Anthropology of the Mediterranean: Between Crisis and Renewal

During the 1960s and 1970s, the development of Anglophone anthropology in the Mediterranean produced several efforts to establish a circum-Mediterranean perspective. By the 1980s, several criticisms were directed against this young regional specialization. This paper examines the main arguments that substantiated the rejection of this comparative endeavour. It argues that the debate about Mediterranean anthropology has been marked by a narrowing of the field. Discussion was eminently "European", concerned only the Anglophone production and focused almost exclusively on the theme of honour and shame. A vast group of studies were not taken into account, both in the establishing of the field and in its dismantling. A larger contextualization shows that a renewal of a Mediterranean level of comparison in anthropology is taking place in a more cosmopolite framework. A new epistemological space seems to be opening, which is not a simple return to the past.