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artisanship itself can be commercialized and generalized, as when Italian ice-cream
shops advertise “artisanal ice-creams” (gelati artigianali).
As the allusion to Thailand shows, the commercialization of craft is not a peculiarly
Mediterranean phenomenon; nor is the commodification of the idea of artisanal pro-
duction. Yet various Mediterranean countries have a long tradition of operating in this
way. In Italy, official agencies actively encourage the idea of a high-end artisanship,
which sweeps aside humbler forms of production in favor of profitable artistic indi-
vidualism and erases the attitudes that informed the older modalities (see, for Naples,
Broccolini, 2008: 312–318). The image thus produced has also come to symbolize
the small family workshop as the ideal–typical site, not only of artisanal manufacture,
but also of a concomitant and emblematically Italian mode of economic prosperity
(see especially Yanagisako, 2002 on the Comasco silk manufacturers). Italy may be
unusual in the degree to which the conflation of artisanship with artistry has taken
place, in part because a long period of prosperity encouraged such developments and
in part because the Renaissance already furnished a model of expensive artisanal pro-
duction. But this has not saved Italy from the usual mass production of cheap, clumsy
souvenir items, a tendency that also draws nourishment from the rapid expansion of
low-end tourism.
Souvenirs, as collectibles, become a goal in themselves. In many ways, they carica-
ture the self-image that local and national agencies want to promote. Yalouri (2001:
133), for example, in her study of the contemporary local means of the Acropolis,
reproduces a Greek cartoon of tourists admiring a table with variously-sized Acropolis
models while they totally ignore the real thing looming above them. What the car-
toonist is lampooning, I suggest, is more than merely a silly simulacrum (although it
is also that!). As a caricature of an example of miniaturization, a common device in the
souvenir trade, it illustrates in a rather extreme way the ambiguity of the relationship
known in semiotics as iconicity, in which a derivative image may through repeated
experience become the “original,” relegating the actual original to the status of a copy
or a fake. When tourists are more interested in an Acropolis that will decorate their
living rooms than in the ancient monument from which the model is derived, they
effectively re-situate the meaning of a form that for local residents has deeply symbolic
and even religious resonance, and that a bare century earlier had mostly been consid-
ered important for representing the partial survival of a deeply-respected ancient cul-
ture in the modern nation-state—a symbol invested with so much reverence, moreover,
that Greeks reacted with outrage when Coca-Cola published an advertisement with
the columns of the Parthenon replaced by Coke bottles (Yalouri, 2001: 108).
The iconicity principle, which also underlies the idea of cultural similarity that is
common to virtually all nationalisms, also appears in a genetic version. This, too, has
played its role in the creation of a Mediterranean identity. Arguably based on a local
explanation of physiological similarities among kinsfolk of different generations (see
Vernier, 1991), it has become the basis of the assumed similarity among people of
adjacent nation-states, as well as assumptions about a shared genetic heritage that fits
local “folk theories” as well as nationalistic ideologies. The film Mediterraneo, for
example, plays with the Greek saying, “Mia fatsa, mia ratsa (one face, one race),”
itself apparently a Greek caricature of an alleged Italian saying (una faccia, una razza)
which, when pronounced properly in Italian, does not reproduce the perfect rhyme of
the Greek fake version and may not even be an Italian saying (especially as faccia is not