Anthropology of the Mediterranean: Between Crisis and Renewal

Abstract

During the 1960s and 1970s, the development of Anglophone anthropology in the Mediterranean produced several efforts to establish a circum‐Mediterranean perspective. By the 1980s, several criticisms were directed against this young regional specialization. This paper examines the main arguments that substantiated the rejection of this comparative endeavour. It argues that the debate about Mediterranean anthropology has been marked by a narrowing of the field. Discussion was eminently “European”, concerned only the Anglophone production and focused almost exclusively on the theme of honour and shame. A vast group of studies were not taken into account, both in the establishing of the field and in its dismantling. A larger contextualization shows that a renewal of a Mediterranean level of comparison in anthropology is taking place in a more cosmopolite framework. A new epistemological space seems to be opening, which is not a simple return to the past.

Keywords:

• Mediterranean
• Anthropology
• Regional Studies
• Epistemology
• Place

Acknowledgements

This article was translated by Penny Allen, with additional modifications by Dionigi Albera.

Notes

[1] This indecision was resolved by a wholly unforeseen possibility that materialized during a conference in Cambridge in 1963. “During the course of it, at some intermission in some pub or other, I poured out my ‘where next?’ anxieties to one of the younger and less over‐socialized British participants—I can, alas, no longer remember who it was—and he said, “You should go to Morocco: it is safe, it is dry, it is open, it is beautiful, there are French schools, the food is good, and it is Islamic”. The logical force of this argument, bereft as it was of scientific argumentation, was so overwhelming that, immediately the conference ended, I fled to Morocco rather than returning to Chicago. I drove about the country talking to various sorts of officials and looking at various sorts of walls, gates, minarets, and alleyways for several weeks, and decided on the spot and with almost nothing in the way of either plan or rationale —it was beautiful and it was Islamic—to organize a long‐term, multi‐researcher study there” (Geertz, 1995: 117).

[2] In Ann Arbor, in Aix‐en‐Provence and in Canterbury. The results appeared in 1969 as a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly (vol. 42, no. 3).

[3] The same phenomenon has been remarked in other regions. See for example Blaiser and Muller (1997), Lederman (1998), Steedly (1999).

[4] It suffices to recall the debate between Pitt‐Rivers (1978) and Davis (1978). The study that proposed the largest and most ambitious attempt to design an anthropological approach concerning the Mediterranean, that of John Davis (1977), was marked by a critical attitude towards the methods of most of the studies on which it was based. It was a solitary and promethean plea for a more resolutely comparative and historical approach.

[5] The group included Anne M. Bailey, Annabelle Black, Victoria Goddard, Olivia Harris, Josep R. Llobera, Jill Mortimer, Brian J. O’Neill, Sandra Satterlee and Nukhet Sirman.

[6] Herzfeld 1980; 1984; 1987; Wikan 1984; Llobera 1986; Lever 1986; Pina Cabral 1989.

[7] Pina Cabral stressed his dissent with the idea of a Mediterranean cultural distinctiveness in regard to male status. He argued that the gender‐specificity of moral values seemed to apply “to the whole of pre‐modern Europe and to continue to apply to many areas of the so‐called Western world”. After noting that pub and bar behaviour is far more agonistic and violent in England or Germany than in Andalusia, he concluded: “One is therefore tempted to think that one of the reasons middle‐class and upper middle‐class young Anglo‐American scholars are so deeply impressed with the agonistic display of manhood among southern European peasants is that they are so ignorant of working‐class behaviour in their own countries of origin” (1989: 402).

[8] Certain authors vacillate. This is the case with Chris Shore, who, after having written an anti‐Mediterraneanist pamphlet in 1994 (Goddard, Llobera and Shore, 1994), proposed the following year the exploitation of literary sources for the anthropological study of the Mediterranean (Shore, 1995).

[9] See on this subject Albera and Blok 2001.

[10] To take ethno‐nations as units for comparisons within states, as Llobera did in 1986, does not seem entirely innocent and appears somewhat sinister in light of events that later occurred in the Balkans. In addition we note this author’s wavering between alternative propositions to the Mediterranean: in 1981, it is southern Europe; in 1986, south‐west Europe; in 1994, just Europe.

[11] This phenomenon is far from being specific to Mediterranean anthropology. Anthropological theory has produced distinctions in which epistemology and geography overlap. If that is true for classical moments in the history of the discipline, this metonymy, by which a concept appears to sum up the anthropological concern with an entire geographical area, is reinforced in the study of complex civilizations. This is the sense of the critique made by Appadurai (1986), when he observed that a series of gatekeeping concepts seemed to have monopolized the theoretical field in several cases—and he cited in particular the hierarchy in India, filial piety in China, and the complex of honour and shame in the Mediterranean area. In this way attention was focused on a visible phenomenon, via a simplification that contributed to the creation of a common language among specialists (Appadurai, 1988).

[12] This aspect was the object of a reflective scrutiny by Pitt‐Rivers (1994: 25). In discussing his long‐standing collaboration with Peristiany, he argued that their respective visions of the Mediterranean were complementary rather than identical. Peristiany’s “anthropology was founded upon his African experience, yet his vision of the Mediterranean contained a great deal of introspection as well, for he was himself a very ‘Mediterranean man’”. Pitt‐Rivers’ approach, on the contrary, “was that of a convert who found in the Mediterranean a critique of, and thus an escape from, the society in which he had been born and bred”. Thus identification was at work in Peristiany (“one may discern in Peristiany’s orientation a certain tendency to take Greeks as the essence of Mediterraneans and to ignore those who do not measure up to the Hellenic yardstick”) and contrast in Pitt‐Rivers (“my own vision of Mediterraneans… contained a somewhat naïve attempt to identify them by the ways in which they differ from those who peopled my English childhood”). See also Friedl 1995.

