Since antiquity, the cultivation of olive trees has been a central feature of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. In addition to their historical use as symbols of peace and friendship, olive trees have come to serve as powerful natural tokens of resilience, endurance, and longevity—eternal life even—given their ability to survive for hundreds of years and thus surpass human timescales. They have also stood for quintessentially “Mediterranean” landscapes and life-worlds, having held significant places in agrarian livelihoods, consumption, nourishment, as well as religious rituals, for millennia. Olive production unites cultures and societies in Western Asia, North Africa, and Southern Europe regardless of state borders, linguistic or religious divides, and continental boundaries. All this suggests that, around the Mediterranean, olive production is deeply embedded in social, economic, and cultural life in ways such that reveal it as a shared legacy.

And yet, across the region, the cultivation of olive trees is being transformed at unprecedented speed and scale. Changing weather patterns have in recent years resulted in a constantly declining olive harvest, leading to soaring prices of olive oil and affecting local economies and consumer practices alike. The introduction of new technologies and equipment, both in cultivating and processing olives, has fundamentally reshaped the ways in which olive trees are planted and cared for and their fruit harvested, processed, and marketed. Conflict, economic hardship, and hopes for a better life have pushed olive-growing communities out of the rural hinterlands to urban centres both around the Mediterranean and in the Global North. Olive trees themselves have also been forcefully caught in various mobilities in response to changing socio-political climates or as a result of violence. Trees have been uprooted and destroyed in the conflicts ravaging the Middle East, whereas revaluations of land and property bring in development projects that replace olive groves with dwellings and infrastructure. These changes have gone hand-in-hand with the exchange and use of certain olive cultivars—adapted and suited to specific local climes and soils—across wide distances, resulting in the introduction of olive trees in new and often hostile conditions and locations.

This two-day conference seeks to map, document, and critically examine the ways in which localised forms and practices of olive production take on larger translocal forms around the Mediterranean basin and how these olive entanglements have been transformed in recent years. All the while, it considers olive trees as active agents that enable people’s emplacements and senses of belonging, and seeks to understand how these affective connections to localities are changing with the transformation of olive cultivation.
 

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