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An Anthropology of Crosslocations introduces a radical new approach to understanding location. The co-authors show that the question of where something is depends on how places are mutually connected and disconnected. The location of a place can be established by different logics, such as national borders, ecosystems, or economic zones. These different ways of classifying the relative value and significance of a place coexist and overlap: for example, national borders are regularly crosscut by ecosystems. By thinking of 'location' as a process defined by several different coexisting locating regimes, the book showcases a fresh way to think about the multiple and overlapping connections and disconnections between here and elsewhere. This approach can fundamentally revise ethnographic and anthropological views on the importance, value and significance of where people, things and animals are located and, as such, redefines the idea of ‘the field.’ The volume brings together seven anthropologists who have worked together for six years. The chapters take the reader through a series of journeys around the Mediterranean region—to North Africa, the East Mediterranean, and Southern Europe. Each chapter unfolds an ethnographic or historical account of the coexistence of different values and meanings of location in different places.

The project form – a goal-driven approach to resource allocation and task coordination – is one of the most widespread organisational technologies in the world today. Significantly, projects are pervasive organisers of time. They tether activity to schedules. They entail social synchronisations and disruptions. They presuppose particular temporal imaginaries – for example, time as partible and progressive – that mediate action. This introduction examines how the temporalities of the project form organise, animate, complicate and condition social dynamics. In surveying the contributions to this special issue, we highlight how the project form's figuration of time grounds three modalities of normative power: projects as a model of purposive human agency; projects as a form of temporal containment; and projects as an ideal of action and futurity that linger long after their ostensible completion.

La forme de projet − une façon d'aborder l'attribution des ressources et la coordination des tâches qui sont déterminées par les objectifs − est une des technologies d'organisation les plus répandues dans le monde d'aujourd'hui. Il est significatif que les projets constituent des organisateurs pénétrants de temps. Ils attachent l'activité à un calendrier. Les projets impliquent des synchronisations sociales ainsi que des perturbations. Ils présupposent que des conceptions temporelles particulières − par exemple, le temps comme partible et progressif − servent de médiateurs d'action. Cette introduction examine comment les temporalités de la forme de projet organisent, animent, compliquent et conditionnent la dynamique sociale. En contemplant les travaux de recherche dans ce dossier, nous soulignons comment la configuration du temps dans la forme de projet fonde trois modalités de pouvoir normatif : les projets comme un modèle d'intermédiaire humain et résolu ; les projets comme une forme de contenant temporal ; et les projets comme un idéal d'action et d'avenir qui ont des répercussions à long terme après leur conclusion apparente.

This article examines imaginaries of the social agency of the project form in contempo-rary Egypt. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with lower-middle class men in Cairo who contrivesmall-scale investment projects, it demonstrates how projects are envisioned to (1) create the worldanew, (2) shape the ‘near future’ and (3) fashion platforms of relative stability amid unpredictability,hustling and making do. The article also illustrates how the project form’s normative temporalitiesare often distorted, materialising in iterative sequences of never fully completed projects that none-theless ‘make the world move’. In conclusion, I suggest that the same iterative temporality is recog-nisable in the Egyptian regime’s current push for spectacular megaprojects, and that an imaginary ofsocial and temporal agency undergirds the attraction to Egyptian projects across scales.

Cet article examine les imaginaires de l’agentivité sociale liés à la forme de projet enÉgypte contemporaine. En s’appuyant sur un travail de terrain à long terme avec des hommes dela petite classe moyenne au Caire qui mènent des projets d’investissement à petite échelle, nousmontrons comment ces projets sont envisagés comme ayant trois objectifs : 1) créer le monde ànouveau, 2) façonner ‘l’avenir proche’, et 3) fabriquer des plateformes de la stabilité relative, malgréles conditions d’incertitude, les pratiques de l’arnaque, et débrouille. L’article montre aussi com-ment les temporalités normatives de la forme de projet sont souvent dénaturées, et se matérialisenten séquences itératives de projets qui ne sont jamais achevés mais qui, malgré tout, ‘faire bougerdes choses’. En guise de conclusion, nous suggérons que la même temporalité itérative est recon-naissable dans la politique actuelle du régime égyptien de créer des mégaprojets spectaculaires, etun imaginaire de l’agentivité sociale et temporale est à la base de l’attraction aux projets égyptiensà toutes les échelles.

In recent years, the Mediterranean region has reasserted itself in the world: popular uprisings have unsettled long-standing political regimes, economic crises have generated precarity, and nationalist movements have reified some borders while condemning others. The circulation and stagnation of people, ideas, and objects provoked by these events draw attention to regional connections and separations that, in turn, challenge strict geopolitical renderings of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In considering this resurgence of interest in the Mediterranean, this introduction asks: what role does 'location' play in our conception of region and region-formations? What kinds of locations are generated in the contemporary Mediterranean? How do historical, legal, political, and social connections and separations shape the experience of being located somewhere in particular? Furthermore, the introduction explores how, by placing in dialogue diverse approaches and traditions, this collective volume works on two levels at once. First, each contribution posits its own Mediterranean 'constellation'. Second, the collective volume presents a wider understanding of what historically inclined anthropologists might conceive of as a Mediterranean 'constellation'. In doing this, the introduction proposes a theoretical apparatus through which we can understand cultural and historical values of region and region-making in and beyond the Mediterranean.

In recent years, the Mediterranean region has reasserted itself inthe world: popular uprisings have unsettled long-standing political regimes, economic crises have generated precarity, and nationalist movements have reified some borders while condemning others. The circulation and stagnation of people, ideas, and objects provoked by these events draw attention to regional connections and separations that, in turn, challenge strict geopolitical renderings of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In considering this resurgence of interest in the Mediterranean, this introduction asks: what role does ‘location’ play in our conception of region and region-formations? What kinds of locations are generated in the contemporary Mediterranean? How do historical, legal, political, and social connections and separations shape the experience of being located somewhere in particular?

Furthermore, the introduction explores how, by placing in dialogue diverse approaches and traditions, this collective volume works on two levels at once. First, each contribution posits its own Mediterranean ‘constellation’. Second, the collective volume presents a wider understanding of what historically inclined anthropologists might conceive of as a Mediterranean ‘constellation’. In doing this, the introduction proposes a theoretical apparatus through which we can understand cultural and historical values of region and region-making in and beyond the Mediterranean.

This article explores men at a state-owned youth center in Cairo, struggling to cope with uncertainties and change in the aftermath of Egypt’s January 2011 Revolution. Conceptually, the article critically engages anthropologist Laura Bear’s suggestion that an ethics of productivity saturate neoliberal masculinity. As my ethnographic stories about football coaches and state bureaucrats illustrate, being a good man recurrently surfaced as a problem of how to work productively in and on time: as ambiguities between discordant futures that left material needs, familiar care, and development of football talents difficult to reconcile. Often, my interlocutors linked this conundrum to a wide-ranging opacity, conjured as “corruption” (fisad). My analysis of this male predicament allows me to spotlight one of the Egyptian revolution’s most luring promises: a transparent and meritocratic system, where a man’s work would finally be allowed to work on all futures deemed morally and materially significant.