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56 Practical Mediterraneanism
the Holocaust on the grounds that these were urban people who
consequently would be incapable of filling the country’s need
for agricultural labour—a need that in fact had already been met
to excess. 31 (The fundamental selectivity of such characterizations
was also demonstrated, ironically, both by the new Israelis’
eager and dramatically effective embrace of agriculture
and by their subsequent refusal to acknowledge long Palestinian
engagement in the same activity on the same land.) And yet, as
Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City has made us
particularly aware, the term ‘culture’ is itself entailed—dare I
say ‘rooted’?—in the practices of agriculture, a metaphor that
is reproduced in academics’ models of ‘the field’. The town–
country duality is tense with historically embedded ambiguities,
and these reflect both the existing cultural evaluations to be
found all around the Mediterranean and beyond, and the discontents
of civilization that afflict countries claiming Mediterranean
sources for their own hegemonic models of high culture.
In Greece today, the notion of culture has bifurcated; in
partial contrast with the neoclassical politismos, the more ironic
and self-mocking model of a cosmopolitan koultoura marks the
Greek intelligentsia’s engagement with an international economy
of taste. Koultouriaridhes, culture vultures, are often those
who today most disdainfully reject the neoclassical in favour of
the folkloristic and the Byzantine—concessions, respectively, to
an international trade in picturesqueness and a religiously neo-
Orthodox desire to return to pre-Cartesian ontologies in
roughly equal measure. 32 Those Mediterranean origins of
Western civilization are now transposed from the neoclassical
to a reworking of the noble savage and the oriental mystic. Zen
Buddhism and yoga seem to thrive in Athens almost as luxuriantly
as neo-Orthodoxy and the revival of folk systems of belief
and practice as well as the creation of a traditionalist Greek
nouvelle cuisine.
Doubtless it is no coincidence that this phenomenon has
occurred at the same time as Greece has begun to shift from
31 Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None Is Too Many: Canada and the
Jews of Europe 1933–1948 (Toronto, 1982), 54–5.
32 On the latter, see Chrestos Giannaras (Yannaras), ˇæŁïäïîßÆ ŒÆØ ˜ýóç óôç
˝åüôåæç ¯ººÜäÆ (Athens, 1992).