Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Place

House and home

Felix Stein — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 10:11:58 +0000

Initially published 9 Dec 2019

Abstract:

If asked to imagine home, most of us will come to think of a particular house or building. And, for many of us, the quintessential image of home remains the place we grew up in. This close association between house and home has long marked anthropological literature. And yet, when we imagine home, it is often not the structures themselves but the feelings, practices, and relationships within familiar spaces which give home a powerful sense of belonging. Home may be the scent of a grandmother’s cooking, the familiar fuzz of a worn cushion, the seemingly defiant thrill of hanging posters on the wall as a teenager, or the knot of tension in the stomach of a child listening to an argument in the adjoining room. Recent anthropological studies have hence looked beyond physical structures to understand home in terms of a diverse array of practices, meaningful and imaginative forms, and feelings which surround a sense of groundedness within the world. Understood in such terms, home becomes something much less solid than a structure of stone or wood. It tends to be contestable and fragile, a domain not only of belonging but also of potential alienation when attempts to make home fail or are subverted. This flourishing literature increasingly suggests that while physical shelter may be a basic existential need, it is houses and homes, wrapped up in the desire and struggle for belonging, which underpin human sociality.

Introduction

The study of home within anthropology, and within the social sciences more broadly, occupies a curious position. On the one hand, houses, homes, and practices of homemaking have been an inescapable background within anthropological writing throughout the discipline’s history. Houses and homes have been recognised as an essential ground upon which many of the most prominent theoretical questions of social science unfold, from the nature of kinship, to the reproduction of class and gender differences, to the shaping of sensory knowledge. On the other hand, however, houses and homes often remain out of focus, with their ability to ground and shape social life simply taken for granted and lacking analytical elaboration. They tend to be the mere background to the ‘real’ objects of analysis. The intimacy and idiosyncrasy of home spaces can threaten to confound efforts to consider broader questions of social reproduction or social transformation. And yet it may well be that no one lives without a home, and that home plays an inescapable role in defining who we are.

This entry traces anthropological attempts to think through the significance of houses and homes in shaping our lives. Given the persistent gap between the centrality of home to most of human life, and its peripheral position within most social science, these attempts represent fertile analytic starting points for the study of social life more broadly. For heuristic purposes, this entry presents ‘house’ and ‘home’ as distinct but related entities. It takes the ‘house’ to be the material and often-generic form of the home in a given society. Thus, the house points here to familiar physical structures in streets and neighbourhoods, which mainly take shape through the practices of planners, architects, craftspeople, and builders. The house, however, also refers to the idea of houses or households as typical social institutions, defined by dominant norms. In contrast, the notion of ‘home’ emphasises the subjective sense of being rooted within the world. Both ‘house’ and ‘home’ exist simultaneously as physical entities, subjective feelings, and as objects of various discourses which seek to shape, reinforce, or contest the forms they take. Both entities do not always map neatly onto one another. ‘Home’ may refer more to imaginary spaces, or to bodily practices rather than physical structures, while houses, as sites of labour, conflict, and tension, may be at times fundamentally unhomely.

The house: from symbolism to social reproduction

The conceptual distinction between house and home is a relatively recent one, and for many years anthropologists did not give much importance to either concept. Early scholars such as Lewis Henry Morgan (1981[1881]), writing on American aboriginal houses, or Bronislaw Malinowski, who defined the family as a group of kin tied to ‘a definite physical space, a hearth and home’ (see Collier, Rosaldo & Yanagisako 1987), saw the physicality and particularity of the home as secondary. When homes appeared within anthropological accounts, they ‘tend[ed] to be thought of as a “case” of symbolism or cosmology rather than a subject in their own right’ (Humphrey 1988: 16). In addition to being seen as a symbol indicating particular cultural beliefs, earlier generations of anthropologists also saw the house mostly as a container or setting for those social relations, such as kinship, which were taken to be of primary interest (Carsten & Jones 1995). While the home environment certainly mattered in earlier anthropological work, it did so because it was seen as an important element within broader meaningful orders, or as symbolically-laden stages, upon which important social dramas such as marriage or initiation rites played out.

Two seminal works by Pierre Bourdieu and Claude Lévi-Strauss both reflect this approach, but also mark the beginning of a shift in focus towards unpacking the role of houses in fundamental social processes: Lévi-Strauss (1983) wrote on ‘house societies’, defined as societies where elite power was organised via the institution of often noble ‘houses’, which bundled together familial descent, land, power and wealth. In such societies, including the Native American Yurok and Kwakiutl as well as medieval European societies, Lévi-Strauss argued that noble houses played a critical role in sustaining society by encompassing forms of power that might otherwise be in tension (1983). For instance, marriages within noble houses turned allies into kin, reconciling the tension that might have existed between maintaining distinct family groups and interests, and the desire to build cross-cutting alliances (Lévi-Strauss 1983: 187). This approach continued to see houses as ‘containers’. However, in contrast to earlier works, the act of containment itself was now highlighted as playing a critical role in sustaining the social processes it encompassed.

Meanwhile, Bourdieu’s famous essay on the Kabyle house traced how corresponding distinctions of light/dark, public/private, and male/female sat at the heart how the Kabyle people, a Berber group living in the Atlas mountains, viewed the world (1992 [1970]). These distinctions not only shaped public conduct and religious belief, but were also manifest in the very layout, furnishings, and domestic routines which made up the Kabyle house, as well as in everyday domestic routines. In Bourdieu’s account, the physical organization of the Kabyle house not only reflected this structured worldview, but was also responsible for reproducing it. This argument would find full expression in his later theory of ‘habitus’, which he came to characterise as ‘a system of predispositions inculcated by the material circumstances of life and by family upbringing’ (Bourdieu 1976: 118). Although Bourdieu’s later work does not deal with the house at the same level of empirical or conceptual detail (Atkinson 2016), it is clear within his theory that houses are important sites for learning embodied habits and internalising specific values. Thus, as anthropologists began to focus on the home itself, it was largely through physical houses. For Lévi-Strauss, houses literally and conceptually encompassed and mediated relations, while for Bourdieu the structured, material form of the house became the primary ground for social reproduction.

In many ways, the first surge of attention flowing from the study of houses into the realm of homes has followed from the meeting of these two approaches, revealing that houses and homes are spaces where relations were not only reproduced, but actively mediated: a point made in an important volume by Stephen Hugh-Jones and Janet Carsten (1995). This new understanding of house and home has been illustrated in different ways. In her study of Malay domestic life, Carsten (1997) puts the hearth at the centre of the house: it is the place where the family meets, where food is prepared, and where kinship is made through the transformation and sharing of substances. She argues that ‘[h]earths are obvious sources of physical sustenance, but they are also often the symbolic focus of the house, loaded with the imagery of the commensal unity of close kin. Houses are material shelters as well as ritual centres’ (Carsten 2003:55). By sharing food, kinship is made and reproduced (many Malay express the two concepts as being like siblings). Here, the physical and symbolic dimensions of domestic life are not easily separated. Rather, as other authors have also argued, it is the physical enactment of kin relations, and their direct involvement in sustaining life through forms of care and nourishment, which give these relations weight and reality, investing them with memory and feeling (see Martens & Scott 2006; de Pina-Cabral 1986). Such attention to care, unity, and togetherness also brought questions of homeliness into focus, alongside matters of material wellbeing, collective ritual, and social reproduction.

Likewise, the making of a house and the making of a marriage can often be closely linked, as was the case among the Zafimaniry in Madagascar when studied by Maurice Bloch (1995). As a married couple’s house becomes stronger – ‘grows bones’, as several Zafimaniry put it – and transforms into a hardwood construction over time, the relationship of the married couple becomes more stable. No longer separating out broader social processes from the house itself, Bloch instead argued that house and marriage were interdependent. For married couples, in fact, key moments and challenges in a solidifying marriage, such as the birth of the first child, were intertwined with on-going processes of renovating and decorating the house. As the family unit matured, and took on wider roles and responsibilities, the physical structure of the Zafimaniry house grew increasingly solid and ornate, both reflecting this maturity and significance and contributing to it.

