Towards a Social Anthropology of the Mediterranean [and Comments and Reply]

Abstract

Davis's People of the Mediterranean provides a detailed survey of the writings of anthropologists who have worked in Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Its author focuses on economic organization, stratification, patronage, family and kinship, and the way anthropologists have dealt with history. He concludes that they have failed to compare, to work in cities, to relate part to whole, and to make use of history. These failures, he argues, maybe the consequences of a mass inferiority complex among Mediterraneanists. While partly admitted, these failures are inherent in the structural-functionalism that until recently dominated most anthropologists, not just Mediterraneanists. Davis's work, while provocative and informative, is limited by his own failure to provide a set of problems that could have placed his abundant data in a meaningful comparative framework. The consequences of variations in the region's geography and economy, dimensions Davis ignores when discussing Mediterranean unity, might well have provided such a framework; they furnish part of the answer to some of the similarities and differences he notes but does not explain.