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An Island in between: Malta,

Identity and Anthropology
Jon P. Mitchell
Published online: 19 Nov 2007.

To cite this article: Jon P. Mitchell (1998) An Island in between: Malta, Identity
and Anthropology, South European Society and Politics, 3:1, 142-149, DOI:
10.1080/13608740308539529

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 REVIEW ESSAY

An Island in between:
Malta, Identity and Anthropology

JON P. MITCHELL
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Malta is the southern-most of the southern European nation-states, lying

on the very fringes of the region. As a consequence of its location, the
politics of contemporary Malta are dominated by questions of identity -
mainly whether Malta should join the EU and be considered European,
or whether the Maltese are better served by adopting a more
independent position in the central Mediterranean, and acting as a
bridge between its northern and southern shores. The general elections
of 1992 and 1996 saw the issue of European Union accession rise to
prominence. The former established an apparent mandate for Malta’s
entry to the Union, that was subsequently withdrawn by the latter,
following controversy over the introduction of VAT and threats to
traditional hunting practices. Both issues loom large in popular
perceptions of Europe.
Questions of identity preoccupy the Maltese population, and its
academic output. A number of recent publications have emerged,
bringing together scholars from different disciplines to pin down
Maltese identity (Cortis 1989; Fiorini and Mallia-Milanes 1991; Frendo
1994). Inevitably, the publications have been dominated by historians.
Eric Hobsbawm once remarked that if nations are the modern world’s
heroin addicts, then historians grow the opium. It is they who provide
the raw material to fuel the fires of identity politics - in Malta’s case,
providing the evidence for and against Maltese European identity.
The anthropological study of national identities, and particularly the
role of history in their production, is an important and burgeoning field.
Yet, it has not yet fully arrived on Maltese shores. This observation was
made by Paul Sant Cassia in his History, Anthropology and Folklore in
Malta (1993). One of the few indigenous Maltese anthropologists, he
both summarized the development of anthropology in Malta to that
date, and set out his agenda for the future. To a large extent, that agenda
is still open. The key area of identity remains to be fully investigated.

South European Society & Politics, Vol.3, No.1 (Summer 1998) pp.142-149
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
 AN ISLAND IN BETWEEN 143
Since 1993 a number of key developments have taken place in
anthropology within, and on the subject of, Malta.1

MALTA’S ANTHROPOLOGICAL TRADITION

It is axiomatic that anthropology, although perhaps not the hand-maiden
of colonialism, nevertheless developed in its wake. Malta was a British
colony from 1800 to 1964, but it was not until the very last decade of
this period that it became an object of anthropological study. Sant Cassia
links this lack of interest to Malta’s ambiguous position between the
known ‘us’ of the metropolitan homeland and the unknown and
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inexplicable ‘other’ of the other colonized territories - places which

warranted, for example, the development of the International African
Institute as an institution dedicated to British understanding of
indigenous African cultures.
From the start, Malta seemed more explicable - a society in which the
elites were literate, which had an institutionalized legal system, and had
strong historical links with the Catholic church. Prior to British
colonization, Malta had been an effective theocracy under the Knights of
St. John (1530-1798). All this made Malta less of an ‘other’ and so less
of an object for the anthropological gaze. In any case, the British interest
in Malta was primarily as a naval base. It was a situation for which
Maltese historians have coined the term ‘Fortress Colonization’. So long
as strategic interests were not under threat, the colonial administration
was happy to remain ignorant of local life. The need to understand the
local population was less pressing than in other parts of the empire.
Consequently, anthropology in Malta had to wait until the last few
years of colonialism, at a time when - partly because of decolonization -
anthropology as a whole is said to have come ‘part-way home’. The
development of European, and particularly Mediterranean,
anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s marked a period during which
anthropology was redefining its object. Governments of former colonies
became increasingly intolerant of anthropologists’ attentions, and
anthropologists themselves began to realize that European cultures were
just as interesting as ‘exotica’.

