ABSTRACT
The societies of the mediterranean have not generated any major debate within economic anthropology. That is partly because anthropologists have in some sense taken mediterranean economic institutions for granted; partly because none of them has been a determined contributor to theoretical debate; and partly because their method of work, in small communities where they have emphasised isolation and have tried as much as possible to conduct an island investigation, has concentrated their attention elsewhere. So for example the world of market places has been investigated only in Morocco and, with three exceptions (Benet, 1957; Mikesell, 1958; Waterbury, 1972), not since the studies by Westermarck's protégé Fogg in the late 1930s. Fogg worked through interpreters, and because the Spanish Zone of Morocco was closed to foreigners from 1936 he seems to have conducted most of his investigations without leaving the Villa Westermarck in Tangier. His articles are full of detail, and interesting, but not much referred to nowadays. Otherwise the economy is generally taken for granted and the reader is allowed to assume that, on the whole, it is really very like the economy he knows and understands from personal experience – except that one or two things need to be explained about the economy of sheep or olives or whatever; and those dim fruits of technical lore come retailed in the guise of constraints to account for such minor divergences from the wholly familiar as there may be. Yet even if there was complete consonance between village economy or tribal cantonal economy and the familiar, supposedly uniform, economies of the more industrial societies of Europe, that would be no good reason for failing to investigate and record. It is likely that if any of the anthropologists who had worked there had been determined to contribute to theory, the differences between the mediterranean and 'the market economies' would have been emphasised, perhaps even to exaggeration. Certainly the institutions are there and could be depicted in relief: quirks of labour recruitment (Sanders, 1955); the use of lotteries to determine the allocation of resources of wood (Kenny, 1961), of water (Berque, 1955), of office (Freeman, 1970), or to divide an inheritance (Levy, 1956); the symbolism of food and the sexual division of consumption (Ferchiou, 1968) – any of these institutions might give pause for thought. Indeed, Maunier, in his essay on taoussa, finds traces of it from Kabylia to Provence, and considers himself in the presence of un grand fait méditerranéen (Maunier, 1927). Doubtless the discovery of grands faits méditerranéens is a shaky enterprise requiring boldness and even a certain indifference, on occasion, to the weakness or absence of evidence; but the institutions, taoussa, adra, are there and could be the basis of economic investigations which, of course without question far too venturesome, nevertheless had the virtue of presenting data on economic activity and of not assuming that it was, in these peasant societies, just an inferior version of the anthropologist's own rational, profitable, commerce.
