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the usual word for “face”!). By making it appear that the Greek and Italian languages
share a similar-sounding proverb, Greeks evidently seek to claim an identity that man-
ages to be both “Mediterranean” and “European” at the same time. The film then
projects the resulting stereotype onto an international canvas, reinforcing popular
images of a more-or-less homogeneous Mediterranean culture and people. (I have
also encountered wine, foodstuffs and even soap—presumably made from olive oil—
using the Mediterranean name as a promotional device.) Some national governments
sought to exploit the cinematic image of a passionate, beautiful, and sexually-permis-
sive Mediterranean through allusion to films popular in the English-speaking world
(see Hazbun, 2007–08: 21) despite local religious disapproval and the equally-
generalized anthropological stereotypes of Mediterranean restraint and chastity.
In this context, costume—which is often represented in the souvenir trade by small
dolls wearing clothes that no modern inhabitant would want to be seen wearing
except for the purposes of folkloric displays (Collier, 1997: 211–212)—offers a medi-
ation between physiognomy and culture. Its miniaturization in the souvenir trade
nicely expresses its irrelevance (with a few exceptions) to modern life and its associa-
tion with a nostalgic and prettified view of the past. This phenomenon is very wide-
spread, and is certainly not unique to the Mediterranean. But its long presence there
is a fair indication of the role that Mediterranean countries have played in the develop-
ment of this particular variety of commercialized nostalgia—presumably because it
could be used to generate among a larger public the kind of domesticated exoticism
to which Davis (1977: 7) once attributed anthropologists’ interest in the region.
Films and magazines help to generalize foreign images of how Mediterranean cul-
tures ought to appear. Souvenirs (including the costumed dolls) and photographs,
both ostensibly non-invasive modes of trophy-taking, play on these images and allow
consumers from abroad to absorb and share their most common features. At least one
anthropologist working in a Mediterranean country has made a point of criticizing
the crass reification and social damage entailed in the production of “culture by the
pound” (Greenwood, 1989). Whether or not the effects are always so devastating, it
is clear that they contribute to the emergence of locally powerful forms of entrepre-
neurialism, which benefit from, and feed, the presumed desires of the visitors.
Performances, objects and images nourish the tourists’ implicit goal of claiming some
sort of explorer or pioneer status, and, in so doing, they also reinforce increasingly
simplified regional stereotypes. Just as tourists expect considerable physical comfort in
their ersatz adventures, they also derive considerable mental comfort from the convic-
tion that they have experienced a genuinely Mediterranean (or Spanish, or Moroccan,
or Turkish) moment, materialized in the souvenir or photograph. In other words,
they seek excitement within a safe familiarity. Such genuflections to habitus generate
infinite reiterations of cultural representation, leading to a process of simplification
that is not unlike the process whereby gossip reduces the detail in narrative so that the
entire story becomes a recognizable token of a comfortingly familiar type. We might
call this phenomenon the domestication of the savage Med.
The simplification that this domesticating process entails evidently reflects eco-
nomic considerations, especially those connected with labor. Take, for example, the
production of woven “Greek bags.” In the mountain villages of western Crete, local
women who previously wove complex hunting bags known as vouryes for particular
ritual purposes now, using essentially the same equipment but working through local