THE BOISSEVAIN LEGACY

During this period, Malta came under the anthropological spotlight,
with the pioneering work of Jeremy Boissevain in the late 1950s
(Boissevain 1965, 1969). His main concerns became central to the
Europeanist-Mediterraneanist oeuvre. His work centred on the
 144 SOUTH EUROPEAN SOCIETY & POLITICS

relationship between Maltese ritual and political factionalism.

Examining two Maltese villages, he observed a kind of competition -
known as pika - between supporters, organizers and enthusiasts of
different, local patron saints’ feasts (festi, sing. festa). Pika led to intense
symbolic rivalry manifest in ever-exuberant spending on the main
ingredients of festa: fireworks and brass band marches. It also at times
led to direct, violent confrontation between different festa factions, or
festa partiti.
Reading between the lines, the festa partiti can be seen as a symbolic or
ritualized manifestation of party-political antagonisms. In a situation where
most villages - and some parishes - were divided into two partiti,
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Boissevain observed that whilst one tended to be ideologically oriented

towards the church and supportive of traditional bourgeois authority
figures (lawyers, doctors, priests), the other tended to be more radical, even
anti-clerical, and socialist in orientation. The division between festa partiti,
then, mapped on to ideological and party-political divisions between the
right-wing Nationalist Party and the left-wing Malta Labour Party.
Such antagonism persists in the 1990s. The grass-roots support for
the two main political parties is still oriented towards different festa
organizations, but the Nationalist-Labour division can be taken a step
further, to incorporate identity politics at a national level. Thus, a pro-
clerical stance can be interpreted as support for emphasizing Malta’s
long-established links with Europe. Indeed, it was the pro-church
Nationalist Party that in 1990 tabled Malta’s application to join the EU
(then the EC). In contrast, 1990s anti-clericalism is coterminous with
anti-Europeanism. The Malta Labour Party, which remains cynical of the
Catholic church’s power and influence in Malta, is similarly opposed to
strong links with Europe, and since coming to power in October 1996,
seems to have gone some way to establishing tighter links with Libya.
As well as the relationship between ritual, religion and politics,
Boissevain’s other legacy was a concern with the personalized politics of
patronage and clientelism. In its various forms, this has been seen as the
quintessential southern European political culture (Gellner and Waterbury
1977). Like the politicization of ritual, and the ritualization of politics, this
type of personalized politics is as common in 1990s Malta as it was in the
1960s. However, it is something about which Maltese are increasingly self-
conscious. In the past few years, commissions against clientelistic practices
have been established, and public opinion is damning of cases that are
unearthed. Yet, there is a profound sense of inevitability too - a feeling that
‘this is the way we Maltese do things - it will never be stamped out’. Again,
this can be linked to a politics of identity, this time in its relationship to
ideas about development.
 AN ISLAND IN BETWEEN 145
The concept of patronage, as used by anthropologists, has been
criticized for once more setting up a distinction between the
(stereotyped) notion of bureaucratic rationality prevalent in the North
and West, and (similarly stereotyped) non-bureaucratic and even corrupt
practices in the South and East. Where ‘we’ have rational, disinterested
bureaucracies, it is argued, ‘they’ have corrupt ones based on patronage
and clientelism. Moreover, the difference between the two is couched in
the idiom of development, itself derived ultimately from Weber - ‘they’
have not ‘yet’ developed a fully functional bureaucratic ethic.
Problematic though this argument is, it is nevertheless one into which
indigenous Maltese arguments about bureaucracy, politics and corrupt
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practices also fall. The issue surfaces in debates among intellectuals, in

