Sunday, March 16, 2014
Palladian (Omni Shoreham)
The ongoing Eurozone crisis prompts questions about both the viability of the European project and the techniques used to ensure its continued support. While scholars such as Cris Shore and Renita Thedvall have explored the crafting of Europeanism at the level of the European Union, relatively little anthropological inquiry has addressed urban leaders enacting EU goals outside of Brussels during the present Eurozone crisis. This paper explores the cultivation of European belonging in Marseille, France with special attention to narratives resurrecting the Mediterranean and enacting the cosmopolitical in Marseille's year as European Capital of Culture, known as MP2013. This project examines ethnographic material gathered during five months of fieldwork in Marseille as well as promotional literature, museum displays and public speeches made during 2013 festival events. I will discuss the narrative strategies used by Marseille's leaders to negotiate demands from supranational, national, regional and local actors in the context of both ephemeral festival events and permanent alterations to the Marseille landscape. Marseille's extensive urban development project, Euroméditerranée, has been woven throughout the MP2013 narrative as the transformation of public space that infuses the spirit of Rome and Greece through a cosmopolitan Mediterranean city. I argue that in constructing a narrative that promotes both the city and the supranation, Marseille's leaders have presented the goal of a united Europe and allied Mediterranean as an old reality, writing cosmopolitanism as simultaneously ancient and contemporary and proposing to resurrect that unity in an effort to spur change without inciting reprisal.
