ABSTRACT
I think all the contributors to this volume would agree that the theoretical thread that has linked Mediterranean studies for much of the twentieth century is now in pressing need of revision. Regardless of the problems still remaining over the concept of the Mediterranean itself, for much of this period the idea has been accepted that academic specialisation should continue to focus on constituent regions, each defined by historical and cultural singularity, and the encounters and interactions between them. What the editors in the Introduction describe, quoting Cherry (2004), as hyper-specialisation in the study of regions has been to the detriment of examining flows and movements of peoples and things except in the language of encounter between fixed localities or regions. ˆe editors have described this as the ‘fundamental paradox’ that ‘while islands in general serve as essentialising metaphors for isolation (e.g. Kirch 1986; Rainbird 1999), in the Mediterranean they are more often than not interconnected through much broader social, cultural and politico-economic interaction spheres’ (this volume: p. 10). While the isolationist language of ‘cultures’ and ‘peoples’ has been avoided for some time in archaeology, words such as ‘identity’, ‘locality’ or ‘ethnicity’ have been substituted instead, without perhaps a significant development in conceptualisation or empirical investigation. It would be widely acknowledged in archaeology that since the impact of Frederik
Barth (1969) on studies of ethnicity, identities have been seen as constituted rather than essentialised and to varying degrees open to transitory movements and change. As the editors say:
ˆe lesson that archaeologists can learn from the social sciences is that selfascribed identities, whether individual or collective, are not primordial and fixed, but emerge and change in diverse circumstances: socio-political, historical, economic, contextual and – in the case of the Mediterranean’s seas and mountainous islands – geographical. (this volume: p. 4)
Dissatisfaction with how the local has been conceptualised is in part due to the looseness of the term ‘Mediterranean’ and the loss of a sense of unity that has taken place since the distancing from Braudel’s writing on the Mediterranean as a ‘civilisation’. But it has also been a response to the changing realities of understanding the present
response of Mediterranean societies to the impact of globalisation and postcolonialism. ˆe recognition that ‘societies’ are constituted and reconstituted over long periods of time is complemented by the knowledge that this has not been sui generis with each in possession of its own unique history but through the flows, movements and connectivities that have constituted them in difference (Figure 12.1). So, in terms of archaeological theory, the turn away from the study of autonomous localities has, as in this volume, resulted in the reverse perspective; the study of flows and connectivities as the basis for understanding the production of localities. At present, when cultural difference is increasingly becoming deterritorialised
because of the mass migrations and transnational/transcultural flows of the late capitalist, postcolonial world (Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1992; Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 5), there is obviously a special interest in understanding how questions of identity and cultural differences are spatialised in new ways and may have been so over long periods of time. ˆe idea of the Mediterranean as a ‘cultural ecumene’ or having been constituted as ‘a world in creolisation’ for a very long time (Hannerz 1987) may therefore be apposite. Beginning in the 1970s with the various influences from political economy and world systems theory insisting on foregrounding
regional and global forms of connectedness (Gunder Frank 1967; Mintz 1985; Wallerstein 1974; Wolf 1982), several authors linked ideas of the Mediterranean in prehistory as a core to various identifications of semi-periphery and periphery within what we might call a Greater Mediterranean (Fynn-Paul 2009), usually with some conception of unequal exchange and differential wealth accumulation as the links between them (Kohl 1978; Frankenstein and Rowlands 1978; Sherratt 1995). ˆe work of the late Andrew Sherratt is certainly the most salutary here as a consistent and immensely learned and influential argument for the case that the local was always constituted through the role it played within inter-regional flows and connectivities of material lives (Sherratt 1993). While strong criticisms were made of the determinism of world systems theory, it is indisputable that it created a focus on the large-scale movements of persons and things that has been beneficial in showing how archaeology is unique in its capacity to provide large ranging patterns in the material culture data at its disposal. A second critique that has helped to move discussion of difference beyond the idea
of autonomous localities or ‘cultures’ has been the focus on hybridity. A Hobbesian view of society and culture as order emerging from a primordial state of original chaos has its own Judaeo-Christian roots which, of course, are not unrelated to the longterm history of the Mediterranean. But whereas the secular version of a telos of order achieved through social solidarity has been described as a Western cosmology (Sahlins 1996), the elevation of ethnic and cultural hybridity aims to look at alternative versions of chaos and order that relate broadly to postcolonial experiences concerned with the ‘provincialising’ of a European-led view of World History (Chakrabarty 2000). Our present fascination with hybridity is not only a conceptual response to understanding current global shifts in geo-political and historical relations but also to its use as a metaphor to grasp very different efforts towards differentiation, classification and hierarchisation that are occurring now and have occurred in the past (Scott 2005). If order means the creation of difference, the categories that impose order are themselves products of differentiation – the blending or reblending of differences as part of the praxis of connectivity. It is understandable that theorists of hybridity have explored the processes that erode and destabilise boundaries; hence interstitial zones and borderlands, non-places and fuzzy zones, mobility, migration, transnational movements and flows and technologies of mass communication have been emphasised in new research mainly because the formerly naturalised limits of nations, cultures and ethnicities had become blurred in forms of and spaces of hybridity, flux, liminality and uncertainty (Brightman 1995; Scott 2005: 194). ˆe power holders of old orders are, of course, concerned to limit these tendencies for dichotomies to disintegrate and chaos to ensue before new ones can be established (Bhabha 1989; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). ˆe recognition that all differences are constructed, negotiable and transient and yet will always be with us encourages hybridity theorists to argue that sites of original chaos (i.e. culturally homogenous units where no difference is recognised or allowed) are brief and insubstantial moments in long-term historical processes. We do, after all, make meaning by making order, and we make order by cognising and recognising categories (Douglas 1966).
