Anthropology of the Mediterranean Area

Anthropology in the Mediterranean area is nothing new; some of the earliest ethnographies took place there (34, 175). But an anthropology of the Mediterranean area (23, 48) which includes both Christian and Muslim sides is both new and controversial. One reason for this development is the recent upsurge in south European ethnography. Favoring the most mar­ ginal areas of the south, Europeanists have gradually become aware of many affinities between their peoples and those of North Africa and the Levant. These resemblances start with environment but include many issues of life (88, p. 10): male-female relations, community orientations, patron­ client dependencies, and, more recently, a supposedly similar peripheral relationship to the core of industrial Europe. A Pan-Mediterranean focus in anthropology goes back to Redfield's observations in the 1950s about the anomalies of Mediterranean peasant personality (147, p. 66). Shortly afterwards, Julian Pitt-Rivers and Jean Peristiany organized a number of symposia to explore the question of Mediterranean distinctiveness. This collaboration gave rise to a number of collections. Some of these had a unifying theme like honor and shame (13 1), while others lacked any connection other than geography (1 321 34, 14 1). In the late 1960s, Wolf ( 180) and Gellner (73) compared society and religious symbolism in Latin Europe and the Muslim Middle East. But their coruscations did not ignite much commentary at the time. In 1971 , Jane Schneider published a theoretical paper on the origins of the Pan-Mediter­ ranean honor-shame complex (156). Her paper was important because it was the first to demarcate a continuum of material variables which hypo­ thetically constituted the basis of Mediterranean unity.