Abstract
This chapter reviews the contributions to the volume with reference to parallel scholarship in Mediterranean Studies (Braudel, Horden and Purcell), critical geography (Doreen Massey) and psychogeography (Guy Debord). It argues that—unlike most scholarship in Mediterranean Studies—the chapters in the volume take as their point of departure not the geography of the Mediterranean, but a population and a culture. By diverting focus from geography to culture, these chapters suggest an exciting new directly in scholarship on the Mediterranean.
It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to two people who helped to bring this chapter into focus. Michael Pifer read a very rough first draft and offered thoughtful and imaginative advice. And Kathryn Babayan welcomed me into the fold of Armenian Studies at Michigan and introduced me to fascinating scholars whom I would not otherwise know—including Michael. My warmest thanks go to both of them for community, intellectual stimulation, and support.
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Notes
- 1.
See David Abulafia, “Mediterraneans,” in Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. W.V. Harris (Oxford [U.K.]: Oxford University Press, 2005), 64–93.
- 2.
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 23.
- 3.
Braudel, The Mediterranean, 276.
- 4.
Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 2.
- 5.
Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: the World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 34.
- 6.
Doreen B. Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” in Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 146–56), 154–155. ProQuest Ebrary.
- 7.
Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” 155. On the political production of “place” and “space,” see David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). For discussion and bibliography of “routes” and “roots,” see Tim Cresswell, Place: An Introduction (2nd edition. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 88–114.
- 8.
Guy Debord’s “Theory of the dérive”—which is understood as the foundational manifesto of psychogeography—first appeared in Les lèvres nues in 1956 and was reprinted in the Internationale Situationniste #2 in 1958. It has been archived by the Situationist International website; see http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html (accessed June 12, 2017).
- 9.
For examples of the critique of the Mediterranean as organizing principle for anthropological scholarship, see Michael Herzfeld, “Honour and Shame: Problems in the Comparative Analysis of Moral Systems,” Man NS 15 (1980): 339–351; and “The Horns of the Mediterraneanist Dilemma,” American Ethnologist 11 (1984): 439–454. For a recent recuperation of Mediterranean ethnography, see Naor Ben-Yehoyada, The Mediterranean Incarnate: Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
- 10.
See e.g., E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).
- 11.
For a discussion of the Armenian alphabet, see Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, The World’s Writing Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 356.
- 12.
For examples of other alphabets derived from the Greek, see Coptic, Georgian, Gothic, Glagolitic, and Cyrillic.
- 13.
Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea,, 45.
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Mallette, K. (2018). The Mediterranean Is Armenian. In: Babayan, K., Pifer, M. (eds) An Armenian Mediterranean. Mediterranean Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72865-0_15
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