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60 Practical Mediterraneanism
Roman wishes to justify a furious reaction, this, too, is ‘Mediterranean’.
Being ‘Mediterranean’, however changeable its semantic
load, is also not without a heavy load of entailments. For those
powers for which the Mediterranean has traditionally been the
zone of terrorist states, the mafia, and ‘amoral familism’, 37 all
of these characteristics interlinked as the basis of a vicarious
fatalism, the two elements of aggressive touchiness and indolent
non-involvement are ‘proof’ of supposedly innate characteristics
that justify paternalistic and oppressive responses. That
such characterizations are an unfortunate but common feature
of the present-day geopolitical landscape is sometimes a hard
point to get across. When I recently taught a large undergraduate
course on ‘Cultures of Southern Europe’, several students
accused me of endorsing crude stereotypes—because, apparently,
they had missed the point that these stereotypes exist
‘on the ground’ as well as in the earlier scholarly literature and
that an honest empirical appraisal could hardly leave them out.
There is a useful object lesson here, and it concerns the pragmatics
of stereotyping itself—an activity that does not admit
much irony or humour.
Mediterranean stereotypes are not always, or automatically,
demeaning. For the more powerful nation-states that today at
times claim a Mediterrnanean identity—France among them—
historical rights to the mainstream of European history are what
is more likely to be emphasized. But note that this is the first
mention of France in this essay. Is France, which after all has an
extensive Mediterranean coast, ever mentioned in the classic
anthologies of Mediterranean ethnography? Portugal, with a
far weaker geographical claim, appears much more often.
Here I suspect that we are dealing with political hierarchy
again: France, while geographically Mediterranean, belongs to
a different category of countries—imperial, northern, universalist,
and rationalist, a country that—unlike Portugal, Spain,
Greece, and sometimes Italy—does not generate ‘ethnic food’
in North America but is instead the authoritative source of
haute cuisine.
37 This phrase gained considerable notoriety after its proclamation by E. C.
Banfield in The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, Ill., 1958).