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Practical Mediterraneanism 49
own engagements and to embed the regional in wider forms of
comparison.
Otherwise, in the rather limited version proposed by Davis, a
perfectly reasonable exercise turns into a circular argument.
Intermediate comparisons of this type have a tactical rather
than a substantive advantage. Inasmuch as they may reveal differences
within a framework of undeniable contiguity rather than
of pre-emptively conceived similarity, I am all in favour. Greece
and Italy, for example, while sharing the mantle of the classical
past, are radically and starkly different in important respects:
while in Italy all cultural roads appear to lead away from Rome, a
city viewed by other Italians as a provincial place where people
speak an ugly dialect, and while nevertheless national policy
recognizes local variation everywhere including the capital, in
Greece Athens remains the object of passionate ‘city mania’
(astifilia) and is the cultural capital of a self-homogenizing polity,
a lone European Union member state in the extent of its footdragging
on the principle of minority self-determination.
Let me explicate this point a little further. Greece and Italy
are contiguous and have long and at many levels experienced the
phenomenon that produced what Horden and Purcell, 9 perhaps
rather too sociomorphically, call the ‘interactionism’ of some
earlier (and indeed ancient) writers. The question that interests
me is why, in two countries that are so manifestly different from
each other but have ‘interacted’ so intensively and extensively,
we so often find the same images of ‘the Mediterranean’. Can we
link the respectively different uses of such stereotypes to the
structural and institutional differences between the two countries?
If so, can we also, by analogy, extend the same mode of
analysis to all those countries where a significant segment of the
populations invests time and effort in claiming a Mediterranean
identity? Such a project, I suggest, would have enormous heuristic
value for understanding the current international politics of
taste and might, again by analogy, shed some light on modern
scholars’ use of the label ‘Mediterranean’ for describing past
societies as well. It is a concern that would not necessarily
prove incompatible with the ‘ecological’ interests of Horden
and Purcell or with the more generically materialist ones of
9 CS 12.