Introduction: Remapping Mediterranean anthropology

ABSTRACT

We introduce this special issue, which re-examines the fluctuating fortunes of the Mediterranean in anthropology and ask what it offers for contemporary anthropological explorations. We locate the Mediterranean within the history of anthropological (and more broadly, ethnographic) development of core ideas and methodologies concerning personhood, narrative, and culture making. Our approach to the study of the Mediterranean focuses less on why anthropologists abandoned a notion of regional cultural unity, and more on the bases through which such unity is performed and on the concepts and categories which anthropologists might recuperate to account for such performances, even in the wake of their rejection of ‘cultural areas’ as such. Such an analytical move requires the remapping of the Mediterranean as a regional formation that is both multi-scalar and transnational. We argue that the Mediterranean must be approached alongside other attempts to critically remap space and human and ecological connections in anthropology and at is margins; that the study of the Mediterranean should converse with recent developments in the study of sea and oceanic worlds, whether from a historical anthropological or transnational/transregional perspective. At the same time, we outline the benefits of paying attention to the unique place that the Mediterranean might occupy among such maritime worlds. Such a Mediterranean projects a kaleidoscopic vision, combining not just premodern pasts and modern presents, but also a long and conflictual present perfect, in which past and present processes enliven each other, underwriting possible futures.

KEYWORDS:

• Mediterranean
• transnational/transregional formation
• maritime/oceanic anthropology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Two recent volumes, both related to the Zentrum für Mittelmeerstudien, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany, promote the ongoing interdisciplinary efforts to recognize the renewed importance of the region (Borutta and Gekas 2012; Lichtenberger and von Rüden 2015). Another edited volume by anthropologists focuses on shared sacred spaces (Couroucli 2014). An earlier special issue (Sant Cassia and Schäfer 2005; see also Bromberger 2006) follows lines more similar to those of the edited volume that came out of the conference in Aix-en-Provence in 1997, which we discuss later in this introduction (Albera, Blok, and Bromberger 2001). Finally, Dionigi Albera and other anthropologists were involved in the scientific committee of the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (MUCEM; Ricciotti 2013).

2 See also Sarah Green’s five-year ERC research project (2016–2021), ‘Crosslocations in the Mediterranean: Rethinking the Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Relative Positioning,’ based at the University of Helsinki, involving a diverse group of researchers engaging with ‘changes in the relations between people and locations within the Mediterranean Region.’ https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/crosslocations.

3 Parochialists often combine otherwise contradictory assumptions about the universality and uniqueness of their specific places or ways. See Herzfeld’s treatment of the term ‘parochialism’ and the scalar elasticity of prejudice that it illuminates (Herzfeld 2007).

4 The term ‘constellation’ – much better than the parallel term ‘figuration’ – helps us draw attention to the historical and contingent (‘processual’) nature of such spatio-political processes (Elias 1978, 1991: 46; Algazi 2008, 445 esp. fn.4).

5 See Rothberg (2009) and Slymovics (this issue) for expansions and applications of these multidirectional insights to an equally (post)colonial and racialized Mediterranean world. See Danewid (2017) and Smythe (2018) for recent invocations of a ‘Black Mediterranean’ called forth by those seeking refuge and asylum who reference perduring colonial violence within their present suffering and identity projects.

6 It is equally extraordinary that the same recalcitrant ‘culture area’ category of the Mediterranean has also survived to remain disconnected from some of the geographical area’s constituent sub-regions, most famously from former Yugoslavia. The latter remains outside not only a ‘Europeanized’ Europe and its bordered-out ‘other’ (Todorova 1994; Bakić-Hayden 1995; Borneman and Fowler 1997; Green 2013a). The wider Balkans seem to remain outside even the tri-continental Zomia, the Mediterranean.

7 Marcel Mauss’s ‘gift’ met its Mediterraneanist counterpart in Julian Pitt-Rivers’s ‘hospitality’ and ‘grace’ (Mauss 1954; Pitt-Rivers 2011, 2012). Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ‘savage mind,’ set the stage for Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad’s ‘habitus,’ originally developed to explore the durability of peasant practices in both Algeria and southwestern France (Bourdieu 1966, 1979, 1972; Bourdieu and Sayad 1964). Anthropological truisms about marriage and the family are similarly troubled in the work of Abu-Lughod (1985), Goody (1983), Suad Joseph (1993, 1994), and Khuri (1970); as were assumptions about magic and religion in Ernesto De Martino’s historical anthropology of southern Italy (2005, 2015), and as were segmentary lineage theories questioned and refined in the various studies of Asad (1970), Campbell (1964), Gellner (1963), Herzfeld (1985, 1987), and Hammoudi (1996 [1974]).