Review: The Connecting Sea: History, Anthropology, and the Mediterranean

Reviewed Work(s): The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History by Peregrine

Horden and Nicholas Purcell: Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape by Predrag
Matvejević and Michael Henry Heim: A Mediterranean Society. An Abridgment in One
Volume by Shlomo D. Goitein and Jacob Lassner
Review by: Henk Driessen
Source: American Anthropologist , Jun., 2001, Vol. 103, No. 2 (Jun., 2001), pp. 528-531
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association

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 BOOK REVIEW SECTION

Book Review Essays

The Connecting Sea:

History, Anthropology, and the Mediterranean
HENK DRIESSEN
University of Nijmegen

The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean His-

sea and its shores. It is a collection of miniatures replete
tory. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell. Malden,
with interesting, nonsystematic, bits of information and
MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. 761 pp. serendipity. The first section is a catalog of Mediterranean
Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape. Predrag
Matvejevic'. Michael Henry Heim, trans. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1999. 218 pp.
A Mediterranean Society. An Abridgment in One
Volume. Shlomo D. Goitein. Jacob Lassner, ed. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1999. 503 pp.
Since the late 1980s there has been a crisis of confidence
among anthropologists in region-wide comparisons. Part
of a more general questioning of the area-studies model,
this crisis is the result of forces both from without and
within academia. The end of the Cold War, the disintegra-
tion of the Soviet bloc, and increasing global interdepend-
ence undermined the geopolitical basis for conventional
area expertise from without (cf. Lewis and Wigen 1999).
Said's Orientalism and the deconstructive drive in post-
modem anthropology have undercut area-wide compari-
sons from within. As a result, many anthropologists, in-
cluding those who work in the Mediterranean area, have
tended to retreat to the safe haven of ethnographic descrip-
tion.
The authors of the three works under review go against
the grain by making forceful pleas for studying the circum-
Mediterranean area as a distinctive historical unit(y). Al-
though quite diverse in subject matter, point of view,
scope, and purpose, all three books challenge anthropolo-
gists to look beyond the particularities of their field locali-
ties for region-wide insights.
The charming, beautifully illustrated book by Predrag
Matvejevi6, a scholar of Slavic studies, represents a Medi-
terranean voice and a personal, at times poetic, view of the
experience, ranging from waves, caves, and sea smells to
shipbuilding, sponge gathering, and the relation of Medi-
terranean peoples to the sea. The second considers the his-
tory of maps of the Mediterranean world up to the seven-
teenth century. The third is a glossary of names for all
kinds of things Mediterranean. Matvejevid's approach is
part of the Eastern European ethnological preoccupation
with maps, linguistic phenomena, and culture traits. It
makes a nice companion to the detached, Olympian, and
more systematic views of the Mediterranean contained in
the other two books.
A Mediterranean Society is a one-volume abridgment of
Shlomo Goitein's monumental five-volume, 2,850-page
historical anthropology of the Jewish communities of the
medieval Mediterranean. Trained as a philologist like
Matvejevid, Goitein conducted fieldwork among Yeme-
nite immigrants to Palestine before he embarked on his
huge project. He saw himself primarily as a sociographer
of old societies based on their texts, an approach congenial
with the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz. The
texts he studied came from the unique depository of dis-
carded documents (the genizah), ranging from court depo-
sitions to private letters, attached to a synagogue in Fustat,
Old Cairo. The Mediterranean, "The Sea" for the medieval
Jews, facilitated the development of a cosmopolitan soci-
ety that played a significant role in the emerging world
economy. Traces of the urban world of Jewish merchants
who traded from Sicily to India so vividly evoked by Goi-
tein can still be found among Jewish communities in Bar-
celona, Melilla, and other Mediterranean ports.
This reviewer finds the selection of material in Jacob
Lassner's abridged version unfortunate. Lassner has omit-
ted even the bare skeleton of economic life (the original

American Anthropologist 103(1):528-541. Copyright ? 2001, American Anthropological Association

