlier, and it already justified its name, Crazy March (marzo pazzo). “Have you seen what kind of work this is?” Salvatore asked me in the kitchen. “We are only three hours of sailing from Mazara, and we are waiting for a force eight storm [out of twelve on the Beaufort scale], and they want to go quickly in and out of Porto Empedocle, so that we could [afterwards] escape to Pantelleria!” Hajj later explained to me the logic behind that decision. The forecast projected winds of up to thirty-­four to forty knots and waves eighteen to twenty feet high for the channel of Sicily. But storms hit the north more than they do the south. Going to Porto Empedocle shortened the voyage to and from the Lampedusa fishing banks by a total of six hours. Had we gone to Mazara, we might have been stuck there until the storm passed, especially since the crew would have asked to go home, and some of them might have jumped ship. By avoiding Mazara, the owner made it harder for anyone who considered jumping ship to act on such an idea. A stop in Porto Empedocle would be over in four hours, and we would still be able to run southward at full speed and avoid the storm. “Perhaps I will leave the ship when we get to Sicily,” Salvatore told me when the first glimpses of the Sicilian mountains appeared on the horizon. “I am losing my mind. If you tell them that you are leaving the ship, they call you a vagabond, a strikemonger. Only in Mazara is it like that.” As I understood it, Salvatore’s anger was directed at the owner for preferring to work one more day rather than let the crew see their families back in Mazara. Hence the pizza, which the owner’s son brought us from Mazara after we made port, together with cannoli alla ricotta: a taste of home, so close to home, yet not close enough. In port, after we had finished unloading all the seafood cartons, we waited for an hour or so; some of us played with the idea that the storm had already hit the channel and that we would be staying in Sicily at least for the night. But an hour later, the captain stepped onto the pier with his bag. Once the owner, who now had also become the captain, gave the order, we released all ropes and headed out to sea. Perhaps the captain and the owner had planned it that way. I remembered that Hajj had told me something about it. It wasn’t that he jumped ship. But we deckhands, whom everyone had kept in the dark regarding anything from the duration of the next net to the date of our return to Mazara, hadn’t expected this. And the surprise only emphasized the difference between the captain, who could go home just like that, and the rest of us. For the first time since we had left Mazara, the ship’s bifurcated hierarchy was united: now Zu Nino both gave us the orders and represented

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the paycheck at the end of the voyage. This change diminished the bosun’s latitude, since the captain was no longer present for him to pit against the owner. If almost everyone else was cultivating thoughts of jumping ship, the bosun must have felt the same, only more so. And the storm, which was picking up as we headed southward, back to the Lampedusa fishing grounds, did not make things easier. Visions of Coming Home When we were making our way southward with the Sicilian mountains behind us, the realization that we would not be seeing Mazara made Hajj explain to me a fact of fishers’ lives. “Nour, what do you think?” he said. “When the man in a marriage has a sexual problem or no experience, could the marriage last?” “I think it depends.” “No, it will not last, because the woman will always want to escape and cuckold her husband. That’s why it is important not to have problem of ejaculation.” “So what do people do?” “When we come home after a voyage of a month or more, we end up getting home at about 3 a.m. Then you have to wake up your wife and perform. Coming home is not completed until you do that. Then in the morning, you usually spend the breakfast with the children, and you give each of them a bit of money from what the owner had given you before leaving the ship. Therefore in order to have sex [successfully], you must practice alone before the ship gets to Mazara.” There is probably nothing particular about these fishers’ masculine anxieties as such. Rather, the temporal emphasis they put on “performing well” upon their return home made this anxiety, as well as the practices it entailed, coincide with the other aspects of their “coming back home.” The unique temporal unfolding of masculinity here foregrounded its relational, multiscalar character (Monterescu 2007). As with the fish that they make sure to hand out to their friends when they come back, here too, the mariners’ general absence from the landed life of their community shaped their conduct in a way that assured, or so they hoped, that they would leave a strong enough mark before they once more disappeared. We arrived at our fishing ground around 10 a.m. after rolling and pitching throughout the night. The first net we hauled in disappointed Zu Nino, and the sea kept rising, but after a short while he decided to stay at sea and

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fish. I could see on people’s faces that they were quite angry at the decision. “You know why we are still fishing right now? Because we are brave mariners!” Hajj said ironically. “If the captain were here instead of the owner, we would be in Lampedusa now, having coffee at the bar.” Another net was hauled in several hours later, and the catch was not improving, so the bosun told us that we would probably spend the night fishing on the bank. Then came divine intervention. The command transmission system that controlled the motor stopped working, and the ship was practically out of normal control. For us deckhands this was quite a cause for a celebration. We stopped fishing, and it was not our fault. The mechanics were running back and forth between the engine room and the cabin with various tools and spare parts in their hands. The owner strolled around deck shouting, “What can we do now?!” The rest of us deckhands listened to Hajj and the bosun as they exchanged stories about how they had once saved the day by solving some malfunction that the ship’s mechanics could not manage. The mechanics—­the people who had delighted at the deckhands’ maladroit sorting skills—­were now getting the heat. After a while, the mechanics said they had no way to fix the problem at sea, so we headed toward Lampedusa, to the deckhands’ delight. Early the next morning, the mechanics fixed the engine. We were expected to reenter port later that night because our captain had finished his affairs in Mazara and was coming in on the 10 p.m. flight from Sicily. With that appointment in mind, the deckhands hoped to stay in port throughout that day. But the chief mechanic goaded Zu Nino to go out and fish. Perhaps Paolo’s insis­ tence that we go out fishing again for that brief period was his small revenge, or maybe he wanted to make up for his failure to fix the problem at sea. In any case, we headed back to sea and, an hour later, we hauled out another net. We were supposed to go through two nets before heading back to port, but at 7 p.m., after only one short run, we folded the gear and ran at full speed to Lampedusa. When we arrived at the approach to the port, however, the winds were too strong for us to enter, so we waited adrift outside the harbor until sunrise. The Television The Naumachos’s path through ports, waterways, and fishing grounds dra­ matized onboard interaction in another way. As the ship oscillated between the two shores of the channel, various things, memories, connections, and tensions staged outer space on this floating stage. The proximity to either

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Figure 20.  Chief mechanic Paolo (left) and second mechanic Mario watch television in the dining hall.

shore summoned landed symbolic realms, at times technologically, at other times theatrically. That night, as we were drifting off the Lampedusa coast, Fathi and Montassar enjoyed the opportunity of a free night at sea and took over the dining room. Fathi spread out on the bench in front of the television while Montassar tuned in one of the Tunisian channels. After all, we were only about seventy nautical miles from their home country. The two cousins-­deckhands then took out a soft drink bottle and seemed to enjoy themselves for the first time in the voyage. The bosun came down from the bridge, gazed for a minute at the Tunisian talk show his cousins were watching, and went to his cabin. After a while, the two cousins turned off the television set and went out for a cigarette. Later that night, Zu Nino came down from the bridge and turned on the television. Hajj and the two cousins were still there, preparing to go to bed. When the Tunisian channel appeared on the screen, the owner called out to the bosun, “Fuck! It’s Arabic! Gia’[nni], what have you guys done?” The television set, which needed constant retuning because we kept changing our position, manifested this mobile casting perhaps in the clearest way. Due to the schedule of work, it generally “belonged” to the mechanics and the owner, the only ones with free time on their hands. Yet on those rare

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occasions when the deckhands were free, they took possession of it. The closer we were to Tunisian shore, the better the reception. This continuous occupation and reoccupation of the television turned into scenes for asserting and drawing boundaries: of national belonging as well as within the power relations onboard. The Tunisian deckhands made nothing of the fact that they had to adjust the television to a Tunisian station. For the owner, on the other hand, the Tunisian images on the screen came close to transgression. Outer Space II: Honor Reconsidered Interpersonal offenses and the honor they challenged connected the space of the Naumachos to the sea in which we were sailing and the lands at its edges in other ways as well. One morning, towards the end of our third week at sea, I found some mozzarella in the fridge and gathered the courage to use it for a salad that lunch. Paolo, perhaps moved by the novelty, asked the bosun: “Giovannotti, is there mozzarella in Tunisia?” The bosun, whose given name was Abderrahman, ignored him. When we had bananas for desert, Paolo asked him, “Giovanuzzo, are there bananas in Tunisia?” while peeling and eating his banana with much explicit gesturing. When the bosun kept ignoring him, Paolo turned to Fathi and talked to him in Italian, which he knew Fathi did not understand. The bosun then joined Paolo in making fun of his Tunisian cousin, and until the end of lunch, they kept calling Fathi, only to tell him things he could not understand. Fathi, who seemed agitated by the whole scene, finally responded by saying that Paolo did not know how to “fikufiku,” which was his way of using the verb ficcare (to fuck). Paolo left Fathi alone and sat down to watch television, which was set to one of the Italian channels. He then turned his back to ask the bosun: “Giovannuzzo, are there televisions in Tunisia?” The bosun shot at him, “Yes, there are,” entered his cabin, and shut his door. During the next sorting round there was an empty place at the sorting table, and the bosun invited me to work with them. I looked at Hajj, probably because I did not want him to think that I was betraying our platform squatting class. He gestured with his head that I should go ahead and join the table for that net. Perhaps because of my presence, the chief mechanic spent much of the sorting time in harassing Fathi. He kept saying “fukufuku,” his way of imitating Fathi. Fathi told Paolo to leave him alone, but to no avail. So he concentrated on sorting the catch. Fathi’s uncle did not seem too eager to defend him, but he did interpret the scene for me. “It means

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finochio [gay],” the bosun said. “Don’t pay attention to Paolo, he likes Fathi.” He nudged me to make sure I understood his insinuation. Paolo, who saw that the bosun was using the interaction to turn the joke on him, did not wait long before retaliating. “Gia’—­is there fukufuku in Tunisia?” “I have a woman in Lampedusa.” “Sure! A black guy with a thirty-­five-­centimeter snake!” Paolo gestured with his right arm the size he was citing. “You don’t believe me?” the bosun protested. “I have a woman in Naples and one in Palermo and two others in Mazara.” Confronted with the detailed testimony of the Tunisian bosun’s cross-­ channel prowess, Paolo changed strategy. He turned to Fathi and me and asked: “Fuck-­fuck is good? [È buono nica nica?],” imitating the Tunisian word for it. Paolo might have meant this choice of language as a gesture of détente, but the bosun would have none of it. He replied, “Talk about serious things, not this bullshit.” Earlier, Paolo was making Tunisia into a backward country by asking the bosun about the existence of everyday items (mozzarella, bananas, television) in Tunisia, insinuating that such things might not exist there. Now the improvisation game of insults intensified: it was as if Tunisian and Italian territories were pawns in a game of sexual insults: each side painted the other as gay, preferably the penetrated party (cf. Palumbo 2013, 1095–­96). To protect his own name, the Tunisian bosun (“Gianni”) boasted of exploits with women on Italian soil, to which Paolo responded by a stronger, more articulate, and racially specific insult. Yet, rather than making accusations from afar, both sides were engaging in forays into their counterparts’ symbolic territory—­Paolo by wondering about the existence of what he took to be civilizational necessities in Tunisia, and Abderrahman by enumerating the women he “had” in Italian ports. In a way, Paolo and Abderrahman were performing the same dynamic that Jane Schneider had elaborated in her analysis of honor in the Mediterranean (1971). Only that here, the ecological and political dimensions unfolded on a transnational scale: Paolo, the Sicilian chief mechanic from the Mazarese fleet encroaching on Tunisian territorial waters, was cast as the roaming pastoralist, and Abderrahman the Tunisian was cast as the agriculturalist whose territory was being violated. When Paolo repeated the questions over dinner, I asked him if he had ever been to Tunisia. He said that he had been, and that his ship had been seized in Tunisia four times. He had also been shot at by Tunisians and Libyans when he was fishing with the lights off in the Golfo di Sirta (the Sidra Gulf in Libya). “When you go to Tunisia, they ask you to stop, and if you are

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moderate and stop they don’t do anything. But if you run away, they shoot and don’t care.” He told me he had been twice in Binzerta and twice in Sfax. They take your papers and stop the ship. But you can go ashore and dance and go to the casino. These are moderate Arab countries. If you behave correctly, you are safe. It’s a vacation. We went to buy drums, and the Tunisians went home, and when we were released we called them and they came [with us back to Mazara].

I then asked him how, if he had already been four times to Tunisia, he did not know what was or wasn’t there. He immediately changed his expression, and said that he had been “just kidding.” Later, when I was cleaning the kitchen, he told me that he was no racist. “They are my brothers. I have been working with them for twenty-­five years. I am no racist. I am only joking with them.” I was not sure whether I just imposed some norm of cross-­cultural manners onto the relationship between Tunisians and Sicilians onboard. Then, when I went into the cabin, Hajj was translating and interpreting the interactions to Fathi, dropping every now and then a word about Paolo’s character and morals as he saw them. I was thus somewhat relieved to see that Hajj at least agreed with my interpretation of the chief mechanic’s attitude. Tunisian deckhands and Sicilian officers were casting themselves and their counterparts as figures from “the other shore,” a shore onto which one would venture to indulge in the transgressive implications thereof. Some of these moments were symbolic, like the game of offenses between Paolo and Abderrahman. Others were more functional, as in the captain’s attempt to sell a catch behind his kin’s back with the help of the crew, or during the crewmembers’ attempts to call home near Lampedusa. Yet more generally, the ways in which people were casting outer space as props and background for onboard interaction was conditioned by the ship’s position and course between the two shores. This is why Lampedusa played a central role on this floating stage: it was close enough to the Tunisian shore, it was the weekly port of call, and it provided the only concrete and periodic appearance of that outer space. Lampedusa was thus an outpost of Italian presence—­a base for the ship’s ventures into Tunisian space, to be entered, articulated, and used. The mythical story most Sicilians had to tell you was about fishing illegally in Tunisia. Getting seized was described not as a failure, but as a deeper venture into “the other side.” That Sicilian crewmembers recounted these stories aboard a ship of a fleet that professed such transgressive maneuvers seemed only to increase the dramatic effect. Yet there and then,

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aboard the Naumachos, such transgressions were only alluded to. None of them were actually taking place. A World Upside Down When we reached Lampedusa with Zu Nino the next morning, the captain had arrived back from Sicily, and he received the ship’s lines when we approached the pier. The weather outside had deteriorated, and it was the general assumption that we would be spending the night in port. More Mazarese trawlers came in from the storm, and by lunchtime the entire fleet seemed to be tied to the piers. Everyone seemed relaxed, perhaps because we had had two easy days with less fishing and sorting than usual, or perhaps because Zu Nino was about to leave and we knew we would remain with the captain. Just before dinner, Zu Nino was preparing to leave the ship and go to the airport for his flight back home. He bid us all farewell, and everyone told him that he should shave and change his clothes before boarding the airplane. “Everyone on the plane is well dressed,” Hajj told him. “What do I care about these people?” Zu Nino replied, but he finally did shave, and took off just in time for his flight. The next morning, just after sunrise, the fleet headed back to sea. For the first time since the voyage’s beginning we were alone with the captain, and the difference was immediately felt. On the first day we hauled out only two nets, each taking five hours. We used the longer periods between work astern to sleep and shower. On the other hand, with no owner present, the mechanics were taking the helm in the bridge at night, which reduced the sorting company from seven persons to four. We spent these sorting hours together around the table and, with no owner to scold us for not sorting with both hands, the deckhands’ morale seemed on the rise. Besides, Hajj told everyone that we should be back in Mazara in ten days, just in time to sell our catch before Easter. With the owner gone, coffee ceased to be an issue. In one of the coffee rounds, the bosun sat with the captain in the bridge. When I climbed to hand them their cups, the bosun told me, smiling: “Coffee—­for dad always first!” Nor was the bosun alone in calling the captain “dad.” During the previous month, the owner had tried and failed to convince the crew to regard their ship as a family. Regarding everything from the food to work, they all resisted this framing and insisted that theirs was a contractual exchange across class lines, by which the owner should accordingly abide. Now, when the captain commanded the ship, the family metaphor was on everybody’s lips. Perhaps it was because he was not their employer, only his

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partial accomplice. Perhaps it was their illicit scheme to sell fish behind the owner’s back that made him more deserving in their eyes for the familial idiom. Or perhaps it was because he did not seem to care if they treated him as their parent. Whatever the reason, patronage, family, and labor coexisted peacefully onboard. During the following net, I raised my gaze from the pile of sardines that lay in front of me to the crew around me. Here were eight Tunisian and Sicilian fishers, most of whose hands were much more swollen than mine with bruises from the previous fortnight at sea, bruises that did not heal because they kept getting wet with the incessant work. Those hands had been undergoing such a treatment for twenty or thirty years. All these men could spin the expected yarns of escapades, illegal fishing, and smuggling in one direction or another, for this or that purpose. Yet they were not, or were no longer, in the business of “making a hit.” Instead, they crewed on a ship that staged the nostalgic reminiscence of such past glories, if those glories had ever actually happened. Any past adventure, which by now appeared only in the myths and stories that abounded, turned into an oppressing obsession to be mulled over during the incessant, muddy toil. Sure, ten or twenty years earlier, the catch had been so abundant and the voyages so daring that some of these fishers have been able to build a house for themselves, perhaps even two, some in Mazara and others in Mahdia or La Chebba. But now a month at sea of working astern day and night would make a deckhand earn an income no greater than what one would earn in a halftime job ashore. As the Naumachos rolled and pitched between Lampedusa and the Tunisian shore, its crewmembers reverted to playing games of mutual offenses and boundary marking, with their hands in piles of seafood that were always too small. The daily routes the ship took—­now toward Lampedusa, now closer to Tunisia—­magnetized these games between the channel’s two poles. In a constellation that made its actors search for self-­definition, meaning, and gain as they incessantly went into opposing territories, the Naumachos turned into a theatrical mirror chamber, or perhaps a mirror prison cell, a moving emblem of the mutual regards between which the ship navigated. For the Sicilians onboard, home was northward. That was the realm to protect, leaving southward for practical assaults of various kinds. For the Tunisians, on the other hand, the channel was a world upside down. Like the threshold in the Kabyle house (Bourdieu 1979), Lampedusa became the channel constellation’s axis mundi. Here too, neither space nor the nomenclature that gives it its sense (and directions) is oriented from the south. This was the Channel of Sicily, with the possessive intended. For the Tunisians, home was in Tunisia, in one way, and that was their realm to

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protect, if only because that was where their Sicilian crewmates and counterparts were habitually transgressing. Yet home was also in Mazara, from where the ship was embarking on its voyages, and where profits, families, and horizons were being formed and dismantled. And the ways in which Hajj and his compatriots made and remade their lives in Mazara was often connected, all too connected, to the lives and work of the people most invested in the charges on the “integrity”—­cultural, sexual, or otherwise symbolic—­of their other “home,” Tunisia. Leaving Lampedusa southward or westward often entailed venturing into unwelcoming waters—­waters that Tunisians entered not as a homecoming but as infiltration. In such events, they would be the mediators in whatever exchanges might transpire, assuaging a Tunisian officer’s recalcitrance with either words or things. To these Tunisian seafarers, “going home” always meant drawing farther from home, no matter in which direction the Naumachos was going. Every month, the ship’s hold carriedless fish when it returned to Mazara; and every month, heading back out to sea made less sense.