Anthropologists have also highlighted the role played by houses in producing a distinctive mode of economic organisation, known as the ‘house economy’ (Gudeman & Rivera 1990) or the ‘domestic mode of production’ (Sahlins 1972). Following a theory developed by Alexander Chayanov in relation to peasant economies, Sahlins describes household production as defined by the needs of the domestic unit – and as such as relatively low. In a parallel way, Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera observed how their informants sustained their agricultural livelihoods in an increasingly market-driven world, drawing on fieldwork with farming communities, first in Panama in the late 1960s, and then in Columbia from the 1970s onwards. Here, material practices were organised through the house (Gudeman & Rivera 1990: 2). While ‘both the house and the corporation are means for accomplishing material tasks’, the house economy is distinct in that it is ‘smaller, […] locally based and wholly or partly produces its own means of maintenance’ (Gudeman & Rivera 1990: 10). This organization enabled the household to pursue goals and modalities of mutuality, as well as individual well-being, distinct from but connected with the imperatives of the market. As such, Gudeman and his collaborators describe the house as the basic unit of economic life connected to others through bonds of exchange – while striving to be self-sufficient – and embedded in communities (Gudeman & Hann 2015). Again, the role of the house in mediating these relations and in the re-production of the family and the household is key.

Gudeman’s work ties in with approaches that emphasise the house as a sort of technology, which brings people together and mediates their relations with others, far beyond the confines of their economic existence. This argument is set out by Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence-Zuñiga in the introduction to their volume, Home life:

Both households and families use houses more than as settings for activities of production and distribution or as consumer goods. They are also mechanisms of communication, which channel and regulate social interaction among family members and between separate households. […] The house defines a place that belongs to a particular set of people and also defines, through co-residence and shared usage, the set of people that belong to a particular place. (1999: 3)

In each of these cases, although houses and homes are understood as playing an essential role in reproducing social relations, this reproduction cannot be taken for granted. Houses, homes, and those people within do not simply take up a pre-given place within an ordered cosmos. Rather, social reproduction is revealed as an often idiosyncratic process, where different individuals and families work to take up, challenge, or reinterpret given and familiar social roles. Houses and homes play a key role in such processes, mediating between individuals and society. Their construction and arrangement, as well as the kin relations which come together to create a ‘household’, often follow and reproduce existing social patterns. At the same time, the material and social resources of households are taken up in creative ways. As such, houses and homes situate individuals and families within society: not identically, but always in particular locations.

Assembling home: materialist approaches

If one strand of anthropological attention focused on the role of houses and homes in social reproduction, another strand has asked on how homes, and acts of homemaking, shape subjects themselves. Instead of examining the role of homes in sustaining or remaking key social institutions, the family, or labour, these approaches have looked more closely at the variety of lives and relationships that unfold within the home. They have focused more closely on questions of what it means to eke out a sense of belonging, security, and worth within and through the home, but also on the tensions that can emerge between different members of a household when feelings of belonging, security, or value do not align. In highlighting the subjective stakes of homes and homemaking, such work also begins to suggest a contrast between the house and household on one hand – which might be understood as a social institution, reflecting dominant norms – and the home, which might be understood as including feelings of rootedness, safety, and value.

The contrast between a physical ‘house’ and a subjective sense of ‘home’, however, is not hard and fast. Instead, as work on the materiality of the home has shown, houses are often made into homes through the reworking of their material forms. Renovation, decoration, and furnishing, for example, help transform houses from generic expressions of familiar forms into places which tell the story of distinct, personal lives and relationships. This has been shown in a study of residents on a North London council estate (Miller 1988). Danny Miller documented how residents decorated and renovated their council flats in ways which both reflected their class position but also inflected this position with a personal sense of identity and belonging. Focusing not on homes themselves, but on the possessions and consumption practices that concentrate within their walls, Miller has continued to examine the importance of material objects for developing a sense of home. These objects include fitted kitchens, furniture, and knickknacks, but also the materials of the flats themselves such as concrete, wood, or brick which channel noise, light, and warmth. They allow homes to express not only given social meanings but the particularity of individual biographies and interpersonal relations (2009; 2001; 1998). As a result, the objects in one’s home are simultaneously involved in placing oneself in broader society, creating relationships of care, and developing a personal sense of biography, whereas the home both facilitates and reflects these interwoven processes. Together, home, the possessions which fill it, and the memories attached to both, shore up our sense of identity and belonging against the tribulations we might face in the outside world (Miller 2001). The physical permanence of material objects, and their peculiar mode of assembly within the home, serve as durable sources of security (Petridou 2001). The subject, the inhabitant of the home, as Elia Petridou argues in her study of Greek students’ homes in Britain, is advanced through the ‘interaction with objects’. These objects could be furniture but also food, which is less place-bound; their totality and the security that accompanies them is in part based on an understanding of home as a ‘sensory totality’ (Petridou: 88). As such, for Miller (2009; 2001; 1998) and others (see also Gregson 2007; Dittmar 1992; Daniels & Andrews 2010; Cieraad 2006), creating a sense of home is directly linked to activities like shopping for material goods, arranging furniture in the rooms or narrating stories and memories of different objects. Shifting the focus onto materiality helps clarify a distinction between the physical house, whose forms often follow dominant norms, and a felt sense of home, which plays with and reinvents these forms, without necessarily subverting them.

On a more macro-level, anthropologists studying architecture and urban planning have highlighted that the material qualities of our surroundings work to shape bodies, habits, and mobility in line with broader social patterns (see Buchli 2013 for an overview). Following Bourdieu, they ask how houses impart particular social understandings and roles, often focusing less on individual houses or homes, and more on housing as a form of infrastructure (see Larkin 2013 for a review of infrastructural approaches). Thus, specific forms of architecture can give colonial aspirations physical form (e.g. Rabinow 1995 on France and its former colonies). In addition, specific features of houses, such as gates, tend to structure social relations. They may create class and race-based enclaves, as in American upper class suburbs, where segregated communities are established around singular houses or groups of them (Low 2003). On an intra-house level, Christine Helliwell (1996) studying the Dayak in Borneo, or the contributors to Beyond kinship (Joyce & Gillespie 2000) on various other house societies, go into detail of how houses and their architectural design restrict bodies, channel sensory awareness, produce sociality, or provoke interventions (e.g. in response to a quarrelling couple). While partitions – often flimsy and transparent – can create a division between private and public, they can also lead to forms of sociality. Likewise, changing housing conditions can be used to structure and sustain political outcomes. For example, moving Chicago ‘project’ residents into newer, mixed-income buildings led them to lose access to the free and effective heating systems of their former homes. Thereby, the residents were subject to a ‘sensory push’ towards becoming better workers and consumers, who bore the risks of their own survival individually (Fennell 2011). Many approaches which look at houses as infrastructure are grounded in actor-network theory, which in its most radical iterations refuses to see houses as stable objects at all, but instead approaches them as collections (or ‘assemblages’) of objects, materials, and processes, all of which exert agency and make demands on people in particular ways (e.g. Vokes 2013).

