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46 Practical Mediterraneanism
respect due to a research object even if we continue to harbour
doubts about its utility as analytic tool. Indeed, its methodological
utility is reduced to the same degree that this exponentially
intensifying self-stereotype interests us as a cultural and
political phenomenon. Epistemology is at the heart of the matter.
For the idea that the Mediterranean is more interesting as a local
category than as an analytic tool is hardly novel any more. What
I find extraordinary, then, is the curious circumstance that, in an
age in which just about every other category has been deconstructed
or reconstructed, or at least has self-destructed, ‘the’
Mediterranean has shown a remarkable tenacity in the face of a
barrage of critiques—indeed, that barrage has at times seemed
simply to confirm its general importance. And that, in my view, is
a thoroughly weighty reason for taking it seriously.
I shall take my lead here from two highly significant studies,
one an enormous and encyclopedic review of the Mediterranean
itself, the other a brief but suggestive overview of a very distant
but surprisingly analogous area. The weighty tome is Horden
and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea. I am impressed by the seriousness
with which these authors have broached their complex
field as well as the generosity with which they treat the ideas of
those, including myself, with whom they disagree on key issues.
More substantively, I find some surprising common ground in
our divergent positions, and would like to reciprocate their
engagement here.
2. comparing the comparisons: power,
authority, and classification
The physically lighter (but intellectually no less interesting)
work is Rena Lederman’s essay, ‘Globalization and the Future
of Culture Areas’. 2 This position paper is an overview of the
current status of Melanesianist writings in modern anthropology.
Much as anthropologists have had to wrestle with the exoticism
of much of the earlier Mediterraneanist writing, while
recognizing its very substantial ethnographic and comparative
2 Rena Lederman, ‘Globalization and the Future of Culture Areas: Melanesian
Anthropology in Transition’, Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998),
427–49.