African-­European Cross-­Cousin Marriage Onboard the Naumachos, honor provided the theatrical links between the space of the ship and the wider scales of the sea and lands around us. Actions, courses, offenses, and the honor they put at stake recalled the different realms of the channel. The Channel of Sicily had been signified and shaped by the events at sea. Both the zone to which the term applied and the relationship between that zone and the wider Mediterranean were charged and recharged with meaning throughout the Fish War—­through the scaling effects that the sequence of events had on honor and space in the central Mediterranean. Perhaps the most immediate instance of such shaping is the term “Channel of Sicily” itself, which already encapsulates three choices: a channel, a possessive preposition, and an Italian island. Throughout the Fish War, Mazarese calls to defend Italian honor marked the space of the offense in the possessive: the central Mediterranean as “the Channel of Sicily.” Mazarese fishers’ possessive nomenclature derives from the southward-­expansive navigation that the Mazara fleet has been practicing since the Sixties. During the previous five decades, whenever the Tunisian, Libyan, or Algerian coast guards seized a Mazarese trawler, the event was declared as having taken place “in the Channel of Sicily.” As the Mazara fleet and its operation zone expanded, so did the zone denoted by the term. Like the deckhands’ urine

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around the aft deck, the “war” delimited that space and shaped it. The Fish War took place in the Channel of Sicily. To examine the historical anthropology of  Tunisian-­Sicilian relations this way, we need to rescale a classical theme in Mediterraneanist anthropology—­ the segmentary dynamics of “honor and shame”—­to a transnational scale. Here, the “historical” in “historical anthropology” entails two principles of processual analysis. First, instead of assuming that Italian honor motivated action at any of the scales in question (Sicilian, Italian, or European, to name three possibilities), we should examine what frames other than honor people projected onto the events of the Fish War, and then follow the historical process that started when some people framed events in terms of honor, set the scale of that honor at the national level, and demanded that all fellow nationals behave accordingly. To conjure and galvanize honor at any given scale is to tell people that they belong to a group of that scale, to demand that they see themselves as such, and to call them to defend it. In Mazara’s political chronicles, honor—­Italian honor, specifically—­gradually prevailed as the frame for the Fish War. People’s sense of honor—­whose it is and who offended it—­played a crucial role. The second principle requires that we follow the dynamics of the transnational process rather than assume that the groups and alignments that emerged at the beginning of the process persevered throughout. Mediterra­ nean political relations in the late Sixties initially unfolded between nation-­ states, which themselves belonged to larger (continental/civilizational/ religious) sets: European countries as a group were opposed to Arab countries, to North Africa, or to the entire continent of Africa. In such a view, any connection between Italy and Tunisia (and more so between Sicily and Tunisia) was therefore a connection between two geographically adjacent but, structurally speaking, politically distant political units. According to this scheme, the political relations that the Transmed pipeline offered would have connected the two continents as distinct and opposing “lineages” or “tribes.” This international lineage view of the world is also used to explain how the European Economic Community (EEC, established in 1957) began a gradual continental “fusion” of the various national “imagined communities” into a new solidarity group: the European Union (Shore 1993). This international and supranational schema mistakenly lends itself to a view of political process that confounds lineages with segments and identifies the structure of political relations with an alignment of groups in a given time, tribal or international (Varsori 2001; Gilbert 2010). It examines nation-­states and wider political elements (like the European Union) as “solidary groups

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[that] form, and then combine or conflict, in predictable ways within a system sustained by a balance of power between its elements” (Dresch 1986, 309). The application of this lineage-­based view of segmentation from tribal to national situations is not at all surprising, considering that Ernest Gellner promoted both of them (1981; 1983). In the view of segmentation taken here, segmentation does not unfold between corporate groups but the other way around: grouping emerges from the segmentary course of events (Dresch 1986). The transnational structure is not one of nation-­states. It hinges on political worth. The Fish War and the proposed pipeline underlined the structural relationship between Mazaresi and Tunisians across the sea that linked and separated them. In these relationships, Mazaresi politicians perceived the effects that both tense and peaceful events had on Mazarese political worth through the tension between cross-­channel potential affinity and national (and European) fraternity. As we shall see, they strove to commit the Italian government, the EEC, and the Sicilian regional government to their political worth. The vicissitudes of Mazaresi shaped their segmentary political relations with Mahdia, Tunisia, Sicily, Italy, Europe, and Africa, and reshaped the relationship between national fraternity and transnational affinity across difference. As we shall see, recurrent calls to defend Mazarese trawlers in the name of Italian honor unintentionally distinguished Mazarese from Sicilian, Italian, and European interests. The chain of events realigned cross-­channel political relations between Mazaresi and Tunisians along a transnational political imaginary of affinity across difference. This realignment redefined the role and reach of patronage and familial idioms in Mazara as well as between that town and Palermo, Tunis, and Rome. Consequently, political relations between Mazaresi and Tunisians moved from one model of cross-­border political relations to another—­from international to transnational, from a model made of prefixed units to one which allows for those units to change in the process. From Monologue to Dialogue During the early Seventies, rising shipowners like Ignazio Giacalone initially galvanized the fishers’ “rage” as a scaling device. They mobilized the fleet in strikes to express that rage, reminding their patrons of their moral obligation to assist Mazaresi in their plight, and forcing upon national politicians the palpability and urgency of Mediterranean affairs. Soon, however, the risks in unleashing the specter of a belligerent Mediterranean started to emerge. The balance between class, patronage, and family, on which the

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owners-­politicians’ political project depended, did not last long. The alignment of political conditions that had enabled that balance soon made that rage’s scaling-­up potential slip from the shipowners’ hands. In the process, “rage” turned into injured national “honor,” and turned that honor into a compelling frame for relations in Mazara as well as across the sea. When honor framed these relations, it defined the group offended by that offense; it pointed to the offender and its potential accomplices, including potential “traitors in our midst.” During the two years following the 1973 strike and the announcement about the construction of the Transmed pipeline, it became gradually clear that Mazarese politicians’ influence in Rome came short of securing the diligence of the Italian foreign ministry in releasing their trawlers from seizure in North Africa. Previously, these periodic sequences of events had been contained within the Mazara-­Palermo-­Tunis-­Rome personal network. The successful “protocol” for releasing seized trawlers made the Republicans’ Mediterraneanist visions seem convincing, as were the claims that the fleet was one organic industrial operation. The intensification of seizures at sea in 1974 and 1975 unleashed new spatiopolitical energies. Mazarese trawlers continued to fish illegally in Tunisian waters, Tunisian coast guard ships kept seizing them, and Mazarese politicians and shipowners negotiated the trawlers’ release. Yet the list of trawlers waiting in Tunisia for their release increased. This was no longer the Mediterranean of peace and cooperation. Nor was it clear whether Mazarese fishers were ready to regard their Tunisian counterparts as fellow Mediterraneans. The fleet’s ships and fishers turned into moveable emblems for another, more belligerent kind of spatiopolitical project. The intensification of the Fish War in 1974 and 1975 initiated a multi­ sided struggle over the signification of the fishers’ “rage” among the dominant parties in the Mazara city council. The fleet-­council relationship evolved from an orchestrated Republican one-­party show into a more complex dialogue. After the municipal elections of 1975, three new Mediterraneanist contenders appeared on the council floor: the Christian Democratic DC, the communist PCI, and the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano–­ Destra Nazionale (MSI-­DN, or Italian Social Movement–­National Right). The struggle had a signifying and mobilizing dimension. Each of these parties followed a different combination of patronal connections to politicians in Rome, claims to personify the fleet, declarations about unity of different kinds, and the transnational imaginary that these entailed. Semiotically, the struggle revolved around what the rage stood for: workers’ awakening, clients’ moral demands, or a fraternal compatriots’ call to defend national

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honor. In terms of mobilization, the question was who could organize the thousands of trawler deckhands to express that rage as an emblem of class, patronage, or honor. The centrist DC challenged the PRI mainly through its new acquisitions from among the shipowners’ class, including one owner whose family had close ties to Giulio Andreotti, Italy’s most prominent post–­ World War II politician. The PCI also succeeded in recruiting a prominent shipowner who until 1975 had been an adherent member of the DC and who joined the PCI list as an independent member, a move he justified by citing the DC-­PCI “historic compromise.” The last new contender was the MSI-­DN, headed by Nicola Cristaldi, nowadays Mazara’s mayor. This party counted no owner in its ranks at that point, and could not claim to be “of the fleet” in any metonymic sense. At the same time, this shortcoming freed them to maneuver between the various elements in the fleet. Since all other parties, especially the PCI, were already looking for collaboration with the PRI and the “big” owners, it was not too complicated for the MSI-­DN to make themselves into the representative of the deckhands rather than of the owners. In September 1975, the Republican Ignazio Giacalone, by then the deputy mayor, presented the persistent problems with Tunisia and asked the council to support a new international fishing agreement. The previous Italian-­Tunisian fishing contract had expired on the last day of 1974, more than eight months earlier. According to the proposed contract, Italy would pay one billion lire in return for 175 fishing permits for the zone between six and twelve miles from the Tunisian shore.2 Giacalone’s request gave the cue for the MSI-­DN to position itself as the champion of Italian honor. The national government was responsible for “the scant value attributed to Italy in the international scene.” The only way to save Italy’s national honor was to send “two helicopters and a naval ship to the Channel of Sicily [. . .] even if those means could do nothing to prevent the seizures of our vessels and Tunisians ‘hunting,’ since they are too slow and unarmed.”3 In this equation, seized Mazarese trawlers signified in­­ jured Italian honor, which the Italian national forces should defend. By signing the proposed fishing agreement, Italy would “admit to being dominated by Tunisia with the only intention of favoring those big shipowners who have the possibility of going to fish in these waters.”4 The neofascists’ move was double. Their belligerent claims regarding Tunisia faulted all other parties for neglecting the country’s national honor. At the same time, the mention of “big shipowners” set them apart from the rest of the fleet, which the MSI-­DN now tried to represent. As in other European right-­wing political projects of the time, they used this belligerent tactic to recapture idioms of

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authority, solidarity, and community and render them as the basis of an integralist political project (Holmes 2000, 89). Against the Communists’ and Republicans’ attempts to shed the light of the Mediterranean’s long history and wide horizons onto the channel, Nicola Cristaldi and his neofascist colleagues asked to reverse that signifying relationship. The issue at hand was “the Fish War in the Channel of Sicily,” not “peace in the Mediterranean.” The Killing (1975) The struggle over the galvanizing and signification of rage—­and more broadly over the framing of the Fish War—­intensified with the pace of events at sea. Ten days after the neofascists’ first coordinated intervention in the council, and at the height of the Tunisian-­Italy negotiations over a fishing agreement—­on the night between October 3 and 4, 1975—­a Tunisian coast guard ship shot and killed a Mazarese fisher. The entire Mazarese fleet reentered port, and preparations for a general strike in town began. In a unanimous motion, the Mazara city council asked the Italian government why “they did not consider acting with extreme resolve toward Tunisia, whose conduct [. . .] had reasserted [that country’s] will to control the well-­stocked waters of the Mediterranean through the use of intimidation and violence, to which Italy had reacted [only] with resignation and renunciation.”5 This was the limit of consensus. As national attention to the incident rose, the stakes in the killing’s alternative framings rose: an injury to Italian national honor or a misguided clash between Tunisians and Sicilians who should act in concert in the transnational class struggle. That evening, the trawler Gima entered Mazara together with the entire fleet. The following day, October 6, the fleet declared a unified strike and lowered all flags to half-­mast. The deceased deckhand’s parents came to Mazara for the funeral that was planned for the next day, which was also declared as a citywide day of mourning. On the day of the funeral, the mayor opened another session with telegrams of sympathy from interested politicians and councils of other port cities. Yet the mayor was not from the fleet. He was not “of it.” Ignazio Giacalone (PRI) thus spoke immediately after the mayor, both as his deputy and as the most prominent representative of the fleet in the council. Giacalone’s task was delicate. On the one hand, the fleet had entered the city council and the Mazara political stage through “the honorary entrance” only two years earlier. On the other hand, other parties had already contested Giacalone’s PRI “Mediterranean development” one-­man show. After thanking the council for its “sensitivity” towards the fleet, he announced that “a unified front of the labor unions had been created, with the presence

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of the world of labor and the shipowners.” The owners invited the council “to take the lead in the battle” and asked “all political forces not to diminish their support.” Most importantly, Giacalone called for an organizing of “the disembarking of all crews, which would be coordinated by the unions and would thus show politicians’ and unionists’ maturity of civil conviction.”6 This last move was planned to secure the owners’ control of any unforeseen independent moves from among the fleet’s ranks. With the entire deckhand category disembarked—­and with their fisher’s logbooks deposited in the Capitaneria di Porto—­control of the strike resided with the owners. The latter could always decide when to end the strike by telling their crews that it was time to go back to sea, and that if they refused they might lose their jobs. If the Republicans had earlier claimed that the fleet contained no class divisions, they devised their action plan with exactly such divisions in mind. For their part, the MSI-­DN members were already mobilizing their own independent project. One of them read a motion that a MSI-­DN national deputy would present the following day in Parliament (Lo Porto 1975, 23892). The motion questioned the ministers of foreign affairs, defense, and the merchant fleet as to whether they did not consider acting with extreme resolution toward Tunisia, whose conduct [. . .] had reasserted [that country’s] will to control the well-­stocked waters of the Mediterranean with the use of intimidation and violence, to which Italy had reacted with resignation and renunciation.7

In Mazara, the neofascists declared that the “graveness of the events demanded the unity of all the council’s forces.”8 The “unity” the MSI-­DN was promoting had a distinct flavor: fusing all Italian forces together and waging war on all things and persons Tunisian. The MSI-­DN presented to the council a pamphlet they “had found on the streets,” a screed which linked together the “Tunisians” who had migrated to work in Mazara and the “Tunisian” dignitaries who had come to celebrate the twinning three years earlier with the “Tunisians” who had shot the fisher: ASSASSINS! [. . .] The Libyan and Tunisian governments unilaterally decided to extend the territoriality of their respective waters [. . . and now] Tunisian waters include even the very island of Lampedusa; and we stand by and watch!9

Against the MSI’s attempt to turn Mazarese fishers’ “rage” into injured Italian “honor” and direct it against all things “Tunisian,” the PCI and other

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leftist parties attempted to make the same “rage” signify a transnational class opposition, not injured Italian national honor. They compared the Tunisians’ current plight with the Sicilians’ lot since Italian independence. Tunisia, “a poor and recently liberated people,” had asked Italy to mediate in its negotiations with the EEC, but the Italian government “remained deaf” because there is an old logic, which was established in 1860, in accordance with which the State Government has done nothing but exploit and impover­ ish the South and Sicily [. . .]. This has been and still is, unfortunately, the logic of Italian and international capitalism; the logic of the EEC [. . .].10

In this framing, the Sicilians and Tunisians shared the subaltern position in a transnational class struggle. In this analysis, the fusion of the European Community promised for Sicilians only continued marginality. The alternative to being the South—­be it of Italy or of Europe—­passed through forming the center, with Tunisia, of the Mediterranean. Against the political border that the neofascists drew south of Sicily, the left was attempting to draw one to the north of the island. If the future Europe took the shape of a supranational (agnatic) alliance of sorts, Certa argued against becoming its younger brothers. National Honor versus International Workers’ Solidarity The transformative power of the fisher’s death emerged on the council floor and beyond it—­in the fleet’s heart at the piazza of the old port. The main challenges to the Republicans’ Mediterraneanist vision came from the two parties whose political loyalties to Italian political institutions have been continuously doubted in postwar Italy: the PCI and the MSI-­DN. During the 1975 strike’s first days, both parties offered their own versions of who was to blame for the fisher’s death, what alignment of forces should be forged, and what actions should be taken and against whom. In short, the PCI and the MSI-­DN tried to harness the scaling potential of the fishers’ rage in two opposing directions: a communist fusion of all Mediterranean workers against their European exploiters, and a fascist fusion of all Italian workers against their Tunisian persecutors, as well as against those Italians who had betrayed them and Italian national honor. The PCI class-­struggle framing was spelled out that day in L’unità, the party’s national newspaper. The article focused on the captain’s decision to keep escaping northward and his subsequent responsibility for the fisher’s death:

190 / Chapter Six The autopsy will help establish [. . .] whether Salvatore would have been saved in time. If it is the case that the youth actually died after a long agony [. . .] then the responsibilities of the captain-­owner must be determined. According to some testimonies, in fact, the boy’s agony lasted for much longer than an hour, which is the version of the captain, who in this manner justifies his refusal to “surrender” to the Tunisian patrol vessel (Redazione 1975a).

This analysis came from Mazara del Vallo, though no local communist politician echoed it in the council. By raising the question about the time it had taken for the fisher to die from his wounds, the national PCI mouthpiece offered an alternative framing for the entire event: the death not only was the result of a Tunisian attack on Italian fishers, but might be the fault of the Sicilian captain’s refusal to surrender. In the article this line of reasoning extended all the way to the Italian fisheries’ policy regarding Tunisia and the channel’s waters, or the lack thereof. This default included the Italian “senseless politics of big shipowners.” Accordingly, the L’unità article reported that the fishers had directed their “rage” at the government’s “astonishing and outrageous” conduct, with an “absolute absence of any attempts of racist revenge against the considerable ‘colony’ of Tunisians who work in Mazara” (Redazione 1975a). The PCI strategy entailed several framing and mobilizing moves. First was the mobilization of the entire workers’ categories under the leadership of the leftist unions. Second was an alignment with captains, and perhaps with small shipowners, against the big owners and their connections in Rome and Palermo. Third was the demand for a new labor contract (the previous one had expired more than two years earlier; Redazione 1975b). Finally, there was the promotion of a peaceful international cooperation with Tunisia in the maintenance of the channel’s fishing banks. This project required “in essence [. . .] unity, certainly, but not unanimism; a vice that would risk splitting the front [. . .]” (Redazione 1975b). The “unanimism” that the communists shunned had two faces: a “fictional” unity of owners and workers, and a fictional unity of all Italian political forces against all Tunisian forces. Such an alliance would include the MSI-­DN and exclude the Tunisian labor migrants, six of whom, L’unità reported for the first time, had worked alongside the deceased aboard the Gima during the shooting. The MSI-­DN agenda regarding the fleet targeted Tunisians both rhetorically and physically, both inside Council Hall and outside it, in the piazza of the fleet. During a fishers’ meeting of leftist labor unions that were attempting to use the strike to mobilize the fleet’s deckhands, a group of about

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seventy neofascists started shouting and throwing chairs.11 The next morning, October 8, some members of the same group went around the old port with chains and attacked Tunisian labor migrants (Vasile 1975a). Yet on the following day the provocateurs and their petition calling for “Arab-­hunting” disappeared, at least temporarily (Vasile 1975b). The struggle between the communists and the neofascists over the signification of rage and the strike’s direction was just warming up. At that point, the left seemed to come out victorious, at least in its own eyes. On Saturday, October 11, a week after the Gima had entered Mazara’s harbor, the “federation of antifascist unions” declared a general strike in the entire city of Mazara on the following Tuesday (Vasile 1975c). The strike was planned to coincide with the opening of official negotiations between the Italian and Tunisian governments over a new fishing agreement—­the same agreement that Ignazio Giacalone had promoted in the city council a month earlier. Later that Saturday, a Tunisian patrol vessel seized another Sicilian trawler. During the general strike, the leftist unions organized processions in Mazara and Palermo, which included Tunisian fishers, and presented banners that read “Italians and Tunisians for the triumph of labor” (Gambescia 1975). Indeed, in other parts of the procession, the MSI-­DN group reportedly shouted slogans like “Wage war on Tunisia! Send vessels to shoot!” (ibid.). Nevertheless, the strike seemed to provide the left with an opportunity to assert its role the representative of all workers against the shipowners. The PCI and the leftist unions missed exactly that opportunity. On October 20, more than two weeks into the strike, the Italian and Tunisian governments concluded their negotiations. As long as the negotiations continued in Tunis, the two issues at hand—­the fishing agreement with Tunisia and the labor contract between owners and workers in the fleet—­remained intertwined. As a result, the PCI could claim that it championed the fishers’ interests on both fronts and at both scales—­national labor matters and international affairs. Now that the international issue was resolved, the PCI had to choose—­locally and nationally—­where it stood regarding the fishers’ working conditions. To insist on the labor contract would hurt the relations that the PCI was trying to maintain in the city council; to call for an end to the strike would jeopardize the left’s pretense of championing of the exploited. At the end, the PCI supported the return to fishing, even though no labor contract had been achieved (Redazione 1975c). Perhaps this was so because the local PCI council group included the big shipowner Matteo Asaro, and was thus at least to some extent beholden to the political economic interests of owners like him. Perhaps the PCI was calculating that too

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much time had passed since the beginning of the strike to permit enough room for labor-­related maneuvers. Whatever the reason, the PCI and almost all other political parties and unions supported the reembarkation—­ everyone, that is, but the MSI-­DN and its affiliated union. Contrary to the leftists’ expectations, the fishers’ “rage” had not exhausted itself. In the following week, many fishers refused to rejoin their ships and take to sea, and many of them returned their union cards. The MSI-­DN tried to organize a new general strike in town, and the municipal administration attempted to mediate between the shipowners and the workers, at times without any main national union present. In the confusion that ensued, it was unclear who was running the deckhands’ autonomous strategy. Then, on October 30, almost four weeks after the incident, protesters occupied the city council hall and burned a car in front of the Association of Free Shipowners in the old port’s piazza.12 The two MSI-­DN direct actions—­against the council hall and the shipowners’ association—­posed a threat to the council and its model of political representation as well as to institutional labor negotiations. The continuation of the strike at the hands of the MSI-­DN turned on its head the double dichotomy that had initially structured the chain of events. If leftists had initially upheld the workers’ struggle—­both within the fleet and across the Mediterranean and Europe—­they now supported the owners’ attempt to return to sea. And the MSI-­DN, which had originally framed the killing and the struggle as a question of national honor and international animosity, were now facilitating the workers’ continued struggle for a new labor contract. Ironically perhaps, the left’s failure in the struggle for the mobilization of the fleet’s deckhands brought its local politicians to blame the deckhands for this turn of events. On the council floor, a Communist member interpreted the events in a rancorous tone. Because the deckhands came from “certain classes of underproletariat” and showed “scant political and syndicalist/labor consciousness,” it was easy for “subversive forces to instrumentalize this chaos.”13 If previously the PCI had seconded the PRI claim that there was no class division in the fleet, now the Communists were making the fleet’s deckhands into an “underproletariat”: We should also understand the psychology of the sailors [. . . who] spend fifteen days, ten days, and twelve days at sea [at a time]. Then they come [back], and if perhaps one of them is married, he goes to make love to his wife; and if one is not married, he goes to have fun somewhere; and they do not have the material possibility to be able to read, to be able to study, to be able to discuss their problems. It is an extremely difficult reality.14

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In the struggle over the mobilization of the fleet, this speech was the left’s bitter admission of its own failure. And because the MSI-­DN was now mobilizing the fishers, any accusation of the former implicated the latter, a point the MSI-­DN members happily made: This evening, in front of the gravity of the problem, the council wants to be only a demagogue, continuing [as it does] to talk about constitutional arc, about antifascism and the like, as if the fishers, who only want their problem resolved, were interested in these things.15

At the end of the 1975 strike, the fishers’ rage no longer traveled along the routes that national politics had previously paved for it. The grounds for its framing as patronage, family, or labor did not exhaust it, since the sequence of events detached the course of events from these local, provincial, and national scales. The turning point was the signing of the Italian-­Tunisian agreement, which defused the international enmity and disarmed the neofascists’ strongest political weapon. At the same time, the fishing agreement challenged the left to choose a side between the owners and the workers—­ between the local and national scales of labor politics—­a dilemma that the PCI did its best to ignore. Instead, the neofascists’ late control over the strike gave the fleet’s political role a new dimension. In other words, the MSI-­DN mobilization of the fishers’ rage as injured Italian honor scaled down the point of political agency to that scale which was both the most local and the most transnationally mobile: that of the fleet. Soon, this segmentary dynamic intensified with the developments in the Transmed project and the ongoing clashes at sea. With My Cousin against My Brother? The intensification of the Fish War introduced the fishers’ rage as an additional scaling device to the familial idioms, which the Transmed project emblematized: the pipeline conveyed potential familial affinity across the sea; the rage, which the clashes emanated, signified honor and its grouping effects on different scales. As events unfolded, these two scaling devices started affecting each other, as well as the scales and shapes of both unity and affinity. The serious accusations by Mazaresi that their own national government was betraying them clarified the difference in interests between Mazara and Rome. Into these tensions, news of progress in the Transmed project appeared in October 1975, rekindling Mazaresi’s hopes about their national government’s willingness to help their emerging Mediterranean

