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Practical Mediterraneanism 47
richness, Lederman—who also acknowledges the Mediterranean/Melanesian
epistemological parallel—argues for the importance
of the Melanesianist tradition as an ideal test case for
examining ‘situated disciplinary discourses’. 3 She thus brings
the role of anthropologists themselves into critical view, showing
how their mutual neighbourliness (both geographic and intellectual)
can generate comparative and critical insights that can then
be further projected into more global comparisons. Such comparisons
will also then inevitably include the role of anthropologists
and those whose thinking has been affected by these
scholars as data relevant, not so much to mere disciplinary introspection,
as to an active inspection of the engagement of theory
with the political realities of a world in which epiphenomenal
globalization may mask persistent cultural specificity. 4
My intention is not to argue—as some believe I have done in
the past—for a dismantling of the category. I have never
claimed that the Mediterranean did not exist; indeed, like
facts themselves, such culture-area categories have an existence
by virtue of being articulated, and this is the key point to which
I address my remarks. To say that the Mediterranean ‘does not
exist’ is as silly as to argue that facts themselves ‘do not exist’.
They exist in the sense that they are representations of something
experienced in the phenomenal world. 5 Thus, too, the
Mediterranean has impinged on many forms of consciousness,
of which the academic may be a paltry reflection but is a reflection
nevertheless. Thus, to deny its existence is as obtuse as to
treat it as an obvious fact that needs no further comment. These
apparent ontological truisms become interesting—but then
they become extremely interesting—when we ask who makes
them and why. They serve as a point of entry into a politics of
knowledge that includes in its purview the constitution of what
we are pleased to call ‘the West’.
3 Ibid. 442.
4 See, for example, James L. Watson, ‘Introduction: Transnationalism,
Localization, and Fast Foods in East Asia’, in J. L. Watson (ed.), Golden
Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia (Stanford, 1997), 1–38.
5 See the argument I have made on similar grounds, derived substantially
from Vico, to the effect that, inasmuch as facts are constructions of reality,
they have the same ontological status as other perceived realities (M. Herzfeld,
‘Factual Fissures: Claims and Contexts’, Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 560 (1998), 69–82).