Ritual and Ritualism in a Contested Sea: Scalar Distortions of Space and Time

Abstract

AbstractThe ground of mutual understanding between locals and migrants in the Mediterranean Sea emerges through the performance of ritual activities. These should be distinguished from the formalistic or incantatory sense of “ritualism.” They include the socially engaged practices of hospitality—a virtuous tradition that governments, even as they claim it for the nation-state, violate in local eyes by confining migrants to impersonal spaces and uncertain futures. Passages across the sea also partake of a pervasive sense of ritual, which thereby offers rich metaphorical material for considering the scalar shifts at play—shifts that entrain such conversions of social interaction into the asocial frameworks of neoliberal management (which in turn encourage aridly scientistic modes of inquiry) but conversely also domesticate cultural distance through a subtle apperception of shared habits of gesture and generosity, made accessible by the close vision of ethnography as described in these essays.