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interests. But in 1977, ENI and the Italian Ministry of Industry decided to cancel the building of the pipeline and to opt for shipping the gas by tanker from Algeria to a terminal in northwestern Italy. The choice between building a pipeline and establishing a gas-­shipping infrastructure had far-­reaching regional implications (Stevens 2000, 234). Between the initial announcement of the pipeline project and the decision not to go through with it, Algeria had reinforced its relations with the Soviet bloc by agreeing to host the Soviet Black Sea fleet.16 As a member in NATO, Italy was expected to avoid binding and permanent infrastructural connections with pro-­Soviet countries like Algeria, and the proposed pipeline was one such connection. In other words, the pipeline would be an infrastructural Catholic “marriage,” whereas the gas-­shipping infrastructure presented less permanent or constraining relations (Marcello Colitti in an interview; Hayes 2006, 59). Constructing the pipeline would thus reorient Italian international commitments further from the country’s already tenuous obligations to NATO and US policy in Europe and the Middle East. What now stood between Mazara and the success of the pipeline was another, stronger segment in the Italian nation-­state: the industrial North, the old patriarch, already pulling towards Europe and the Atlantic. To some Mazaresi, this raising of the stakes was actually clarifying: “There arose a need to modify [Italy’s] Mediterranean policy.”17 The question of whether Italy was “Mediterranean” or “European” and ”Western” suddenly took the shape of an exclusive dichotomy. The Fish War and the pipeline’s construction intensified the segmentary dynamics, only this time downwards along the Europe-­Italy-­Sicily-­Mazara continuum. In July 1977, the building of the pipeline was secured (if not the delivery of the gas), after Algeria, Tunisia, and Italy concluded their negotiations. The cause of this felicitous change—­the convincing effects of a wave of seizures at sea or agreement on the compensation for Tunisia that met its demands—­depends on the observer’s position. At the same time, in September of that year, the Tunisian coastguard seized four trawlers and fired on one of them.18 Then, on December 8, 1978, the Tunisian coastguard killed another Mazarese fisher.19 Mazarese went once more to Palermo and Rome hoping to convince their patrons “to force the EEC to respect the Italian nation’s prestige regarding Tunisia.”20 The following year, 1979, another fishing agreement with Tunisia expired, triggering another wave of seizures. Shipowners kept protesting that these had taken place outside the zone of Tunisian control, and they demanded the Italian navy’s protection. But after several seizures were verified to have taken place within zones of Tunisian responsibility, the Italian national opinion was that the clashes had been

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caused by Mazarese trawlers’ transgressions. In a discussion of the situation in the Italian Senate, the foreign undersecretary condemned the “unhelpful behavior” of some of the trawlers and announced that the navy was operating also to prevent Mazarese transgressions (Zamberletti 1979, 1590). In response, the fleet prepared to go on another strike. MSI-­DN activists attacked Tunisian workers around the old port (as they had done in 1975), incidents which their politicians explained as “the consequence of the fishers’ rage, which has been repressed for long years, during which a lot of blood has been poured in the Channel of Sicily.”21 Yet this “rage” was now directed as much against the Italian and Sicilian governments as it was against the Tunisians. Moreover, the segmentary logic of action had entered even the leftist politicians’ perspective. Short of citing “rage,” they laid “the blame solely on the regional government, which [was] revealed as the servant of the national government, which in its turn has always followed the interests of the industrialists of the North, leaving the problems of the South to fester.”22 At the height of the Fish War, with the pipeline’s construction well underway and a growing community of Tunisians living in Mazara and working in its fleet, Mazarese accusations no longer traveled directly to Rome, the failed defender of Italian national “honor” (or national executive of the northern capitalists). Rather, the transnational dynamics segmented the Rome-­ Palermo-­Mazara line in a way that faulted Palermo for serving Rome, which Mazarese politicians by now frequently accused of subservience to Brussels, as well as to Paris and Washington. Mazaresi from the PCI to the MSI-­DN felt wronged by each and all of the instances in the Europe-­Italy-­Sicily hierarchy. In “a fairly stable segmentary system,” sections whose members feel wronged may leave their tribe (Dresch 1986, 318, 320). Switching geopolitical sides, however, was not an option Mazarese politicians considered. Instead, what emerged in the following years was a Mediterraneanist perspective of cross-­channel political relations that emphasized cross-­lateral connections (with Tunisia) over lineage descent (within Italy and the European “family of nations”). Mazarese would remain Sicilian and Italian, but once political relations were charted from the center of the sea and from the point of connection, other Sicilians and Italians would be farther along this central idiom of political relations: transnational relations as affinity across difference. This process unfolded not without any national patriarchal repercussions. While the Italian national government conceded the building of a pipeline, it took the construction and operation away from the Sicilian regional company and delegated them to ENI’s national subsidiary, SNAM.23 The cross-­cousins could marry, as it were, but their patriarchs kept the dowry.

196 / Chapter Six

Transnational Affinity versus Domestic Unrest As the Transmed pipeline became an established fact, the logic of affinity expanded to other dimensions of relationships across the sea. This projected affinity reverberated up and down the threads of patronage and honor which had previously reigned in the relationship in town as well as between Mazara, Palermo, Rome, and Tunisia. First, the pipeline, which was planned to arrive in Mazara in 1981, triggered everyone’s imagination, even as Sicilian and national officials were still negotiating what if any benefits its passage in the island would bring to its population.24 Second, in the months that followed the expiration of the fishing treaty between Italy and Tunisia, the two national governments negotiated the future of fisheries in the channel along the new lines of bi-­national companies, in which the Tunisian partner would own 51 percent and the Italian would own 49 percent.25 In support of the initiative, the mayor asked Mazara’s city council to sign a motion declaring that “after many misunderstandings, difficulties, and at times also clashes of a certain gravity that gave rise to particular tensions,” there came the time to “make the Mediterranean a sea of work, of peaceful cohabitation, and of sympathetic cooperation at all possible levels.”26 Binational companies would expand the pipeline’s logic of binding affinity. The council and its constitutive parties were thus asked by the mayor to regard previous belligerent events as the prelude to a peaceful future. In this spirit of rapprochement, a Mazarese delegation visited Mahdia to renew the twinning agreement with the Tunisian city. Tunisian reports of the celebration declared that the Mazarese delegation had come “to give the twinning of the two maritime citadels new blood [ . . . ] of brotherhood expressed in deeds.” This language consistently applied the term “brotherhood” to actions, and not to the description of the relationship between Sicilians and Tunisians: “The protocol handshaking ended with brotherly hugs, like a family destined to live through sharing and difference.” Although the hugs were “brotherly,” the parties were not “brothers,” but cross-­ kin: related enough to be called a family, but separated enough to be different from each other. They were linked by the “difference” that separated them. Both difference and relatedness emanated from the long history of animosity and vacillating power relations. It was this history that the article emphasized: “In the Fatimid capital, Mazzara del Vallo [sic], the twin-­city, is the opposite maritime gate where the first Maghrebi soldier landed in the conquest of the Gold Island, three epochs ago.”27 The Tunisian official report of the twinning ratification underlined the past moment of Arab superiority. In Mazara, the mayor emphasized a

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medieval figure that projected a reversed power relation on the Tunisian-­ Sicilian present rapprochement. In his report to the council on the delegation’s voyage to Tunisia, he recounted the delegation’s visit to the tomb of “the countryman ‘Imam al Mazari,’ [who is] much venerated in that nation. . . .”28 Imam Al-­Mazari was “a countryman” of both Mazara and Mahdia, since he had been born in the former town (in the year 1061) and died in the latter (in 1141). The imam’s migration echoed the Norman conquest of Sicily, which had ended the Arab rule of Sicily, and which the Tunisian government’s mouthpiece La presse de Tunisie cited. Beyond that, the imam was perhaps the perfect “shared relative” for this new bond of affinity because he connected Mahdia and Mazara directly; neither his life nor the new link had anything to do with Algeria or the rest of Italy. The Mazarese delegation’s visit to the imam’s tomb summoned the spirit of that ancient scholar to bless the transnational bond. This new transnational affinity did not terminate the Fish War. It rather aligned the parties’ interests in the war’s last phase. This realignment unfolded both transnationally and within the political scene in Mazara. Transnationally, though the pipeline’s construction advanced, Italy, Tunisia, and Algeria had not signed the contract for the actual supply of gas. The focus on gas supply clarified the interests that Tunisian and Sicilian shared, and distinguished them from those of Algeria and Italy (and Africa-­Europe), the pipeline’s two extremities. In this new alignment, Mazarese trawlers once more proved useful moveable emblems. In Mazara, the ongoing negotiations over binational fishing companies shifted local political alignments once more. Previously, the struggle pitted nationalist honor against internationalist class solidarity. Now, local honor—­and the familial solidarity it demanded—­confronted patronage between shipowners and Rome. Since the 1975 strike, the MSI-­DN had rallied the fleet’s rank and file, while the owners-­politicians in the council had succeeded more or less in representing their entire class. Now, these same politicians—­mainly from the DC and the PRI—­also stood to harvest the political profit from any future binational fishing companies. Smaller shipowners, with weaker or no patrons in Rome, faced the risk of exclusion from the initiative and joined the MSI-­DN’s regionalist project. Within this new realignment, the council was heading toward a new clash of alternative Mediterraneanisms. On one side stood the MSI-­DN, which had gradually secured its control over the mobilization of the fleet, now including some smaller shipowners. On the other side stood all those political forces invested in the bonds of transnational affinity—­most importantly, the pipeline and the proposed binational companies.

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This struggle unfolded throughout the Eighties both at sea and in Mazara. Every phase of negotiations triggered a new wave of seizures and clashes at sea. The MSI-­DN framed these incidents as injuries to Italian honor and initiated a new strike, which they directed against everybody from national and regional politicians to these politicians’ clients in Mazara—­the “big” owners and their allies in the city council. From their side, these politicians had lost their control over the strikes and the fishers’ “rage.” Yet the rising stakes in trans-­channel cooperation made it easier for them to mobilize their patrons in Rome, who came to Mazara to show their support for their local clients and their Mediterraneanist project. As a result, the council floor turned into the stage of a struggle between two mobilizing projects that unfolded outside of it: the patron-­client network between Mazarese and national politicians encountered the rage-­harnessing mobilization of the fleet, which the MSI-­DN forged in the piazza of the port. In September 1982, the three national governments were concluding their negotiations over the gas supply. Following a new wave of seizures at sea, the MSI-­DN declared the occupation of the city council chamber, including a hunger strike of three of the “small” owners whose trawlers were still in Tunisia.29 With some “small” shipowners supporting them, MSI-­DN politicians now accused those who did not of clientelistic betrayal of their fellow owners. One MSI-­DN member called the DC owner-­politicians “puppies,” “servile,” and “marionettes,” and demanded that the council have respect for those who are hunger-­striking [, . . .] who have the spine and the character to defend their families [, . . .] who spent their lives at sea [, . . .] the lives that they now see robbed by the Tunisians; these Tunisians to whom you, in an act of abandonment, cowardice, and vileness, have granted the possibility to dominate [us].30

A decade earlier, Ignazio Giacalone and the PRI had cited “family” against any mention of class struggle within the fleet. Now the MSI-­DN was using the same familial idiom to distinguish those owners who in their character exemplified national honor. The hunger strike lasted for a week, but the MSI-­DN members had already mobilized the fleet’s reentry and organized a general assembly “under the Italian flag.”31 The strike ended more than a month later, at the end of November 1982, when the Italian foreign minister was about to leave for Tunisia in order to materialize the agreement on binational fishing companies.32 To end the strike, the city council approved the MSI-­DN motion, which narrated the previous two months with the neofascists as the main protagonists and warned all local and national authorities

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that they would be accountable for “future actions that would lead to the closure of the fishing sector.”33 The motion passed with the sole objection of the members of the PCI, and tranquility descended upon the town. From Rage to Collaboration The modus operandi that emerged in the wake of the 1982 strike turned the Mazara city council into the stage for performative transformation between honor, patronage, and family at different scales. Transnationally, affinal bonds across the channel became more concrete and abiding. In May 1983 the pipeline was inaugurated on the basis of an agreement that had the gas become Italian property immediately upon crossing the Algeria-­Tunisia border (Stevens 2000, 238). If the gas was the “blood” of the Algerian nation, the delivery agreement clarified that Tunisia was as much a “foreign body” as Italy, since Algerian gas could not travel through Tunisian territory as Algerian. With Tunisia distinguished from Algeria and Sicily from Italy, the clashes at sea turned from an obstacle to cross-­channel union into a Sicilian and Tunisian device to enforce their interests over the more distant ones of Algeria and Italy. On the political stage in Mazara, these increasingly abiding transnational relations turned the council into that scale of the constellation in which honor converted into patronal care. Their belligerent zeal notwithstanding, the MSI-­DN members synchronized the transnational and local scales of interests. As the mobilizers of the fleet and its fishers’ rage, they gradually forced local politician’s patrons in Rome to pay more attention to Mazara. If the demand for attention appeared in honor terms, the response came in the form of reaffirmed patronage relations between Rome, Tunis, and Mazara. The MSI-­DN still held the capacity to mobilize strikes and agitate locally against Tunisians outside the council chamber. Yet it now limited itself to threatening such actions on the council floor. In response, municipal coalitions framed the discussion of the Fish War in terms of unity. To present such domestic unity and tranquility, the coalition insisted on unanimous motions within the council. On the one hand, this unanimity proved to politicians in Rome that their clients in Mazara controlled the situation. On the other hand, rumors of threats to that unanimity urged the Roman patrons to appear in person in the Mazara council. Their appearances—­and the solid patronage they performed—­proved to the Mazara council its own renewed importance as a political stage. At the same time, these visits underlined the power of the Fish War and the MSI-­DN threats, which triggered these periodical reaffirmation ceremonies.

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For example, in August 1985, Giulio Andreotti, then the Italian foreign minister, participated in a special session of the Mazara council. Earlier that month, the trawler Rosa Gancitano had sunk while a Tunisian patrol vessel was chasing it in the fishing zone under Tunisian custody. In preparation for Andreotti’s visit, the council had unanimously approved a statement warning that in the lack of “national attention,” the “social tensions” (read: menaces against Tunisians in town) might recur.34 In his reply to the Mazara council, Andreotti pushed for the binational companies but also dwelled on his relationship with Francesco Paolo Lisma, the shipowner whose son he had baptized.35 If the mayor—­a member of  his own DC party—­had read to him the words of an MSI-­DN threat, Andreotti responded by citing patronage as the best way to fix any problems. The MSI-­DN belligerent strategy from the Eighties thus delivered the promise of the PRI from the early Seventies: Mazara council’s duty “to remedy [. . .] the inefficient Italian foreign policy.”36 The new political situation aligned the parties’ interests in the war’s last phase. The pipeline as well as the imminent binational fishing companies produced binding effects on Algerian, Italian, and Tunisian interests, but did not end the Fish War. On the contrary—­they proved to Mazarese politicians and their Tunisians collaborators the power they had in convincing everybody to look seaward. The Fish War’s last phase took place two years later, almost in a mood of reunion. In late 1989, during the ongoing negotiations regarding binational fishing companies, another wave of seizures ended with fifteen Mazarese trawlers in Tunisian ports. In response to events at sea, the Mazarese fleet returned to Mazara threatening a strike, and the Mazara city council convened for several emergency sessions, including one with the Italian foreign minister. The mayor framed the reentry as a preemptive measure “in order to avoid further damage to the Mazarese fleet, [showing] a decision of great responsibility.”37 He also assured the national minister that the council would undertake “all the initiatives considered necessary” to resolve the fisheries problem and avoid tensions in town.38 This time, however, the council discussed the clashes at sea in direct connection with “the problems” that “the Tunisian presence in town created.” Early in 1990, the council issued its final unitary motion regarding the Fish War. “The Tunisians wanted to guard their own interests,” the MSI-­DN text explained, “and if we want to read between the lines of the things said in Palermo by the Tunisian Fisheries Commissary, we [can] note that, [at least] in words, they wanted to guarantee our interests as well.” What follows is the original text of the MSI-­DN motion, with the words that were subsequently omitted from the unitary declaration given in italics.39

Pissing Rage / 201 The clandestine Tunisians in Sicily and in this city are numerous, [and they are] incredibly tolerated by the authorities; the shooting in the Channel of Sicily goes on, and they shoot at head height, thus blatantly contradicting the same Tunisian Fisheries Commissary that had given [us] assurances that no use of arms would be ever made; the Tunisians shoot because they want to constrain the Italian authorities to accept the mysterious Tunisian proposals, and they shoot in order to have involuntary collaborators; the tension in the Channel of Sicily emotionally incites the sailors and their families to accept what the government of that country has asked.

The same MSI-­DN politicians who had harnessed and channeled the fishers’ “rage” during the Eighties declared ten years later that they had been “emotionally incited” into supporting the Tunisian government’s requests. Nevertheless, this was still the MSI-­DN language, which needed some tweaking for the entire council to approve. The final unanimous declaration dropped the first sentence (in italics) and it also added that while “Tunisian immigrants should not compete disloyally” with the Mazaresi fishers, “neither must they become the object of unscrupulous economic operators’ exploitation.”40 The unanimous declaration signaled the end of the old bifurcated view in which any interaction took place either between two distinct and sovereign countries or between two opposing transnational classes (of oppressed and oppressors). In the new view, all aspects of Mazarese life—­including clashes at sea—­were framed as Sicilian-­Tunisian transnational relations. These relations were now being charted from the channel outward, rather than from the continents towards their point of contact. Mazaresi did not become Tunisians’ “brothers”—­whether as oppressed Southerners, Mediterraneans, or human beings. Differences of identity and interests remained. But the transnational affinity across difference aligned the linked parties with each other and against their respective “older brothers”: a lineage theory and nationalist prohibition if there ever was one, though not a rare occurrence, at least not in parts of southern Europe (Campbell 1964, 71). Conclusion This was the last that was heard of the fisheries in the city council of Mazara del Vallo for a long time. The fisheries, which had entered the city council through the “honorary entrance” in the early Seventies, left the stage two decades later. Yet rather than taking its leave on that same red carpet, it dispersed in various directions: sideways, upwards, and downwards.

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The council floor ceased to be a stage for the action for various reasons: first, the rate of seizures dropped significantly during the Nineties after the end of the Cold War. Second, the expansion thrust that the Mazara fleet had undergone until the mid-­1980s turned into a steady decline, both due to a rechanneling of government funding and to a gradual depletion of fishing banks. Finally, the two main actors most invested in Mediterraneanist spec­ ters left the council floor. Cristaldi from the MSI-­DN went on to become a regional and national politician, and in 2009 he won the mayor’s seat. In an interview with me during his election campaign, he told me with pride: “I have ascended onto the national political scene on the waves of Italian-­Tunisian tensions.” As the slogan for his party’s 2007 provincial election campaign—­“More Sicily in the Mediterranean!”—­suggests, he did not abandon his penchant for Mediterraneanist turns of phrase. Cristaldi’s predecessor as the holder of the fleet’s magic wand on the council floor, Ignazio Giacalone, made his exit in less upwardly mobile circumstances. His party at the time, the DC, ousted him immediately before the 1990 municipal elections. After an investigation regarding embezzlement culminated in arrest warrants against him and others in town, Giacalone escaped to Tunisia (Sciacca 1993). As anthropological terms of trade, idioms of alliance and affinity are underrated, especially on a transnational scale. In her discussion of the global situation, Anna Tsing suggested that analysts pay attention “to the changing definitions of interests and identity that both allow and result from” transnational events by focusing “on the historical specificity of events . . . and the open-­ended indeterminacy of the regional processes” that shape them (Tsing 2000, 349). The story of the Fish War and the Transmed shows how such interests and identities emerged out of an underlying transnational, kinship-­informed, segmentary cosmology. Mazarese did not discover their Mediterranean horizon somewhere in the Seventies, nor did they cease to see themselves as Italians in the following decades. Both national and transnational categories followed the process throughout. Yet the growing tendency towards Mazarese-­Tunisian alignment turned Mazaresi’s perspective from national to transnational—­from alliance to affinity across difference. Pitt-­Rivers’s fundamental observation about kinship and marriage clarifies that transformation, only on a transnational political scale: “One might sum up the Mediterranean as a region in which marriage is not made for the sake of kinship but rather the reverse; kinship, such as it is here, is derived from the links of marriage . . .” (1977, 73).

SEVEN

Terms of  Transcultural Affinity

Iconic Bridges One night toward the end of February, Zu Nino entered the deckhands’ front cabin when we were almost awake. “Between Palestine and Israel there is always war!” he declared. February 2008 saw a rise in violence between Israelis and Palestinians, along the usual power balance that had seventy Palestinians and two Israelis killed by the end of that month. Those of us who were passing our days without going up to the bridge were in the dark regarding news from the shore, but Zu Nino, who spent many hours a day on watch, was as updated as anyone in Mazara. In response to his declara­ tion, Hajj said something about the situation, but then Zu Nino continued his train of thought: “Baby Jesus, Joseph, Mary, John the Baptist, Peter, every­ one, everyone was born in Palestine and then came to Italy. Why? All of them, all of them!” Zu Nino then left the cabin, and Hajj and I would have probably wondered aloud about it, but the next sorting round was upon us, so we all went to sleep. Two days later, during the sorting astern, Zu Nino resumed his discussion: Fuck—­Saint Joseph, Mary, Saint Peter, they were all born in Palestine. How come they ended up in Italy? Damn [porca], these Arabs, they’re sly. They were sly and they remained sly! Arab seafarers—­ha!

