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 eight
The paradox of the present age is that the signs of contemporaneity—the internet,
globalization, neoliberal dominance of the world’s economies—have brought with
them a vastly intensified focus on the past, or rather on ideas of what the past might
have been as well as representations of what it almost certainly was not. That is, as it
were, the diachronic paradox. The corresponding synchronic paradox is that this
focus on distinctive national histories has brought in its train a remarkable degree of
homogenization in the treatment of heritage. To some extent that is the result of the
Eurocentric bias that continues to pervade international organizations dedicated to
heritage conservation (see, for example, Askew, 2010). It perpetuates a peculiarly
parochial form of universalism, made possible only by imperial domination of much
of the world by a few western powers, and continued in the form of a global hierarchy
of value in which those powers’ aesthetic and ethical standards are invested with the
generality that only a very specific and powerful form of political self-interest makes
possible. If the post-modern condition is marked by an ironic appreciation of the past,
then the idea of a historically salient Mediterranean offers a virtual laboratory for
examining the production of such discourses and their material realizations. In this
essay, I will explore some of the factors that have generated the sense of pervasive
homogeneity as well as the seeds of its potential unraveling.
The Mediterranean region has a particular relationship to the phenomenon of
parochial universalism because it is seen as being at once the fons et origo of Western
culture and power, and yet also, in part precisely because of an antiquity that confers
both gilded respect and political marginality, as a region excluded from the advantages
of a privileged modernity (see also Ben-Yehoyada, this volume). Single countries
within it have suffered the same fate, albeit in widely varying degrees, as have particu-
lar islands, regions, and ecosystems (see Heatherington, 2010: 30–38). Generically,
the condescension that a Mediterranean identity can evoke in more powerful regions
is reflected today in the relationship between the southern members of the European
Union and those at its northern epicenter.^1 The Mediterranean region exhibits a par-
ticularly tight association between cultures deemed to be “ancient” with relatively
Po-Mo Med
micHael HerzFeld