On the other hand, a range of works on the home has focused on emotion and affect, where affect denotes forms of bodily perception that slip below conscious detection and are frequently hard to put into words. Affects often have a strong material basis, which is why the material arrangement of homes can serve to suffuse them with specific atmospheres of feeling (Daniels 2015; Olesen 2010). For example, in Jordanian Bedouin homes, the profusion of green-tinted windows fills them with a radiant green hue which evokes a sense of divine presence (Bille 2017). Specific forms of light are not simply a religious symbol. Rather, for instance, green light’s physical brilliance, immaterial nature and its ability to seep into spaces help construct deeply evocative feelings of piety and virtue. This helps householders make their claims to virtue visible to and felt by others, and it shapes domestic moods and interactions. As such, while the use of green light clearly reproduces dominant notions of piety and a public-private distinction, these values come to life in affective ways within individual households. They come about at the intersection of materiality, emotion, social relations, and the practices of dwelling, and they shape personal notions of home.

Re-making home: feminist and critical approaches

If homes have come to be seen as sites where people can negotiate and even contest their place in the world, then this is in no small part thanks to feminist writings on domestic labour and women’s lives. While the universalism of the specific, often Marxist concepts used to theorise women’s domestic efforts has often drawn criticism from anthropologists (Edholm, Harris & Young 1975; Strathern 1992), Marxist approaches, and the anthropological responses to them, have nonetheless productively focused attention on the domestic sphere as a domain of labour and creativity, as well as one holding the potential for alienation or exploitation.

For example, in her ethnography of a high-rise apartment building in Karachi, Laura Ring (2006) traces how inter-ethnic peace is the product of the relentless work of women’s domestic labour. Peace prevails despite on-going tensions between different nationalist factions who share the building, including Sindhis, Punjabs, and Muhajirs. As they went about their lives together, the female residents would exchange gossip, share fashion and grooming tips and preferences, reflect on questions of religious practice and belief, or help one another navigate family tensions. These seemingly-mundane interactions worked to build bonds between households, offering both men and women a localised counternarrative to stories of irreparable political and ethnic divides. Ironically, the success of these small, everyday efforts could make the state of friendship, care, and peace in the apartment building appear to some (including the ethnographer, initially) as if this were simply a natural state, rather than a product of sustained work.

In documenting the everyday labours involved in making a home, feminist scholars have also called for more careful attention to tensions between exploitation and belonging, and between social change and social reproduction. For example, Lila Abu-Lughod, studying Awlad 'Ali Bedouin women in Egypt (1990; 1986) traces how ostensibly oppressive norms of public male honour and private female modesty are creatively taken up by women to claim power for themselves. By echoing men’s insistence over strict separations between men and women within the home, women eke out space to smoke, scheme, and share household secrets. They invert their formal deference to men, while retaining their claim to modesty and virtue. These practices can often become forms of resistance, challenging power dynamics within households and potentially driving broader social change. Thus, traditional Bedouin marriage tends to involve elder relatives selecting a woman’s betrothed, with little input from the bride herself, and with financial support for the couple expected to come from kin. However, women may resist such practices by asserting their own desirability, chafing at the obligations this practice produces, and remaining enchanted with the idea of a spouse with an independent income. Through buying lingerie or makeup, they assert a role for desire – both theirs and that of their husbands – in determining marriages. Such assertions reshape power dynamics within and between households, granting women more power over prospective and actual husbands, as orchestrators of desire. They also reposition the home as a more private space between husbands and wives, one shaped by consumer goods, and less dependent on kin.

Lives within the home can be constrained by multiple, intersecting forms of power, from gendered hierarchies to the power of the state. Yet, even under what may seem like desperate or desolate circumstances, home can serve as a site of creative response and as a repository for hopes and dreams. This is illustrated in Clara Han’s (2012) striking ethnography of slum households in Santiago, Chile, where she traces home as a site of ‘active awaiting’. Living in a present where the possibilities for life are tightly constrained by debt, gang violence, and the punitive force of the state, Han nonetheless traces how small interventions in the home – the pawning of a beloved music player, or the sheltering of a relative away from an abusive partner – create small spaces in which new, perhaps unknown possibilities can take root and grow.

This emphasis on interpersonal relationships, on belonging, security, and worth, and on power and contestation, remain rooted in the house, as a physical space, but move beyond it in emphasising the subjective dimensions of home. For instance, classic analyses of hospitality may focus on how, for hosts, acts of hospitality may serve to enact the authority and moral standing of householders, and how such domestic sovereignty relates to broader forms of cultural and state authority (e.g. Herzfeld 1987). In contrast, recent studies of homes on the margins (e.g. Han 2012) have come to ask how homes mediate and constrain the very possibilities of caring for others, as hosts or otherwise, as a fragile and often fraught enterprise. Even in studies focused on physical houses and other structures, home often comes to life not as a symbolic or material form, but as an experiential and relational category.

Supporting this shift in focus away from physical structures to lived forms have been critiques of western understandings of home, as a product of capitalist modernity. Over the course of the twentieth century, western understandings of home have centred around the idea of a privately-owned dwelling, occupied by a nuclear family (Dupuis & Thorns 1996; Madigan, Munro & Smith 1990). These have been coupled with philosophically inspired works drawing on phenomenological (Ingold 2011) or existential traditions (Jackson 2005) to ask what it means for people to have a place within the world. From these impetuses, a growing body of work has approached the concept of ‘home’ not as a typical or identifiable institution, operating to reproduce given forms of authority, but instead as a name for the on-going efforts and dreams of people to secure a place or sense of belonging in the world, something felt, lived, imagined, or struggled for.

Home as a process and ideal

If the understandings of home explored above remain grounded in the notion of a physical house, occupying a fixed geographical location, a further set of perspectives engage with representations and practices of home more widely. Home and the processes linked to it are not necessarily material, and even when they are, they do not need to be linked to a house. Home may evoke the notion of a homeland, whose material basis lies in the smells of street foods, the cadence of a dialect, or the grand architecture of symbolic monuments. Yet, homelands may also be predominantly imaginative entities. This is the case, for example, with the Sikh ‘homeland’ of Khalistan, which exists as a yet-to-be realised nationalist vision, amongst local and émigré activists, who frequently discuss such visions online (Axel 2004). Linked to the imagination are the practical habits which produce and reproduce a sense of home, and which may persist in doing so, even in the absence of a fixed material basis. Particularly in situations where a material home is not immediately available, as in states of homelessness, refuge, or migration, the imagination, memory, and practices of homemaking become crucial to sustain a sense of stability and security. Homeless people, for example, may establish a sense of home in terms of their daily routines, moving through city streets, collecting new materials for temporary shelters, begging, and meeting with friends and familiar faces. In this way, they do not just structure their day, but also their surroundings (see Veness 1993; Lenhard, forthcoming).

Home may thus be seen as always in-between the real and the ideal and imaginative (Mallett 2004). It can relate to ‘the activity performed by, with or in a person's things and places. Home is lived in the tension between the given and the chosen, then and now’ (Mallett 2004: 80). As Shelley Mallett argues, ‘people spend their lives in search of home, at the gap between the natural home and the particular ideal home where they would be fully fulfilled’ (2004: 80). This analysis links ideas about home as a future (ideal) homeland inspired by past experience to notions of home in the present. It foregrounds that homes are made and have a procedural quality to them.

Catherine Brun and Anita Fabos (2015) position the idea of home-as-process at the centre of their work inspired by different contexts of migration. They describe home as a set of everyday practices, while ‘such practices involve both material and imaginative notions of home and may be improvements or even investments to temporary dwellings; they include the daily routines that people undertake [...] and the social connections people make’ (Brun and Fabos 2015:12). This view of home builds on Mary Douglas’ (1991) classic minimal definition of the home, as the act of bringing a particular space under control. For Douglas, a home is first and foremost a localised activity of ordering and control in the present, produced through accumulating meaningful objects and through enacting familiar routines in a certain space (see also Easthope 2004; O’Mahony 2013). Douglas continues her analysis in the following way:

home is always a localizable idea. Home is located in space but it is not necessarily a fixed space. It does not need bricks and mortar, it can be a wagon, a caravan, a board, or a tent. It need not be a large space, but space there must be, for home starts by bringing some space under control (1991: 289).