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 BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS 529

volume 1), much of the flavor of daily life (volume 4), Their
and, golden rule of Mediterranean history is diversity in
most seriously, volume 5's unique focus on the individual.
unity and fragmentation by land cum interlinkage by sea.
Microecology, connectivity, and flexibility are the three
What remains is interesting enough: community organiza-
tion, family life, and its values, and a schematic picture
closely
of related key concepts. Their approach fits well into
the routines of daily life, but several topics, sexualitythe age of the Internet with its interfaces, fluidity, and in-
among them, for which the genizah hardly contains useful
terdependencies (in fact, much of Intemet jargon is derived
information, are dragged in at the expense of, for instance,
from seafaring).
A brief discussion of four "definite places" (the Bekaa
honor, travel, or seafaring, about which the original work
provides a wealth of detail. valley, south Etruria in Italy, central Cyrenaica, and the is-
The Corrupting Sea, the intriguing title of Hordenland andof Melos in the Aegean) results in the following defi-
Purcell's hefty tome (a second one on climate, disease, and of microecology: "a locality ('a definite place') with
nition
demography is in the works) expresses the view of ancient a distinctive identity derived from the set of available pro-
Greek and Roman writers that easy communication by ductive sea opportunities and the particular interplay of human
was detrimental to social order. It is an odd start for a book
responses to them found in a given period" (p. 80). It is not
that stresses the vital importance of sea connections theforecological features of the zone per se that define mi-
Mediterranean societies. Of the three books at hand, this is
croecologies but rather the interaction of opportunities for
the most suggestive for anthropologists. It is also the most
agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry, hunting, gath-
ambitious. The authors, specialists in ancient and medievalering, fishing, and forestry, and, most importantly, for en-
history, make extensive use of anthropological theory and gagement in larger networks of redistribution. The book's
evidence, attributing "transforming power" to comparative main argument is that the distinctiveness of Mediterranean
ethnography in the field of Mediterranean history (p. history
178) and its continuity over three thousand years results
and adopting Roy Rappaport's model of human ecology. from "the paradoxical coexistence of a milieu of relatively
Horden and Purcell initially aimed to test the notion easy ofseaborne communications with a quite unusually
Mediterranean unity against evidence from prehistory,fragmented
An- topography of microregions in the sea's coast-
tiquity, and the Middle Ages, as a complement both to landsFer- and islands" (p. 5).
nand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean Horden and Purcell's affinity with anthropology lies in
World in the Age of Philip H (1976), which for a long time their local perspective with its emphasis on the small-scale,
seemed to have marked an end rather than a beginning of the less visible, and subaltern as a basis for the search of
Mediterranean studies, and to the more modest purview of common denominators across wide spans of time and
Goitein's A Mediterranean Society. In the end they not space. This approach yields original insights. Horden and
only expanded their scope to encompass the pre-industrial Purcell's key chapter on connectivity offers a fine exam-
Mediterranean over three millennia and a wider range ofple. They start from the acoustic and visual element in the
evidence (archaeology, literary works, historical docu- development of networks of interaction. Given the moun-
ments, and a number of scientific disciplines) but also tainous nature of most coastlines, much of the Mediterra-
called into question much of the received wisdom on the nean basin is linked by lines of sight. In a large part of the
subject, including that of Braudel and Goitein. Rather than sea sailors thus find themselves in sight of land, a condition
offering completely new evidence, they bring together, re- enhancing a sense of connectivity.
assess, and reinterpret existing knowledge. Bibliographical From this microecological position they are able to de-
essays appended to each chapter provide mines of anno- velop refreshingly iconoclastic and contrary views of Medi-
tated references. The synoptic result alters the perception terranean historiography--debunking, correcting, and re-
of Mediterranean history and anthropology. fining a whole range of commonly held views. They
The Mediterranean region that emerges from the three discuss numerous less-studied small localities rather than
books is much more fluid than that of Braudel. Matvejevi# the few famous cities. They concentrate on highly local-
warns us that "its boundaries are drawn in neither space ized husbandry instead of more spectacular pastoral net-
nor time. There is in fact no way of drawing them: they are works. They opt for a rural focus to counteract the urban
neither ethnic nor historical, state nor national; they are like bias in the historiography of the Mediterranean. They ar-
a chalk circle that is constantly traced and erased, that the gue against Braudel that the Mediterranean derives cohe-
winds and waves, that obligations and inspirations, expand sion less from its networks of routes than from the more
or reduce" (p. 10). The core of Goitein's Mediterranean is general connectivity of its microregions. They disaggre-
the littoral between Tunisia and Egypt with extensions to gate towns as a separate category. They suggest that the
the west (North Africa, Muslim Sicily, and Spain), the east dispersed, changeable hinterlands of larger settlements
(Muslim countries of southwestern Asia) and the land of rather than fixed "natural" hinterlands has been the Medi-
the "Romans" (the Balkans and Mediterranean France). terranean norm. They favor small vessels, cabotage
Horden and Purcell prefer to define the Mediterranean in (tramping along coasts), and low commerce over large
terms of the unpredictable, the variable, and the local. ships, major shipping lanes, and high commerce (against