politicians’ rhetoric and in everyday discourse. By castigating themselves
for their inability to conduct politics in a disinterested, non-personalized
way, Maltese themselves fall into a model whereby the ideal of
bureaucratization, ultimately based on an image of European rationality,
is held up as a future hope. This ideal would play Malta into a northern
and western politico-cultural sphere. Once more, conflict emerges
between the interests which herald this rationality as an attainable ideal
for future Maltese politics, and those which are more sceptical - whether
European identity should be sought in political life, or whether the
Maltese ‘Mediterranean’ character makes this impossible.
Boissevain’s early work - and my observations on it - are ‘from the
outside in’, as it were: in the classic mode of an external observer
treating a foreign culture as their object of study. Since Boissevain, a
handful of other scholars, mainly from Britain and the USA, have also
worked in Malta. Their topics of research range from indigenous music
and its relation to politics, patronage and clientelism in the fishing
industry, and the position of women in the Maltese urban centres
(Herndon 1971; Lafayette 1996; Mitchell 1996; O’Reilly Mizzi 1981;
Wilhelmsen 1976).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIGENOUS MALTESE ANTHROPOLOGY

Over the years, an indigenous Maltese anthropology has also developed.

British-trained scholars, such as Paul Sant Cassia and Ranier Fsadni
initially focused their attentions comparatively, on other Mediterranean
societies - principally Cyprus, Tunisia and Libya. Latterly, though, they
also turned their attention, along with a new generation of
anthropologists, to Malta itself (Fsadni 1993; Sant Cassia 1989; 1993).
The impetus for this was the development in the early 1990s of an
anthropology programme at the University of Malta. The University has
 146 SOUTH EUROPEAN SOCIETY & POLITICS

a long history, dating back to the late sixteenth century when the Jesuits
established a college in Malta. It remained a fairly small establishment
until the early 1990s, since when it has expanded rapidly, not only in
absolute student numbers, but also in terms of the degree programmes
on offer.
Sant Cassia took on the initial task of setting the anthropology
programme on track. He established a BA programme, and the
provisions for higher degrees - at both master’s and doctoral levels. The
programme has had frequent input from overseas scholars, and all
courses are assessed to international standards through links with other
European departments. The list of visiting scholars which the University
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has entertained includes Colette Piault, Jack Goody, Keith Hart, Bob
Layton, Michael Carrithers and Judith Okely. Since 1994, the
programme has been run by Sybil O’Reilly Mizzi, an American with
Maltese connections, who has made the longitudinal study of women in
urban Malta her life’s work.
Institutionally, anthropology has been concerned with establishing its
position alongside a somewhat stronger sociological tradition, and a
well-established and influential historical establishment. The Journal of
Mediterranean Studies, published from Malta since 1991, has been
important in pursuing this goal. Interdisciplinary in scope, the journal
has encouraged a cross-fertilization of the disciplines and published some
important work in, for example, performance studies and cultural
history (Cremona 1995; Cassar 1993). As part of its expansion,
anthropology teaching at the University of Malta has inserted itself into
economics, legal studies and medicine - providing a fresh look at familiar
issues for students in those fields. Since 1995, it has organized an annual
conference. The themes of the three conferences to date reflect the
theoretical preoccupations of the Maltese anthropological world, and
the extent to which this local, indigenous tradition has built on the early
work of Boissevain and others.

RECENT TRENDS IN MALTESE ANTHROPOLOGY

The first annual conference dealt with the theme of national

development. This reflects a deep concern not only with modernization
at a political and cultural level, but also with economic develoment and
its consequences. A central issue in contemporary Malta is its
dependence on the tourist economy. This sector is economically
insecure, dependent as it is on the fashions and affluence of overseas
consumers.
Seen in the 1960s as the economic saviour of independent Malta,
 AN ISLAND IN BETWEEN 147
tourism developed apace through the succeeding generations and peaked
in the early 1990s, with a number of consequences. First, the Maltese
shoreline has become increasingly over-developed, with old town houses
and undeveloped areas being replaced by modern high-rise hotels.
Second, several historical and archaeological sites have been targeted as
tourist development areas. Third, and consequently, relations between
the Maltese people and tourists themselves, as well as tourist developers,
have become increasingly strained. A number of scholars, including
Jeremy Boissevain, have begun to focus their attentions on the economic,
environmental and social consequences of tourist development.
The second annual conference focused on changing religious beliefs
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in the modern world (Clough and Mitchell forthcoming). Featuring