From this perspective, making a home is about finding a daily structure, regular rhythms, and constructing routines (Easthope 2004: 135; O’Mahony 2013). April Veness (1993), who worked with homeless people in Delaware in the late 1980s, stresses the importance of habits, rhythms, and routines for making home — often as mundane as routinely visiting certain neighbourhoods, shelters, and food kitchens. Veness found that installing a temporal order to the day as well as the environment was a key part of peoples’ daily home-making.

Julie Botticello (2007) takes the notion of home further away from a fixed dwelling towards a ‘site of practices where comfort, familiarity, and intimate sociality occur’ (2007: 19; see also Capo 2015). In her study of Nigerians living in London, Botticello not only looks at a newly constructed home of immigrants but also at how a sense of home does not have to be limited to domestic, private space. Instead, home extends into the public realm of the street, of outdoor markets. The home-as-process, built on practices and routines, does not have to involve a fixed structure. It denotes a ‘highly complex system of ordered relations with place, an order that orientates us in space, in time, and in society’ (Dovey 1985: 39). All this takes us not just into the everyday rhythm of routine and practice, but to the ways in which such practices unfold over vaster spaces and longer periods of time.

Thus, imagined, in-process homes may be grounded in nostalgia – a feeling of reaching backwards in time that is already present in its Greek root (ὅμοιος [homoios]), which relates to homesickness. Memories and a yearning for a past home are often part of home imaginaries. Coming from the field of migration studies, Brun and Fabos (2015) define this idea of what they call HOME (in all capitals) as the ‘geopolitics of nation and homeland’ (13). It symbolizes an often idealised return to the cultural environment of one’s past. Georgia Doná (2015: 69) analyses this nostalgia as the ‘memories of, longing for, and imaginations of homes that are idealized’, anchoring this longing in a conglomerate of sanitised prior experiences. The idea of home as ‘homeland’ figures strongly in the social science literature on migration and refugees. In her study of refugees in Georgia, Brun (2015) finds that return and repatriation are greatly important for the people she worked with who were escaping from the Georgian war in the late 1990s. Here, home has to do first of all with an ‘absence’ of ‘social relations and practices possible to enact in the familiar home environment’ (Brun 2015: 7). It is related to a feeling of nostalgia for the home of the past. Brun’s informants think of home primarily as a (lost) homeland, both in the sense of a country and a cultural routine that includes taste, language, people, and, particularly, family. Home might therefore be understood firstly as an imagined entity that carries what Liz Kenyon (1999) calls a right to return and a place of origin (Birdwell-Pheasant & Lawrence-Zuniga 1999). It is a place we depart from and have a desire to return to (Hobsbawm 1991). In their review of the literature on homelessness and home, Peter Kellett and Jeanne Moore (2003) position the concept of home in between personal and collective-cultural memory and desire: ‘certain aspects of home seemingly shape and motivate homeless people’s experience and behaviour […] and the desire for [it] acts as a powerful personal and cultural objective’ (124, 128). Likewise, for people in situations of displacement, Brun and Fabos (2015) argue that ‘understandings of home are often based on the past: people long for the home they lost’ (7). In this sense, home is immediately connected to the yearning and desire for a better future.

Caroline Humphrey (2005), in her historical analysis of Soviet shared houses and apartment blocks, shows that the imagination of different futures is likewise part of making a home. In the Russian city of Magnitogorsk, near the border with Kazakhstan, where workers’ dwellings were often built around a central public living space, workers would frequently adapt such public space according to their personal routines and imagination rather than necessarily follow Soviet collectivist ideals. Here, the ‘comforts of everyday domestic practices (byt) gradually invaded the austere spaces of even the exemplary Soviet Nakomfin apartment house’ (Humphrey 2005: 40). The infrastructure and built environment interacted with the ‘imaginative and projective inner feelings of the people’; together they were ‘mutually constitutive of fantasy’, pointing to a different possibility for living, for instance in carving out private spaces where quiet conversations could take place (Humphrey 2005: 40, 43).

The idea of home as something located largely in an imagined future is even more striking in Sara Ahmed’s (1999) study of migrants’ writing, particularly Asian women living in Britain. She found that home is often a destination, a place to travel to:

The space which is most like home, which is most comfortable and familiar, is not the space of inhabitance — I am here — but the very space in which one finds the self as almost, but not quite, at home. In such a space, the subject has a destination, an itinerary, indeed a future, but in having such as destination, has not yet arrived (Ahmed 1999: 331).

According to Ahmed, home is quintessentially not about the present, but about one’s hopes, about a future place where one has not yet arrived (also Bloch 1995) and which might be related to an idealised past homeland. This is particularly true for refugees, for whom idealised, imagined, or remembered homes play a particularly strong role, not simply in maintaining a sense or hope of rootedness, but in impelling their movement in search of such homes (Jansen & Löfving 2011; Doná 2015)

Jeanne Moore brings together this focus on an imagined future with the importance of daily routines in discussing homeless migrants, arguing that ‘[h]ome is a powerful desire for many homeless people […] this desire is shaped by particular goals and lifestyles’ (2000: 212). Many homeless people continuously ‘struggle along’ in the present, longing for a better home in the future: a place to sleep and a way to have meaningful relationships, as well as objects (Hecht 1998; Desjarlais 1994).

For refugees, the homeless, and many others, remembered homes may lack a sense of homeliness and security all together. Cristiana Strava (2017), writing of life in the Hay Mohammadi neighbourhood in Casablanca, explores how histories of state violence create a sense of precarity, uncertainty, and insecurity that gave homes an air of unhomeliness. Here, violence is marked in the remains of an old secret prison, or in the rebuilding of the neighbourhood to facilitate military control, dispossession, and enduring poverty. Strava traces the ambivalent responses to such feelings of unhomeliness. Residents of Hay Mohammadi sometimes strive to contain or move beyond such feelings through daily acts of care, which push back on historic narratives of abandonment or unscrupulous landlords alike. Yet daily care can also become implicated in reproducing unhomeliness, such as when broken plumbing, or tiny spaces, both of which evoke continued abandonment or exclusion, nonetheless come to be accommodated within everyday routines. In such circumstances, lived experiences of dwelling may themselves not be the primary anchor for hopes, dreams, or ideals of home. Speaking to such circumstances, Stef Jansen (2009) claims that, rather than seeing home as a ‘remembered site of belonging’, it should be seen ‘prospectively as a socially constituted object of longing’ (2009: 57; see also Jansen & Löfving 2011). Thus, as imaginative spaces that stretch out across time and are brought about through practice, homes are never static.

A final tension worth mentioning is that between alienated and unalienated characterizations of home. On the one hand, when explored in terms of familiar routines, closely held ideals, or a site of comfort or intimacy, home emerges as a domain where subjects’ sense of who they are is bolstered and reproduced. Here, home is the space, the practice, or the imagined idyll where alienation might be undone. On the other hand, however, both imagined and physical homes may be sites of displacement: places where one is made to feel out-of-place or even threatened, places which evoke ideals that have not yet materialised, or something which is in need of continual, ungratifying labour. In these conceptions, home is characterised by a distancebetween subjects’ sense of selfhood, and their experience of home. It can thus be a domain that contributes to a sense of alienation, experienced as exclusion, dislocation, instability, or simply a desire for something other than what is given. In many cases, alienation and its escape may be present in the same account. For instance, the migrant women whose lives Ahmed traces try to make home in the everyday even as their experiences are often characterised by a sense of unhomeliness. In spite of present alienation, they see in the future the promise of an ideal, unalienated home. Alienation and its opposite continue to remain in tension, negotiated across space and time, through contending imaginaries, or through differently oriented practices.