[13] Furthermore, one must not underestimate the fact that the same symbolic geography that opposes a rational North to an emotional South operates on different scales (see Fernandez 1988). A sceptical reader might wonder if Goddard, Llobera and Shore (1994) were not reproducing the same stereotyped opposition within southern Europe when they evoked the North of Portugal, Catalonia, Provence and Lombardy as places that escape “Mediterranean” values, as opposed to Andalusia and Sicily, for example (1994: 22).

[14] Apparently Peristiany’s assumption of the role of a “native” anthropologist was not fully appreciated in Oxford and, according to Campbell, “this decision to work in Cyprus was seen in Oxford as an almost heretical initiative since the validity of an anthropologist’s perceptions were believed to lie in the very act of studying, and immersing oneself in, the thought processes of a culture entirely different from one’s own”. It seems that Evans‐Pritchard was particularly irritated at this “deviation” of John Peristiany’s interests from the social anthropology of East Africa. Thus, “despite John Peristiany’s personal affection for Evans‐Pritchard, this negative attitude towards Mediterranean studies in the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology at this time played its part in persuading him to move to Greece after he had received an invitation from UNESCO to establish a social sciences centre in Athens” (Campbell, 1994: 18).

[15] For explorations in this direction, see Bromberger 2001; Capo 1999b; Ferrié and Boetsch 1992.

[16] The narrowing of the field that marked the crisis of Mediterranean anthropology is also manifest in a nearly complete lack of discussion with other disciplines that have developed knowledge about the Mediterranean. If the birth of ethnographical research in Mediterranean countries does not coincide with Pitt‐Rivers’ monograph, as the canonical chronology suggests, the use of the Mediterranean as an analytical tool does not begin with Anglophone anthropology (nor with F. Braudel, the only patron saint invoked by the latter and by his critics). The invention of the Mediterranean in social sciences goes back at least to the nineteenth century. A long and complex genealogy shows that the Mediterranean has been involved as an analytical instrument in several fields: human geography, history, political science… These representations of the Mediterranean in turn overlap with other more vast and ancient filiations: literary or philosophical, scholarly or popular. See for example Bourguet et al. (1998) and Fabre and Ilbert (2000).

[17] This work would lead to the publication of two fascicules about holidays and about food stocks, and of a collective work about the practices and representations of space. See Bromberger 2001: 77, n. 1.

[18] The translation of Pitt‐Rivers’ book (1977) and of an anthology of Mediterraneanist texts in the Anglo‐American tradition (Kayser 1986) contributed to this dialogue.

[19] Several comparative Mediterranean publications followed (Ravis‐Giordani, 1987; Bromberger, 1997). The Institut d’Ethnologie Méditerranéenne et Comparative was a founding member of the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme, established in Aix‐en‐Provence in 1997.

[20] The journal Mediterraneans/Méditerranéennes (in which ethnography is mixed with other genres, such as photographs, reports, poems) was created in 1990 by Kenneth Brown. The interdisciplinary Journal of Mediterranean Studies: History, Culture, and Society in the Mediterranean World was founded by Paul Sant Cassia in 1991 and is published by the University of Malta. Tullia Magrini initiated in 1996 the multimedia Web journal Music & Anthropology: Journal of Musical Anthropology of the Mediterranean, based in Bologna.

[21] Fiume (1989), Magrini (1993), Capo Zmegac (1999a), Roque (2000), Albera, Blok and Bromberger (2001). An experiment in the same direction was coordinated by German researchers (Greverus et al. 2000; 2001).

[22] In several works, Paul Sant Cassia (1991; 1993; 2003) has contributed to keeping this discussion open.

[23] On the basis of the same awareness of the risks Eurocentrism, Hann (2003) recently proposed the adoption of a Euroasian comparative framework.

[24] This posture has been provocatively defined as “critical essentialism” (see Albera 1999).

[25] This is a point that has been stressed, in a more general way, by Appadurai (1988).

[26] This approach has some precedents in the Mediterraneanist tradition (Wolf 1969; Schorger and Wolf 1969; Schorger 1983: 542–3). Evans‐Pritchard argued that anthropologists studying Mediterranean peoples should be less concerned with likenesses than with differences between them (1965: 25). Including the study of differences and contrasts in the agenda of comparative analysis was also envisaged by Pitt‐Rivers, for whom “a past of four thousand years of continual contact” means that in the Mediterranean differentiation between societies and culture was originated by reciprocal acquaintance and not by lack of contacts (1983: 14). Yet this perspective was partially eclipsed by the prevailing quest for similarities.

[27] See Grendi 1980, Raggio 1990, Cavallo and Cerutti 1991, Torre 1995. Blok’s monograph (1974) was translated into the eponymous collection of Einaudi.

[28] The references are numerous. See for example Malina 1993; 2001; Malina and Neyrey 1991; Moxnes 1991; 1996; Neyrey 1996; 1998; 1999; 2001.

[29] For a subsequent discussion with Herzfeld, see Herzfeld (2005); Horden (2005); Horden and Purcell (2005).

[23] In order to encourage dialogue, the Association d”Anthropologie Méditerranéenne (ADAM) was created in 1998. Its aims are to promote anthropological research in the Mediterranean world, favouring exchanges between different anthropological traditions, to foster the circulation of information and knowledge, and to overcome linguistic and epistemological barriers.

[31] For a programmatic statement of the project for a world anthropologies network, see “A conversation about a world anthropologies network”, Social Anthropology, 2003, vol. II, n. 2, pp. 265–9.