In the contextualizing light of newsreels, one rarely finds connections be­ tween labor migration, the Holy Family and Jesus’s disciples, the ongoing war in Gaza, and shrewd navigation of the kind that unauthorized migrants have practiced to arrive to Italian shores. Yet it was to these connections that Zu Nino’s tongue-­in-­cheek questions referred. The two contemporary events were unauthorized migration to Italy and the ongoing Israeli-­Palestinian

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Figure 21.  Zu Nino and Hajj in the deckhands’ cabin

conflict. Italian media outlets gradually connected these two events through news items about growing numbers of migrants who, upon being captured at sea or on Italian soil, declared their origin as Palestinian, in the hope of winning either asylum or refuge. What Zu Nino did was to compare the present phenomena of a conflicted Palestine and unauthorized migration to Italy with phenomena he drew from the Christian scriptures. By doing that, he cast Jesus as well as his family and disciples as “Arabs,” and compared their “arrival” in Italy to that of unauthorized migrants. Finally, his professed bewilderment in front of the Holy Family’s cunning navigation transferred by association to the “Arab seafarers,” including those sitting and sorting seafood in front of him. Zu Nino’s allusion to mythical scenes and figures in framing present events follows similar instances of social poetics (Herzfeld 1985a, 40–­41), with one crucial difference: here a Sicilian Christian was casting his coun­ terparts, rather than himself, through allusions to mythical figures. As a re­ sult, if on the lips of Cretan shepherds such casting justified their moral superiority, here making Jesus, Joseph, Mary, and the saints “Arabs” only confounded any such moral superiority. If seaborne cunning was blessed as the act of the Holy Family, then all “Arab seafarers” were so blessed. If, on

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the other hand, such cunning was deplorable, as were the “sly” Arabs who nowadays practiced it, then the same went for the founding figures of Chris­ tianity who, in Zu Nino’s allegory, had brought Christianity to Rome using the same tricks. Zu Nino’s jocular pronouncements show how religious al­ lusions travel diagonally: his juggling of past with present created slippage among social categories and the received relationships between them, as well as between those categories and the casting orders they entailed to the present. In this interreligious imaginary, Arabs, Tunisians, and Muslims did not always face Sicilians, Europeans, and Christians. On the contrary, differ­ ent lines could connect present persons to past figures in unexpected ways and with surprising moral implications. Both aboard the Naumachos and ashore, people made claims to affinity across difference and distance as scaling devices. Tunisians and Sicilians have been relating to each other across difference—­religious, national, or civilizational—­for a long time now. When they have done so, they have alluded both to the mythical past and to religious and other categories in framing the present. These allusions have distinguished between categories and persons. Yet the freedom, which this distinction has permitted, has not stemmed from an assumption of universal individual freedom to shed one’s affiliations and appear as just a human being. Rather, it has stemmed from the repertoire of past categories, figures, and relationships, and the flexible casting possibilities that this repertoire provides for relationships and inter­ actions in the present. This view of the relationship between history, culture, and action forms the terms of transcultural affinity. These terms premised multicultural sociability not on the avoidance of difference, but on its con­ stant marking. This way of making and breaking social relations stands in stark contrast to cosmopolitan tolerance, global human fraternity, and official interfaith dialogue, which have shaped recent scholarship on the Mediterranean and the example it is said to set for a global political order. People aboard the Naumachos demanded that everyone profess a reli­ gious creed—­any particular one—­as a necessary condition for participation in social interaction. As a result, conversation revolved not around brotherly bond beyond cultural specificity, but around mutual jousting and the cele­ bration of friction and adversity. These practical rules of multicultural inter­ action depended on a flexible—­at times irreverent—­approach to relation­ ships, persons, and categories. Hajj and his fellow crewmembers informed and justifed this flexibility by alluding to past moments of such transcul­ tural interaction, a past that also made them related (Palumbo 2004). In Mazara’s recent history, various actors have used these same relating devices

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for their respective, often mutually exclusive Mediterraneanist projects. In the aftermath of the Fish War and following the successful opening of the Transmed pipeline, the region-­making project that had reigned over Maza­ rese politics until the Eighties saw its demise. The end of the Cold War also reduced the Mediterranean’s geopolitical role and the benefits Italian and Tunisian politicians stood to harvest from their position at its center. Dur­ ing those years, the diminishing profit from trawling in the central Mediter­ ranean further obstructed Mazarese politicians’ attempts to maintain their political and economic importance. Yet even if the region-­making project was unmade, the various motifs, stereotypes, and possible associations remained available and ready for the use of future projects. In the past two decades, several such projects and counterprojects of Mediterraneanist cultural politics emerged in Mazara in the background of the Barcelona process and the growth of concerted Euro­ pean action in southern Europe and North Africa. The promoters of these projects, like Zu Nino, used idioms of affinity across difference along differ­ ent spatial and temporal scales in relating the present situation to the long twentieth century of cross-­channel migration, as well as to the early-­modern and ancient pasts. If, during the Fish War, Sicilians and Tunisians had gradu­ ally come to regard each other as being related across the difference that divided them, they now rearticulated the same set of contested framings in their imagination of the wider Mediterranean. Cosmopolitanism and Modernity The Mediterranean itself has reemerged since the end of the Cold War, cast as the cosmopolitan space par excellence—­an example both for Europe and for the entire globe. Cosmopolitanism belongs to that set of academic con­ cepts for which the Mediterranean has been famous in the past century. Like the two other oppositions in the discourse of modernity and the Mediter­ ranean (patronage and the honor syndrome), what makes Mediterranean cosmopolitanism stand out is the impediments it is said to have set to the universalizing or leveling effect prescribed by the ideology of modernity. Images of interethnic and interreligious cohabitation in port cities like Alexandria and Izmir countered nationalism, “a theory of political legiti­ macy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across politi­ cal ones” (Gellner 1983, 1). Yet, unlike modern political order (“offended” by patronage) and modern cultural order of subjectivity (“offended” by the honor syndrome), the political order that nationalism epitomized was probably the least popular stripe on the banner of modernity. Nationalism’s

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unpopularity (at least among academics) can thus explain cosmopolitan­ ism’s prominence in imaginations of postnational global order (Mignolo 2000, 721; Beck 2002). As the Mediterranean opposite of nationalism, the image of cosmopol­ itan port cities became an object of paradoxical nostalgia for a moment that emblematized a certain image of non-­national modernity—­urbaneness, refinement, and intercultural coexistence and conviviality (rather uncriti­ cally; Borutta and Gekas 2012, 5). In the aftermath of World War I, the nationalization of the littoral severed—­at times violently—­the cross-­marine connections its cities maintained: “Alexandria turned ‘Egyptian,’ Salonika ‘Greek,’ Izmir ‘ Turkish,’ and Habsburg Trieste ‘Italian’ ” (Tabak 2009, 79). Mid-­twentieth-­century North African anticolonial nationalization similarly reduced European presence and the strictly cultural cosmopolitanism it had conditioned. In the battle between two notions of modernity—­pluralistic cultural elitism or nationalism—­the latter had the upper hand. The depar­ ture of European residents from port cities in the Levant and the Maghreb marked the end of the Mediterranean—­the last of its many deaths—­and fixed the identification of modernity with the spread of the European model of nationalism (Viscomi 2016). Herein lies the productivity of cosmopolitanism as a theme rather than as an analytical tool: the political economic and cultural conditions of life in turn-­of-­the-­century port cities fit comfortably within both modernity and the Mediterranean. The discourse on cosmopolitanism combines the his­ toriographical and anthropological strands of Mediterraneanist studies: on the one hand, it partakes in the temporal split between modernity and the Mediterranean; on the other hand, it focuses on a recent phenomenon that becomes both emblematic of the wider Mediterranean and a contempora­ neous opposite of European modernity. Elegies of cosmopolitanism thus echo histories of the Mediterranean that date the sea’s death to earlier peri­ ods, not because they agree on the conditions for the sea’s end, but because all accounts construct their respective Mediterraneans in opposition to the “modern” present. At the same time, these elegies turn cosmopolitanism into the spatial companion to patronage and the honor syndrome. What­ ever their view of port cities circa 1900, they portray a Mediterranean model of action surrounded and then defeated by a modern—­that is, national—­ expansion. Cosmopolitanism’s ambivalent role in Mediterraneanist schol­ arship clarifies the limits of any reconstruction of the Mediterranean on the basis of a time-­bound definition. At the same time, it provides us with an important clue about the role that terms of transcultural affinity play in contemporary dynamics of region formation.

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The Aft-­Deck Symposium on Faith and the Creation One morning, while everyone was busy sorting the recent net, Hajj ad­ dressed the question of my religious beliefs. Hajj—­the shrewd ethnographer that he is—­broached the issue by telling me that he wanted to start praying. “When?” I asked. When he stopped sailing, he replied—­“because here on­ board, I can’t do it.” Then he asked me: “Do you pray?” “No.” “Not even once a year? I do at Ramadan.” “Well, I kind of do on Passover.” “And when is that?” “It’s around April.” My response made him expand the conversation, and it seemed that the people at the table were too busy discussing other issues to notice our con­ versation. As the sorting of the catch was usually dominated by talk about sex and money, I was ready for some change. “You Jews, what is your year like?” Hajj asked. I did not understand, so he repeated his question: “Your calendar year? Is it lunar?” “Yes.” “Ah! You see? We are much more similar than we realize.” “True.” I was not sure about the direction of the conversation, and was having a hard time keeping up with the pace of everyone’s sorting. “And the year, when does it start?” “It starts in September generally.” “No, I mean the historical year, when does it start?” “I don’t understand.” “For example, we start the counting with the Hijra of Mohamed.” “Ah, we start it with the creation of the world, and there is now 5,700-­something [years].” “And you write it in school?” “Yes, but we use letters, not numbers.” “OK, but it is still the same.” Until that point, Hajj had led the discussion to show me that “we” and “you”—­that is, Muslims and Jews—­were not that different. But my response about the origin of the earth changed that direction. “So you say that the world was created five thousand years ago? That can’t be true.” “And the fact that Jesus was born only to a mother is?” “What, are you saying that he had two mothers?”

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“No, the fact that he was born to a virgin—­that’s true?” “Well, we Muslims believe in it too.” “And that’s possible?” “Well, that’s according to religion.” “So, we also believe that the creation was five thousand years ago.” “But that can’t be true!” “And the rest is? People that fly on horses with wings, and the sea that opens for the people to pass through? Is that possible?” “Wait, I am not talking about miracles. I am asking a specific question, you said that you believed that the world had been created five thousand years ago, and it seems impossible. It was created long, long, long before that.” “And I think it is related. These are all things created by God, no?” “Well, I think . . .” At that point, I interrupted Hajj to tell him something that I hhad wanted to tell him for a long time: “You know, I am very happy to talk to you about it. In America you can’t say these things to people.” “Why?” “Because you might offend them.” “Really? That’s not right. You should say anything; only that way can you have peace.” After lunch, when we were sorting fish again, I was hoping to pick up our conversation where we had left it, but Hajj seemed more quiet and pensive, so I asked him: “How are you?” He did not respond. I expanded the ques­ tion. “O Hajj, how are you doing?” “Bad, bad—­at sea [it’s] always bad,” he replied, ending the discussion in a way that left me with much to desire. In our short discussion, Hajj and I had occupied more than one pair of positions. On the face of it, we were a Muslim and a Jew doing our best to find flaws in the core myths of each other’s religion. Yet we did not cite religious affiliations as grounds for justifying our claims, but two opposing distinguishing logics: Hajj distinguished between the order of nature and the miraculous—­the creation and extraordinary events—­while I lumped all factual claims from the Scriptures as being equally implausible. As a result, I declared all beliefs illogical, whereas according to Hajj, if some beliefs, like Jesus Christ’s conception, were not subjects of logical consideration, others were.1 Finally, this entire short discussion cast both Hajj and me as persons debating something that was both larger and smaller than our relationship: larger because it conjured up cosmological and universal issues, and smaller

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because our relationship contained the discussion, rather than the other way around. Hajj’s last point, that we should be able “to say anything,” addressed ex­ actly that. It framed our interreligious interaction as an example of transcul­ tural relationship, and then postulated this example as a norm. According to that norm, sociability should not be premised on the avoidance of dif­ ference. It should unfold through its constant marking. Hajj’s next lesson in personhood expanded the role of difference from an aspect of the relation­ ship to a necessary condition of its parties. No Atheists Allowed The first discussion Hajj had opened about faith, the creation, and interre­ ligious interaction had taken place just before Zu Nino left us for Sicily. The tensions still in play at the time were perhaps the reason why Hajj switched to talking about how hard it was to be at sea before I felt we had exhausted our discussion. A week or so later, Zu Nino was gone and the Naumachos was sailing on calmer social waters. The same kind of weather that had made us go into Lampedusa twice in the previous week was still with us. Yet, with the owner gone back to Mazara, the captain and the crew found a smoother working pace. Easter was already less than two weeks away, and everyone had begun guessing when we would enter port in time to sell the cartons of seafood that were stacking up in the ship’s freezing chamber. With our days at sea numbered, everybody had more time and attention for wider issues. Hajj broached the topic of religion again when he told me that he wanted me to read him some verses from the Bible. In response, I told him that if he decided to pray that day, he should ask God for a storm, so that we would be forced to go into port and rest. Hajj replied, “ We say in Tunisia that when two people are talking and one says suddenly, ‘ What time is it? Oh, I have to go and pray,’ the other one says, ‘Read an opening verse [iqra Fatiha] for me!’ ” Waving a nice chunky prawn in his hand at me, he added: “By now, you have become a Muslim Jew!” I told him he should not worry; that would not happen. To which he replied, this time while collecting big shrimps with both hands, “I am Christian, Muslim, and Jewish. What are you?” Taken by surprise, I retorted: “I am an atheist.” “Atheist?” Hajj replied. “You know, in all my friends, relatives, and neigh­ bors, I do not know even one person who does not believe in God.” “Well” I retorted angrily, with my hands searching for some prawns in a pile of sardines, “among all my friends I can count those who believe in

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God on one hand!” Perhaps my abrupt reply had come from exhaustion. Perhaps Hajj’s insistence destabilized my relativist center of gravity. In either case, our heated discussion alerted the people at the table, who shot at us, “Sort with both hands!” So we went back to sorting quietly, but not before Hajj told me: “Don’t say that you wish for a storm. You can tell me that, but the others—­you should be wary of them. They are ruffiani.” A bit later I wanted to get his attention, so I called him; “O my [paternal] uncle!” “I have no brothers’ sons who do not believe in god,” he shot back at me. “A Jew is better than someone who does not believe in God.” After a pause of a minute or two, he added: I don’t care whether there is a God or not, as long as I keep searching for one. My wife prays and my children do too. I am ashamed that my ten-­year-­old son prays and I don’t. The people in my neighborhood tell me I should pray, because I am such a good man, and the only thing that is missing is prayer. Perhaps I will start when we go back.

The same night, when we were working on the hydraulic drum and prepar­ ing to drop the net for the first night’s route, Hajj asked me again, “I am Muslim, Jewish and Christian. These are not my words. These are the words of Gandhi. And you? What are you?” Overwhelmed again, I responded in my best Sicilian dialect, “What do I know [Che ne saccio]?” “No, that is not a response,” he chastised me. After thinking for a bit, I said, “You know what? I am cosmopolitan!” With a worried look, Hajj replied, “Why can’t you talk in clear words?” This conversation, some eight months after I had arrived in Mazara, came at a significant moment in my fieldwork. As I had initially begun my fieldwork with notions of the cosmopolitan Mediterranean, I assumed that my stay in Mazara would gradually turn me from an identified specific per­ son (Israeli, Jewish, student in the United States, volunteer at the church’s afterschool, and so forth) to a generic human and global co-­citizen whom people would accept as such. Quite to the contrary, as time went by, my specific social persona became more articulated, and if anything more nu­ anced: I became “the American,” “the Israeli,” “the Jew,” “the Jew from Pal­ estine”—­and, on the lips of more cynical souls, “the captain” or “the pro­ fessor”—­but always somebody, never just anybody. To be sure, I could participate in some aspects of this process, but all in all, mine was an Aris­ totelian shaping, not a Kantian shedding. As a result, I became used to the idea that my interaction with the people in town would not gradually strip me of all my linguistic, ethnic, national, and religious attributes. So it did

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not surprise me that Hajj expected me to believe in the Jewish God. What surprised me was the fact that he expected me to believe in God, any god, as some sort of necessary condition for personhood. My response, perhaps self-­evident to most of my academic interlocutors, came short of that. Like many of the conversations that preceded them onboard, these dis­ cussions about creation, faith, and belief revolved around the framing of social relations. But there was one main difference: If previously the sides to the discussion had been the crew and the owner, or the mechanics and the deckhands, now the discussion involved Hajj on the one side and me on the other. He was framing transnational relations as those between persons who were recognizable through their religion, home port, or nationality, whereas I asked to avoid any such casting. In a way, Hajj was educating me in the terms of transcultural affinity. Rules of Interreligious Engagement Hajj’s insistence that I wear a specific costume on our interreligious stage framed two principles for interaction: that people appear in front of each other as concrete personas; and that interactions should unfold through open references to the characteristics of those personas. This did not auto­ matically condone any gesture no matter however potentially offensive it might be. On the contrary, the concreteness of casting options drew from an intricate staging repertoire with its limits and its norms. As it had done in other aspects of onboard life, here food played a key role. Several days after our discussion of my faith, I asked Hajj if I should prepare a certain dish I had in mind for dinner. Some tomato sauce had re­ mained from lunch, and I thought I would cook some peas and mushrooms in it. Hajj replied that I should drop the salsa and just bake the peas in the oven, because “all things [made] in the oven are too special!” I must have insisted on my original plan, because Hajj then continued: In all my years in Mazara I have never heard of the thing you want to cook. I am not saying [it’s] good or bad. Mazaresi are disgusted by things they do not know. For example, from us all they want is couscous and that’s it! All other things disgust them. During [a previous] voyage before Christmas, an old Maza­ rese was making fun of me about the bsissa.2 He said: “Now you have to eat that crap [cacata]?” I can’t remember the word, but it was a word similar to “shit.” Can you talk like that about food, I ask you? And bsissa is very special. You need good fingers. You need clean women [to prepare it]. You need clean women.

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I have heard Tunisians in Mazara and Tunisia complain about Sicilians’ limited openness toward their cuisine. After all, couscous with seafood is by now adopted throughout Sicily as one of the island’s original dishes, though Sicilians shun other couscous dishes, as well as other Tunisian reci­ pes. What Hajj’s words added was a distinction between habit and professed preferences: it was one thing not to know a certain dish, but another thing altogether to be disgusted by the unknown, and even to declare that disgust in front of those who habitually eat the food. Moreover, Hajj was making his folk seem more open to cultural experience—­one way to define cosmo­ politan attitude (Hannerz 1990, 239)—­than Mazaresi. In other words, he was claiming Tunisians’ superiority on the basis of cross-­cultural openness as grounds for comparison. Together, Hajj’s demand that we be able to talk about anything and his complaint about Mazaresi’s insensitivity framed intercultural and interre­ ligious relations as both specific and permissible. Rather than declaring all cultural specificities beyond approach, he turned markers of difference—­ and attitudes or dispositions toward them—­into the compass for navigating relatedness. Hajj’s last remark about the role of women in preparing bsissa pointed to the gendered dimension of that navigation. His next point elabo­ rated on that dimension: “You Jews, you know how to cook. We Arabs say: ‘Sleep with the Chris­ tians and eat with the Jews! [urqud ma’ al-­nasaara w’kul ma’ al-­yahoud].’ ” “You mean ‘to stay over the night?’ ” “No, ‘to have sex.’ It’s a Tunisian phrase. [Those who say it] think about the French, because of the period of French control of  Tunisia. The word ‘to have sex’ is not there, but it is [intended] inside the phrase.” “Sleep with the Christians and eat with the Jews” outlines the shape of interreligious intercourse for Muslim men in colonial Tunisia. The culinary aspect seemed straightforward: “Christians eat pork, and Jews don’t, so your food is halal.” Besides, as he had said before, the general opinion was that Jews could cook well. The reference to sexual conduct was more complex, since it involved more than the self-­explanatory cultural exchange. What made it acceptable for Muslim men to have sex with Christian women but not Jewish women? First, there is the question of the baby. If a Jewish woman gets pregnant, the child would be Jewish, and that’s bad. Second, they used to say that you would have less trouble with French girls, but I don’t know if it’s true. That’s all from stories, I wasn’t born yet.3

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Later, Hajj asked me: “O Nour, if you fall in love with a girl in Tunisia, would you marry her?” “Certainly, why would I ever not?” I responded, quick on my relativist feet. “Bravo,” he said, “I like that idea.” He went back to sorting his pile. Rather than a lesson in religion, any religion, Hajj provided me with an examination and a general survey of interreligious masculine conduct. It mattered less to which religion I adhered exactly, or how much I did. What was expected of me was to profess that in the constellation of the three religions in question, I would cross interreligious boundaries in the accepted direction and the proper manner. Instead of a religious etiquette, this was a set of strategies for transcultural engagement, and a masculine one at that. If Hajj had previously professed a general openness to differ­ ence, this openness now took a more specific and directional shape. Hence the importance of affinity—­and the idioms of marriage it invokes—­as the model for such relations. Where people see each other as related, the shape of their relatedness informs how they may interact and unite. T he Moral Perils of Contact The relationship between masculinity and the moral perils of interreligious contact came up again several days later when, during one of the sorting rounds, the bosun told me to join him and the chief mechanic at the sort­ ing table. When I sat down, the bosun asked me: “Nour, tell me, is your dick trimmed?” “Yes,” I replied, unsure as to the direction of the conversation. “Ah! You see?!” he shot at the chief mechanic, “Isn’t it good like that? Beau­ tiful and red!” At that point, the chief mechanic, who seemed to be disap­ pointed by my response, asked me: “Wait, are you Muslim?” I probably felt competent enough at the game of transcultural banter, because I opened by saying that yes, I was, and then told him that “both religions did that.” The bosun, content as he seemed to be with the exchange, took out his pack of cigarettes and offered me one, which I accepted. He then took out his lighter and gestured toward my cigarette with the lighter in his hands. I acknowledged the gesture, leaned forward for him to light my cigarette, and then said “Ya’yshek [may He give you life],” which is the standard informal “Thanks.” “Hashaak, ya’yshek,” he corrected me. “You are supposed to say ‘Hashaak.’ ” It was the first time I had heard the word in that context, so I asked him what it meant. “It means, ‘This has nothing to do with you. It’s not you.’ ” “Hashaak?” “Yes. ‘You are spared.’ And then you say ‘ Thank you.’ ”

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Happy with the short learning moment, I said: “Hashaak, ya’yshek.” The bosun then replied not with the usual “You’re welcome,” but with a varia­ tion on the “You’re spared” theme: “Hashaak sauw.” “What does that mean?” “It means, ‘Nor does it have to do with you.’ ” “The lighting of the cigarette?” “Yes.” “Why?” “I don’t know. But they say that in the old days, the Bey would sit in his palace surrounded by his mistresses, and when he wanted a cigarette he would take one and put it at the end of one of those long holders. Then one of his mistresses would light it for him. Therefore, in order to make it clear that you are not my mistress and I am not yours, we say ‘Hashaak.’ ” Now, it is true that the bosun was always ready to provide sexualized explanations for anything under discussion. It is also true that many Tuni­ sian men light each other’s cigarettes without expressing any such mutual sparing. My presence as an inquisitive outsider might have prompted an act that did not necessarily take place regularly. Nevertheless, the allusion to sexual and social subordination illuminated something about the potential sexual insinuations of one man’s lighting of his friend’s cigarette. It was as if the actual gesture of holding a lit lighter close to the face of one’s friend was so charged, that it needed to be deflated by a mutual declaration that the thing that had just happened had nothing to do with either side. There was something both fragile, exposed to threats, about that masculinity, and sub­ ject to constant maintenance. Excited as I was about the little ethnographic treasure I had stumbled upon, I repeated the bosun’s exegesis to Hajj, who was not totally convinced. “I am not sure that’s the reason.” “Why? What do you know?” “Well, in the old days, when the French were controlling Tunisia, the Jews would come and greet us by saying, ‘Ramadan Kareem.’ We would then respond by saying, ’Hashaak min al-­h’amsa.” “ ‘You are spared from the Five?’ What does that mean?” “Yes, that’s the Five Pillars of Islam.” “And what does that mean?” “Well, it can mean two things: either ‘ You should thank your God that he does not make you fast for a whole month like us,’ or it could mean ‘Thank you, but our religion has nothing to do with you.’ ”

