126 michael herzfeld
Architecture, moreover, has been a site of particular contestation between Christian
and Islamic traditions, with mutual destruction and desecration a frequent aspect of
conflict in the region. Such conflicts, to be sure, are known from many parts of the
world. Because the Mediterranean is the location of long confrontations between
Christianity and Islam, however, and one in which the language of the Crusades offers
a recognizable template for renewals of hostility in our own times, it offers a particu-
larly wide range of illustrations of the processes involved: outright mutual destruc-
tion, reuse (from the Byzantine ecclesiastical use of spolia from pagan temples to the
recasting of religious sites as museums^6 ), attempts to celebrate coexistence (and other
attempts to erase it), appropriation of religious buildings as national monuments, the
use of religious models for secular monuments, exuberantly postmodern adaptations
of older decorative motifs, oral traditions about particular loci and the folkloristic
interpretations that often accompany the reporting of such narratives, and a rich and
often highly polemical exegetical literature to go with all of these processes and
practices.
Historically, the Mediterranean has been the site of some remarkable instances of
ritual coexistence, bringing together worshippers from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim
communities (Albera and Couroucli, 2012; Couroucli, this volume). The nostalgic
recuperation of these convergences at a time of globally-intensified religious hostility
invites some serious reflection on how what Anton Blok (2001: 115–135) has called,
after Freud, the “narcissism of minor differences” can morph into spatially-enlarged
hostilities, turning the Mediterranean—which for Blok (2001: 173–209) was a largely
coherent cultural area, albeit one that was open to some flexibility of definition^7 —into
the site of multiple, repeated conflicts, many of them ostensibly religious as well as
ethnic. Inasmuch as the Mediterranean was the seat of much of the activity around
and within the Crusades, the resurgence and amplification of these conflicts—as well
as the touristic exploitation of Crusader sites from Krak des Chevaliers in Lebanon to
the Lodge of the Knights of John of Malta and Jerusalem in Rome and the imposing
churches and castles of Rhodes, Cyprus, and Israel—can very easily be commodified
as long as the conflicts themselves are not allowed to intrude on the moneymaking
and its attendant reifications. These sites are ideal candidates for son et lumière displays
as well as the ever-proliferating sale of souvenir items that, through their sheer banal-
ity, obscure and routinize the often horrific massacres that occurred in the past and
threaten to resurface in the present.
One area in which we can follow and analyze the production of stereotypical images
with some degree of accuracy is in craft production. The visible aspects of crafts are
only the tip of a very complex system of social relationships. It is equally important to
understand the formal relationships among the craft objects themselves, the social
contexts of their production, and the locally-approved modalities of personhood that
validate production as “traditional.” In the last of these three dimensions, even some-
thing as simple as location can be crucial; one reason for which artisans continue to
cling to their workshops, even when gentrification forces them to relocate their dom-
iciles, as has happened in many of the so-called centri storici in Italy, is the value that
the location confers on the objects, a value that also translates into cash. As Cohen
(2000: 183) remarks for Thailand, if tourists can actually see the production of what
they buy, this is a value-added form of authenticity. On the other hand, not only can
most types of objects be mass produced as “souvenirs,” but the very notion of