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50 Practical Mediterraneanism
Davis, but it offers the added advantage of providing a factual,
historical, and political framework for taking seriously what
people in the area itself have had to say about these matters.
Indeed, I suggest, it would ground the study of regional culture
and society more, not less, empirically.
I have said that the Mediterranean category is an example of
the larger representational category known as ‘fact’, but I would
like to qualify that remark by suggesting that factuality itself is
always a constitutive act. Claims that the Mediterranean ‘exists’
are performative in Austin’s sense; 10 they do not so much enunciate
facts as create them. Our task is then to determine what
conditions make these utterances persuasive as statements of
fact. My first suggestion is thus that we treat attributions of
Mediterranean culture, not as literal statements, however literally
they may be intended (and it is not for us to attribute motives
to colleagues any more than we would to those whose cultures we
have been studying), but as performative utterances that can,
under the right ‘felicity conditions’, actually create the realities
that people perceive. This is a crucial move: it allows us to see
claims of Mediterranean unity as a number of things: excuses
expressive of, and enmeshed in, a global hierarchy of value in
which ‘Mediterranean’ comes somewhere between ‘modern’
and ‘primitive’; 11 political moves aiming to unify weaker countries
behind a strong regional leader such as France; the rhetorical
moves of publicity campaigns designed to exploit
lingering exoticism among consumers or awaken their mystical
leanings toward new diet fads; 12 and scholarly classifications
shoring up the boundaries of existing disciplines or, more
kindly, for defining new alliances and agglomerations capable
of generating novel and interesting heuristic options (which is
where I would locate Horden and Purcell’s impressive tome). It
also allows us finally to get away from the tiresome ontological
debate and to focus instead on issues of power and hierarchy.
10 J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, 2nd edn. ed. J. O. Urmson
and M. Sbisà (Cambridge, Mass., 1975) (1962).
11 Davis, People of the Mediterranean 7. And see also n. 26 below.
12 See now Vassiliki Yiakoumaki, ‘‘‘The Nation as Acquired Taste’’: On
Greekness, Consumption of Food Heritage, and the Making of the New
Europe’ (Ph.D. diss., Department of Anthropology, The New School University,
New York, 2002).