“The Mediterranean: a Wall” Comment on Lidia Dina Sciama’s paper “The Mediterranean: Topos or Mirage?”

Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2013

ISSN: 1016-3476

Vol. 22, No. 2: 245–251

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‘THE MEDITERRANEAN: A WALL’ COMMENT ON LIDIA DINA SCIAMA’S PAPER ‘THE MEDITERRANEAN: TOPOS OR MIRAGE?’

JOÃO

DE

PINA-CABRAL

University of Kent

This paper is a comment on Lidia Sciama’s essay where she asks herself about the continued relevance of the Mediterranean Paradigm—here defined as an approach that assumes that ‘uniform culture areas’ are the basic object of ethnographic and sociohistoric description and comparison and proceeds to define the Mediterranean culture area by the occurrence of a supposed ‘honour and shame syndrome’. This paper makes three central points: (a) we must achieve a better understanding of the history and theoretical background of the mid-twentieth century British Mediteårraneanist school, (b) we have to shed methodological nationalism in European ethnography and develop a more sophisticated approach towards sociocultural comparison, and (c) we have to stop pretending that we have not noticed that the Mediterranean Sea has become a major battleground for one of the most bloody and tragic struggles in our contemporary world (the right to be paid a decent wage for one’s work).

If even ‘amoral familism’ has been revisited, why not the ‘Mediterranean syndrome of honour and shame’? It is surely a matter of interest that topics of anthropological debate have a way of returning after having lain dormant for a long time. Sometimes we are fortunate, and this is the result of new data having emerged or of new theories having been developed; some other times, unfortunately, it is nothing more than people’s preference for simple, shortcut solutions when faced with complex problems. We must be grateful to Lidia Sciama, therefore, for calling our attention to the fact that the issue of the ‘Mediterranean culture area’ is not dead, as many of us had hoped it would be. Lidia does a very good job in her paper of identifying what are the principal characteristics of the position that we oppose. For the sake of the present debate, I will call this position the Mediterranean Paradigm (thenceforward MP). This is an approach based Copyright © 2013 Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta.

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on two essential tenets: firstly, MP assumes that “uniform culture areas” are the basic object of ethnographic and socio-historic description and comparison; secondly, MP defines the Mediterranean culture area by the occurrence of a supposed ‘honour and shame syndrome’. In the light of the sorry experience of earlier arguments (Pina-Cabral 1991a), it is probably necessary to set three disclaimers immediately at the start: firstly, differences in ‘culture’ (what I would rather call sociocultural differentiation) do exist, they are often spatially determinable and they have a way of surviving in the longue durée; secondly, the Mediterranean exists—the sea is there, the history of cooperation, conflict and intellectual contact that it both hindered and facilitated is undeniable and to think of the history of Europe without placing it in the context of Mediterranean history would be absurd; and thirdly, ‘cultures’ do constitute contexts where modes of personal self-evaluation are geared in particular determinable directions. In her paper, Lidia reports in consternation that MP is not dead after all and, in her characteristically gentle manner, she reminds us of why it remains a deeply flawed approach. As she points out, the origin of the ‘honour and shame syndrome’ is usually imputed to the Oxford Mediterraneanists of the 1950s and 1960s—people such as Julian PittRivers, John Peristiany, and John K. Campbell. This observation, however, brings with itself a curious misunderstanding that needs to be examined. When people who worked closely with Campbell, like myself or Michael Herzfeld, argued against MP in the late 1980s,1 both Pitt-Rivers and Campbell were alive and they shared our misgivings. Curiously, in 1986, Peter Loizos and myself were attacked in the pages of Critique of Anthropology by Josep Llobera who, having failed to hear us out, assumed a little too rashly that we were supporters of MP (Loizos 1987, Pina-Cabral 1987). One of the reasons why John Campbell and myself felt the need to edit the collected volume Europe Observed (1992) was precisely because we realized that all sorts of mistaken assumptions were at play that needed correcting. In 1952, when Pitt-Rivers and Franz Baermann Steiner first concocted the notion of ‘honour and shame’ (cf. Steiner 1999, vol. 2) and, shortly after, when Campbell used it in Honour, Family, and Patronage (1964), it was never a culturalist perspective based on a Murdockian concept of ‘culture area’ that was at stake. This only came later in the work of the American Mediterraneanists (people like Jane Schneider 1971). Even a person like John Davis, who chose to surf that wave in the 1970s, never fully endorsed the notion of ‘culture area’ and that is one of the reasons why his People of the Mediterranean (1977) is theoretically such an equivocal statement.

