110 naor ben-yehoyada
Europe’s pre–1800 ce periphery, comparable to those of the Yangzi Delta, the Kantō
Plain, and Gujarat; a periphery abandoned with the Atlantic expansion and coloniza-
tion (Pomeranz, 2000: 24–25): “the transatlantic relations that followed conquest
and depopulation ... made the flow of needed resources to Europe self-catalyzing in
ways that consensual trade between Old World regions was not.”
When examined through the prism of modernity, the time-bound nature of histo-
riographical definitions of the Mediterranean shapes the latter’s fragmented picture.
European modernity split the area into its European and non-European parts, and
subjugated all, in varying degrees, paces, and fashions to non-Mediterranean Europe’s
hegemony. At the same time, it discharged the Mediterranean as north-western
Europe’s functional periphery. Together with the end of the Mediterranean, the com-
patibility and comparability of the Mediterranean’s southern and northern parts or,
more politically germane, Christian and Muslim parts seemed to diminish as mod-
ernization accelerated. And since modernity stood for history and change, the regional
division of labor relegated history in the active to northern Europe, history in the
passive (or as reaction) to North Africa and the Levant, and a place “out of history”
for parts of southern Europe. On a global political economic scale, then, modernity
for the Mediterranean stood for European modernity: the diminishing reliance of
northwestern-European development on the resources, connections, and move-
ments the Mediterranean had previously provided. The northern invasion anticipated
a northern abandon.
Accordingly, students of the Mediterranean of the late-nineteenth and twentieth
centuries have tended to follow one of three assumptions about their objects of study:
(1) that entire sociocultural lives and worlds survived to the present because they
were detached enough from their modernizing surroundings;
(2) that habits of thought and action continued whereas contexts of action changed; or
(3) that the modes of action apparent in the present had been shaped, in recent
times, in reaction to the various strands of modernization.
The three main topics in studies of the contemporary Mediterranean —honor and
shame, patronage, and cosmopolitanism—reveal different combinations of these
assumptions, and stage a different struggle between continuity and change, moder-
nity and tradition. This is not to say that everything written on the contemporary
Mediterranean can be subsumed by these three strands. Romanticizing nostalgic
accounts, essentializing descriptions, manifestos of inter-faith, inter-culture, and inter-
nation union abound. Yet these texts serve more as documents of modern
Mediterraneanism than as analyses of the modern Mediterranean (be it in the singular
or plural).
Honor and shameThe first option had been espoused by Braudel and proliferated by early social anthro-
pologists, who adopted his view of entire swaths of the Mediterranean rim as
“museums of Man” (quoted in Horden and Purcell, 2000: 463). Social institutions
like the hamoula in Palestine (Cohen, 1965), patronage, honor, and family among
the Sarakatsani in northwestern Greece (Campbell, 1964), and the complex of