A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
chapter twenty-two
Hybridity in the entire Mediterranean world from its origins to the present is a vast
topic requiring a thematic, sharp focus. Defining hybridity is of course necessary, so
let us limit it mostly to people and their material cultures, not nature or institutions.
A thing like a sixteenth-century tooled-leather book cover might be an authentic or a
pure Ottoman product or an Italian fine copy. Is the latter in some sense a hybrid of
local and imported leather-working skills, as Mack (2002) has shown, or simply a
fake? “Hybridity” has moved from botany and orchids, and making mules, to the
most arcane regions of post-colonial theory and some rightly consider whatever the
word means to be an intellectual dead-end. If we focus on people and culture, we may
be able to retrieve some value for the term hybridity as a category of analysis. Looking
mostly at human cultures and much less at material artifacts nevertheless is no excuse
for neglecting religion as a breeding ground for Mediterranean hybridity. Also, a study
of the medieval documents deriving from the famous Geniza depository in Egypt
(Goldberg, 2012) reminds us that formal institutions like legal codes provide a necessary
context for interpreting how people lived in their cultures.
The hybrid is a mixed being, originally, for this Greek word, the offspring of
feral and domesticated pigs. As a person, the hybrid is the product of a mixed rela-
tionship. Hence one classic way of looking at the hybrid is to view it as the result
of the mixing of two pure types, however defined. Hybridity deriving from more
than two sources might be possible, as in fusion cuisines or eclectic styles of music.
The hybrid is not the gray result of mixing white and black, not the mean between
opposites. The offspring of hybrid parents can further complicate matters as they
interbred, but we will concentrate on the first generation, and hence living beings,
not art or food. Of course it is possible for a person to be bicultural and multicul-
tural as well. The mixing of light and darkness, such a common theme across the
Mediterranean, did not result in a dim hybrid, possibly because both pure types
must possess some positive qualities. (Yet pure evil also existed, with grave
consequences for the righteous, and the hybrid.) Over time this mixing can create
complex, creole peoples and cultures where the idea of purity has become lost. But
Hybridity
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