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The hope behind Oxford Mediterraneanism in the early 1950s was to be able to combine British anthropology’s ‘empiricist tradition’ (Evans-Pritchard’s favoured label, cf. Mary Douglas 1981) with a hermeneutical, historicist inspiration. Never forget that this was the time when Oxford anthropology had turned away from a scientivistic Durkheimian approach and was trying to develop a historicist, interpretivist approach under the philosophical inspiration of R. G. Collingwood (Evans-Pritchard 1962 [1950] and 1963). At the same time, Franz Baermann Steiner was lecturing his Oxford students on Simmel and we now know that his inspiration is behind some of the central concepts that structured anthropological theory in the second half of the twentieth century (Dumont’s ‘hierarchy’, Douglas’ ‘purity’, Bohannan’s ‘value’, among others). Weirdly enough, this theoretical history was not immediately apparent to those of us who argued against MP in the late 1980s (cf. Pina-Cabral 2009). The realization only slowly dawned on us after Richard Fardon published the work of Steiner, Pitt-Rivers’ supervisor, who actually visited him in the field in southern Spain (see Figure 15 in Steiner 1999, vol. 2). There were two main reasons for this: firstly, Steiner’s sudden death two years before his disciple published The People of the Sierra (1954); secondly, EvansPritchard’s empiricist preference for hiding the theoretical inspirations of ethnographic descriptions. As Pitt-Rivers rather dejectedly confesses in the preface to the second edition of his monograph (1971), the absence of any reference to the inspiration of verstehen sociology in his work is due to Evans-Pritchard’s direct intervention. As it turns out, Evans-Pritchard’s own hermeneutic inspiration was not German but rather the endogenous interpretivist historicism of Collingwood (1994 [1936]), whom he favoured since his Oxford days, when he had studied the anthropology of religion with Marrett. In fact, this partly explains my dissatisfaction with people’s response to my widely read paper criticizing the Mediterraneanist status quo published in Current Anthropology (1989). The central focus of that paper was an argument criticizing the approach to sociocultural differentiation that emerged from the old primitivist mode of identifying the units of anthropological analysis—today, I imagine, we would call my position an attack on sociocentrism. As ethnographers moved into modern contexts, the ‘tribes’ of the classical authors (the Tsonga, the Nuer, the Bororo, etc.) were morphed either into ‘ethnic/religious groups’ (the Muslims of. . . , the Negros of. . . , the Chinese of . . .) or nationally branded settlements (‘the Greek village’, ‘a Portuguese town’, ‘a French commune’, etc.). Thus, instead of developing a model for dealing with superimposing, historically complex processes of sociocultural differentiation, leading to

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continuities and discontinuities in time and space that could not be easily encapsulated into a single national or ethnic label, ethnographic comparison in the study of Europe was carried out along national borders and taking recourse to territorially defined administrative units. Worse still, for reasons that were clearly political, the long-term cultural continuity of the Roman Catholic heritage was disguised by concepts such as Mediterranean unity that split off the poor European south from the rich European north. Concepts such as ‘amoral familism’ or ‘honour and shame’ were instruments in the ideological validation of that distinction by rooting it in the assumed psychological characteristics of the persons studied. My own fieldwork in Northern Portugal (1986) placed me in a rather awkward position. All of my anthropological colleagues automatically assumed that, since I studied Portugal, I had to be a Mediterraneanist. But, in fact, the ethnographic material I had to deal with from Minho was worlds away from Pisticci or Grazalema. It was far more comparable to Brittany, to Ireland, or the Shetland Islands—basically the regions that Edwin Ardener’s students at the time called ‘the Celtic Fringe’. My insistence on explaining this was met with generalised suspicion. In turn, my arguments against the Culture Area school were interpreted as an ideological rejection of Portugal’s supposed Northern African heritage.2 My subsequent efforts at demonstrating how one might undertake a theoretically richer mode of studying sociocultural differentiation in southern Europe remained largely unread outside a small circle of Portuguese-speaking colleagues (cf. 1989, 1991a, 1991b, 1992). Those who are in the grips of a politics of identity have little patience for complicated arguments concerning historically layered differentiation. As Eugen Hammel complained three decades ago (1984), anthropologists continue to work in the ‘one village, one vote’ mode of comparison and, aside from that, they continue to take recourse to politically overloaded national or ethnic categories as a way of placing their fieldwork comparatively. This is what comes of the Culture Area approach. It is enough to consult the bibliographies of English-speaking or French-speaking Europeanist monographs to realize that the authors’ universe of comparison seldom crosses over the borders of the nation-state where their study is set; this, in spite of the fact that the borders of Greece, Portugal, Spain, or France can hardly be treated as meaningful boundaries of sociocultural differentiation. In fact, this is not a specifically Europeanist phenomenon. Both in Africa and in the Amazonian lowlands the calls for comparative studies of sociocultural differentiation by people like Gluckman or Maybury-Lewis have also largely been forgotten in favour of what one might call a ‘one tribe, one vote’ comparativism.