ethnographic examples from a wide range of societies, the conference
was able to set up a comparative framework within which to examine the
processes occurring within Malta - particularly the simultaneous rise of
‘new’ Christian religious movements and other types of spiritualism -
‘new age’, satanism, witchcraft. This work represents a departure from
and development of earlier work on orthodox Catholicism and the ritual
tradition of festa, to encompass the expansion of the charismatic
movement and various other forms of non-orthodox devotion.
Subsequent related work has focused on the hoary question of structural
causality in religious transformation - to what extent changing religious
beliefs can be seen as a consequence of changes at a sociopolitical or
economic level. Can the apparent rise in personalized religion, and the
prevalent belief that satanism is rife in Malta, be seen as a result of the
country’s marginal and potentially unstable position in the modern
world system?
The third conference represented a development of O’Reilly Mizzi’s
work on urban women in Malta. It put together scholars to discuss the
position of women in the Mediterranean. A number of themes emerged,
but particularly the complexities of tradition and emancipation in the
contemporary Mediterranean situation. A central problem was whether
or not the ‘traditional’ female roles of motherhood and homemaking can
be seen as equally fulfilling as ‘modern’ career womanhood - particularly
in a situation where traditional roles are highly socially valued. A
profound ambivalence emerged about the process of ‘modernizing’
women’s roles, which mirrored ambivalence about the development
process more generally.
The concerns of these three conferences confirm that Malta feels
itself ambivalently situated, in a number of key areas, between the
apparent ‘modernity’ of the European world, and the ‘traditional’
societies of what one might want to call the Mediterranean. This
 148 SOUTH EUROPEAN SOCIETY & POLITICS
ambivalence at a socio-cultural level is compounded by economic and
political marginality, and fuels the national debate about identity.

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

Besides these preoccupations, Maltese anthropology has also cast itself a

wider net. At undergraduate and graduate level, important work is being
done both within Malta and elsewhere. Among the current projects are
an examination of rural change in Syria, a project on community and
ecology among Arizona ‘cowboy’ cattle-herders, and an exploration of
narrative and authority in the Maltese legal system.2
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The suggested research on identity and the nation has also got
underway. Two important projects have been conducted on Maltese
minority groups. The first on the well-established Greek community, the
second on Sindhi Indians (Sammut 1993; Falzon 1996). There is still
more work to be done at this level, particularly on the Arabic community
in Malta, and the small but growing number of refugee groups. In terms
of Maltese identity itself, work is being done on historical consciousness
and family memory among the established Maltese elite, on the
mobilization of political rhetoric in the party politics of identity, and the
dynamics of the public sphere as a medium for identity politics. This
work can, and should, be taken further.
The creative construction of identity comes as a response to
particular politico-cultural conditions. In contemporary Malta, it has
emerged in the context of a post-colonial state that is economically and
politically marginal to both the European Union and the Arab world.
Richard Handler (1995) has recently argued that one of the dilemmas of
researching questions of identity is that we tend to ‘deconstruct’ those
identities just at a time when marginal societies are appealing to them for
strength. Despite this dilemma, it is a task that should be undertaken, if
we are to understand the situation of countries such as Malta, and more
fully comprehend the dynamics of South European politics and society.

NOTES

1. I conducted two years of fieldwork in Malta’s capital, Valletta, from 1992 to 1994
(Mitchell 1996, forthcoming).
2. Mark Falzon, University of Cambridge, is working on the politics of identity in
Europe; Nadia Theuma, University of Malta, is working on tourism in Malta; J-J Vella,
University of Malta, is working on Syrian rural economy; David Zammit, University of
Durham, is working on Maltese lawyers; and Louise Zerafa, University of Malta, is
working in Arizona.
 AN ISLAND IN B E T W E E N 149
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