Introduction. Ethnographies and Emergencies in the Mediterranean: Black Holes of Our Modernity

Abstract

This section is an anthropological response to the atrocity of the media coverage and death of thousands of human beings in the sea linking Southern Europe with Northern Africa, the Mediterranean. It responds to the moral economy of asylum and the rhetoric of humanitarianism based on «crisis» and «emergencies» rather than social justice and human rights. We consider the Mediterranean from the ethnographic perspective, analysing and experiencing borders in a specific way, away from media cameras and political populism, and closely in touch with the stories and interpretations of the people who cross them. We address Mediterranean borders as they really are at the current moment: interconnected, delocalized, much more extensive than defined by law as «the European frontier». They constitute a «pressure cooker», exacerbated by the effects of police controls in transit countries like Morocco, Libya and Turkey. This border Regime extends to the European territory contains through the 400 immigration detention centres and the monitors of foreigners settling in Europe. The overwhelming borderland regime calling into question the validity of the ethical and political principles that led to the construction of the European Union.