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As Hajj was offering me his exegesis of “This has nothing to do with you,” it occurred to me that though he might have liked to differ with the bosun on that matter (as on most others), the two versions were not that far apart. Both exegeses of the phrase “This has nothing to do with you” point to a key element in interactions across borders, whether sexual or religious. In one case, an implication of sexualized intimacy is avoided; in the other, it is the marking of an interreligious boundary one should be wary of trespass­ ing. Yet both exegeses outline the rules of a game that was made of such acts of trespassing: the deflating gesture addresses not the relationship between the persons, but the implications of a given interaction for that relation­ ship. In both cases, by clarifying that the interaction has “nothing to do” with the person, the gesture is supposed to guard the integrity—­of the Mus­ lim community, or of the masculine impenetrable subject—­while letting the interaction (greeting neighbors during their holy month or lighting a man’s cigarette) continue. In that, both interpretations of this sociably excluding gesture share Hajj’s earlier demand regarding interreligious discourse. They all show how people acknowledge difference, mark the boundaries it charts between people; how, rather than erasing those differences, these gestures enable distancing, transgression, and latitude around them; and, importantly, how the gestures are patterned and learned. These degrees of interactional flexibility are not grounded on an abstract humanity that the participants are supposed to share, but on an assumption of their related­ ness across the difference between them. As the Naumachos plowed the waters between Sicily and Tunisia, it staged scenes from two different sites of interreligious contact: colonial Tunisia and present-­day Mazara. These two historical moments were separated by six decades and presented transnational movements in opposite directions. The ideology of interreligious contact in Mazara of the 2000s increasingly staged two separate groups—­Tunisians as Muslims and Arabs against Sicil­ ians as Europeans and Catholic Christians—­even if, as we shall see, these categories did not dictate the shape of relationships between them. As we have seen in the previous chapter and will see again shortly, people in Sic­ ily framed these relations according to the historical precedents that the Sicilian past provided for such interreligious contacts, mainly from medi­ eval Arab and Arab-­Norman Sicily. Yet in the middle of the channel, as far from Mazara’s social context as from Tunisia’s, present-­day Mazara faced colonial Tunisia, with its tripartite Muslim-­Jewish-­Christian relationship and the opportunities for relations and transgression it provided. Colonial Tunisia’s repertoire of possible relationships more closely resembled in its specificity the directional taboos of kinship charts, with their culinary,

Terms of  Transcultural Affinity  /  217

sexual, and matrimonial do’s and don’ts, than any prevalent notion of cultural or political cosmopolitanism, or the universal human sameness on which its political imagination rests.

From Profits of Belligerence to the Dividends of Merger The tension between the Mazarese present and the Tunisian past of interreli­ gious and transnational relations colored Mazara’s role in Mediterraneanist cultural politics as much as it framed our interactions aboard the Naumachos. Ashore, official Mediterraneanist cultural politics countered the richer, more specific, and informal framing of the wider Mediterranean and the variety of contacts it provided as a transnational space of relationship across difference. During the switch from the “Cold War” to the “War on Terror,” and dur­ ing the increasing Italian attention (positive and negative) to its labor mi­ grants, Mazara’s transnational stakes have again risen. In the process, Mazara has since the Nineties turned into one of the Sicilian hubs of Mediterranean­ ist cultural politics. The rising tide of Mediterraneanist initiatives in Italy and southern Europe have increased the town’s visibility and turned Mazara into an emblem of Mediterraneaness. The frequent allusions to the Mediter­ ranean in Mazara have followed the wider intellectual discourse about Italy and the sea that surrounds it, and have enjoyed a wider institutional inter­ est in the production of regional identities within Europe (Palumbo 2003; Narotzky and Smith 2006). Until Tunisia erupted in revolution, Italy itself seemed to follow an ascending Mediterraneanist course. And Italy was not alone in that (Rogozen-­Soltar 2007; P. A. Silverstein 2013). The European Union was discovering its southern “neighborhood” as the new geopoliti­ cal playground. Italy used its geographical position to brand itself as the Mediterranean state par excellence, through new international pacts with Maghreb countries and the many cultural projects in the South. Finally, around the country, study centers and forums bearing the adjective “Medi­ terranean” are appearing by the dozens (Benigno 2010). Italy was becom­ ing Mediterranean, so it was reported, for two reasons: first, because of its increasing role in European relationships with North Africa, and second, because it was rediscovering the depth and spread of such connections in its own past (Renda 2000; Frascani 2008; Cassano 2005; Bono 2008). As national attention switched from the clashes and intrigues of the 1970s and 1980s to the wider Mediterranean, other cities around Sicily and southern Italy vied for prominence in the new regional culturalist agenda. In Mazara, this culturalist tide opened with the speech of Pope John Paul II

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about interreligious relations in 1993, which he gave in Mazara. The town’s magnates still consider it as the ultimate proof that their town is more Med­ iterranean than other contenders in the province, like Marsala or Trapani. Various organizations and actors have sought to use their town’s potential role as an emblem of the Mediterranean and of transnational relationships across it. In the process, Sicilians and Tunisians in Mazara have alluded to the ancient Mediterranean past they share: a past that, once made present, informs how they make and break social relations. A Generational Shift The rise in culturalist projects in town followed the drop in the fleet’s profitability and its diminishing presence in the town’s daily life. The enor­ mous riches that the Mazara fleet had created over the years did not remain in the fleet. Like Zu Nino, many shipowners kept their children from be­ coming fishers themselves. The more successful the parents had been, the more probable it was for their children to leave the fishers’ life behind them. In the local typology of fleet characters, this generational evolution turned the heads of the fleet from “captains” to “captain-­owners,” and then to just “owners” who sent others to captain their trawlers, and finally to “owners’ sons,” who had “never set their feet aboard a ship.” The latter generation of “owners’ children,” whose older members are now already in their fifties, were sent by their parents to the university. Some of them left Mazara to pur­ sue careers in the North; they come back annually to spend the summer in their hometown. Others came back with law or accounting degrees to man­ age their parents’ businesses. This generation of shipowners’ children thus saw not only the town’s glamorous economic rise, but also how seaborne glut transformed into landed established wealth. They learned how to treat the fleet the way the landside middle class had always treated it—­as their embarrassing relative. These persons are the main actors in the town’s current political scene. Their careers outline what Mazara underwent from the end of its fleet’s heyday to the aftermath of the fleet’s decline. Several of them have been participating in municipal politics as council members, mayors, and party secretaries. One of them became head of the newly founded union of the local shipowners’ associations in 2009, and served later as a deputy in the regional assembly in Palermo, before he lost to his previous political patron and current mayor in the 2009 municipal election. Another actor in town, whose father was director of the Free Shipowners’ Association, currently runs the regional office of the right-­wing labor union. The only woman

Terms of  Transcultural Affinity  /  219

among this generation of shipowners’ children has no brothers, making her the heiress to her father, a captain-­owner for many years and currently the president of the Free Shipowners’ Association. She founded a business consultancy in 2009, and after running for the same deputy seat at the regional assembly, she has been promoting various projects like fish tourism and international marketing initiatives. These “owners’ children” and others like them have thus been transform­ ing their familial affiliation through various kinds of professional knowl­ edge into affairs that abut the fleet’s dying activity. Since the Nineties this new generation of local politicians and executives has been baptizing the fleet’s operation to fit the new Mediterraneanist political agendas of the Barcelona process and the growing concerted European action in southern Europe and North Africa (Pace 2007). In transforming maritime capital and connections into landed affairs like local and regional administration, busi­ ness, and political clout, the members of this new generation have divorced the fruits of the town’s seaborne riches from the fleet’s ambivalent past. The tale of Mazara’s culturalist new attire is the story of their generation. Perhaps the one “owner’s son” who has outdone his peers in transform­ ing his family’s seaborne riches into Mediterraneanist capital of sorts is Gio­ vanni Tumbiolo. He comes from a family of shipowners and fish merchants that has been prominent in the fleet for three generations. His grandfather, whom old fishers still mention with a combination of loathing and rever­ ent awe, was murdered in the Palermo fish market years ago. Giovanni’s father managed the family’s fishing business for many years and, unlike other shipowners, succeeded in raising his son within the local middle class. Rather than joining his father’s business, Giovanni, who had studied inter­ national labor law with a focus on the history of Italian-­Tunisian fisheries relations, founded an international fisheries consortium, COSVAP MediDis­ trict. Through this consortium he has been promoting the establishment of bilateral fisheries treaties between Sicily and the countries that historically fought to keep Sicilian trawlers away from their fishing banks. He has also attempted and failed to win the mayor’s seat. Tumbiolo’s COSVAP consortium may provide an example of this new kind of Mediterraneanist project in town. Among its activities, COSVAP is responsible for an annual international conference, which usually includes the signing of several treaties for technological exchange, fishing permis­ sions, fuel dispensation for Mazaresi trawlers in the countries they visit, and other neocolonial permutations of the belligerent interactions that once made the fishing fleet famous. Perhaps the extreme version of this new ex­ pansive articulation of the fleet’s rebranded past came after violent clashes

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broke out in 2007 and 2008 between the Lebanese armed forces and the Fatah al-­Islam group in the coastal Nahr al-­Bared refugee camp in Lebanon. The following year, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) invited the consortium to send several Mazarese trawlers to Tripoli “to pro­ pose a system of cooperation among fishers of diverse ethnicities and reli­ gions.” The system, so declared Tumbiolo in the press release that celebrated the mission, was based “on the model that had already been practiced in the Mazara fleet for many years . . . of the peaceful cohabitation of local Christian workers and their Maghrebi Muslim counterparts.”4 It goes with­ out saying that the trawlers were sent to Lebanon on the condition that they would be permitted to fish along the country’s shores. Of the fleet’s various components, the consortium has recently been the only expanding business. The Lebanese mission illuminates this fact. By turning the Mazara trawlers into the new fisheries branch of “peacemaking forces,” COSVAP managed to crystallize the fleet’s belligerent history into pedagogic services it could then propose in exchange for the fishing per­ missions the fleet so desperately needed. More important, the consortium managed to do so because what it had to offer the UNDP was easily charted on the European cognitive map of the Mediterranean. The consortium thus accomplished in the fisheries what many actors in town wish to achieve regarding other aspects of that European Mediterraneanist imagination. In the afterlife of the Mazara fleet, COSVAP has perfected the art of resurrecting its spirit to make it perform the town’s new role within the new European agendas regarding the sea. The initial tone to Mazara’s recent key role in Mediterraneanist framing came on May 8, 1993, when Pope John Paul II made a pontifical visit to Mazara.5 In his speech, the pope wove a plot that began with the Norman conquest of Sicily and the constitution of a diocese in town. In reference to the nationally acknowledged fact that in the Nineties, Mazara included the largest proportional Arab population of any Italian city, the pope said: Mazara del Vallo is a crossroads between the Euro-­Christian civilization and the Arab-­Muslim one. It continuously lives the challenge of tolerance and dia­ logue. Here, the phenomenon of African immigration is so consistent [and] carries complex social problems, especially with respect to labor. Your great resource, dear ones, is as always the sea, a generous sea, but exactly because of this an exploited and contested one. So much so, that it becomes the place of deplorable conflicts [ . . . ]. You know well, however, that no authentic development can be based only on economic profit [. . . .] It is indispensable that the entire civil community

Terms of  Transcultural Affinity  /  221 grow and be based on strong moral values, and the source of such values, you are aware, is spiritual! Only the light of the conscience and the moral law per­ mit us to find solutions equal to the grave questions we confront in everyday life and in the organization of society.6

This speech had a constitutive effect on the local discourse about the Mediterranean in town. It has been quoted repeatedly by the bishop, poli­ ticians, business entrepreneurs, and officials ever since—­so much so that, during the summer of 2008, the Mazara diocese celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the papal visit with a concert led by the renowned conductor Riccardo Muti. In opening the concert, the bishop stood on the conduc­ tor’s podium and, with his back to the orchestra and the sea, cited the late pope’s words in framing the town’s current role in the Mediterranean. In the bishop’s view, Mazara was the diocese of the Mediterranean (Mogavero 2011). It is exactly this view that stands at the center of the diocese’s pasto­ ral mission in recent years. If COSVAP promotes the Mazara fleet as the fleet of the Mediterranean, the bishop does the same for the town’s church. Cast Thy Neighbor as Thy Kin References to the ancient past that southern Europeans and North Afri­ cans share run deeper than official discourse. Many Sicilians and Tunisians in Mazara often allude to an ancient Mediterranean past that, once made present, informs how they make and break social relations. During my fieldwork in Mazara I encountered various permutations of the following conversation. Along the quay of the town’s old port, Tunisians and Sicilians talked politics on a daily basis. Whether people discussed news of a lo­ cal or national instance of anti-­immigrant racism, the relationship between the two countries, or their own working conditions, Tunisians often framed their protest not as citizens or denizens, and hardly ever as rights-­bearing humans, but within a past they conjured up as specific to them and Maza­ resi. At a certain point during the conversation, the Tunisian would cite “the culture, medicine, chemistry, agriculture, geography, and philosophy that we have brought to Sicily.” At the end of the list of benefits brought by Arab rule to the island, the Tunisian would say: “So why are you treating us like slaves?” In response, the Sicilian would usually say: “Yes, it’s true, during the days of Roger II [1005–­54 CE] Sicily was the most beautiful place on earth!” At that point the conversation would usually wonder off to other topics, or the band of fishers would disperse to go home with the bread they had bought.

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In these short exchanges, fleeting but recurrent, Tunisians and Sicilians cast each other—­the “we” and the “you”—­as descendants and representa­ tives of a distant past. Both sides referred to a period of peace and prosperity, in which Muslims and Christians had cohabited on the island, and both sides framed current social relations between the present sides through a script that they derived from that common golden age. Nevertheless, the blissful periods Tunisians and Sicilians summoned were not one and the same. The Tunisian side mentioned Arab Sicily of the ninth century, and the Sicilian side replied by recalling Arab-­Norman Sicily of the eleventh century. Like other contested narrations of family histories, the exact power relations between the sides were under dispute, each side referring to that specific moment in which they had had the upper hand over their counter­ parts. These differences usually became explicit only later, when each side provided the full exegesis of its intent. Tunisians cast themselves as the descendants of the Muslim fleet that in 827 CE had landed near Mazara on its way to ruling the entire island. This discursive move cast their current migration to Sicily as a reiteration of the medieval one. According to that script, current Sicilians were descendants of “backward, illiterate peasants” who had succumbed to Muslim conquest and then enjoyed its blessings for two centuries. The least present-­day Si­ cilians should have done was accommodate Tunisians’ arrival in light of the many blessings that had been brought by their medieval predecessors. For their part, Sicilians cast themselves as the descendants of the Norman Hauteville/Altavilla dynasty, which between 1061 and 1091 had led the con­ quest of Sicily. In this script, Tunisians were cast as mere courtiers in a king­ dom that had been “reconquered” and then “ruled again” by Christians, ignoring the difference between Byzantine and Catholic “Arab-­Norman” Sicily. By moving two centuries forward, Sicilians cast themselves not as the island’s subjugated population, but as the lords of the land who retain the sovereign prerogative to choose how to treat their Arab subjects and what­ ever blessings they might provide. They also associated themselves with Nordic conquerors, whose only qualification for current Sicilians’ purposes was their being European and Christian. Sicilians and Tunisians often cast each other in roles taken from the past, from which both sides see their descent. Similar segmentary strate­ gies for social boundary making have been analyzed within a given “pre­ vailing ideology” (either national or supranational; Herzfeld 1987a, 159). But in Mazara, the object of people’s allusions is not common descent but affinity—­not a shared ancestor, but a duo of two shared historical pairs (from the ninth and eleventh centuries) on which they do not completely

Terms of  Transcultural Affinity  /  223

agree. When such contested casting unfolds across national ideologies, they outline a transnational “ ‘community of disagreement,’ and the points of contention among them—­the remembrance of . . . wars, conflicting claims to [political supremacy, and] genealogical controversies . . . are the points at which their respective identities are most fully elaborated. Except for a list of [historical group] names that belong to the region, there are very few historical representations internal to the [channel] that [Sicilians and Tunisians] share (Shryock 1997, 59; adjusted for the channel’s figures).

The structure of these discussions enables people to frame their recent shared history of exchanges and animosities without predetermining whether any one relationship should be belligerent or amicable. The Mediterranean offers a peculiarly fertile ground for such a role-­play, exactly because it is one of those zones on the globe in which the geopoliti­ cal musical-­chairs game has been played by almost all sides for a significant amount of time. When any two people from either side of the channel meet, the one from the southern side of the channel can be and often is cast as a descendent from Carthage, medieval Islam, the antifascist Maghreb, and so forth. The person from the channel’s northern side is accordingly cast as having descended from Romans, Christians, Byzantines, Normans, Italian Fascists, and so forth. And because each group fought at one time or another with any other (Abulafia 2011), people can cast their interlocutors simulta­ neously as past friend, past foe (victorious or defeated), or a combination of both. These segmentary strategies thus have a double function: they cast both parties as personifications of a past social configuration (“Me Charle­ magne, you Sultan”), but they also imply the power relations in that past social configuration. And since every person can occupy various positions within these historical pairs, people can articulate connections by choosing between the various historical scripts at hand. Let me be clear. Transnational terms of affinity do not imply an “any­ thing goes” approach to the making and breaking of social relations. The specific castings each side attempts are conditioned by the possible con­ nections between present people and past figures on the one hand, and by the desired political affiliation on the other. When Tunisians and Sicilians allude to medieval Sicily, no one declares that what unites them is that they believe in one god, and there is a good reason for that. Anyone who has par­ ticipated in discussions about monotheism and world politics, both before and after the last decade of interreligious animosity, has heard the expres­ sion “We are all sons of Abraham.” Some of us have even found ourselves

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saying such things. But the platitudinal aftertaste left by such “cosmopoli­ tan” pronouncements derives exactly from the fact that they mean nothing concrete. Even when uttered sincerely, they carry no palpable political im­ plication because they reach to a moment too far in the past and postulate a brotherhood too homogenous and inclusive, at least on a Mediterranean scale. Contrary to these declarations, the relationships that Sicilians and Tuni­ sians outline are power-­laden, exclusionary, rife with difference, and specific enough to shape their political alignments. Along the same lines, Sicilians often depict themselves as Romans fighting the equally glamorous Carthage, and cast people from Milan or northern Italy in general as “barbarians who were still eating with their hands when we had poetry!” In this script, Sicil­ ians’ socioeconomically superior “national brothers” (e.g., from Milan) be­ come more distant than the Muslim, Arab, and North African migrants, who are codescendants of the ancient Mediterranean union, not unity. As Mi­ kaela Rogozen-­Soltar shows for Andalusia, Mazaresi have addressed ques­ tions of inclusion and exclusion of migrants from across the sea not against the background of universalist rights or global scales of politics, but always through an overt discussion of “how to conceptualize regional history and how to enact new ways of being modern [Mazaresi]” (Rogozen-­Soltar 2012, 637; Mallette 2010). Indeed, this localist casting of present collectivities as reincarnations of past ones often derives from folklore, “ever the source of historicist accounts of national identity” (Herzfeld 2003, 307). Yet when people use them transnationally, they sometimes end up weakening the grip of their respective imagined communities. T he Mediterranean Talks Back In most events that Mediterraneanist projects of produce, the institutional settings normally cast the participants according to the regionalist visions that these projects promote. Yet speakers do not always stick to their casting orders or read their scripted lines. Such improvisations chart different links between past figures and present persons. As a result, they frame alterna­ tive transnational political relations and the obligations they entail. In May 2008, the fisheries consortium COSVAP organized its annual conference. The agenda included the signing of new treaties for scientific and economic cooperation between Sicily, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Malta. During the conference, the consortium’s managers and their collaborators in Mazara’s city hall, the diocese, and the various Italian ministries applied the adhesive image of a “shared Mediterranean history” to the town’s new attempts of

Terms of  Transcultural Affinity  /  225

unequal cooperation with North African partners. In the days before the conference, the entire town was recruited to prepare the desired multicul­ tural mirage in the event’s concluding evening: the “multiethnic ‘night of the Euro-­Mediterranean Dialogue’ with folkloric tastings and dance.” Chil­ dren of  Tunisian immigrants who had a Maghrebi music group were asked to perform with their Sicilian belly dancers on a street stage next to the Mu­ seum of the Dancing Satire. Tunisian women were asked to prepare “Arab delicacies,” which they would offer outside their homes at night to the in­ ternational group of dignitaries who planned to walk in the Kasbah’s allies and admire cosmopolitanism alla Mazarese. One cultural tourism entrepre­ neur prepared a talk about the fifty years of Mediterranean culture in town. Finally, high school seniors participated in a day-­long conference entitled “Lessons of the Consortium, Lessons of the Mediterranean,” which was supposed to be presided over by the bishop. In the conference’s celebratory closing session, titled “Encounter and Sharing among the Peoples of the Mediterranean: The Model of the Medi­ terranean Consortium,”7 all dignitaries congratulated each other on their shared high Mediterranean spirit. Following the speeches of various foreign and local politicians, the president of the Libyan fishing shipowners’ asso­ ciation, Mohamad Lajel, asked “to say some words.” Lajel had not appeared on the session’s speaker roster. Nor was he among the group of veteran political Mediterraneanists who used their speeches to congratulate each other on decades-­long friendships and collaboration for the greater Medi­ terranean good. Perhaps as a result, his impromptu speech diverged from the usual script. After thanking his Sicilian hosts, Lajel proposed some “historical consid­ erations about the shared history of our Mediterranean.” He described the island’s Muslim period, and the cultural and scientific contributions of that period to Sicily and Europe. When the Italian interpreter present at the table took the microphone and began translating, Lajel made sure he mentioned all dates and translated all his words. After several rounds of Arabic words and Italian translation, the Libyan owner asked the audience: What did the Arabs bring, really, to Sicily? This is a question that each and every one of us has to ask himself [. . .] these Arabs who came here for two hundred years [. . .] and brought medicine, navigation, arts [. . .] can they be defined as vandals or as apostles of civilization?

