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Practical Mediterraneanism 53
Iberian (and so Mediterranean?) in origin, 19 we could hardly
subsume all of the Indian subcontinent under a Mediterranean
rubric unless we were to grant the Moghuls a more sweeping or
durable cultural hegemony than even their own chroniclers
claimed for them, 20 or unless we are to surpass Greek nationalists
in attributing the entire gamut of Indian culture to Alexander
of Macedon.
What initially seems paradoxical is the consistency with
which the stereotype appears within the area itself. From Morocco
to Turkey, from Thessaloniki to Toulouse, we hear more
or less the same list of traits that supposedly characterize Mediterranean
peoples. As an anthropologist, I am less interested in
arguing about the truth or falsehood of these characterizations
than in examining the play that local social actors give them in
everyday encounters. 21 Indeed, my complaint is precisely that
anthropologists and others who are shy of seeming to embrace
stereotypes have sometimes been dangerously reluctant to
tackle them analytically as an ethnographic phenomenon, as a
speech act that can be tracked across a wide array of social
contexts and historical periods, and as both the instrument
and the expression of power in a struggle to determine the
global hierarchy of value. In an age in which globalization has
become a popular theme of conversation and analysis, moreover,
it is precisely this globalization of the regional that ought
to command our attention. Who stands to gain from it?
We can best begin by trying to define the stereotype. Honour
and shame form the underlying binary here, at least as far as the
anthropological literature is concerned. 22 In passing, I would
simply remark that I have not so much opposed recognizing the
ideas that have been glossed as ‘honour and shame’ as I have
19
See Paul H. Gelles, ‘Equilibrium and Extraction: Dual Organization in
the Andes’, American Ethnologist 22 (1995), 710–42.
20
This is the move that Carroll Quigley (‘Mexican National Character and
Circum-Mediterranean Personality Structure’, American Anthropologist 75
(1973), 319–22) notoriously did for Mexico, linking such generic stereotypes
very clearly to the equally reductive notion of ‘national character’; cf. James
W. Fernandez, ‘Consciousness and Class in Southern Spain’, American Ethnologist
10 (1983), 165–73, for a critique.
21
Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy 156–64.
22
J. G. Peristiany (ed.), Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean
Society (London, 1965).