Afterword: Reclaiming the Middle Sea for Humanity

ABSTRACT

This special issue addresses both the changes and the continuities that have marked the recent evolution of anthropological research on the circum-Mediterranean peoples. The authors demonstrate how a growing self-consciousness of the region's people as ‘Mediterranean’ produces new configurations, including official (government) but also nostalgic (local) deployments of an allegedly traditional set of supposedly Mediterranean values, including those glossed from the early days of Mediterraneanist anthropology as ‘honor’ and ‘shame.’ The region illustrates cultural and linguistic lability, helping to move anthropology toward a more flexible understanding of regional as well as national forms of belonging and of their frequent if partial convergence. In this larger cultural theatre, moreover, we can discern more clearly the artificiality of national borders, a condition that warns against returning to the concentric reification of a ‘Mediterranean culture area’ that was so prominent in an earlier era of scholarship and allows us to understand how and why the impulse to reify the Mediterranean as a self-evident category took such a powerful hold in both the anthropology of the 1960s and does so, in instructively different ways, in the geo-politics of today.

KEYWORDS:

• Mediterraneanism
• reification
• geo-politics
• nation-states

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.