The Arab dignitaries, who were sitting in the first two rows, listened to the speech in the original Arabic. Nevertheless, they joined their Sicilian hosts

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in applauding only after the translator had finished translating the Arabic into Italian. The Libyan representative continued to describe the lives of some promi­ nent ancient Arab Muslim men of arts and science and their contributions to Sicilian life. At that point, a few Arab dignitaries clapped their hands while the rest waited for the Italian translation before joining the entire room in another round of applause. The Libyan owner continued: We have started with the Greek world and lived through the Islamic civiliza­ tion, have now arrived to the time of brotherhood [. . .] the twenty-­first century.

Most of the Arab-­speaking dignitaries started applauding somewhat cau­ tiously at this point, and when this part had also been translated, the Sicil­ ians in the room applauded as well. Finally, the speaker concluded: At the beginning there was the word. And I say, here we have started with the word!

In front of this quote from the opening of the Gospel of John,8 and before the translator was able to translate that last bit, those who understood the Arabic applauded loudly. Most of the Italians, who had not understood La­ jel’s Arabic, remained in the dark for several seconds while their Arab guests were already congratulating their colleague with continuous applause. Then, after the translation was finished, the entire room applauded together. During the conference’s concluding session, I sat with the cultural tour­ ism entrepreneur and Munsef, the Tunisian itinerant vendor. The two of them were apparently pleased both with the speech and with the way in which it unfolded back and forth between Arabic provocations and the au­ dience’s reception in Italian. Here was a representative of a North African country who imposed his version of the geohistorical imaginary that con­ nected the fleet at hand with the abstract and distant “Mediterranean.” His Sicily was Arab, not Arab-­Norman. Moreover, in his closing sentence, he both quoted the Gospel in front of his Catholic hosts and then inverted the scripture’s logo-­genesis when he projected it onto the present. It was as if he were saying, “All that we have heard, said, and signed is still words.” This provocation appeared against the backdrop of his vindication of the Arab foundation of Sicilian heritage, which in turn justified his demand that words be made into deeds. His “brotherhood,” like that of the Tunisian for­ eign minister during the ratification of the twinning agreement in Mahdia,9 did not describe the relationship, but called for mobilization.

Terms of  Transcultural Affinity  /  227

That evening, the projection of Mazara’s inconvenient past onto the un­ certain future, which I had heard many times, received its gradual pragmatic affirmation from the Arab dignitaries who, after each sentence, waited a bit less before they applauded their Libyan colleague. And the more the Arab-­ speaking guests applauded each time, the more bound were their Sicilian hosts to join them in congratulating the Libyan owner for reminding them, as Mazaresi often did themselves, that they were “too Arab.” As we were walking out, the entrepreneur turned to me and said: “How good it is that the bishop didn’t come!”

CONCLUSION

Mediterranean Afterlife of a Dying Fishing Town

Many things have happened between Mazara and the other side of the channel in the past eight years. New economic, political, and cultural initiatives in town have emerged, carrying the word “Mediterranean.” And they have all sought to secure the town’s role in the region and help its economy. The bishop initiated some of these projects and gave his blessing to many others. Above all, the bishop has recently extended the same strategy to intervene in the new transnational dynamics of unauthorized migration and interception that were engulfing Mazara and its fleet. In the summer of 2009, Monsignor Domenico Mogavero celebrated mass in an unprecedented way—­from an altar mounted on the upper deck of an Italian coast guard ship. The ship was anchored, together with the trawler tied up alongside it, off the leeward shore of the Italian island of Pantelleria, almost equidistant between the Mazara del Vallo and the Tunisian shore. The position of this seaborne mass—­afloat at the center of the Mediterranean—­ served the ritual staging of a macrocosmic transformation. Both during the mass and afterwards, the bishop conjured up the space of Holy Communion as “the Mediterranean, this great Lake of Galilee.” By casting the twenty-­first century Mediterranean as the Gospel’s Lake of Galilee, the bishop expanded the ritual act of communion and recast all its elements: the coast guard ship as Saint Peter’s boat, and the participating Sicilian fishers as the apostles. When, during the seaborne mass, the bishop iterated Christ’s words to Simon and Andrew, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men,” he cast the unauthorized migrants in danger of drowning as souls in need of salvation and, by implication, the Italian state and the European Union as Herod and the Pharisees. The ritual casting served the bishop in justifying and applauding the fishers of his diocese’s fleet for responding to distress calls made by

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vessels carrying clandestine migrants en route to Italian shores as examples of Christian, Sicilian, and Mediterranean “hospitality” (Ben-­Yehoyada 2016). Over the past decade or so, the Mediterranean has once more occupied a central role in the European political imaginary. It has reemerged in the international news cycle as the sea that migrants try to cross towards European shores—­and the place where many of them die. Since the creation of the European Union and its unified border regime, Europe’s southern shores have become the aim of people trying to enter the continent. Waves of migration have triggered a reinforcement of interception attempts, and interception in turn has facilitated and increased migration flows. For Europeans, these events have turned the Mediterranean into a mirror that reflects their dilemmas about the tensions between the bounds of their political union and boundless humanity. Following several disasters at sea in the aftermath of the revolutions in Tunisia and Libya, Pope Francis chose to hold his first pastoral visitation in office in Lampedusa, where he decried “the globalization of indifference” to migrants’ deaths and christened the Mediterranean, particularly its seabed, as “a massive grave” (Vatican 2013). One might think that these recent developments would push scholars to reexamine their views of the present and recent history of the Mediterranean. Yet, in the prevailing view of the relationship between modernity and the Mediterranean, the sea still stands no chance. The challenge that the current Mediterranean poses to our understanding of regions is to examine transnational constellations on the basis of the varied idioms of relatedness that people use to inform and shape their political relations across borders. The challenge in studying such dynamics is double, because the two aspects of such an analysis—­the role that terms of relatedness like alliance, affinity, and allegiance play in politics and the multiscalar (that is, segmentary) shape of political processes—­have been traditionally considered marks of premodern or unmodern social situations (Gellner 1977; Boissevain et al. 1979). As a result, current understand­ings of transnationalism have preferred to view people as connected, instead of examining how people come to see each other as related. The recent fascination with oceans is a case in point (Steinberg and Peters 2015). In its globalist imaginary, ships—­ especially oceangoing tankers and post-­Panamax container ships—­stand for the global. This (literally superficial) view of connections as the stuff of transnationalism is not the only one possible.

The Sea’s Seven Souls The vicissitudes of Mazara, its fleet, and the central Mediterranean offer a recipe for an historical anthropology of transnational region formation. This

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recipe hinges on three distinctions: between connections and relations, between project and process, and between comparison from without and the dynamics of relatedness from within. By returning to the Mediterranean, we may acquire new lenses for looking at how regions come to life and then dissipate the world over. Connections and Relations One way to shift our attention from connections to relationships passes through the pope’s name for the Mediterranean: “a grave.” This declaration drew attention from the surface to the bottom of the sea. To be sure, the events and actions it addressed occurred at sea level, but the image and the relationship that it signified reside much deeper. In the current Mediterranean, several things that either lie on the seabed or pass through it play a key role in the way people relate to each other and to the past, present, and future they share. To be sure, these things emblematize modernity: unauthorized migration, motorized fishing, gas pipelines, and maritime archaeology. Yet these forms of connection and movement across the sea also show structural similarities with past moments of connection. As a result, they reveal how we can bring this most recent instance of region formation from the present Mediterranean to an equal footing with our studies of its past reincarnations. Many of the phenomena that Mediterraneanist social scientists term as transnational would make good candidates for such constellations. As an analysis of narcotics trafficking in the post–­World War I Levant shows, “local, nation-­state, transnational, and international processes unfolded simultaneously” (Schayegh 2011). In fact, the same simultaneous unfolding took place in various subregions throughout the twentieth century. Agrarian cultivation remained “parceled and segmented” well into the twentieth century (Tabak 2009, 82). Transnational infrastructure projects like gas and oil pipelines have both reconnected Europe to and through the region and increasingly rekindled images of Mediterranean reunion of long-­lost cousins (Hayes 2004). Transnational opportunities for illicit circuits of exchange continued to practice their “corrupting” effects on centralizing projects’ attempts at social order: from interbellum anarchist (Khuri-­Makdisi 2010), to counternational cultural projects. Viewing transnational regions as constellations that undergo processes of formation and dissipation helps us to bypass the impasse between the call to define regions according to their unique characteristics (Horden and Purcell 2000; Bromberger 2006; Morris 2003) and the demand to deconstruct such projects as academic othering (Herzfeld 1980; Pina-­Cabral 1989).

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The contemporary Mediterranean is often declared fragmented and dishar­ monious—­that is, according to erstwhile standards of wholesomeness and harmony. In contemporary accounts of the Mediterranean, the two most frequent features are tourism and unauthorized migration, both referring to locals’ xenophobia, which faces north in the former case and south in the latter. Yet limiting the current Mediterranean to these two phenomena risks judging whatever we see in and around the sea as relics of a premodern past rather than transformed continuations of it in the present. Once we examine the processes of region formation that condition the current shape and image of the Mediterranean—­the interaction of maritime cross-­border connections and official region-­making projects—­it will no longer depend on any historically bounded characteristic—­economic, human-­ecological, or other—­or on any essential cultural trait. It is therefore our task to search for structural similarities across periods even more than continuities: not to show that the Mediterranean is still alive in the habits of thought of some of its residents, but to argue that it could reemerge as a transnational constellation in modern times. Modern technologies of connectivity and mobility shape the cultural politics of the Mediterranean. A recent example from the middle of the Channel of Sicily can show this. In the scene of Mediterraneanist cultural politics and transnational heritage, maritime archaeologists concentrate on relics like the Satiro Danzante, a Greek bronze statue that was found in 1997–­98 between Pantelleria and Tunisia (Tusa 2016). These relics are not of Italian heritage but of Mediterranean heritage, in two senses: they index past connections, and they belong to no nation. In their attempts to access such relics, archaeologists rely on two kinds of technology. Fishers are their beachcombers. Pipeline companies provide the advanced underwater equipment that state-­employed archaeologists often lack. In other words, the means to access past Mediterraneans rely on the technologies of mobility and connectivity that shape the present Mediterranean. Contemporary interaction and movement across the sea thus shape Mediterraneanist imag­ inaries, and the people moved by these imaginaries in turn remake the Mediterranean. Project and Process Treating infrastructures and technologies through the relations that people forge with them trains our eyes to search for relationships farther away from where we usually found them, and on vaster, more varied scales. This perspective also enables us to distinguish between the projects that people

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initiate to make their regions and the processes of formation that follow, overflow, and transform these projects. In the recent past of Mazara and the Channel of Sicily, people have used things like exquisite seafood items and underwater gas pipelines as scaling devices. They have charged such things with idioms of relatedness like patronage and kinship, which they have stretched transnationally, and then they have sought to harness these scaling devices to their regionalist projects. These various attempts have operated under several, often mutually-­ contradictory projects. Yet together, they have added another layer to the ever-­changing sense of palpability of the central Mediterranean and of the wider sea. Mazarese fishers and politicians are not alone in trying to make their region. The same goes for political projects of wider scales and larger import. In Plato’s The Laws, Cleinias suggested that the preservation of states from “luxurious and depraved habits” should situate them “about eighty stades, roughly speaking, from the sea” (Plato, Laws Book IV, 704b: Plato 1952, 255; Horden and Purcell 2000). This maritime aversion is echoed in the botched attempt of the French ex-­president Nicolas Sarkozy to unite the Mediterranean in Paris as much as it pertained to the Abbasid control of the Mediterranean littoral from landlocked Baghdad. Both the Abbasids and Sarkozy’s Union for the Mediterranean, which continued decades of NATO attempts to control the sea far from its shores during the Cold War (Ambrosetti 2001), relied on their respective “sea of believers”—­the Cold War Atlantic and the medieval Indian Ocean—­for their political projects in their shared “sea of infidels” (Picard 2012; Pace 2007). The Mediterranean has been the stage for European political thinkers’ centuries-­long distinction between the political purity of bodies politic and the depravity of doing things across borders. Since the distinction they have bequeathed to us have recently traveled beyond the Mediterranean’s shores, so must our insistence to challenge them. The anthropological emphasis on national ideologies of belonging and state governance has drawn our attention to political relations along two dimensions: a horizontal belonging to groups and a vertical subjugation to governance. In this perspective, we are bound to examine anything happening across borders as being conditioned by projects. Yet if we acknowledge the vast array of social relationships and the political relations they inform (Parkes 2003), we should expect people’s actions and imaginaries to unfold transnationally along a social grain that has three, not two, weaving directions: alliance, allegiance, and affinity. In the central Mediterranean, people framed action and forged relations along all these

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directions. Whereas notions of national fraternity or class solidarity shaped their claims to act in union, transnational bonds of affinity—­relatedness across difference—­shaped their evolving relations across the channel. Meanwhile, people promoted this affinity by forging diagonal bonds of allegiance: patron-­client relations and the obligation they demanded to hold across lines of class, location, and scale. Such forms of dependence may be “discomfiting to what we might call the emancipatory liberal mind” (Ferguson 2013, 224). This unease regarding forms of political action that have little to do with equality or identity of interests has in previous decades shaped the view of progressive social scientists (of liberal, Marxist, or anarchist creed) of patronage within national borders as inequity and exploitation (Wolf 1966; Gellner 1977; Scott 1977). Nowadays, when the horizon of political action has turned global, similar assumptions regarding autonomy, emancipation, and political equality reemerge on the widest scale. We have learned to suspect nation-­bound calls for liberty, equality, and fraternity; but when similar calls are made globally, we still take them not only as the horizon of our political aspiration, but as the touchstone of transnational politics as well (Moyn 2010). The new scale has revived old issues. The attention to transnational affinity and allegiance can help us challenge another piece of received wisdom about the scales of social action. The formation of the Channel of Sicily as a transnational constellation since the Sixties has conditioned action and movement along its shores. This process has been conditioned by the political space in which it was unfolding and has reshaped the spatial boundaries and scales of social action (Lefeb­ vre 1991, 14–­16, 280–­83; Goswami 2004, 28; Subramanian 2009). Yet view­ ing this process as a convergence of the local and the global only reasserts assumptions about the primacy of these two extreme scales without examining their salience. As long as we hold scales to vary between the local and the global, we construct a set of concentric Venn diagrams around the local, the national, and the global. In this Russian Matryoshka doll scheme, Mazara would belong in Sicily and the latter in Italy, which in turn would fit inside Europe, itself a supranational formation on the global scale. In viewing scales this way, we reiterate a reifying understanding of political process, except that now we take spatial scales rather than social groups to be “corporate.” That is so because in this view we assign any given location similarity with all other locations on the same scale (cities in Sicily, administrative regions in Italy, states in Europe, and so forth), and spatial subordination to all scales above it. Processes of transnational region formation cross such concentric scales diagonally. The formation of the channel constellation was shaped by a past

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that Sicilians and Tunisians shared, by their similar kinship and affinity idi­ oms, and through the specific Sicilian-­Tunisian structural relationships in which transnational segmentation unfolded. Throughout the process, people came to see each other as related, albeit in symmetrically opposed ways. Each side alluded to particular past events that cast the present in its own interest. This divergence of viewpoints only complicated the spatiopolitical dynamics: both sides’ allusions transformed their political relations with each other and with the wider transnational constellation. The idioms both sides used for their evolving relations came from kinship and marriage; the working of these relations was segmentary; and the resulting transformation was from internationalism to transnationalism. Neither nationalism nor internationalism exhausts this dynamic. Nationalism’s grip on social scientists’ political imagination can be illustrated by their tendency to call inner divisions in nations by the holistic term “fragments,” not the modular term “segments.” In contrast, seafarers and politicians around the Mediterranean see no problem in segmenting their political worlds in two fundamental ways: they open national scales upwards (e.g., Europe/Mediterranean) and downwards (Sicily, Mazara), and they create lateral and diagonal relations across these hierarchies (Sicilian-­ Tunisian). This evidence of transnational segmentary politics and the political imagination it articulates should make us question whether the “harsh wedge” that nationalism was supposed to drive “between cosmology and history” (Anderson 1991, 36) has in fact been permanently or fully inserted (Shryock 1997, 32). In a political anthropology that takes “imagined communities” as the cosmological building blocks of a world turned global, fraternity will be wrongly assumed to monopolize people’s political imagination. Until political anthropology absorbs the insights of crossness—­kinshipping and otherwise—­ segmentation will be confused with lineage, and the latter with fraternity. When viewed in this way, the uses of segmentation and kinship idioms to understand transnationalism may lead some to argue that the analysis has neglected to consider power relations. For the people discussed in this book, no such opposition between terms of relatedness and power relations exists. The view of transnational politics that cousinage in general and cross-­ cousin marriage in particular symbolize—­affinity among the kindred across the difference between them—­pervades this specific constellation. Rather than “diffuse, enduring solidarity” (D. M. Schneider 1977), kinship idioms serve Sicilians and Tunisians to express their power-­laden political relations across difference. A sea separates human rights NGOs’ “fraternity or nothing” view of transnational politics—­the idea that in the absence of political

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organizations based on the ideology of fraternity, chaos reigns in the stateless “state of nature”—­and the many-­headed political cosmology that emerges from stories about Arabs and Sicilians, Romans and Carthaginians, and the constellations they delineate in the present. If we follow their lead, we may expand our examination of the central Mediterranean to ask in what different ways other transnational constellations undergo region formation and disintegration: other cases where allusions to a shared past, specific idioms of relatedness, and segmentary dynamics shape the formation and disintegration of transnational constellations. Returning to the Mediterranean does not mean reifying the sea or any other region as an area of cultural unities. It offers new lenses for looking at transnationalism the world over. Constellations are often “multiethnic, multilingual, and multiconfessional space[s]” (Ballinger 2011, 59); they contain changing boundaries, idiomatic diversity, and the misunderstanding it entails. When they undergo region formation, the segmentary dynamics are shaped by the transregional specificity of terms of relatedness and intraregional diversity in the way they are used to inform political process (e.g., crossness or bilaterality). Between Sicily and Tunisia, the move from internationalism to transnationalism entailed a gradual preference of affinity across difference over descent. The alternatives to descent may take other forms. If, as it were, Mazaresi turned to their cross-­cousins when their brothers had disappointed them, in other places and other times, adoptive kinship (like milk-­kinship) provided the political alternative to brotherhood and descent (Parkes 2001). If such alternative idioms to fraternity are as meaningful for transnational political relations elsewhere as cousinage and marriage are in the central Mediterranean, we should expect the meaning of national fraternity to have been shaped in relation to them, and to inform both nationalism and transnationalism accordingly. The modularity of the nation form, in other words, may reside not only in its “intimate links” with “the reworking of global capitalism, and the relational character of intra-­and inter-­state fields” (Goswami 2002, 795), but also in the different political cosmologies in which it has been operating the world over. Consequently, a rise in the use of alternative terms of relatedness would accompany transnationalism as the contemporary instance of a centrifugal process (Lieberman 2008, 697). These terms can be both transregionally specific and intraregionally diverse. Processes of region formation may therefore be shaped by the reemerging political significance of terms of relatedness to transnational relations, which during more nationally centripetal periods were latent.

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Image and Drama Attention to processes of region formation forces us to abandon anthropologists’ oscillation between a call for following things globally and a demand to limit our view to the local, as an arbitrary poetic choice that becomes our craft (Marcus 1995; Appadurai 1996; Candea 2010). Indeed, the search for multi-­ sited ethnography replaced previously holistic mimesis with a new, “ineffable totality of a protean . . . ‘cultural formations.’ ” But the problem with the latter does not necessarily reside in its hyper-­real allure; and to avoid its pitfalls we do not have to profess “methodological asceticism” (Candea 2007, 180). The choice of arbitrary locations and the call for following any of the world system’s aspects share one common trend. Both approaches have abandoned the productive tension between the search for changing social formations (or constellations) and the application of “cultural” concepts (semiotic, pragmatic, structuralist, and the like) as a complementary tool in understanding how such formations transform. It goes without saying that formations like the channel constellation can overflow the sites we delimit, as much as they temporally expand beyond the periods of time we spend in these sites. We are therefore confronted with a poetic choice: we may bind ourselves to the theatrical unities we impose on our objects of study, or we can let them lead us from their tangibility as social formations to the worlds they invite us to imagine (Levi 1991). If we turn such moving sites like the Naumachos into stages, we can make the dramas that unfold on their decks summon the spaces and histories in which these floating stages meander. We are, in other words, in search of the specific, not the local: the captivating spatiotemporal formations that people conjure up and operate under the assumption of their existence. Such specific formations do not necessarily reside either in the local or in the contemporaneous. On the contrary, what such formations share is the mutually shaping relationships between the ever-­changing social constellations that generate them and the contested idioms that condition perception, action, and movement (in time and space) in these constellations. Once we follow infrastructures and terms of relatedness as they traverse the sea, we can see how people use them as scaling devices, how they scale up their here and their now, and how they manipulate the segmentary structures of alliance, affinity, and allegiance across borders and the sea. In other words, we will be able to see how they conjure up their regions. My claim is not that we should promote transnational politics on the basis of cousinage, milk-­kinship, or other such terms of relatedness. People

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around the world have been doing that for some time now. My claim is that we should articulate our academic understanding of transnationalism to match the complexity of regionally specific (and internally diverse) ways of making and breaking transnational relations. The alternative—­assuming that when people interact transnationally, all they have in mind is fraternity—­will not do, not only because it would have us assume that on the global scale only the like come together, but also because it would prevent us from understanding what transnationalism is all about: unity by that which divides, linkage by that which separates.

