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BOOKS

Religions traversées. Lieux saints partagés entre chrétiens, musulmans et juifs en Méditerranée

Dionigi Albera et Maria Couroucli (Ed.), Actes Sud- MMSH, Coll. Etudes méditerranéennes, Arles, 2009, ISBN 978-2-7427-8268-0, 340 p

This book allows us to discover a religious phenomenon very present in the Mediterranean, yet still very little known: the frequentation of the same sanctuaries by faithful belonging to different denominational groups. The coeducation, this aberration for any integrism, turns out to be a traditional phenomenon, especially in the Eastern regions of the Basin, where people have had to adapt themselves, for numerous centuries, to political and religious unstable life. Far from being monolithic sets, religions appear indeed to be "crossings". This book is a bright illustration of it.


Les Médias en Méditerranée. Nouveaux médias, monde arabe et relations

Khadija Mohsen-Finan (Ed.), Actes Sud-MMSH & Editions Barzakh, Coll. Etudes méditerranéennes, 2009, ISBN 978-9947-851-0, 380p.

Since the 1990s, the generalisation of satellite televisions and the growing use of Internet have deeply modified the media landscape and contribute to a profound change of the relationship between the people and information. From now on complete political actors, media maintain at the same time conflict and ambiguous links with the various powers in place - politics, legal, religious, financial - and directly influence the international relations. Questioning the history, multiplying the approaches and the examples - from Italy to Lebanon, of the analysis of the sociology of the Web to the media treatment of the israeli-palestinian conflict - probing the evolution of the policy and religious imaginary, this book proposes to better locate the place and the role of the media in the Mediterranean societies, and more particularly in the Arab countries. Far from amalgams and abusive short cuts, this book offers precious elements to apprehend a new and complex reality.


La puissance maternelle en Méditerranée : Mythes et représentations

Geneviève Dermenjian, Jacques Guilhaumou & Martine Lapied Actes Sud-MMSH & Editions Barzakh, Coll. Etudes méditerranéennes, 2008, ISBN 978-2-7427-8073-0, 174 p.

From this only indisputable specific character of feminity which maternity is, this book questions on the female gender in relation to the maternal power in the Mediterranean. To begin within, it registers itself in the long time of the myths and beliefs, through maternity and deity in ancient Greece, or by questioning the symbolic figures of Eve and Mary, of Lilith or teryel, the ogress from the kabyle world. It continues, at a more contemporary level, by questioning the representations of the maternal power through psychoanalysis, the eloquence of the forms, maternity in the female novel or in the search for lost maternal power in the movies. A number of essential texts to understand what is played, from yesterday to tomorrow, regarding maternity and women's place in the Mediterranean.


L'image de la femme au Maghreb

Khadija Mohsen-Finan Actes Sud-MMSH & Editions Barzakh, Coll. Etudes méditerranéennes, 2008, ISBN 978-2-7427-8069-3, 126 p.

Woman is an eloquent prism to talk about societies of the Magreb. But this prism is too often deforming. The image which is built by the media in Morocco, by the cinema in Tunisia, or by the print media in Algeria deserves to be questioned in order to see more clearly and to understand what is really happening around women's place in these countries and about the taboo question of the fight between sexes in the patriarchal family. Far from approximations and the common thinking, it is important to decipher how women live in the Maghreb and what the accounts and the legends which forge our representations are. The religious question – the one of the veil or of terrorism – have a tendency to saturate the glance, in particular European, of emotions which block and prevent from seeing, from one bank to the other of the Mediterranean, the complexity of the Magreb societies where women play a prominent role. The case of the graduate women of the Magreb is in this respect revealing. A multiplicity of models coexist now in Algeria, in Tunisia and in Morocco, where woman's modern image no longer merges with that of Western woman.