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Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for
Everything, from Epistemology to Eating
Michael Herzfeld
1. on the ontological persistence of
ashrinkingsea
At the beginning of a new century, I confess to a feeling of
astonishment that we are still talking about the utility, or otherwise,
of the concept of ‘the’ Mediterranean. I do not mean that I
am astonished to find that the Mediterranean Sea is still there,
although the ecological mess we seem to be making of the planet
might give one pause before accepting even this apparently
simple certainty (and certainly the fish that were once a defining
feature of the diet to which it has given its name appear to be
getting ever scarcer and more expensive). Indeed, if Horden
and Purcell are right to see a nexus of ‘environmental opportunism’
and ‘frequency of change’ as what constitutes the basis
for acknowledging some degree of systemic and chronologically
deep distinctiveness in the region, 1 these latest vicissitudes
would seem to offer a magnificent test from which their thesis
may well emerge in good order even if the place itself does not.
Nor do I mean that I am astonished to find anthropologists and
historians recognizing common cultural characteristics in the
countries bordering this shrinking sea; with not only that physical
shrinkage but with the conceptual shrinkage of the world into
a ‘smaller place’ widely attributed to new technologies of communication,
the people of the relevant countries are themselves
apt to encourage precisely such sweeping essentializing of ‘their’
cultural area, and this, as I shall argue below, constitutes an
important reason for treating the idea of regional unity with the
1 CS 67, 74, 80.