114 naor ben-yehoyada
impede. Gilsenan’s analysis of the uses of patronage by both the observers and aspiring
patrons in Lebanon, as well as Clancy-Smith’s reconstruction of the evolving role of
Muslim notables in rebellions against French colonial expansion in North Africa have
shown how what is widely taken to be the cultural specificities of politics in these places
came out of an interaction that shaped what both modernity and its putative detrac-
tors came to be (Gilsenan, 1977; Clancy-Smith, 1994).
This advancement enabled a more complex view of the relationship between what
modernity and Mediterraneanness stood for. Once patronage was examined not as an
anti-modern dyadic unequal relationship but as the elementary form of culturally-
perceived networks of mediation, it was shown to stretch between regional and
national bureaucracies and the rural communities under their jurisdiction (Schneider
and Schneider, 1976; Gribaudi 1980). In other words, unlike the honor and shame
perspective, patronage turned from a delineator of non-modern places and peoples
into a geographically-unbound dimension of socio-political action (Gilmore, 1982:
194). If the webs of relations that stretch from modernizing political projects and
social forces to those places, people, and societies deemed Mediterranean, then both
a Mediterranean modernity and a modern Mediterranean became possible.
In a Mediterranean modernity so examined, politics of authenticity interlaced with
the channeling of power and resources that modern state institutions promulgated:
In the postcolonial era, when “modernity” and “authenticity” have become the twin
fixations of political thought in the Middle East, it is quite ordinary for the culture-
making classes to drape new identities in the legitimacy of older, genealogical traditions,
and vice versa ... Amid all this ideological anachronism, it is still quite common for tribes-
people to be portrayed (and to portray themselves) as remnants of another age, wholly
atypical in their traditionalism and marginal to the national cultures in which they live.
(Shryock, 1997: 6)Shryock’s critique of the image of tribalism in Jordan could be expanded to the
circum-Mediterranean, and to official projects of cultural politics as well as violent
crime syndicates like the Sicilian Cosa Nostra (Dickie, 2004; Herzfeld, 2005b:
30–32).
As for the possibility of a modern Mediterranean, this resided in the fact that the
historical agents of the vast and profound change that stood for the end of
the Mediterranean (Horden and Purcell, 2000: 474) did not operate safely behind
the line demarcating tradition and Mediterraneanness from modernity and a post-
Mediterranean world. On the contrary, to paraphrase Shryock and Herzfeld, where
projects of modernity wear traditional attires and social institutions previously taken
as Mediterranean and pre-modern participate in the working of modern institu-
tions, we may wonder whether the rumors of the Mediterranean’s death were
premature. Marshall Hodgson’s critique of the uses of the term modern are still
very much relevant:
Common current usage can result in calling “traditional” certain political or economic
patterns that are clearly not characteristic of a “Modern” form of society in our special
sense, but which may have developed only in the nineteenth century and in response to
the presence of “Modern” conditions in the environment. (Hodgson, 1974, vol. I: 51)