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530 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 103, No. 2 * JUNE 2001

Goitein, whom they criticize for overstressing the mercan-Horden and Purcell see the heterogeneity of the population
tile and neglecting the geographical). They correct the pre-of coastlands as a correlate of structural mobility. This mo-
vailing view of an early medieval depression caused bybility is also essential for the way in which cultural unities
hostilities between Islam and Christendom. They stress the have developed. Here they echo the position taken by John
importance of marginal lands and activities against the Davis in his survey of Mediterranean anthropology 25
overemphasis on a uniform system of dry farming. They years ago: "If there are any common characteristics, these
attack the erroneous association of pastoralism with primi-must be the product of contact, exchange-they must be
tivism and underdevelopment. They correct the bias to- created by human interaction" (1977:19). But while Davis
ward single great innovations. They argue that subsistence rejected an explanatory role for ecology, Horden and Pur-
cell call attention to the ecological preconditions of this
agriculture was the exception rather than the rule. They re-
ject the view that the supposed agrarian revolution in the
movement and to the effects of human interaction in shap-
Middle Ages caused a rift with Antiquity and betweening the environment.
North and South. They qualify the widely held view of Throughout their book Horden and Purcell find it neces-
overgrazing by goats as the main cause of erosion by point-sary to turn to the anthropological record in order to illumi-
ing out the impact of human action. Deforestation is a re- nate distant periods. They use ethnographic material not
sult of sugarcane refining, mining, charcoal production, only for confirmation, supplementation, and substitution of
kilns, bathhouses, barrel making, house- and shipbuilding. historical evidence but also for new questions, for theoreti-
They tone down the doctrinal differences among Judaism, cal ideas, concepts, and new methods, and, most impor-
Christianity, and Islam by drawing attention to the spatial tantly, for validation of Mediterranean continuity. The fi-
substratum of these religions, the intricate network of con-nal part of their study is entirely devoted to anthropology
nections among cult sites, and the implied movement ofand the question of continuity and discontinuity. Horden
substantial numbers of people over short and long dis-and Purcell assume rather than demonstrate that in the
tances.
course of the twentieth century Mediterranean unity has
Most of these points are well taken and convincinglybeen
ar- shattered by the turmoil of modernization and the in-
gued, even when, as is often the case, conclusive evidence
corporation of its coastal nations into global political
is lacking. On some of the topics they tend to bolt.economies,
The technologies and communication networks.
definition, role, and status of towns in Mediterranean his-
This is a delicate matter in view of their rejection of di-
tory is a case in point. In their eagerness to undo the urban
chotomies, turning points, and watersheds in the three
bias in Mediterranean historiography and its typologies of
thousands years of Mediterranean history prior to industri-
urban forms, they end up abolishing the town category al-
alization. For the two pillars on which they base their no-
together, replacing it by the concept of larger settlement
tion of Mediterranean unity, fragmentation and connectiv-
and fluid hinterland. They may be right in their estimate
ity, seem as valid today as in the long past. The fault line
that inhabitants of settlements of 10,000 and over in pre-in- they perceive between the preindustrial and the postindus-
dustrial Mediterranean societies amounted to less than 10 trial Mediterranean rests heavily on an implicit assumption
percent of the total population, but this arbitrary statistical of relative stability in rural communities prior to the Sec-
approach neglects the cultural dominance of towns in ond World War, itself a rather daring extrapolation from
many zones. Their conclusion that there are no specifically the twentieth-century ethnographic record to three millen-
Mediterranean urban forms seems too hasty. They mention nia of Mediterranean history. One may agree with them
the agro-town only in passing, and wrongly so, for this set- that the major change lies in the dimensions of change it-
tlement type which can be found in France, Spain, Italy, self: its unprecedented scale and rate. But the when and
Syria, Turkey, Greece, and North Africa, is a good candi- how of this change and its differential impact on local
date for Mediterranean distinctiveness. Much of the earlier communities, rural and urban, around the Mediterranean is
ethnography of the Mediterranean that they invoke suf- largely undocumented. Horden and Purcell rightly see an
fered from a rural bias (fieldwork in marginal places). This important task here for anthropologists: "they will show
bias was corrected from the 1970s onward by urban-based how changes have been experienced, giving us the 'insider,'
fieldwork and systematic attention to town-hinterland dy- ethnographic view of what earlier chapters have described
namics. largely from the outside, from historical evidence: how mi-
Part 3 of The Corrupting Sea attempts to explain con- croecologies maintain their identity despite the mutability
nectivity and its consequences for Mediterranean cohe- and the shifting frontiers which we have attributed to them;
siveness, showing how microregions "coalesce" on a how they have cushioned or diffused the impact of revolu-
grand scale. This coalescence is predicated upon three im- tion and catastrophe" (p. 474). Many recent historically
peratives for survival in the face of unpredictable ecologi- aware ethnographies do provide details from periods much
cal and political forces: diversification, storage, and redis- earlier than the end of the nineteenth century, showing how
tribution. A high level of mobility of goods and people is the observed present has grown out of a documented past.
crucial in this Mediterranean system of risk avoidance. Purcell and Horden's contention that "for present purposes

