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young nation-states embroiled in crises that bespeak the discontents of aggressive
modernity: war, pollution and nationalist extremism. That these problems appear in
specific, relatively marginal regions—the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and so on—
seems only rarely to provoke reflection on the geo-politics that shield more powerful
players from acknowledging their own involvement in the production of these same
problems, or indeed in the production of images of a generic “Mediterranean^ culture.”
That device has been politically expedient for some actors, those engaged in attrib-
uting it (whether from outside the region or as local, profiteering elites), and highly
disadvantageous for many of those so recognized, and it has generated an intellectu-
ally suspect form of bureaucratic essentialism that itself repays critical analysis
(Yiakoumaki, 2011). The stereotype constitutes a lived reality with sometimes wildly
divergent real-life consequences for those who inhabit its spaces (Kousis, Selwyn and
Clark, 2011: 6). It has generated pronouncements about “heritage” that reinforce a
geo-political dynamic of severe global inequalities both within the region and between
the region and the global movers and shakers (see Herzfeld, 2004).
The development of a Mediterraneanist discourse in the post-modern age of crea-
tive historical management has also been topically uneven. The reasons for this are
clear and practical; they reflect the exigencies of the global dynamic I have just
described and, to a very large extent, reinforce and perpetuate it. While there are
areas of convergence, there are also barriers, especially linguistic ones, that impede
the recognition of shared heritage. Most notably, the products of so-called “intangi-
ble heritage” do not lend themselves to cross-linguistic generalization, especially as
folksongs and popular narratives, appropriated by nationalist ideologies from the
early nineteenth century on, are too closely associated with particular languages and
with powerfully national forces for them to serve as tools for conceptualizing a larger
and more inclusive cultural entity. In reality, as we see with both folksongs and prov-
erbs, themes and concepts can leap across linguistic boundaries.^2 The important
question is thus not whether they can make such transitions, since empirically the
evidence for that process is incontrovertible, but whether the scholars who specialize
in their study—folklorists and philologists for the most part—can themselves tran-
scend narrowly nationalistic perceptions in order to recognize the resulting com-
monality. A few have done so; more have not, and, when they were able to spot such
shared elements, they often argued—in a local version of diffusionist doctrine, that
their own countries were the originators of the entire corpus. Perhaps the most extreme
example of this kind of thinking is the infamous Turkish “sun language theory” that
held all languages to have emerged from Turkic words associated with the worship
of the sun (Aytürk, 2004). But folklorists and archaeologists promoted other such
notions in abundance.
Cuisine, on the other hand, is sufficiently fragmented in many of these coun-
tries—even those, like Greece, that claim a high degree of cultural unity (Yiakoumaki,
2006)—to be broadly assimilable to the goals of creating a “Mediterranean diet”—a
fantasy of postmodern capitalism if ever there was one. It is not tied to a particular
language, and the common use of olive oil, pasta, and bread, along with shared fish
and vegetable products, creates the grounds for a veritable Mediterranean gastro-
nomic industry.^3 Some countries display much greater culinary diversity than others,
to be sure. Italy, for example, is as much riven by “gastro-dialects” as it is by linguis-
tic differentiation. Italian cuisine, moreover, incorporates elements derived from