Prado, Italo and Giuliana B. Prato. 2011. Citizenship and the Legitimacy of Governance: Anthropology in the Mediterranean Region (Collection: Urban Anthropology Series). Farnham, Surrey, Burlington: Ashgate. 221 pp. Hb.: £55. ISBN: 9780754674016
A collection of scientific papers is one of the most popular means of publication of academic production in social sciences and humanities. Several collections are assembled as a consequence of a specific event (symposium, conference or anniversary) and have an ambition to present and critically discuss certain problematic or thematic fields through different contributions. The latter is the main reason for promotion of such collections: not as coincidental or arbitrary, but as planned and reflected selections of texts that share common themes. Despite that, we can frequently find that such collections are assembled of rather diverse texts (both regarding content and methodology), that have little or nothing in common. The editors of such collections seem to try to bridge (or conceal) this problem with vague titles, which define their thematic scope so indeterminably that (almost) any text from the field of humanities or social sciences could be included. Several exceptions exist regardless of this wide-spread trend. The collection Citizenship and the Legitimacy of Governance is one of them.
This collection presents revised and expanded versions of papers discussed at one of the IUAES's (International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences) workshops, and addresses the complex relationship between citizenship and governance in different societies of the 'Mediterranean Region'. In the introduction, the editors provide an in-depth critical analysis of the establishment of ethnographic research in Mediterranean Region, which has been demarcated by the ethnocentric perspective and exotisation of such communities since 1960s: 'The social organisation of Mediterranean societies was claimed to be sufficiently idiosincratic, un-Western to be classified as exotic - not quite part of "us" but at the same time representing "our own" history' (p. 4). Several problematic concepts and categories have been formed on the basis of this false and oversimplified perspective (for example, patronage), which authors of this collection are attempting to overcome.
In addition to critically examining established anthropological concepts, this collection also deals with the current problem of the crisis of legitimacy of governance and addresses the question of how governance is experienced by different groups of individuals/citizens. As in several other contemporary anthropological texts, the concept of citizenship is defined not only in legal and political terms but includes also socio-economic, civil and cultural rights. The contributions of this collection demonstrate, through different yet complementary themes, governance's failure to meet citizens' needs as 'all too often definitions of citizenship serve the interests of the rulers at the expense of responsible governance, emphasising the point (Prado 2000: 5) that, as rulers fail to establish a "fundamental accord" between their morality and people's requirements, they fail the democratic process' (ibid.: 12).
This widening gap between governance, key policies on the one hand and citizens on the other is researched through different case-studies (from the 'rubbish crisis' in Naples, urban waterfront renewals in Barcelona to the consequences of EU pressures on Albania, Turkey and others). Four of the ten papers mainly focus on inter-ethnic relations and reveal contradictions that arise from the imposition of governments' policies and unequal, discriminatory distribution of social power (as can be observed from the research
of Arab-Jewish relationship in the Israeli towns of Haifa and Jaffa-Tel Aviv, a comparison between rights granted to Italian community and to other minorities in Slovene Istria, a case-study of media construction of racial hatred in Portugal and the ethnography of the South Lebanese Christian Enclave).
Besides already cited contributions, we also have to mention two excellent contributions (by Nebi Bardhoshi and Manok Spyridakis), which, through in-depth ethnographic research, succeed in presenting the whole spectrum of doubts and absurdities that derives from relationships between established moralities, national and international institutions on the one hand and individual members of community on the other. As Spyridakis states at the end of his insightful paper of long-term unemployment workers of shipbuilding industry in Greek Piraeus: 'In this context, social actors earn a living using the space created by the clash between dominant groups who hold financial and political power and the dominated's culture of everyday resistance through conscious engagement in the asymmetrical game and management of social reproduction. Their actions are regarded as unlawful by the official political world' (p. 167).
Even though this collection brings interesting contributions content-wise, it exhibits a notable weakness in methodology. The editors present the contributions of this collection as 'the anthropological essays that follow draw on urban ethnographies' (p. 1), while the reader will, on the contrary, note, that the ethnographic part is completely absent in almost half of all chapters. The authors (Prado, Weingrod, Sedmak, Delibaç) of these chapters usually briefly mention that they conducted specific field research in the introduction or notes, yet mostly they do not present the methodology of their research, while they are also not disclosing the key information on their interlocutors. What seems even more problematic is that these authors never cite the viewpoints of their interlocutors directly and they also fail to present their potentially diverse, heterogeneous responses to a certain problem. On the contrary: when presenting viewpoints of inhabitants of a specific place, the authors allow themselves inadmissible generalisation and homogenisation of interlocutors' opinions and reactions, while simultaneously presenting their relationship with the problem as static. Italo Prado, one of the authors and a co-editor of the collection, presents in such manner the relationship of Naples inhabitants towards 'rubbish crisis' as thoroughly one-sided, homogeneous, without any variations or contradictions - for instance: 'Ordinary people's dismay and anger combined with an increasing sense of embarrassment as this major crisis became widely reported' (p. 36). The essay by Mateja Sedmak presents perspective of inhabitants of Slovenian Istria in a similar generalising manner and exhibits the same methodological weakness; for instance : 'The residents of Slovene Istria do not identify with national costumes of folk music; when they speak about other people from Slovenia or travel to another Slovenian town, they say that they will visit Slovenes and they will "travel to Slovenia"'(Sedmak 2011: 60). Similarly generalised is Fernando Monge's writing of Barcelona's inhabitants.
Despite the fact that the other half of contributions does not display the outlined problems, we still have to wonder how it is possible that contributions of this collection are being promoted as ethnographies?
URŠULA LIPOVEC ČEBRON
University of Ljubljana (Slovenia)