“Follow me and I will make you fishers of men”: the moral and the political from the middle of the Mediterranean

Monday, October 20, 2014 - 00:00

Dr Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Cambridge University

Anthropology Seminar, Thursday 6 November, 4.30pm
Anthropology Seminar Room, RH2.20 Rowan House

The talk considers how the obligation to save migrants’ lives at sea has been staged ritually at two key religious ceremonies: the 2009 seaborne mass of the Mazara Bishop and Pope Francis’s 2013 visit to Lampedusa. By drawing attention to the differences in liturgical casting and biblical allusions between these two ceremonies, Ben-Yehoyada offers the shift from the Bishop’s earlier to the Pope’s later sacrament as an example of the changing framing and scaling of the moral-political nexus as they have recently unfolded around the central Mediterranean.