Conclusion

The house and the home have had a varied life in anthropological thought and observation. Developing from an early focus on the house as a social institution, it was first understood as a way of ordering society, a site of practice, and a structure of social reproduction. Houses and homes have also been explored as sites of subject formation, of belonging and security – or the breakdown thereof. Shaped in part by their material underpinnings, domestic processes were constantly being rearranged, reworked, cared for, and reproduced through the efforts of various sorts of domestic labour. Anthropological approaches have recently begun to develop and elaborate a distinction between the house and the home, wherein houses involve normative, widely reproduced, and often material forms, while homes centre around the subjective feelings of belonging and dwelling. This distinction emerged in part through a growing understanding of how households could be sites of unhomeliness, whether for women faced with unvalued domestic labour, or for those living with displacement or the everyday realities of poverty or state violence. Temporal dimensions, from an idealised past to an imagined future, have featured heavily in recent studies. At the same time, a processual notion of home, often as a form of ordering without necessarily being confined to localised spaces of houses, has also become important. The spaces brought under control, in processes of home making, do not however have to be precisely localised. Home-making stretches across time as well as space, and even in the blatant absence of a physical home, the act of home-making often remains a focus point of daily practice.

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Note on contributors

Farhan Samanani explores questions of value, diversity, and community in contemporary London. His work looks at forms of value, understanding, and cooperation which emerge out of everyday life, and traces what happens to these everyday projects within broader political and economic systems. Farhan’s work spans across disciplines, from social anthropology to human geography and political science, and emphasises collaborations with community groups and local and national organizations to create meaningful change. He is currently based at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

Dr Farhan Samanani, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, 37073 Göttingen, Germany. farhan.samanani@gmail.com.

Johannes Lenhard is an ethnographer of inequality in the west, currently based at the Max Planck Cambridge Centre Cambridge for Ethics, Economy and Social Change. Having worked towards a better understanding of homeless people in London and Paris for his PhD, he has recently started a new research project on venture capital investors with fieldwork in Munich, Berlin, London, San Francisco and New York. His writing has appeared in academic peer-reviewed journals as well as journalistic outlets, such as Aeon, the Conversationand Crunchbase.

Dr Johannes Lenhard, Kings College, CB21ST Cambridge, United Kingdom. jfl37@cam.ac.uk

Landscape

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Paola Filippucci

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16landscape

Abstract:

When we think about landscape, we tend to think of natural scenery, empty of people; of a view, spread in front of our eyes; or of a backdrop, a stage for people’s movements and activities. The anthropology of landscape challenges all of these ideas. By sharing and observing local lives through ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologists have realised that landscapes matter deeply to people: they care about the landscapes they inhabit, materially shaping them and attaching meaning to them. Anthropologists have come to argue that people do not only live in landscapes but also through them: landscape is an intrinsic part of, or even actor in human social and cultural lives, constructed by them both physically and symbolically and, reciprocally, helping to make and unmake relationships and identities.

Landscape in the social sciences

The importance of landscape in human affairs was, perhaps predictably, recognised and studied by cultural geographers and archaeologists before anthropologists. Geography is of course centrally concerned with space, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s a number of studies focused on the experiential, subjective, phenomenological aspects of space and place (e.g. Buttimer & Seamon 1980; Tuan 1977); and on the symbolic meanings attached to landscape in the European tradition (e.g. Cosgrove 1985; Daniels & Cosgrove 1988). In particular, Cosgrove and others noted that the English term ‘landscape’ comes from the term of Dutch origin landschap, referring to a painted view of (usually rural) surroundings. As Hirsch notes (1995: 2), this means that the concept of landscape, if used unproblematically and uncritically, carries with it a range of culturally specific assumptions: that it is a visual phenomenon, implying a viewer and a view and so a disconnection between people and space; that it has aesthetic value, embodying a pleasing or ‘picturesque’ form; and that it is rural or to do with ‘nature’ and land rather than with people and urbanised surroundings. We will see below how Hirsch rethought the concept in a bid to produce a more culturally sensitive notion of ‘landscape’.

The other discipline that historically has had a close interest in landscape is archaeology. Particularly in Britain, landscape became a central focus of archaeological attention in the inter-war period. The journal Antiquity, founded in this period, introduced the potential of aerial photography, developed during the Great War, in making visible archaeological remains buried in the British countryside, and encouraged archaeologists to view and interpret sites and remains as part of structured, evolving ‘landscapes’, inaugurating the notion of ‘landscape archaeology’ as a way to grasp and understand ancient ways of life. In a fascinating analysis of these developments, Hauser (2007) suggests that this was in part a response to the sight of the devastation of the Great War in France and Belgium in particular, which led artists and others (including archaeologists) to reimagine and cherish Britain as an antique land, with a landscape that embodied its history and heritage and could and should be protected against the new technologies of war and destruction.

More recently archaeologists have discussed the heritage value of landscape in Britain and beyond: in particular, Bender (1993) introduced the idea, central to understanding the role of landscape anthropologically, that groups of people attribute different values to the same landscape; for this reason, landscapes are a focus, and indeed a means, of political contestation and of the formation of different and competing identities. For instance, Bender showed that the landscape of Stonehenge was in the late 1990s (and remains today) the focus of competing interpretations and claims by heritage agencies acting on behalf of the British government and also by ‘pagans’ and others such as tourists, each looking for rather different meanings and value within the same surroundings. This volume also introduced the idea that landscapes are not simply passive screens onto which people project values, but they can be actors in social and political conflict. Focusing on Belfast during the ‘Troubles’, anthropologist Neil Jarman (1993) shows that ideological divisions became embodied in the physical surroundings of the city, creating a feedback loop between space and people: boundaries between the warring groups were not only reinforced by erecting barricades and setting fire to homes, but barriers also became focal points for violent action and so fostered the cycle of violence and division (1993: 111-2). Landscape is not just a backdrop but exerts a sort of ‘agency’ in the unfolding of violent politics: because of its symbolic associations as well as its physical qualities (e.g. in creating barriers, regulating movement, etc.), space contributes to the production and reproduction of violent relations, and insight that helps to analyse many current conflicts, such as that in Israel and the Palestinian territories (see, e.g., Weizman 2007).

So, what anthropologists and other social scientists mean by ‘landscape’ is the human interpretation and manipulation of the physical surroundings in which our individual and collective lives unfold. A ‘landscape’ is something constructed by humans in the course of their daily lives and interactions, both physically and also symbolically, by being invested with meaning, memory, and value. But moreover, anthropologists argue that the two – investing with meaning and shaping physically – go hand in hand and cannot really be separated. One way to conceptualise this is the notion of ‘dwelling’ introduced by Ingold (1995). With this term, borrowed and adapted from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Ingold sought to challenge a separation between the cognitive organization of space (e.g. the creation of mental plans or designs) and its physical shaping through building. Ingold argues that humans ‘dwell’ in the world, i.e. produce and reproduce human lives and relations through practically engaging with their physical surroundings. So for Ingold, ‘building’ – humanly modifying space – is an integral aspect of ‘dwelling’: the physical outcome of the thoughtful, but necessarily embodied and emplaced business of social living, rather than an activity led by a disembodied intellect surveying its ‘environment’ as an object (see also Ingold 2000). This perspective invites us to view humans and physical surroundings as part of the same system: as Ingold puts it, the dwelling perspective treats humans as ‘animals in their environment’ rather than self-contained individuals engaging with the physical world as an object; dissolving ‘the orthodox dichotomies between evolution and history, and between biology and culture’ (1995: 77).

Ingold’s approach has been used productively especially by archaeologists as well as anthropologists working with nomadic hunter-gatherer populations (e.g. Ingold & Mazzullo 2008), perhaps because it seems to imply a sort of seamless harmony between people and their surroundings that is difficult to envisage in the case of urbanised and/or larger-scale populations (but cf. McFarlane 2011). However, the idea that ‘landscape’ should not be understood as a thing independent of people, or even as a thing made by people, but as the outcome of the physical and symbolic implication of people with their surroundings, informs other anthropological approaches of wider applicability. In particular, anthropologists’ comparative perspective and the encounter with non-European cultures leads them to question the very notion of ‘space’ as ethnocentric and to rethink what ‘landscape’ might be in even more radical ways.

