Rites of Return: Back to the Mediterranean, again

ABSTRACT

The idea of ‘returning’ to the Mediterranean dates back to the earliest attempts to formulate a distinct anthropology of the region. Why is this? Certain approaches to the Mediterranean are durable for good reasons; familiarity with them can help us avoid the unwitting recursion of stereotypical frames without simply dismissing important work done in the past or implying that new work is unrelated to older approaches. Contemporary forms of mobility (of people, information, and commodities) are reshaping the Mediterranean, necessitating alternative, multi-scalar approaches to hospitality, honour, patronage, religious pluralism, European boundary-making and other well-established topics. Attention to mobility requires new modes of analysis, and the essays in this issue are especially good at showing the connections between cultural processes that unfold in different locations, at different scales, and with different audiences in mind. Returning to the Mediterranean on these terms might take us places that are genuinely new to anthropology.

KEYWORDS:

• Mediterranean
• regionalism
• mobility
• return
• historical continuity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Clearly they do. But that is a problem for another day.

2 This book is rarely read today. It is a pity. In many ways it is superior to Peristiany’s (1966) canonical volume, which is also (like many classics) widely cited and rarely read.

3 To see why I would make such a claim, sample the essays in Shryock (2004), or consider Herzfeld’s (1997) original formulation.

4 Am I wrong to conclude that South Asia and the Middle East, as institutional and intellectual frames for scholarship, were actually strengthened by anti-Orientalist critique? The Mediterranean, a more benign political label, succumbed quickly, almost comically, like an inflatable plastic raft being sunk by an armor-piercing torpedo. If anything could convince me that there is not a ‘there there’ in the Mediterranean case, it would be this sad outcome.

5 For that, see Matei Candea’s (2018) tour de force study of comparison in anthropology. Not surprisingly, Candea is a Mediterraneanist. His thoughts on hospitality, France, and Corsica are worth reading (Candea 2012). He also studies meerkats.

6 I will stop at this, lest I gradually reproduce key themes in Anthropology through the Looking-Glass (Herzfeld 1987). For a different version of this argument, made from at least eleven different angles, see Scheele and Shryock (2019).