Small places, large issues: identity, morality and the underworld at the Spanish-Moroccan frontier of Melilla

Situated on the north-eastern coast of Morocco, the Spanish enclave of Melilla is a paradigmatic case of an unusual yet increasingly common kind of community. These are small, rather isolated communities with no industry or natural resources of their own, which rely heavily on capital and labour drawn from outside. Together with Ceuta, Melilla is one of the two only land borders between Europe and Africa. The enclave’s economic and political set up reflects its geopolitical importance. Across the border from Melilla lies the Moroccan province of Nador, home to one of the largest communities of Moroccan emigrants in Europe and a steady source of unskilled labour on which the Spanish enclave relies. Connections across the border are strong, including kinship links, employment networks and a wide range of both legal and illegal commercial transactions.Based on twelve months of fieldwork conducted on both sides of the border, this thesis departs from prevailing images of the borderland as either an abstract space of ‘creolisation’ and ‘hybridity’ or a locus of resistance to state power, and suggests, instead, that we carefully consider the large-scale political and economic processes through which places like Melilla and Nador are produced, and analyse the ways in which such global structures shape local reality. A fundamental aim of the thesis, therefore, is to elucidate the nature of the relations between space, place and capital at the Spanish-Moroccan frontier, and understand how such relations affect the lives of those who inhabit the region. This involves thinking about the language of a ‘community’ and the discourses and practices of morality that sustain it; analysing discourses of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ in contexts of institutionalised economic inequality; and understanding local conceptions of identity, morality and legitimacy, and how the three interact.</p

An anthropology of crosslocations

An Anthropology of Crosslocations introduces a new approach to understanding location. Geographical space is often perceived as divided by state borders, but it can also be classified and segmented based on, for example, ecosystems or religious structures and beliefs. The book shows how different locating logics coexist in a single place and how this influences people's lives. The authors are anthropologists who draw on ethnographic and historical research from locations across the Mediterranean region

Audiovisual multisensory integration

Over the last 50 years or so, a large body of empirical research has demonstrated the importance of a variety of low-level spatiotemporal factors in the multisensory integration of auditory and visual stimuli (as, for example, indexed by research on the ventriloquism effect). Here, the evidence highlighting the contribution of both spatial and temporal factors to multisensory integration is briefly reviewed. The role played by the temporal correlation between auditory and visual signals, stimulus motion, intramodal versus crossmodal perceptual grouping, semantic congruency, and the unity assumption in modulating multisensory integration is also discussed. Taken together, the evidence now supports the view that a number of different factors, both structural and cognitive, conjointly contribute to the multisensory integration (or binding) of auditory and visual information. © 2007 The Acoustical Society of Japan