Untitled - UTSC Humanities Research Projects server - University of ...

Practical Mediterraneanism 55
of ‘open’ (morally suspect) and ‘closed’ (morally safe) space, 25
are common, and reproduce the deliberate architectonics of
concealment characteristic of many rural societies in the
region. 26 In Muslim countries, the veil and the latticed balcony
afford greater protection in large public spaces, but are often
less frequently observed in cities than in the countryside. The
dialectics of openness and closure are heavily gendered; they are
also associated with the control of personal information—
indeed, in Greece the literature clearly indicates a parallel between
sexual and other forms of moral continence on the one
hand and the regulation of gossip and demeanour on the other.
It is interesting to note Horden and Purcell’s adoption of the
‘Corrupting Sea’ label in this context, 27 for clearly the Mediterranean
was especially significant inasmuch as it appeared to
dissolve the firm boundaries of a lost golden age. All classification
systems, including bureaucracies, treat poorly defined entities
as polluting or corrupt; 28 and so it was with ‘the
Mediterranean’. And it is also relevant that ‘corruption’ is
associated in popular images in the First World with the idea
of a ‘typically’ Mediterranean society.
Thus, while urbanity might provide a model for a powerful
culture, it also provided a speculative account of its eventual
ruin. This is an old theme, and not only in the Mediterranean. 29
Nazi hatred of the Jews, in particular, was argued partly on the
basis that the Jews’ allegedly urban proclivities—deriving from
that same Mediterranean Sea where the Nazis also claimed
ancestry from Hellas—were ipso facto corrupt and polluting. 30
It is a sad confirmation of such ideas that we soon find an
elected Canadian government rejecting Jewish refugees from
25
See, e.g. Renée Hirschon, ‘Open Body/Closed Space: The Transformation
of Female Sexuality’, in Shirley Ardener (ed.), Defining Females
(London, 1978), 66–88.
26
e.g., Ernestine Friedl, Vasilika: A Village in Modern Greece (New York,
1962), 14.
27
CS 278.
28
Here I am invoking a notion that has been taken as virtually a commonplace
ever since the publication of Mary Douglas’s magisterial Purity and
Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Purity and Taboo (London, 1966).
29
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973).
30
George L. Mosse, Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern
Europe (New York, 1985).