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62 Practical Mediterraneanism
exercise such fascination over many who could reasonably be
seen as its victims.
It is when such attributions begin rather obviously to look
like excuses that we see most clearly how this dynamic works.
For it is in trying to ‘explain away’ certain features that in the
global hierarchy of taste have become generically undesirable
that Mediterrnean dwellers reveal how they perceive both the
real contours of that hierarchy and their own position within it.
That is why their evocation of self-stereotypes, empowering
though they may seem to be in an immediately contingent
sense, ultimately achieve the opposite effect. They reveal expectations—the
basis of that very concern with ‘honour’ that
has been so fundamental to the Mediterraneanist project 40 —
that give massive play to the dynamics of humiliation. To say
that Mediterranean life must be spontaneous because nothing is
predictable, for example, may recognize the ecological realities
that Horden and Purcell have emphasized, but it is also to yield,
at the level of everyday life and in terms of its practical essentialisms,
to an ecological determinism that turns part of the early
scholarly literature into a formidable weapon of present-day
Realpolitik. To accept the self-image of cultures tainted by a
‘corrupting sea’ is to play into the hands of a ‘new world
order’—with its distinctive hierarchy of purity and pollution—that
was already old before George Bush père claimed
the term.
This is not to suggest, of course, that scholars who have
promoted the idea of a Mediterranean area, defined by a
common and distinctive history, deliberately endorse that
seedy cosmology. To the contrary, their efforts today, like
mine, appear to me more directed toward acknowledging what
(in the somewhat rebarbative terminology of an older style of
anthropological writing) we would recognize as an ‘emic’ perspective—the
perspective of local social actors trying to make
sense of an environment in which they are often chastised for
the very characteristics that have also allowed more powerful
40 See Michael Herzfeld, ‘Honour and Shame: Some Problems in the
Comparative Analysis of Moral Systems’, Man (ns) 15 (1980), 339–51. For
an extended discussion of the dynamics of the global hierarchy of taste and
value, see Michael Herzfeld, The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the
Global Hierarchy of Value (Chicago, 2004).