112 naor ben-yehoyada
secluded from modernization or in cultural abstractions of sociocultural situations
that persevered through such transformations. Honor and shame as much as hillside
villages became emblems of that Mediterranean and, as a result, of the Mediterranean’s
non/pre-modern (traditional/authentic) parts and dimensions.
Scholars attempted to break this analytical chain in different links. Some embraced
the examination of honor and shame, as long as attention to sociocultural specificities
prevented the “ludicrous” results of “comparing an Andalusian town with a remote
Central Anatolian village, with Qadhafi’s Libya, with Cretan shepherds, and with the
warring hill tribesmen of eastern Morocco” instead of comparing that Andalusian
town “with its Portuguese, Spanish, and southern French neighbours” (Pina-Cabral,
1989: 404). Here territorial contiguity served as a condition for reasonable analysis:
Europeans should be compared to their co-continentals, not to Africans. Others
found the comparative approach attractive only on a truly universal scale, and con-
demned the limiting of comparison to the regional level as an anthropological sin
(Herzfeld, 1980, 1984). Any supra-local comparison had to go all the way or be
accused of essentializing the geographic category within which comparison was set. In
both cases, the explicit accusation leveled against Mediterraneanists was that they
excluded their objects of study (at times their co-nationals) from modernity by attrib-
uting to them a Mediterranean character (Herzfeld, 1987). The two Ms were again
mutually exclusive.
Most of the debates described here took place between the 1960s and the 1980s.
Yet for all the contributions that ensued, the same positions and accusations appeared
again in the new millennium (Albera and Blok, 2001; Herzfeld, 2005a; Sant Cassia
and Schäfer, 2005; Bromberger, 2006). During the same half century, a political
supra-national organization gradually encompassed Europe. Southern-European
intellectuals claimed the Mediterranean as a southern alternative to the northern-
European way of life (Cassano, 2005), the Atlantic and the Indian oceans saw their
academic transnational stars shine far brighter than the Mediterranean’s, and a new
trans-regional historiography questioned oceanic or continental area delineations
altogether (Wigen and Lewis, 1997; Fawaz, Bayly, and Ilbert 2002). Yet among
Mediterraneanists, the basic assumption that the traits clustered as “Mediterranean”
were essentially opposed to the image of European modernity remained. Scholars
vehemently disagreed with each other about whether these traits were shared by all
Mediterranean societies, whether these traits could be analytically compared, and
whether such a comparison was politically and intellectually justified in the first place
or some sort of orientalism telling more about the observers than about the observed.
Nonetheless, they all subscribed to the theoretical opposition between the “modes of
thought” some saw as Mediterranean on the one hand, and modernity on the other
hand.
Finally, some sought to explain observable traits as reactions to the changes mod-
ernization had wrought on societies around the Mediterranean, and therefore a part
of the process, not a relic of what preceded it. Jane Schneider, whose earlier work
(1971) was lauded as the bravest attempt at a structural pan-Mediterranean explana-
tion of the honor code, later collaborated with Peter Schneider in a study that contex-
tualized their work in the political economy of post-Second World War development
in Sicily (1976). Similarly in this respect, Kressel (1981) convincingly showed how
trends in “homicide for family honour” among Palestinian–Bedouins in Israel could