Heading Home We had only one week or so left at sea. Hajj calculated that fact by counting the days that remained until Easter. Seafood prices would go up in the days before the holiday, and everybody knew that we would enter port at least a couple of days before that. The voyage’s approaching end became steadily clearer by the diminishing provisions. We were still navigating around Lampedusa, and always several hours away from a possible restocking. Nevertheless, the crew interpreted my reports about the nearly empty pantry as a sign that we would soon head north to Mazara. Moreover, any doubt as to the amount of meat in the freezer only made the bosun and the chief mechanic compete for the role of “elder brother” by ordering me to make yet another dish of large red mullet or shrimp for dinner. “The cat is gone and the mice are left to watch the cheese,” Hajj concluded. Then, on our last day of fishing around Lampedusa, the bosun Abderrahman discovered that the mozzarella we had on board had passed its expiration date by two months. Over the following dinner, everyone discussed the matter in somber tones. The chief mechanic Paolo went to check the eggs, and came back to the table to tell us that they also had expired two weeks earlier. “This means that the owner knew about it!” Paolo declared, and everyone seemed to agree. “Lucio, you must throw all of it overboard!” he concluded. Over lunch the next day, Paolo told us that a month earlier, in Mazara, he had thrown overboard an entire box of eggs that had gone out of date. “You didn’t know, and I could have hidden it from you and behaved as if nothing had happened. I could have just not eaten eggs for the entire voyage, but I threw them overboard.” Everyone nodded and agreed that the owner had fooled them. In front of expired produce, the crew finally found its sense of unity. The next day, we saw Pantelleria at dawn. “That’s it,” Hajj said. “We will not be going to Lampedusa any more. From now on we will be fishing to-

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ward Mazara.” Others were not so impressed by the sight of the island. When I asked Salvatore, who was on duty on the bridge, whether the island on our starboard was Pantelleria, he told me he did not know what I was talking about. Either that they did not want to believe we were actually heading home, or they were treating our northbound course as a secret, in the way they had dealt with any sort of plans throughout the voyage. That night, Luck was again on the deckhands’ side, and the Naumachos tore its net just north of Pantelleria. At first the captain ordered the bosun to replace it and prepare the second net for trawling. He even came down to help us with the mending. But after three hours of trying to stitch the small pieces and shreds together into an operational net, he climbed to the bridge, increased the ship’s speed to maximum, and ordered us to fold and tie up the fishing gear. “With all the clandestini vessels that drown in the channel every season, the fish have a lot to eat, and our nets get torn all the time.” I asked Hajj what he meant, and he explained to me the recent changes in the maritime food cycle in the channel. “Sometimes, we find paper money, usually Libyan. You find clothes inside the net, everything and anything!” The last two days at sea were also the time to organize one’s loot from the voyage. With the owner gone, the “heads of departments” were preparing special trays of peeled shrimp and other products that carried a higher value than the ordinary two-­kilogram tray of frozen seafood. Some of them did it together; while others just made sure the cartons they had been collecting throughout the voyage fulfilled their expectations. The last two days, then, already saw Mazara appear on everyone’s mental horizon before we actually saw the mountains of Sicily on the Naumachos’s bow. The deckhands seemed to take their time before heading toward their bunks, cleaning another tray of seafood here and there, taking a shower and shaving, or doing whatever else their imminent portside rebirth entailed for them. On the last evening, after thirty-­seven days at sea, Hajj called me to prepare the ship’s lines before our entry to the port of Mazara. “You might take a ride with me into town if you want, but I am waiting for the fishmonger who buys my cartons,” he told me. “He comes late, after everyone is gone, so if you don’t want to wait that long before you go home, that’s all right. Doesn’t Mario want to come and pick you up?” In the previous days I had talked to Hajj about giving the fish I had been collecting to Mario, my landlord. “Certainly,” Hajj replied, “that would be very nice of you. If you want to give a tray or two as a gift to people in our quarter, that’s nice, but the rest you can give to Mario.” So when my cellular phone began receiving a signal from the network in Mazara, I called Mario, who said he would pick me and my cartons up that evening.

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The Naumachos entered port around eight o’clock that evening, with us deckhands ready with the lines ahead and astern. Zu Nino and the fish truck driver were there to receive the lines. When the ship was tied to the pier, we immediately began to unload the hundreds of cartons from the freezing chamber to the truck on the pier. Once that chore was done, we began to clean the ship, unload the damaged nets, and organize the deck. Then the bosun descended to the freezing chamber, and started to hand us all our cartons. Some of the cartons had our names on them; others bore the word “cooperative.” Together, this heap of cartons was mounted on the aft deck, where we had been sorting all the seafood that now lay frozen in the cartons. No one took cartons aside to make calculations or to check and see who got how many cartons or, heaven forbid, what exactly was hidden inside them. Whatever time any of the parties in the matter may have had to examine their standing in this route-­map of social trajectories of dead seafood, it was now too late to contest the outcome of this aspect of our voyage. “You have five cartons and the other one of the blue fish that you wanted,” Hajj told me, “and I have nine.” He was not sure how many cartons the bosun was taking home, because some of the two cousins’ cartons must have belonged to their uncle. While we organized the pile of all our personal loot, relatives of the crew began appearing on the pier, ready to take us and our gifts home. Each of us stood at the ship’s edge, passed cartons to a friend or relative, and then climbed to the pier. This order of action—­first pass the cartons over and then climb out of the ship—­seemed to ritualize our rebirths. Before we could reimmerse ourselves in the social life we had left a month or so earlier, we had to present our offerings. I saw Mario and his son standing next to their car and talking to the owner, and after I called them over, we began passing my cartons to Mario’s car. “This is for you and the family!” I declared festively. “Thank you!” Mario responded, smiling. “What have you brought?” We opened some of the cartons and I showed him my part of the loot. He observed with a discerning eye the size, type, shape, and condition of the offerings. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and said: “This is all you got after more than a month at sea?” “Why, isn’t it good?” “No, it’s good. But I could have gotten the same here in town. Come, let’s go home. I get seasick just looking at the ship.” After I returned from the fishing voyage with the Naumachos, whenever someone from our crew or from other ships we had met at sea saw me, he would ask me the same questions: “So, does your back still hurt? Are your

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fingers still swollen? Don’t you like it better ashore?” One week when there were many ships in port, Hajj took me around the entire Bar Gianni and asked his friends to show me their hands. Some of them told me of their various medical problems, which they knew would make it hard for them to either fish much longer or receive a disability pension. One day when I asked some of them to show me where they used to be attacked during the neofascists’ rabble-­rousing in the old port, they pointed to their old place of congregation before the Bar Gianni had become their venue, across the narrow street on the canal’s banks. One of them pointed to an abandoned building across the street from Bar Gianni, where the offices of the Free Shipowners’ Association had once stood “before they set it on fire during one of the strikes.” These fishers now pass their years meandering at sea, surrounded by ghosts of the channel’s old days of glut and glory. When they come back to Mazara, all they can do is sit and gaze at the skeleton of the city that remains.

Notes

C h a p t e r On e

1.

Beyond the thirty-­seven-­day voyage on the Naumachos, this work is based on an array of ethnographic and historical research methods including participant observation ashore, interviews, and qualitative and quantitative analyses of archival material and secondary sources. Most of the ethnography was conducted in Mazara del Vallo (with three visits to Mahdia, Tunis, and La Chebba) during the eighteen months from July 2007 to December 2008, and in eight additional visits. The personal names and some details have been changed to respect the anonymity and privacy of persons mentioned in this book, except for those who appear in published sources. 2. Edmund Burke III remains one of the only historians to insist on extending the Mediterranean into modernity (2012, 920). 3. This formulation survived not within the culturalist direction that the Mediterranean unity debate took, but rather in the works of scholars like Jane Schneider (1971, 1990) and Jack Goody (1983). 4. This is not to say that everything written on the contemporary Mediterranean can be subsumed by these strands. Romanticizing nostalgic accounts, essentializing descriptions, manifestos of interfaith, interculture, and international dialogue or union abound. Yet these texts serve more as documents of modern Mediterraneanism than as analyses of the modern Mediterranean, whether in the singular or in the plural (for example, see Matvejevíc 2004; Cassano 2005; Chambers 2008). 5. Other disciplines express fewer qualms in addressing regions (Schendel 2002; Horden and Purcell 2006; Pace 2007; Armitage 2009). 6. As Dresch shows, this view was incipient already in the writing of the coeditor of African Political Systems, Meyer Fortes. 7. As attention to nation-­state institutions displaced a segmentary approach to political process, anthropologists of Europe articulated the concept’s multilevel core in several directions: cultural intimacy as the social poetic in nation-­states (Herzfeld 1984b; 2005a), the “fractal recursivity” behind linguistic differentiation (Gal and Irvine 2000, 38), and the construction of European federalism on a pluralistic view of social order through subsidiarity (Holmes 2000, 51–­52). 8. The term “constellation” helps me draw attention to the historical and contingent nature of such spatiopolitical processes (Elias 1991, 46).

244  /  Notes to Chapter Two 9. This reconstruction reduces the minutes of 478 individual agenda items of the Mazara city council (Verbali del Conciglio Comunale, VCCMdv) for the years 1955 to 2000. The vast majority of the minutes recount the sessions in reported speech, which spans the spectrum of free indirect discourse (Portelli 1990). Chapter two

1. Rumors of a strike circulated again the next November, and people remembered various other autumns in which that had been the case. 2. He later received the title of Grand Officer in the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (Grande Ufficiale, Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana) in 1982. See http:// www.quirinale.it/elementi/Onorificenze.aspx?pag=0&qIdOnorificenza=&cognome =giacalone&nome=ignazio&daAnno=1800&aAnno=2016&luogoNascita=&testo =&ordinamento=2; accessed August 11, 2016. 3. The two persons are respectively l’uomo della montagna (the man of the mountain), Giuseppe Giammarinaro, previously a leading character in the DC in the Provincia di Trapani, so called owing to his origin from the mountainous town of Salemi; and l’uomo della lupara (the man of the gun; d. 2013), Mariano Agate, head of the cosca di Mazara del Vallo, who was prosecuted for the murders of the mayor of Castelvetrano, Vito Lipari, and convicted for those of the antimafia judges Giacomo Ciaccio Montalto, Giovanni Falcone, and Paolo Borsellino. 4. For the wider context of such categorizations, see the History of the DC (Malgeri 1987, vol. III, p. 334). For example, in the summer of 1967, negotiations began between the DC and the PRI, the latter already strong enough to demand the lead (Ballatore, VCCMdv; July 4, 1967, no. 11). 5. Celere, VCCMdv; July 31, 1965, no. 324. 6. Ignazio Giacalone, ibid. 7. Salvatore Giubilato, VCCMdv; August 2, 1973, no. 25. 8. The other item on the agenda was the “Wine War” with France, which took place after the latter had imposed restrictions on the importation of wine from Italy (Mottura 1994, 518). 9. Salvatore Giubilato, VCCMdv; November 25, 1973, no. 355. 10. Celere, ibid. 11. Ignazio Giacalone, VCCMdv; November 25, 1973, no. 355. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. Chapter three

1. A hereditary nickname, or soprannome, is transmitted in an agnatic line (referred to as razza, “race,” or “breed”) and fixes its social identity, which it defines in the communal memory according to “traditional history” about that patriline (Palumbo 1992, 15–­16). 2. At least as early as the thirteenth century, fishers from Sicily, Naples, and Genoa were infamous for going to fish in the Maghreb banks (Bresc 1980, 63). 3. The tonnara (or “mattanza” [slaughter]) uses a maze of standing nets (a camera della morte [death chamber]) for catching tuna in several places along the Mediterranean coasts. 4. Compare with the same period along the Kerala Coast of India (Kurien and Achari 1990; Subramanian 2009).

Notes to Chapter Four  /  245 5.

I use the term “fleet” to refer to the category of motorized trawlers in Mazara. The questions of what the fleet exactly was and who could mobilize and represent it stood at the center of the political history that unfolds in the next chapters. 6. The port was rated in the second category, which meant that it was not suited for the growing shipping industry (Lentini 2004a, 200, 202). 7. The Egadi Islands were famous for the tonnare, especially that of the florio, and Sciacca for its stronger sardine fleet (Candela 1986; Boselli 1882:1:576; Magnani-­Ricotti 1899). 8. Quinci lauds Captain Malfatti, whom he calls “peerless,” for initiating a new period of fishing “that bit by bit transformed the stamp of [Mazara], its market and its maritime class, which at first had been openly hostile to new fishing systems, then turned to obstructionism, and finally to a concealed, though always menacing, opposition” (Quinci 1931, 45). 9. As several scholars have argued, fishers’ and particularly skippers’ claims to cunning and skillfulness render themselves all too easily to fetishization (Pálsson and Durrenberger 1992; Pálsson 1994). To avoid that, I emphasize the structures of remuneration rather than any preternatural capacity to know where fish are to be found. 10. Intriguingly, no lamenting tales circulate in town about the skills or ways of life lost in the process, though stories about that period abound. Perhaps this is due to the overwhelming hegemony of trawling in the last fifty years, which in town is equated with modernity and national importance; or perhaps it comes out of the glut trawling has brought until recently. 11. “Medicinali” like sodium metabisulphite are used to prevent crustacean melanosis, or the blackening of skin and blood in crustaceans, according to national regulations that limit amount and application methods. Chapter four

1. The divergence of sociological views secured debate over each of the axes of analysis. If some authors emphasized “personalized, affective, and reciprocal relationship” (Lemarchand and Legg 1972, 151), others stressed the workings of power in party politics in “developing areas” (Weingrod 1968). If students of national political systems used patronage as an analytical concept to understand clientele systems as extended forms of relations in states’ political cultures (Powell 1970), others compellingly argued that a “local ideological-­normative model cannot be used to analyse itself” (Gilsenan 1977, 168). If some focused on the clients’ point of view to explain patronage as a strategy for securing protection and subsistence (Campbell 1964), others cautioned that clients’ compliance with their relations to patrons should not be confused with the patrons’ legitimacy, which would otherwise be smuggled into our definition of what is structurally clients’ forced compliance with their exploitation (Scott 1977; Silverman 1970). 2. Giuseppe Ferro was murdered in 1983. According to one repentant who collaborated with anti-­Mafia investigators, the Cosa Nostra clan of Mazara killed Ferro as an affront (sfregio) to Gunnella, “who was too greedy [si era troppo ‘allargato’]” in his dealings with the local clan (Borsellino 1991, 4). The murder is one of the only two cases Mazaresi would cite when asked about Mafia-­related events in town, and the only successful one of the two. Other than these two events, so goes local public opinion, Mazara was always the zona franca, a part of Sicily where relatively few people were killed in Mafia wars and struggles, because so many sides were invested in the free and undisturbed operation of the port and its fleet (Bolzoni 1992).

246  /  Notes to Chapter Five 3.

Much contemporary optimism followed these projected changes (J. E. Davis 1959, 61; Carey and Carey 1955); see Jane and Peter Schneider’s political-­economic critique of the program (1976, 132; Jamieson 1990, 14). 4. After Silvio Milazzo, the member of the Sicilian Christian Democratic party (DC) who in 1958 headed a coalition of parties across the board to win against his own party’s Sicilian chief and candidate for the same role (Kogan 1966, 553). 5. The majority of these mediators were affiliated with the Sicilian DC, but most coalition parties were involved in this process (Tranfaglia 1990, 632). My emphasis is on such mediators’ contribution to the shape both of the fleet and of its connections with larger constellations (Gribaudi 1980, 65; Boissevain 1974, 65; J. Schneider and Schneider 1976, 11). 6. Celere, VCCMdv; July 31, 1965, no. 324. 7. Several anti-­Mafia investigations positioned him at the center of some of the famous scandals in the island and brought an end to his political career (Mignosi 1993; Stabile 1988). 8. Two names that appear continuously in the various reports and testimonies about that period are of the heads of local Cosa Nostra families. The first is Giuseppe Di Cristina from the Riesi clan or “crime family” (Provincia di Caltanisetta; Dickie 2004, 285). The second is Natale L’Ala from Campobello di Mazara (Viviano 1990). In the 1978 elections this pact brought a 50-­percent rise in the votes for the Republican Party in the lower house of the Italian Parliament (Niccolai 1972, especially 1127; Stabile 1988). 9. Arena, VCCMdv; October 6, 1975, no. 99. 10. According to information from the Capitaneria di Porto in Mazara. 11. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Italy and Tunisia signed three fishing accords: one in 1963, which was valid until 1970; one in 1971, valid until the end of 1974; and one in 1976, valid until 1979 (Scovazzi 1994; Messina 1994). 12. Interview, October 10, 2008. 13. Asaro Filippo, VCCMdv; September 12, 1970, no. 11. 14. Celere, ibid. 15. Ignazio Giacalone, ibid. 16. Sindaco Dr. Lorenzo Fasulo, VCCMdv; December 22, 1971, no. 113. 17. To bring the message of these newly cemented connections home, posters publicizing negotiations undertaken by Ignazio Giacalone, the newly appointed deputy mayor, and Giovanni Messina from the ALAP were hung around town. Giacalone Ignazio, ibid. 18. Sindaco Dr. Lorenzo Fasulo, VCCMdv; December 28, 1972, no. 381. C h a p t e r fiv e

1. The signifying processes that culinary objects and practices encapsulate make them into metonyms for political conflict (Hirsch 2011, 626; Appadurai 1981), gender and class relations (Bourdieu 1984), moralities of exchange and reciprocity (Thompson 1971), practices of spirituality (Bynum 1985), authenticity (Meneley 2007), and civility (Elias 1994). 2. According to the International Olive Oil Council, annual per capita olive oil consumption stands at about 12 liters for Italy and 4.5 liters for Tunisia (for the years 2002–­7). This translates to daily quantities of 34 ml (2 tablespoons) for Italy and 13 ml (a bit more than 2 teaspoons) for Tunisia, respectively two-­sevenths and

Notes to Chapter Five  /  247 one-­ninth of the daily consumption onboard; see http://www.internationaloliveoil .org/estaticos/view/131-­world-­olive-­oil-­figures, accessed April 2, 2013. 3. This meant we consumed a liter a day for nine people, or 111 milliliters of oil (a bit less than half a cup) per person per day, and that oil went only for garnishing. See Dan Sperber’s discussion of a similar process (1975, 39). 4. Many a naval ship has stories about how crews who hated their commander organized to pee into his coffee, avenging whatever hardships he had brought upon them. 5. The relationship between godparenthood and patronage is neither universal nor historically stable. The analysis of such a distinction in historical perspective receives an illuminating treatment in Peter Parkes’s articles, where he has developed Eugene Hammel’s “alternative social structures”—­allegiance, alliance, and affinity—­ combining them with Mintz and Wolf’s treatment of coparenthood and Esther Goody’s analysis of modes of fosterage (Parkes 2003; Hammel 1968; Mintz and Wolf 1950; E. N. Goody 1982). 6. For accusations of wrongly trying to be a patron, the term padreterno (“eternal father” or God) combined the false presumption of superiority with the misplaced assumption of its generality. 7. The same term is famous for the political use Menahem Begin made of it in the 1981 election period when he shouted, “We are all Jews! All brothers! All fighters!” 8. Slimane Zeghidour, “Sponde 2008: Incontro internazionale di studi,” Septem­ber 18– ­21, 2008. 9. Filippo Asaro, VCCMdV; October 29, 1973, Act 302. 10. L’unità, June 4, 1973, p. 4. 11. Italian-­Libyan relations were Italy’s only Mediterranean postcolonial and neocolonial relationship, and they involved energy extraction as well as various violent episodes (Votaw 1964, 81). Libya’s minor role in Sicilian emigration until the Fifties, and in the Fish War; its relative distance from Sicily; and the absence of Libyan labor migrants in Mazara all made Libyans less ready to play the role of Sicilians’ betrothed transnational cousins. 12. Al Moudjahid, June 21, 1971. 13. Al Moudjahid, June 19, 1971. 14. Al Moudjahid, July 30, 1965. 15. La presse de Tunisie, September 10, 1973, p. 6 ; June 12, 1973, p. 5; August 12, 1973, pp. 1 and 5. 16. La presse de Tunisie, December 22, 1973, p. 4. 17. In this context, some boat owners and Christian Democrat politicians created a center for Siculo-­Arab studies in Mazara, together with the director of the Tunisian National Library, and later created similar connections in Algeria (Lombardo 1963). 18. Nicolò Vella, VCCMdv; January 27, 1968, no. 3. 19. Nicolò Vella, VCCMdv; December 7, 1967, no. 342. 20. Giacomo Giubilato, VCCMdV; September 12, 1970, no. 11. 21. Burgio, VCCMdv; April 18, 1968, no. 37. 22. Rolando Certa, VCCMdV; December 10, 1972, no. 371. 23. Lorenzo Fasulo, VCCMdv; December 28, 1972, no. 381. 24. Rolando Certa, VCCMdv; December 10, 1972, no. 371. 25. Sindaco Dr. Lorenzo Fasulo, VCCMdV; December 28, 1972, no. 381. 26. Ignazio Giacalone, VCCMdv; September 12, 1970, no. 11. 27. Fasulo, VCCMdV; December 22, 1971, no. 113.

248  /  Notes to Chapter Six 28. Fasulo, VCCMdv; December 28, 1972, no. 381. 29. La presse de Tunisie December 18, 1973, p. 5. 30. An articulate version of these aspects of Italy’s foreign energy policy can be found in several versions in the mouthpiece of DC diplomatic activism, the International Spectator (Luciani 1976; see also Luciani 1981). 31. Antonino Marino, VCCMdv; November 25, 1973, no. 355. 32. Antonino Marino, VCCMdv; April 30, 1975, no. 88. Chapter six

1.