Anthropological beginnings: ‘space’

The basis for anthropology’s refusal to take ‘space’ for granted as an objective reality external to humans’ activities and perceptions can be traced back to Durkheim’s seminal discussion of the social origin of the categories of human thought in his Elementary forms of the religious life (1912). In this text Durkheim addressed space as one of the fundamental ‘categories of understanding’, alongside time, number, cause, substance, and personality: these are ‘the solid frames that enclose all thought’ because without them no thought is possible (2001 [1912]: 11). Unlike Kant and other philosophers, however, Durkheim did not consider these categories to be innate, but rather ‘social things’, products of social life, and, in origin, of religious life and thought (2001 [1912]: 11). In the case of space, Durkheim argued that it is only perceptible as such insofar as it is divided and differentiated – into left and right, inside and outside, above and below, and so on: ‘inherently, there is no right or left, above or below, north or south and so on’ (2001 [1912]: 13). These divisions for him arise as people give an ‘affective colour’ to regions, adding that members of the same society hold in common these divisions, implying ‘that they are social in origin’ (2001 [1912]: 13). So the organization of space in each society is modelled on social organization ‘and replicates it’, not vice-versa; spatial divisions like left and right are not innate but originate from social and indeed religious thought. Indeed, for Durkheim the ‘sacred’ at the centre of religious thought is a form of spatial classification, insofar as he defines it as that which is ‘set apart’, separated conceptually but also, often, spatially, from the ‘profane’ (2001 [1912]: 36).

Durkheim’s ideas inspired some classic early studies of socio-spatial organization, such as Mauss’s ‘Essai sur les variations saisonnières des societés Eskimos’ (1904–1905) and, within British social anthropology, Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer (1940). While neither refers to ‘landscape’, both suggest that the way people inhabit their physical surroundings is an important aspect of their society, but not as a determining factor: soil configuration and climate, writes Mauss, do not determine people’s decision to live dispersed or instead in groups: this is determined by social factors such as their technological skills (which control how they exploit natural resources) and their ‘moral, juridical and religious organisation’, which determines whether they can form groups, of what size and so on (Mauss 1983 [1904–1905]: 393, author’s translation). In his study of the Nuer of Southern Sudan, Evans-Pritchard writes about their ‘oecological space’, which he describes as the relationship between the ‘character of the country’ and ‘the biological requirements’ of the members of local groups: e.g. availability of water, the presence or absence of tsetse flies or of rivers and so on make the distance between local groups more or less impassable and so expands or shrinks ‘mere physical distance’ (1969 [1940]: 109). However, Nuer additionally give their spatial distributions ‘certain values which compose their political structure’. In particular Nuer lives are governed by ‘structural distance’, ‘the distance between groups of persons in a social system, expressed in terms of values’ (Evans-Pritchard 1969 [1940]: 110). Such values determine more centrally than physical factors the closeness or otherwise of villages from one another: ‘A Nuer village may be equidistant from two other villages, but if one of these belongs to a different tribe and the other to the same tribe it may be said to be structurally more distant from the first than from the second’ (Evans-Pritchard 1969 [1940]: 110). Social and political affiliations override spatial and territorial ones.

Evans-Pritchard’s ethnography of the Nuer is not entirely consistent on this point. For instance in some of his other works, it appears that physical proximity and cohabitation are important bases of social unity and solidarity in this society, so that physical space does matter to the Nuer as they structure their society, and is even constitutive of their ‘kinship’ structure (1950: 364; cf. 1951; cf. Kuper 2005: 205). However, whether or not it corresponds with ethnographic reality (cf. Kuper 1983: 95), the discussion of ‘time and space’ in The Nuer introduces the intriguing idea that anthropologically speaking ‘space’ need not be linked with physical surroundings at all, but could be a dimension of human life and identity defined and charted by values and relations, in this case those associated with kinship (more specifically descent from common ancestors) and political organization. So, in order to describe and analyse the Nuer’s culturally specific conception and perception of their world, Evans-Pritchard formulated a non-literal concept of ‘space’, abstracted from territorial factors and linked instead with personhood, itself an abstract and culturally variable social construct (cf. Carrithers, Collins & Lukes 1985; Mauss 1983 [1938]).

Although Durkheim’s notion of the social origin of knowledge was later criticised (see Bloch 1977), arguably a long-lasting contribution of these early studies for the study of ‘landscape’ is to suggest not only that people interpret physical space in different ways, but also that anthropologists need to problematise the very concept of ‘space’, treating it as a social construct with a culturally variable content. This insight is central to more recent anthropological studies of landscape.

Rethinking ‘landscape’

The division between sacred and profane space (and time) introduced by Durkheim is at the heart of William Christian’s study of a religion in a Spanish valley, published in 1972 (1972: xv). The book focuses on shrines and on the ‘supernatural rationale’ for their location in the landscape, presenting them as ‘control points at which the people attempt to influence the penetration of foreign material into their countryside’ (Christian 1972: xv). Christian inverts the earlier anthropological convention of landscape as an inert backdrop to the people studied by piecing together the social and cultural world of the population of a northern Spanish valley starting from their landscape. In this study, the environmental setting is understood as an integral element of the society, a ground for it in the most profound sense of providing the means of articulating physically, conceptually, and imaginatively the relationships among persons and also, centrally, between ‘person and God’ (referred to in the title of the book), people and the powers that preside over their world, be they ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’.

For instance, in a setting in which people move seasonally between village and uplands, changes of scenery are said to correspond to changing ‘moods’ among the population: in the upper pastures in spring and autumn, the mood is ‘airy, open and honest’ as people, ‘free from the village’, share food and tools, work together, often breaking into song (Christian 1972: 2). Back in the village, especially in winter, when the young are away on seasonal jobs and people live at close quarters, life ‘is more difficult’, the mood is of ‘competition’, ‘there are people with whom, for one reason or another, one does not speak’ (Christian 1972: 3). The landscape also articulates the villagers’ identity and positioning in the wider world. The villagers have a ‘series of identities’ including the house and family, the village and parish, the valley, the region and the nation-state (Christian 1972: 42). These correspond to the ‘matrix of human relations’ on the ground, formed of ‘what brings people together and what marks them off from each other’, visible in how people behave and communicate, name and create physical and symbolic boundaries (Christian 1972: 11).

For Christian, this also, importantly, helps us to understand people’s relations with the divine: the matrix of their relations ‘provides the context into which relations with the divine must fit’ (1972: 11). So, corresponding to the geographical levels of the inhabitants’ life and identity are specific divine figures (saints, or advocations of the Virgin Mary) to whom they pray, ‘implanted’ in the landscape through shrines: to levels of identity, correspond, in a memorable phrase, ‘territories of grace’ (Christian 1972: 44-5). Christian makes clear that, especially in the case of devotions that are unique to this valley and its population (as opposed to the ‘generalised’, national-level devotions) the shrines are one with the landscape: the images and their powers are immovable, people must go to them: the shrines are ‘transaction points in the landscape between the human group, the land, and the powers that influence the success of the group’s enterprises’ (1972: 45). In practice, the saints are approached as ‘patrons’, intermediaries towards God but also more broadly foreign, external powers, ‘above and below’ the here and now of the village, an aspect for Christian alluded to by the location of many shrines at ‘critical points in the ecosystem’ such as mountain peaks, springs, and caves (1972: 181). Also, like living patrons, saints are applied to individually and from different levels of identity, so that the heterogeneity (both physical and spiritual) of the landscape is one with the heterogeneity of local society. Overall, this study resonates with Durkheimian approaches but also, in its attention to the landscape (physical and spiritual) as a principle and means of heterogeneity rather than unity, it anticipates themes found in the ‘anthropology of landscape’ that started in the 1990s (for another, more recent study that directly rethinks space in relation to the Durkheimian ‘sacred/profane’ dichotomy, see Munn 2003).

