Critical ethnographies of urban heritage in the western Mediterranean region

This themed section evolves out of the panel ‘Critical Ethnographies of Cultural Heritage in Mediterranean Cities’ that was held at the 5th Ethnography and Qualitative Research Conference hosted by the University of Bergamo, Italy, in June 2014. The addition of ‘western’ in the new title indicates that the selected papers all happen to concentrate on cities in the left half of the Mediterranean basin.1 The insertion of this same adjective also conveniently serves to circumvent the prickly subject of cultural unity that stubbornly lingers in the contours of scholarly debate about the Mediterranean region at large, irrespective of the innumerable critiques and incontrovertible evidence proving otherwise