The Mediterranean is one of the most underrated areas in anthropological imagination. On the one hand, its shores have furnished the most complex formulations of the unfolding dynamics of society and culture in time. On the other hand, most Euro-American treatises of alternative social worlds fly over the Mediterranean en route to places taken to be more radically different. After a short view of the historiographical debate regarding the Mediterranean, this essay addresses some of the key the issues that occupied Mediterraneanist anthropology since the Second World War, and which have consequently framed wider debates in anthropology. First among them is the rise and fall of claims about the transnational cultural unity of Mediterranean (or any other geographical area): how such notions of cultural unity related to assumptions that Mediterranean societies were ‘frozen in time’, and what traits and modes of thoughts anthropologists claimed this cultural unity to include. A second set of questions deals with patron–client relations and their related patronage and clientelism, which at a certain moment came close to defining Mediterraneanist anthropology. The essay concludes by outlining the sort of theoretical complexity that Mediterraneanist anthropology has articulated. Acknowledging this complexity should urge us to reconsider anthropologists’ aversion to the regional scales of analysis. It will also provide us with a recipe for scaling up our own tools to match the transnational complexity of the projects and processes that demand our scholarly attention.
Introduction
The communities of the Mediterranean possess both more similarities between different countries and more diversities within their national frontiers than the tenets of modern nationalism would have us believe (Pitt-Rivers 1963a: 9-10).
Is there one Mediterranean or are there many? Should we follow those among its travellers and ethnographers who claim that they have found cultural traits that unite the sea’s shores into a ‘cultural area’, or should we instead limit our understanding of the sea’s unity to geographical characteristics? How should we treat any similarities we might find across space and time? Should we consider them as proof of the sea’s existence as an empirical entity? Or should we alternatively treat them as reasons to use the sea as a conceptual gadfly to our landlocked, unity-miring anthropological imaginations? More broadly