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 BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS 531

anthropology must indeed choose between being history present than Purcell and Horden claim. Even if differences
between the northern and southern, western and eastern
and being nothing" is not only out of date but also gratui-
tous, since there is, of course, more to anthropology than
shores have increased over the past decades-and there is
history.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, honor was so important in
the anthropological literature on the Mediterranean that it
became a "gate-keeping concept" (cf. Appadurai 1986:
357). Horden and Purcell conclude by reopening the de-
bate on honor and shame as distinctively Mediterranean
values, arguing that there is much more unity in historical
Mediterranean value systems than hitherto acknowledged.
For all the diversity in local idioms and contexts of honor
and shame, recurrent features do emerge, a sort of loose
unity of family resemblances.
The difficult question remains whether this configura-
tion is distinctively Mediterranean. Their attempt to com-
pare Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean notions of
honor is a useful starting point for further research. They
show that honor is not merely a construct of Anglo-Ameri-
can anthropologists to legitimate claims to a separate re-
gional specialization, since indigenous scholars have indi-
cated that honor and shame are indeed deeply held values
across the region.
Their overall conclusion concerning Mediterranean
unity and distinctiveness is cautious: "the region is only
loosely unified, distinguishable from its neighbors to de-
grees that vary with time, geographical direction and topic.
Its boundaries are not of the sort to be drawn easily on a
map. Its continuities are best thought of as continuities of
form or pattern, within which all is mutability" (p. 523).
Further research may well show that there is both less
unity to the Mediterranean past and less disunity to the
growing evidence that this is the case-it continues to be
useful to treat the circum-Mediterranean as an arena for
comparative research. The homogeneity created by mass
tourism in the coastal zones and local reactions to it, and
the use of the Mediterranean label itself for self-identifica-
tion would be two good topics. Such research would have
to pay far more attention to the role of individuals than the
books under review.
Note
Acknowledgment. Hearty thanks are due to William Christian
for his corrections of grammar and style.
References Cited
Appadurai, Arjun
1986 Theory in Anthropology: Center and Periphery. Com-
parative Studies in Society and History 28:356-361.
Braudel, Fernand
1976 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the
Age of Philip II. 2 vols. Glasgow: Fontana, Collins.
Davis, John
1977 People of the Mediterranean. An Essay in Comparative
Social Anthropology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Lewis, Martin, and Karen Wigen
1999 A Maritime Response to the Crisis in Area Studies. The
Geographical Review 89:161-168.
Said, Edward
1978 Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Anthropology and Globalization

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told me of his Albanian background and how his father,
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of had always supported Albanian liberation move-
Minnesota Press, 1996. 229 pp. ments, had retired to Macedonia after a career in the United
States as a restauranteur. "Albanians will get freedom," he
Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places.
said, "But it will just take more bloodshed." He told how
UlfHannerz. New York: Routledge, 1996. 216 pp.
his skill at soccer had landed him on a university football
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Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming
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Desires, Contested Selves. Mary Beth Mills. New phenated Americans-Polish, African, Mexican. Some
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. 218 pp. were Moslems, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant. One was a
former priest and some were not religious. The local's
In the summer of 1998 I was riding through Chicago newspaper was in Spanish, Polish, and English.
traffic with a union representative, driving between high- The members were from all over Eastern Europe,
rise apartments on the Gold Coast to defend members of Southeast Asia, Latin America, and various ethnicities of
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