The anthropology of landscape

In the mid-1990s, two edited collections (Feld & Basso 1996; Hirsch & O’Hanlon 1995) and a reader (Low & Lawrence-Zuñiga 2003) mark the self-conscious bid to develop a distinctively anthropological approach to landscape. Their central aim is to ‘unpack Western concepts’ of landscape, place, and space (Feld & Basso 1996: 6; cf. Hirsch 1995: 2) and make theoretically visible ‘spatial dimensions of culture’ (Low & Lawrence-Zuñiga 2003: 1). The most concerted (and complex) effort to do this is found in Hirsch and O’Hanlon’s volume in which Hirsch argues that the notion of ‘landscape’ as physical surroundings is culturally specific to the modern West (1995: 5). In order to develop a cross-culturally valid notion, he proposes an ego-centred approach in which ‘landscape’ is not a relationship with physical surroundings, but the relationship between two ‘poles of experience’ through which people negotiate everyday social life and practice (1995: 4-5, 22).

Specifically Hirsch defines ‘landscape’ as the ongoing ‘cultural process’ (1995: 5) by which we mentally and imaginatively locate ourselves in the world, through envisaging a ‘background’ and a ‘foreground’ to our existence at each moment, and their dynamic and changeable interplay. This can be understood spatially: being ‘here’ (at a specific location) is understood and experienced at each moment in relation to one or more ‘there’, which form its horizon in terms of my own experience (e.g. in my daily routine the ‘horizon’ for being ‘here’ at the office is being ‘there’ at home; in terms of my movements this month, the horizon for being ‘here’ in Cambridge is being ‘there’ in Italy and so on). However, for Hirsch moving away from a Western understanding of landscape means that we must take into account that people understand persons and their location in the world in culturally specific ways. This helps us to see that the familiar Western ‘place’ and ‘space’ are culturally specific metaphors for mutually constituted vantage points that do not need to involve land, objectively and physically understood, at all. Instead, cultures have specific ways of envisaging the dialectical tension between ‘here’ and ‘there’, understood as the more and less immediate reaches of human agency and personhood, practice and ideal, everyday experience and the ‘background’ to it. For instance, the ‘distant horizon’ for the here and now, which in Western understanding is objectified as ‘space’ and understood through the text-based metaphor of the ‘map’, can in other cultural settings be objectified and understood as a horizon made, for instance, by the stories, memories, and traces of the activities of ancestors (in Amazonia: Gow 1995; in Australia: Layton 1995; Morphy 1995), or by cosmic non-human energies accessed and harnessed via chiefly or shamanic powers (in Mongolia: Humphrey 1995). This approach also helps to denaturalise and relativise the Western notion of ‘landscape’. This seems literal and culturally unmediated (e.g. as a subject’s view of an object, ‘land’, which is given independently of culture and is immediately available to the senses, particularly sight). However, if we adopt Hirsch’s perspective, we can argue that what we call ‘landscape’ is not so much a thing ‘out there’ as the tension between the here and now of the viewer and ‘imagined worlds of being and potential’: for instance Green’s chapter in the volume by Hirsch and O’Hanlon shows that in nineteenth century France the emergence of the idea of ‘paysage’, identified with the countryside and as a space for ‘nature’, was part of how people rethought their position in society, formed a consciousness of class in an urban and urbanising context (Green 1995).

Gell’s contribution to the same volume introduces another way in which ‘landscape’ can be relativised. In an account of Umeda, Papua New Guinea, Gell argues that the actual physical environment which Umeda inhabit shapes the way in which spatial distance and proximity can be experienced. Umeda live in small clearings in thick forest and this ‘imposes a reorganisation of their sensibility’ (1995: 235), which makes hearing (and smell) a much more reliable means of sensing distance and proximity than sight. For instance, it was said that the first group of Umeda ever to visit the coast could not perceive the sea as a receding space, but instead perceived it as a vertical wall of water (1995: 235). Because of this, for Gell the Umeda landscape is first and foremost a ‘soundscape’ arising from the interplay between ambient sound and the body through different qualities of word-sounds which encode the experiences of ‘ambient sound’ and the body as a ‘sounding cavity’ (1995: 240). This is ‘mapped’, i.e. represented, not through visual means (such as maps or other visual images) but by sound ‘images’, specifically through verbal sounds in the local language that iconically render via the culturally specific connotations of consonant sounds the physical extremes of proximity and distance, of the village clearing, and the encircling forest and mountain escarpments. For instance, the sound ‘s’ found in sis for 'mountain' carries connotations of sharpness, danger, etc., making ‘audible’ the mountain, depicting through sounds the physicality of the sharp, tall ridges that constitute the ‘distant horizon’ of Umeda villages (1995: 242). Gell does not, like Hirsch, relativise ‘landscape’ by abstracting the concept from people’s embodied location in the world: instead, he roots culturally constituted landscape in the interplay between the sensing body and its particular surroundings (1995: 252; cf. also Feld 1996).

The interplay between body and surroundings is also explored in Feld and Basso’s volume (1996), which focuses on the idea of ‘place’ and on how from a subjective point of view, people transform ‘sheer physical terrain’ into an ‘existential space’ through their imagination and memory (Casey 1996: 14). In other words, the sensing, attentive subject and the geographical object come together. This crucially occurs through the body, as the vehicle for what could be termed the thoughtful sensing of the environing world (cf. Ingold 2000). For Basso, in culturally diverse ways people attend to their surroundings and in practice certain locations can trigger strong emotions or thoughts ‘of a richly caring kind’ (Basso 1996: 54). So he argues that the relationship with places, like all relationships, is reciprocal: ‘as places animate the ideas and feelings of persons who attend to them, these same ideas and feelings animate the places on which attention has been bestowed […] when places are actively sensed, the physical landscape becomes wedded to the landscape of the mind’ (1996: 55). Through this, ‘places come to generate their own fields of meaning’ (1996: 56). Basso illustrates this by showing the central role of places in how Western Apache develop ‘wisdom’. Apache define ‘wisdom’ as a heightened mental capacity that enables people to avoid harmful events by detecting hidden threats. It is developed by thinking about stories that instruct about wise and unwise ways of behaving, judging situations, etc. These stories for Apache ‘sit’ in places: that is, they feature and are associated with named places, which people visit bodily or in the mind in order to access and recall the narratives on their way to wisdom (1996: 73). Visiting, observing, and learning the names of places is the means to develop wisdom, so that for Basso the Apache’s ‘interior landscape’ – their sense of self and moral imagination (1996: 86) – is crucially constructed in constant interaction with the exterior one.

‘Landscape’ in a changing world

The case study above takes us back to the idea, introduced in an earlier section, that landscapes can be seen as actors in human individual and social life, directly involved with the making and unmaking of relationships and identities. We can see that not only do people use and interpret their surroundings as part of living and inhabiting, but land and surroundings help us ‘interpret ourselves’, so to speak: they feature in narratives we make about ourselves, help us tell ourselves ‘who’ we are individually or collectively. We can talk about being ‘attached’ emotionally to places and landscapes, but it’s almost more as if they were ‘attached’ to us, ‘ours’. There is a dialectic of recognition between familiar surroundings and those for whom they are familiar – the land comes to ‘resemble’ us as we inhabit it, it becomes charged with value insofar as it embodies an image of ourselves. While this may perhaps seem confined to populations, such as Apache, who live both physically and spiritually ‘close’ to the land, this is not the case:

Now that the heat of battle is extinguished, this chaos of soil and stones under a sky so gloomy seems absurd. Thought no longer finds ar elationship between that, which resembles nothing, and we, who have lived so many things in the course of our lives. (Pézard 1974 [1918], author’s translation).

