Bridge, Wall, Mirror; Coexistence and Confrontations in the Mediterranean World

Abstract

This article examines three contradictory images of the Mediterranean: the “polyphonic” one of exchange, convivenza, diffusions, and cohabitation; the “cacophonic” one of conflict, incompatibility, hostility, aggression, and ethnic cleansing; and the “anthropological” one of underlying cultural complicities. Each image has had its own literary exponents, and selectively draws upon its own source examples. The author then explores some of the problems associated with each model. For example, for the first model, the notions of hybridity or metissage are criticized because they are incompatible with the logic of the religions of the book, and because the social fluidity contained in these concepts is not borne out by practices and the sentiments of group membership and identity. Whilst the author agrees that the criticisms of the Mediterranean as a uniform cultural area with static attributes and limits (the “Anthropological Mediterranean”) are justified, he nevertheless suggests what gives coherence to the Mediterranean world is not so much the evident similarities but the differences that form a system. These complementary differences, inscribed in a reciprocal field, allow us to speak of a Mediterranean system. Attempting to synthesize Freud's notion of “the narcissism of minor differences” with Wittgenstein's concept of “family resemblances”, the article suggests the image of the insupportable twin, the one who is too much like us. Everyone is defined in the Mediterranean in a game of mirrors (customs, behaviours, affiliations) with his neighbour. All neighbours are close relatives who share Abrahamic origins and their behaviour only makes sense in this relational game. The article concludes by suggesting that to approach the Mediterranean it is essential to examine both its constitutive “family resemblances” and contradictions, and to analyze the interplay of reciprocal differences that now rigidify and then relax. The article thus attempts to explain how such opposed models of “polyphony/harmony” and “cacophony/hostility” could have been constructed based upon some degree of valid (but partial) evidence, and to move beyond and synthesize them into a dynamic anthropological analytical programme.

Keywords:

• Mediterranean Anthropology
• Literary Models
• Social Differentiation and Identity
• Symbolic Markers

Notes

[1] On this amazing sovereign, see the classic work of Kantorowicz (2000).

[2] For Alexandria in the contemporary epoch, see Ilbert (1992, 1996).

[3] “It must be repeated”, comments de Libera (1999: 26), “it is a translation in the interior of the land of Islam, created by the Muslim conquest, which made possible the return of Greek science to the Latin world. But Greek science did not arrive alone, Arab science accompanied it. And moreover, the figure of the Muslim intellectual from which proceeded, whatever one may say about it and contrary to every expectation, that first rough sketch of the European intellectual which was the magister artium of the university, the professor of philosophy.”

[4] On these contemporary commercial networks, see Peraldi (ed.) (2001) and Cesari (ed.) (2002).

[5] On this anthropological invention of the Mediterranean, see Bromberger (2001, 2002) and Bromberger and Durand (2001).

[6] The same observation when we consider the spatial distribution and the juridical status of the communities in Smyrna.

[7] See, among others, Mayeur‐Jaouen and Voilé (2003: 174).

[8] This process is no doubt common to most societies as Lévi‐Strauss (1973: 281–330) shows us in his comparative study of Mandan and Hidaitsa Indians: “If the customs of neighbouring peoples”, he says, “manifest symmetrical relations, we must not for all that seek the causes in some mysterious laws of nature or of the mind. This geometrical perfection thus resumes, in the present tense, the more or less conscious but innumerable efforts accumulated by history and which all aim at the same end: to reach a threshold, no doubt the most profitable one for human societies, where a true balance is achieved between their unity and their diversity; and which keeps the balance stable between communication, favourable to reciprocal enlightenment, and the absence of communication, equally salutary, since the fragile flowers of the difference can only survived in the shade” (p. 300). These relations of symmetrical inversion reach a singular density in the Mediterranean world where the populations share the same God.

[9] On the theme of iconophobia, see Goody (2004) and Centlivres (2003).

[10] Freud uses this concept three times in his work: in Messenpsycholgie und Ich‐Analyse, in Das Tabu der Virginität, and in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. In this last work he writes: “It is always possible to tie together in love a rather big crowd of men, if only there remain others on whom to manifest their aggression. I once studied the phenomenon according to which, precisely, neighbouring communities, which are also close to each other, fight with or make fun of each other, like the Spaniards and the Portuguese, the North and the South Germans, the English and the Scotch, etc. I have given to this phenomenon the name of “narcissism of little differences… One can recognize here an easy and relatively anodyne satisfaction of the penchant to aggression by which the cohesion of the community is more easily assured to its members.”

[11] The drogman/dragoman, the interpreter in the Ottoman Empire incarnated both the positive figure of the cosmopolitan go‐between figure and the negative one of the scoundrel manipulator. “The empire was suspicious”, comments Kadaré (2003: 13). “In its eyes the knowledge of two languages implied an ineluctable possibility of deceit, and the common people, from whom he often came, considered him as a ‘collaborator’. Every one suspected that the interpreter was a traitor: the dominated suspected him of being an accomplice of the dominators, and the dominators suspected him of connivance with those whom they held in subjection”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian Bromberger

Christian Bromberger is Professor of Ethnology and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Aix‐en‐Provence, France, where he directs the Laboratory in Comparative Mediterranean Ethnology (CNRS).