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Mediterranean Reception in the Americas 295
even when the information is stored in recessive genes. This
cultural information, however, is transmitted not only through
genealogical chains, relating to the ancestry of places, names,
institutions, and behaviour; but also through historical lineages
and continuities, including the macrohistory of peoples and
nations, as well as the microhistory of individuals, villages,
and landscapes. There are also cases of constructed filiations:
cases where we perceive the driving force of a wish for méditerranéité,
an option for a root, model, or source localized in that
central reserve of meanings, the Mediterranean. As these wishes
are strong enough to drive larger ideological projects, with their
cultural, scientific and political consequences, the imaginary
genealogies gain the status of another course of tradition.
When, therefore, I talk about Mediterranean reception, I am
focusing on the study of the established connections between
different historical contexts, somehow approached by the
movement of a modern perception. In this study of the transmission
of classical and Mediterranean culture, I will stress the
role of the receiver in the making of tradition, and the semiological
features involved in these transactions of meanings. In
the study of contexts and procedures of reception, we will have
to omit the question of whether there was a serious historical
affiliation, for what really matters is perceiving the great set of
intentions that have presided over the movements towards the
Mediterranean tradition, and the ways these movements drove
forward the presence of Mediterranean references, shaping
pragmatic and long-term social projects, with their corresponding
institutions and iconographies. As a two-way path, this
process shows a flux of meaning, connecting past and present,
local and distant, intentional and casual, connecting also history
and fiction, science and fantasy.
Considering the role of the interpreter in the cooperative act
of reading permits us to understand the conditions in which
images from the past can acquire new life, assuming active
functions in the present, within modern fabrics of sense and
meaning. As the different trends in the theory of reception have
exhaustively shown, 1 the act of reading is much more than an
1 Cf. R. C. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York,
1984). Cf. also Umberto Eco, Lector in Fabula: la cooperazione interpretativa