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There is, however, an aspect of the Mediterranean as it is lived today that Lidia Sciama’s paper does not touch upon and that I would like briefly to highlight. This sea, which looks like a flat horizontal mirror, has become one of the world’s highest walls, on a par with the Mexican wall and in continuity with the Palestianian wall. In the face of the horrors taking place daily in the sea off the Canaries, in Ceuta, in Lampedusa and in Gaza and the West Bank, the verticality of the Mediterranean can hardly be exaggerated. MP’s romantic emphasis on the Mediterranean as a space of sharing and identification is little more than a vapid dream with a very sordid awakening. On the northern side of the wall, the populations of southern Europe, menaced by a sharp reduction in salaries and generalised unemployment, see the migrant populations from the south banging at their gates as a menace to the little that they have managed to retain from what was going to be an economically and democratically unified Europe. Since 2008, the financial war led by Germany in the name of the interests of international capital has left the states of southern Europe in a sorry situation from which there is no immediate exit in sight: civil servants are again being underpaid and having to make do as well as they can by all sorts of other means, universities are again underfunded and professors hold onto their jobs as if there were no tomorrow, families are again menaced by the withering into nothing of retirement pensions, infrastructures are again starting to be left to ruin, public health and dire poverty are no longer a matter of anyone’s concern. The savings that the families had managed to accumulate in the past decades of growth are being sapped at a fast rate by unemployment, increased taxation, and the outrageous rise in the cost of living. In short, the old divisions between the north and south are being reinstalled in Europe and soon Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece will look again very ‘Mediterranean’. But on the southern side of the sea, the Egyptians, the Tunisians, the Algerians, the Moroccans, see their hopes of living in a modern, democratic state with a prosperous liberal economy increasingly unlikely to be realized. From their perspective, the Mediterranean still exists and they too would love to look less ‘Mediterranean’. The reactive response of adhering to a war-like Islam might seem to some for a brief moment to be a way of correcting the evils of social inequality whilst dispensing with the need to become wealthier. Unfortunately, Middle-Eastern oil subsidizes wars, but it does not seem to be willing to subsidize peace. Soon, therefore, as the Syrian destruction progresses that dream too will wilt, as the Egyptian and Turkish public opinions have already visibly understood. In short, to revive MP does not seem to be really worthwhile. Rather, we should start making a thorough effort to rethink (a) the simplistic mode in

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which most anthropologists carry out ethnographic contextualization and comparison and (b) the political implications of pretending that we do not see how, in the northern shores of this sea, Europe is being divided and how, in its southern shores, people are being prevented from achieving the prosperity and political maturity that they deserve. Notes 1. The issue first emerged in the lively polemics at the workshop on ‘European Ethnography’ organized by myself and John Campbell at the 1986 European Congress for Rural Sociology held in Braga (Portugal), out of which came Herzfeld 1987 and Pina-Cabral 1989. 2. This was typified to me by a sharply acerbic remark by Sydel Silverman concerning my Current Anthropology paper when we first met at the founding meeting of what would turn out to be EASA in Castelgandolfo (Italy) in 1989.

References Campbell, John K. 1964. Honour, Family, and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Collingwood, R. G. (1936) 1994. Human Nature and Human History. In The Idea of History, (Rev. ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 205–231. Davis, John 1977. People of the Mediterranean. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Douglas, Mary 1981. Edward Evans-Pritchard. New York, Penguin Books. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1950) 1962. Social anthropology: Past and Present. In Essays in Social Anthropology. London, Fabian and Fabian, 13–28. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1963. The comparative method in social anthropology. London, Athlone Press. Hammel, Eugene 1984. On the *** of investigating household form and function. In Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group, (eds) R. M. Netting, R. R. Wilk & E. J. Arnould, Berkeley: University of California Press, 29–43. Herzfeld, Michael 1987. ‘As in your own house’: Hospitality, ethnography, and the stereotype of Mediterranean society. In Honor and shame and the unity of the Mediterranean”, (ed.) David D. Gilmore, Washington, D.C., American Anthropological Association, 75–89. Loizos, Peter 1987. In reply to Llobera. Critique of Anthropology 7(1): 92–96. Pina-Cabral, João de 1986. Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: The Peasant Worldview of the Alto Minho (NW Portugal). Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— 1987. Anthopology and Fieldwork. Responses do Llobera (Part Two), Critique of Anthropology 7(2): 93–97. —— 1989a. The Mediterranean as a category of regional comparison: a critical approach. Current Anthropology 30(3): 399–406.

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—— 1989b. L’Héritage de Maine: L’érosion des categories d’analyse dans l’étude des phénomènes familiaux en Europe. Ethnologie Française 19: 329–340. —— 1991a. On the supposed irreconcilability of psychological and sociological explanations. Current Anthropology 32(3): 1991, 331–332. —— 1991b. Os contextos da antropologia. Lisboa, Difel. —— 1991c. The category of the Mediterranean and comparative categories. Journal of Mediterranean Studies 1(2): 313. —— 1992. The primary social unit in Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe. Journal of Mediterranean Studies 2(1): 25–41. —— 2009. Observing Europe with John Campbell: a late view on the Mediterranean tradition. JASO n.s. 1(2): 66–73. Pina-Cabral, João & J. K. Campbell (eds) 1992. Europe Observed. Oxford, Macmillan/ St. Antony’s, 202 pages. Pitt-Rivers, Julian A. 1954. The People of the Sierra. Introd. by E. E. Evans-Pritchard. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson. —— 1971. The People of the Sierra. Chicago, Chicago University Press. Schneider, Jane 1971. Of vigilance and virgins: Honor, shame and access to resources in Mediterranean societies. Ethnology 10: 1–24. Steiner, Franz Baermann 1999. Selected Writings, two vols. (eds) Richard Fardon & J. Adler. Oxford and New York: Berghahn.

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