“The segmentary, tribal structure is of honor, not of cohesive groups” (Dresch 1986, 315). 2. Ignazio Giacalone, VCCMdv; September 25, 1975, no. 95. 3. Mario Caruso, ibid. 4. Cristaldi, ibid. 5. Arena, VCCMdV; October 6, 1975, no. 99. 6. Ignazio Giacalone, ibid. 7. Arena, ibid. 8. Arena, ibid. 9. Cristaldi, ibid. 10. Certa, ibid. 11. While the communist newspaper called it “premeditated provocation,” the neofas­ cist council members declared that the incident had taken place only after the head of the group was refused access to the microphone; Cristaldi, VCCMdv; October 30, 1975, no. 104. 12. Alberto Burgio and Nicolò Vella, VCCMdv; October 30, 1975, no. 104. 13. Andrea Anselmi, ibid. 14. Andrea Anslemi, ibid. 15. Cristaldi, ibid. 16. In 1974, as after every Israeli-­Arab war (1956, 1967, 1973), the Soviet navy searched for a port that did not freeze over in winter. 17. Ignazio Giacalone, VCCMdv; April 20, 1977, no. 30. 18. Pernice, VCCMdv; September 16, 1977. 19. Tumbarello, VCCMdv; December 10, 1978, no. 169. 20. Tumbarello, VCCMdv; December 22, 1978, no.180. 21. Arena, VCCMdv; October 19, 1979, no. 99. 22. Certa, ibid. 23. L’unità, July 27, 1977, p. 11. 24. One article header in the newspaper L’unità read, “And what if for Sicily the methane turned into a mere tube?” July 16, 1978, p. 9. 25. Nicolò Vella, VCCMdv; November 25, 1980, no. 156. 26. Ibid. 27. “Mahdia et Mazzara en tête-­à-­tête,” La presse de Tunisie, February 24, 1982, p. 6. 28. Nicolò Vella, VCCMdv; March 22, 1982, no. 3. 29. Cristaldi, VCCMdv; September 13, 1982, no. 75. 30. Norrito, VCCMdv; September 13, 1982, no. 75. 31. Nicolò Vella, VCCMdv; October 11, 1982, no. 79. 32. Nicolò Vella, VCCMdv; November 30, 1982, no. 100. 33. Cristaldi, ibid. 34. Quinci Giovanni Battista, VCCMdv; August 9, 1985, no. 74.

Notes to Chapter Seven  /  249 35. Giulio Andreotti, VCCMdv; August 17, 1985, no. 79. 36. Ignazio Giacalone, VCCMdv; September 12, 1970, no. 11. 37. Rosario Tumbarello, VCCMdv; December 19, 1989, no. 208. 38. Ibid. 39. Cristaldi, VCCMdv; March 12, 1990, no. 45. 40. Ibid. Chapter seven

1. This resembles the distinction Paul Veyne makes between modern and ancient historians (1988). 2. A mixture of roasted cereals ground with fenugreek, aniseed, cumin, and sugar, soaked in olive oil and eaten usually for breakfast. 3. Months later, when I was interrogating several old Tunisians in Mazara about the saying, I heard a fuller version: “Jewish food is halal, and sex with them is not. And sex with Christians is halal, but their food is not.” This was an answer I received from a retired fisher who had grown up in the southern part of the Tunisian shore, in a town where many Jews and Christians had lived before World War II. “But I never followed that edict,” he bragged. “I always did it the other way around.” 4. http://www.ansamed.info/en/news/MI.XAM46715.html; accessed August 22, 2010. 5. This visit came a day before the pope’s famous speech in Agrigento, in which he called to Mafiosi: “I say to those responsible: ‘Convert! There will come God’s judgment!’” http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-­paul-­ii/it/homilies/1993/documents /hf_jp-­ii_hom_19930509_agrigento.html; accessed August 14, 2016. 6. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/1993/may/documents /hf_jp-­ii_spe_19930508_mazara-­del-­vallo_it.html; accessed March 17, 2014. 7. “L’incontro e la condivisione fra le Genti del Mediterraneo: Il modello del Distretto Mediterraneo.” http://www.distrettopesca.it/DesktopPortalMain.aspx?menuid=2396; Accessed May 6, 2009. 8. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). 9. The scene was analyzed in chapter 5, “Mahdia et Mazzara en tête-­à-­tête,” La presse de Tunisie, February 24, 1982, p. 6.

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I nde x

Page numbers followed by “f ” refer to figures. Abderrahman (bosun). See Gianni (bosun) affinity, transnational, of  Transmed pipeline, 196–­99 Agate, Mariano, 244n3 ALAP. See Association of Free Fishing Shipowners (Associazione Liberi Armatori della Pesca, ALAP) Algeria, postcolonial positions of, regarding its resources, 152 Andreotti, Giulio, 118, 200 anthropology: Mediterranean, patronage in, 93–­95; political, 235–­36; segmentation and, 21–­24 Asaro, Vito (crewmember), 13–­17, 44 Association of Free Fishing Shipowners (Associazione Liberi Armatori della Pesca, ALAP), 48, 115, 116 Banfield, Edward, 128 bars, of Mazara, 13–­14 bluefish, as gifts, 109 bootlicking, 98–­99, 133, 137 bosun. See Gianni (bosun) brotherhood. See fraternity, as kinship metaphor cala (fishing route), 73, 84 calendars, monthly, for fishing activity, 73–­74 capital intensification, of trawling, 69 captains: navigation and, 75; obstacles and, 75. See also Enzo, Capitan Celere, Matteo, 48, 52, 121

Channel of Sicily, formation of, as transnational constellation, 182–­83, 234 chief mechanic. See Paolo (chief mechanic) Christian Democracy party (DC), 47, 112, 185–­86 cigarettes, 82–­83, 87 class, 27 cleaning fish, the cooperative and, 96–­97; bootlicking and, 98; categorization of social labor and, 98. See also seafood coastal maritime transport, 67 coffee, role and rituals of, 77–­79, 87, 131–­ 32, 170–­72; and Zu Nino, 79–­80 communities of knowledge, 72 constellations, 26, 243n8. See also processes, region-­formation cooking rituals, 123–­27; Zu Nino and, 123–­27. See also eating rituals; food rituals cooks, ships’: disappearance of, 130; in the past, 130–­31; present day, 132 cooperative: cleaning fish and, 96–­97; defined, 96–­97; effect of, 97 cosmopolitanism, 27; discourse on, 207; elegies of, 207; modernity and Mediterranean, 205–­7; role of, in Mediterraneanist scholarship, 207; as theme, 207 COSVAP (Industrial Fishing Production District) consortium, 36, 219–­20, 224; 2008 conference of, 224–­27 cousinage: applying, to Mediterranean history, 144–­45; during crises, 158–­61; as idiom for political relations, 147–­48

266 / Index Craxi, Bettino, 45–­46 creation, onboard discussions about, 208–­ 9. See also faith; religious beliefs crewmembers, of Naumachos, 110–­11; Vito Asaro, 13–­17, 44; Fathi, 80, 83–­87, 95–­ 96, 101f, 177–­78; food rituals of, 133–­38; Gianni (bosun), 2, 78, 80, 81f, 83–­84, 178; Hajj, 53–­57, 78, 85, 89–­90, 97f, 110–­ 12, 123, 163–­64, 168–­69, 204, 208–­12; Montassar, 80, 83–­87, 86f, 95–­96, 101f, 110f; olive oil and, 130–­31; Paolo (chief mechanic), 2, 64, 178; personal knives of, and eating rituals, 132–­33; remu­neration practices for, 102–­3; role of olive oil in life of, 130–­31, 247n3; Salvatore (second me­ chanic), 90, 91–­92, 106. See also Enzo, Ca­pitan; Zu Nino (owner of Naumachos) Cristaldi, Nicola, 186, 187 cross-­channel engagement, rules of, 17–­20 cross-­channel fishing cycles, 67 Davis, John, 128–­29 DC. See Christian Democracy party (DC) Di Cristina, Giuseppe, 246n8 domestic unrest, Transmed pipeline and, 196–­99 drug trafficking, 231 eating rituals, 123–­27; crewmembers’ personal knives and, 132–­33; onboard Naumachos, 89–­93, 172–­73; social relations and, 127–­29. See also cooking rituals; food rituals EEC (European Economic Community), 183 electronic navigation, 74–­75 energy policies, in Sicily, 151–­52 engagement, cross-­channel, rules of, 17–­20 ENI. See Italian National Oil and Gas Authority (ENI) Enzo, Capitan, 64, 70–­73, 79f European Economic Community (EEC), 183 exchange: as frame for postcolonial transnational relations, 219–­23; as onboard frame, 76, 98, 103; in the routes of sea­ food, 96 faith: masculinity and perils of interreligious contact, 214–­17; onboard discussions about, 208–­12. See also religious beliefs

familial projections, penchant for, 144 family and kinship, 27, 31; fraternity as metaphor of, 145–­46; transnational uses of, 148–­58 Fathi (crewmember), 80, 83–­87, 95–­96, 101f, 177–­78 Ferro, Giuseppe, 112, 245n2 fish. See seafood fishing activity, monthly calendars for, 73–­74 fishing cycles, cross-­channel, 67 fishing knowledge, organizing principles of, 73 fishing methods, of Naumachos, 3–­4 fishing route (cala), 73, 84 fishing zones, 74 fish sorting. See seafood: sorting of, onboard Naumachos Fish War with Tunisia, 31, 151, 156–­58, 167, 184; effects of  Transmed pipeline on, 200–­201; honor and, 32; intensification of, in 1974–­1975, 185–­86, 193–­95; kill­ ing of Mazarese fisher, 187–­89; use of patrons during, 119–­22 fleet, of Mazara. See Mazara fleet food, preparation and consumption of, 31, 123–­27 food rituals: as celebratory markers, 133–­ 38; olive oil and, 130–­31. See also cooking rituals; eating rituals; seafood framing, 26; role of, in Mazara City Council, 27 Francis I (pope), 230 fraternity, as kinship metaphor, 145–­46 freezer chamber, of Naumachos, 100–­105; packing procedures of, 100–­102; types of cartons of, 102 gentry, maritime, 31 geographical extension, 26 Giacalone, Ignazio, 44–­47, 48–­49, 50–­52, 112, 114, 115–­17, 121, 159, 184, 186–­87, 198, 242n2, 243n3; killing Mazarese fisher in Fish War, 187–­88 Giammarinaro, Giuseppe, 244n3 Gianni (bosun), 2, 64, 77, 78, 80–­81, 81f, 83–­84, 102f, 178 godparenthood, patronage and, 247n5 Greene, Molly, 8 Gunnella, Aristide, 48, 112, 114, 115–­18, 121

Index / 267 Hajj (crewmember), 53–­57, 85, 97f, 110–­12, 123, 163–­64, 168–­69, 204; as author’s culinary instructor, 89–­90; coffee rituals and, 78; discussion of religious beliefs and, 208–­12 honor, 32, 182; as frame for social relations, 166; onboard Naumachos, 177–­80; shame and, 166 Industrial Fishing Production District (COSVAP). See COSVAP (Industrial Fishing Production District) consortium internationalism, 235, 236 interreligious engagement: masculinity and perils of, 214–­17; rules of, 212–­14. See also religious beliefs Italian Communist Party (PCI), 47–­48; coalition with Republican Party, 49–­50; framing of killing of fisher during Fish War by, 189–­92 Italian National Oil and Gas Authority (ENI), 151, 152 Italian Republican Party (PRI), 48, 112, 115–­16; coalition with Italian Communist Party, 49–­50; and Mazara, in the Sixties, 114–­19 Italian Social Movement-­National Right, 185–­86 Italy: energy policy of, 151–­52; Mazara as emblem of Mediterraneaness of, 217 John Paul II (pope), 217–­18, 220–­21 kinship. See family and kinship knives, crewmembers’ personal, eating rituals and, 132–­33 knowledge, communities of, 72 labor, 27; element unit of, in seabed trawling, 73; spatial dimension of the labor process, 44, 48, 62–­70, 87, 92, 104 Lajel, Mohamad, 225 L’Ala, Natale, 246n8 Lampedusa, Sicily, role of, 105–­9 La Pira, Giorgio, 150 Libya, postcolonial, 247n11; positions of, regarding its resources, 152 Lisma, Nicola, 118–­19, 200 mafiosi, 45, 244n3 (chapter 2); Anti-­Mafia Commission investigation of, 115–­16,

246n6; and politics, 118, 245n2; Pope John Paul II speech against, 249n5. See also Agate, Mariano; Di Cristina, Giueppe; Ferro, Giuseppe; L’Ala, Natale male rituals, onboard Naumachos, 167–­70 Malfatti, Mario, 71, 245n8; Tunisians and Sicilians in, 221–­23 maritime gentry, 31 maritime transport, coastal, 67 Masmoudi, Mohamed, 153, 158 matrimonial strategies, postcolonial, 148 Mattei, Enrico, 151 Mazara del Vallo, Sicily, 14f; actors in current political scene of, 218–­19; arrival of motorized trawlers to, 71; bars along quay of old port of, 13–­14; city center of, 6, 37–­38; cultural district of, 39; as emblem of Italy’s Mediterraneaness, 217; fishing fleet and, 3–­4, 6–­7; fishing fleet at end of WWII, 72; fishing fleet since the Sixties, 72; Italian Republican Party and, in Sixties, 114–­19; new port of, 35, 37f; old port of, 35–­39, 37f; pat­ronage and people of, 94–­95; Pope John Paul II’s speech in, 217–­18; rise in cul­turalist proj­ ects in, 218–­21; role of, in migration and relations between North Africa and, 6–­7; scaling up of its role in the Sixties, 153–­ 58; before the Thirties, 70–­71; transnational tension between present and past for, 217–­18; triangle of relationships in, 20; Tunisians in, 4, 6–­7, 221–­23 Mazara fleet, 245n5; as cooperative, 49–­50; penchant for North African fishing banks of, 104; role of, in rise of Mediterraneanist allusions in Italian politics, 150–­51 Mazaro River, 37, 37f Mediterranean, the, 4–­7; absence of mod­ern, 7–­9; anthropologists and, 11; at­tempts at controlling, 233–­34; cosmopolitan port cities of, 9; current accounts of, 232; distinctive history of, 8–­9; main topics in studies of contemporary, 11–­12; role of, in European political imag­ery, 230; seven souls of, 230–­38; shared history of, 224–­ 27; studies of cross-­con­nections in, 12; technologies of con­nectivity and mobility and cultural politics of, 232 Mediterranean anthropology, patronage in, 93–­95 Mediterranean Fisheries District, 38–­39

268 / Index Mediterranean history, applying cousinage to, 144–­46 Mediterranean modernity. See modernity migration, 7, 230 Milazzismo, shipowners and, 115 Milazzo, Silvio, 246n4 mobilization, 69–­70 modernity: absence of Mediterranean, 10–­ 12; Mediterranean, 8, 243n2; Mediterranean cosmopolitanism and, 205–­7; non-­ national, 207 Mogavero, Msgr. Domenico, 229 Montassar (crewmember), 80, 83–­87, 86f, 95–­96, 101f, 110f monthly calendars, for fishing activity, 73–­74 motorization, of trawling, 69; spatial and social dynamics on board Naumachos and, 87–­88 Movimento Sociale Italiano-­Destra Nazionale (MSI-­DN), 185–­86; Fish War and, 198–­99; framing of killing of fisher during Fish War by, 189–­93 Munsef (Tunisian itinerant vendor), 39–­40, 226 narcotics trafficking, 231 nationalism, 146–­47, 206–­7, 235. See also transnationalism Naumachos (fishing trawler), 56; bosun of, 64; breakdown of, 174–­75; capitani bravi of, 76–­77; chief mechanic of, 64; choreography onboard, 87–­88; coffee rituals onboard, 77–­79; crew of, 3; deck of, as theatrical stage, 27–­30; fishing  me­thod of, 3–­4; as floating input-­output operator, 62–­65; freezer chamber of, 100–­105; hierarchy onboard, 64; layout of, and movements of crew on, 32, 60f; life onboard after departure of Zu Nino, 180–­82; male rituals onboard, 167–­70; mealtimes onboard, 104–­5; motorization shaping spatial and social dynamics onboard, 87–­88; multicultural interactions onboard, 205–­6; olfactory layout of, 163–­64; “parts system” of, 102–­4; pa­ tronage onboard, 92; pecking order onboard, 83–­87; power relations on board, 107; remuneration practices of, 102–­4; rou­tines aboard, 90–­91; social divisions on­board, 2–­3; stealing onboard, 103–­4; television viewing onboard, 175–­77; ten­

sions onboard, 76–­77; tolerance on­board, 165; trawling practices of, 63–­64; urinating onboard, 163–­65. See also crewmembers, of Naumachos; seafood: sorting of, onboard Naumachos; social relations, on­ board Naumachos; Zu Nino (owner of Naumachos) navigation: captains and, 75; electronic, 74–­75; satellite, 75–­76 “net,” defined, 73, 74, 79–­83 1973 oil crisis, 53; cousinage and, 158–­59 1973 strike, 47–­49 “not to let on” advice, 165 oil crisis of 1973, 53; cousinage and, 158–­59 olive oil: consumption statistics for, 246–­ 47n2; role of, in life of crew, 130–­31, 247n3 orientalist othering, 11 Paolo (chief mechanic), 2, 64, 178 paranza, 68 “parts system,” 102–­4 paternal care, of Zu Nino, 138–­39, 169 patronage, 27; godparenthood and, 247n5; in Mediterraneanist anthropology, 93–­ 95; onboard Naumachos, 92; people of Mazara and, 94–­95; use of, during Fish Wars, 119–­22 patron-­client relations, role of seafood in, 31 PCI. See Italian Communist Party (PCI) pecking order, onboard Naumachos, 83–­87 Permanent Observatory on Mediterranean Fisheries, 38–­39 political anthropology, 235–­36 PRI. See Italian Republican Party (PRI) processes, region-­formation, 10, 23–­25, 232–­36 projects, region-­making, 10, 23–­25, 232–­36 rage: management, 163–­67; role of, as scal­ ing device, 31–­32; as scaling device of social relations, 166; using, as scaling device, 184–­86 reciprocity, 76–­77, 129, 138–­42; and food, 246n1; patronage and, 93, 113–­14. See also fraternity, as kinship metaphor redistribution. See patronage region-­formation processes, 24–­25, 66, 237

Index / 269 region-­making projects, 24–­25 relatedness, idioms of, 143–­44 relationships, in Mazara del Vallo, 20 religious beliefs: masculinity and perils of interreligious contact, 214–­17; onboard discussions about, 208–­12; rules of engagement for, 212–­14. See also faith remuneration practices, 102–­3 rituals: of coffee, 77–­80, 87, 131–­32, 180–­ 82; cooking, 123–­27; food, 132–­38; male, 167–­70; olive oil and food, 130–­31; sorting of seafood as, 92 rubare pesce (stealing fish), 103–­4 ruffiano, 98. See also bootlicking Salvatore (second mechanic), 90, 91–­92, 106 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 233 satellite navigation, 75–­76. See also navigation scaling devices, 27, 205; exquisite items of seafood as, 92–­93; role of rage, 31–­32; seafood as, 233; themes as, 27–­29; Transmed pipeline as, 233 Schneider, Jane, 12, 166 seabed trawling, 62; capital intensification of, 69; elementary unit of labor in, 73; motorization of, 69, 87–­88; of Naumachos, 63–­64 seafood: bluefish as gifts, 109; cleaning of, and the cooperative, 96–­97; commercial specials of, 96; destinations of catch, 109–­ 10; different paths of caught, 92; as gifts, 113–­14; procedures and processes, 1–­2, 96; as ritual, 92; role of, in mediating patron-­ client relations, 31; role of, in shaping social re­lations, 31; as scaling devices, 233; social relations and, 112–­14; sorting of, onboard Naumachos, 83–­87, 167–­70; sorting system of, 100–­101. See also cleaning fish, the cooperative and segmentation, 146–­48, 184, 195, 243n6, 248n1; anthropology and, 21–­24 shame, honor and, 166 shipowners, 118–­19; Milazzismo and, 115; use of fish by, for relationships with politicians, 112–­14 Sicilians: in Mazara, 221–­23; social relations with Tunisians, 4 Sicily, energy policy of, 151–­52 smoking, 82–­83

smuggling, 67 social divisions, onboard Naumachos, 2–­3 social formations, 70 social relations, onboard Naumachos: eating rituals and, 127–­29; framing of, 212; honor as frame for, 166; rage as scaling device, 166; role of seafood in shaping, 31; seafood, use of, for, 112–­14 sorting seafood. See seafood: sorting of, on­ board Naumachos spatial expansion, 69, 70 stealing fish (rubare pesce), 103–­4 strike of 2007, 31, 40–­44; competing frames and, 47–­53 Tantucci, Anna Paola, 145–­46 television viewing, onboard Naumachos, 175–­77 tensions, onboard Naumachos, 76–­77 themes, as scaling devices, 27–­29. See also scaling devices tolerance, onboard Naumachos, 165 transcultural affinity, terms of, 27, 32–­33, 223–­24, 234 Trans-­Mediterranean (Transmed) pipeline, 31, 149–­51, 150f, 156–­57, 167, 183, 184; effects of, on Fish War, 200–­201; honor and, 32; inauguration of, 199; as scaling devices, 233; transnational affinity vs. domestic unrest of, 196–­99 transnational affinity, of  Transmed pipeline, 196–­99 transnationalism, 10, 236; conditions for understanding, 32; current understandings, 230; regions as medium and scales of, 4; as sea of scales and segments, 20–­21. See also nationalism transnational regions: as constellations, 231–­32; formation of, 234–­35 transnational relations, Tunisian-­Sicilian, 166–­67; dynamics of, 183–­84; historical anthropology of, 183 transnational segmentary politics, 235 transport, coastal maritime, 67 trawling, seabed, 62; capital intensification of, 69; elementary unit of labor in, 73; motorization of, 69, 87–­88; of Naumachos, 63–­64 Tumbiolo, Giovanni, 219 tuna fishing, 66, 244n3

270 / Index Tunisia, postcolonial, positions of, regarding its resources, 152–­53. See also Fish War with Tunisia Tunisians, in Mazara del Vallo, 4, 6–­7, 221–­23 Tunisian-­Sicilian transnational relations, 166–­67; dynamics of, 183–­84; historical anthropology of, 183 unrest, domestic, Transmed pipeline and, 196–­99 urinating, onboard Naumachos, 163–­65, 169–­70

Wine War, 53, 244n8 Zeghidour, Slimane, 143 Zu Nino (owner of Naumachos), 64–­65, 65f, 70–­73, 76, 77, 78, 83–­84, 90, 167–­ 68, 204f, 218; coffee and, 79–­80; cook­ ing rituals and, 123–­27; going onboard, 59–­62; health problems of, 105–­6; illness of, 171; on Palestinian and Israeli relations, 203–­5; paternal care of, 138–­ 39, 169. See also Naumachos (fishing trawler)