po-mo med 131
simple or uncouth national cultural milieu (Herzfeld, 2004). On the other hand,
there is also considerable nostalgia for the days when artisans enjoyed a kind of rough
camaraderie that arose from close proximity and genuine intimacy. While attempts to
recreate those conditions, and so to recapture a supposedly lost time of reciprocity
and face-to-face social interaction as well as the role and techniques of true artisan-
ship, risk playing into the neoliberal regimentation of the souvenir market, some of
these efforts are clearly more successful than others. One example, a neighborhood in
Istanbul, teeters on the brink and illustrates the dilemmas that all such initiatives must
face (Baykan et al., 2010: 81–86).
The neoliberal economic order drives many of the changes now taking place in the
region, relegating some communities and even entire countries to ever more misera-
ble margins, while promoting those lucky enough to be entrepreneurial to a socially
stronger position. (Italy’s success was not so much the creation of an economic mira-
cle, which did not last beyond the turn of the century, as it was the successful projec-
tion of a type of small, family-run enterprise as both local and traditional on the one
hand and successfully entrepreneurial on the other.) Countries are no less subject to
the effects of ranking than individuals, as the indignant reception of the rating agen-
cies’ pronouncements in several Mediterranean countries attests. Greece, particularly,
experiences the rough edge of such summary judgments; the endemic corruption and
tax evasion with which the European Union charges the entire country becomes a
basis for its repeated structural and economic humiliation.
Such changes are also both enabled and constrained by the logic of nationalism,
now sometimes stretched to a politically more inclusive and politically expedient—
but historically more tenuous—claim of Mediterranean commonality. While
national borders are proving increasingly porous, the European Union makes
strenuous efforts to re-create boundaries designed to exclude those who try to
enter through the weaker controls of Middle Eastern countries and the complex
littorals of Greece and Italy (see Feldman, 2012). In one sense, the current situa-
tion amplifies the original creation of national borders and cultural buffer zones
under the hegemonic control of a few geographically extraneous powers. Virtually
all new nation-states in the nineteenth century found themselves compelled to
construct more or less homogeneous national cultural images, which were territo-
rially demarcated by clear national borders and were associated with a linear his-
torical narrative of origins culminating in the achievement of national statehood.
Greece exemplifies this process, as, in the following century, does Israel; Jordan,
which has had a complicated and uneasy relationship with Israel and has deployed
massive efforts toward reifying nomadic identity through the commodification and
exhibition of Bedouin arts and crafts, stands in marked contrast to both (Layne,
1994: 154–156 et passim). Italy, which has rarely evinced a strong urge toward
cultural or linguistic homogenization (except for the anti-dialect efforts of the pre-
Second World War fascist regime), emphasizes strong national borders but accepts
and even nurtures a high degree of internal cultural variation and treats the result-
ing diversity as the hallmark of Italian cultural creativity. But whatever their past
experiences, all these countries—Jordan in the face of Israeli territorial expansion,
Greece and Italy as front-line states in the attempt to control immigration—are
increasingly forced into the logic of border regulation that was an externally
imposed condition of their original emergence as nation-states.