These words, written by an army officer about the devastation in rural Eastern France during the Great War, show that even in this least ‘traditional’ of contexts, landscape is a ground for meaning and identity, so that its destruction causes shock, disorientation, and profound estrangement. So, too, it is in our industrialised, ‘modern’ societies that ‘place annihilation’ (Hewitt 1983) has become one of the most lethal weapons in contemporary warfare, which since World War I includes among its aims the eradication of whole enemy cultures and ways of life (Kramer 2007). It could also be argued, following Pierre Nora (1989), that catastrophic experiences of rupture and dislocation in modernity make people more, not less conscious of ‘places’ (both physical sites, and sites of the imagination) as repositories for belonging and meaning (cf. Filippucci 2010). This includes the conditions of contemporary modernity in which individual and collective experiences of, and relationships with, space are said to be transformed and unsettled by increasingly powerful technologies of speed, virtual connection, and destruction, leading peoples and identities to be displaced and delocalised or even acquire ‘a slippery, nonlocalized quality’ (Appadurai 1996: 48; cf. Connerton 2009; Gupta & Ferguson 1997; Harvey 1989).

So, in conclusion, the study of ‘landscape’ is shown to be anthropologically fertile, a ground for theoretical innovation, and for disclosing core aspects of the human social and cultural experience in a changing world.

References

Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Basso, K.H. 1996. Wisdom sits in places: notes on a Western Apache landscape. In Senses of place (eds) S. Feld & K.H. Basso, 53-90. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.

Bender, B. 1993. Landscape: politics and perspectives. Oxford: Berg.

Bloch, M. 1977. The past and the present in the present. Man 12, 278-92.

Buttimer, A. & D. Seamon 1980. The human experience of space and place. London: Croom Helm.

Carrithers, M., S. Collins & S. Lukes 1985. The category of the person: anthropology, philosophy, history. Cambridge: University Press.

Casey, E.S. 1996. How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time: phenomenological prolegomena. In Senses of place (eds) S. Feld & K.H. Basso, 13-52. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.

Christian, W.A. 1972. Person and God in a Spanish valley. Princeton: University Press.

Connerton, P. 2009. How modernity forgets. Cambridge: University Press.

Cosgrove, D. 1985. Prospect, perspective and the evolution of the landscape idea. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10, 45-62.

Daniels, S. & D. Cosgrove 1988. The iconography of landscape: essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments. Cambridge: University Press.

Durkheim, É. 2001 [1912]. The elementary forms of religious life. Oxford: University Press.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1950. Kinship and the local community among the Nuer. In African systems of kinship and marriage (eds) A.R. Radcliffe Brown & D. Forde, 360-91. London: Oxford University Press.

——— 1951. Kinship and marriage among the Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

——— 1969 [1940]. The Nuer: a description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people. Oxford: University Press.

Feld, S. 1996. Waterfalls of song: an acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea. In Senses of place (eds) S. Feld & K.H. Basso, 91-135. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.

——— & K.H. Basso 1996. Senses of place. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.

Filippucci, P. 2010. In a ruined country: place and the memory of war destruction in Argonne (France). In Remembering violence: anthropological perspectives on intergenerational transmission (eds) N. Argenti & K. Schramm, 165-89. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Gell, A. 1995. The language of the forest: landscape and phonological iconism in Umeda. In Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place (eds) E. Hirsch & M. O'Hanlon, 232-54. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gow, P. 1995. Land, people and paper in Western Amazonia. In Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place (eds) E. Hirsch & M. O'Hanlon, 43-62. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Green, N. 1995. Looking at the landscape: class formation and the visual. In Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place (eds) E. Hirsch & M. O’Hanlon, 31-42. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gupta, A. & J. Ferguson 1997. Culture, power and place: explorations in critical anthropology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Harvey, D. 1989. The conditions of post-modernity: an inquiry into the conditions of social change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Hauser, K. 2007. Shadow sites: photography, archaeology and the British landscape, 1927–1955. Oxford: University Press.

Hewitt, K. 1983. Place annihilation: area bombing and the fate of urban places. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73, 257-84.

Hirsch, E. 1995. Landscape: between place and space. In Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place (eds) E. Hirsch & M. O’Hanlon, 1-30. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

——— & M. O’Hanlon 1995. Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Humphrey, C. 1995. Chiefly and Shamanist landscapes in Mongolia. In Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place (eds) E. Hirsch & M. O’Hanlon, 135-62. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ingold, T. 1995. Building, dwelling, living: how animals and people make themselves at home in the world. In Shifting Contexts: transformations in anthropological knowledge (ed.) M. Strathern, 57-80. New York: Routledge.

——— 2000. The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York: Routledge.

——— & N. Mazzullo 2008. Being along: place, time and movement among Sami people. In Mobility and place: enacting Northern European peripheries (eds) B. Granås & J.O. Baerenholt, 27-38. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Jarman, N. 1993. Intersecting Belfast. In Landscape: politics and perspectives (ed.) B. Bender, 107-38. Oxford: Berg.

Kramer, A. 2007. Dynamic of destruction: culture and mass killing in the First World War. Oxford: University Press.

Kuper, A. 1983. Anthropology and anthropologists: the modern British School. New York: Routledge.

——— 2005. The reinvention of primitive society: transformations of a myth. New York: Routledge.

Layton, R. 1995. Relating to country in the Western Desert. In Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place (eds) E. Hirsch & M. O’Hanlon, 210–31. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Low, S.M. & D. Lawrence-Zuñiga 2003. The anthropology of space and place: locating culture. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mauss, M. 1983 [1904–1905]. Essai sur le variations saisonnières des sociétés Eskimos: Étude de morphologie sociale. In Sociologie et anthropologie, 389-477. Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France.

——— 1983 [1938]. Une catégorie de l'esprit humain: la notion de personne et celle de ‘moi’. In Sociologie et anthropologie, 331-62. Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France.

McFarlane, C. 2011. The city as assemblage: dwelling and urban space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, 649-71.

Morphy, H. 1995. Landscape and the reproduction of the ancestral past. In Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place (eds) E. Hirsch & M. O’Hanlon, 184-209. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Munn, N.D. 2003. Excluded spaces: the figure in the Australian aboriginal landscape. In The anthropology of space and place: locating culture (eds) S.M. Low & D. Lawrence-Zuñiga, 92-109. Oxford: Blackwell.

Nora, P. 1989. Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire. Representations 26, 7-25.

Pézard, A. 1974 [1918]. Nous autres à Vauquois. Aurillac: Imprimerie Moderne.

Tuan, Y.-F. 1977. Space and place: the perspective of experience. London: Edward Arnold.

Weizman, E. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s architecture of occupation. London: Verso.

Note on contributor

Dr Paola Filippucci is a Fellow and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. She studies war memory and commemoration in Europe, focusing on the First World War and its material legacy on the former Western Front. The impact of armed conflict on landscape is a central theme.

Dr Paola Filippucci, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. pf107@cam.ac.uk

Mediterraneanist anthropology

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Naor Ben-Yehoyada

Columbia University

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16mediterranean

Abstract:

The Mediterranean is one of the most underrated areas in anthropological imagination. On the one hand, its shores have furnished the most complex formulations of the unfolding dynamics of society and culture in time. On the other hand, most Euro-American treatises of alternative social worlds fly over the Mediterranean en route to places taken to be more radically different. After a short view of the historiographical debate regarding the Mediterranean, this essay addresses some of the key the issues that occupied Mediterraneanist anthropology since the Second World War, and which have consequently framed wider debates in anthropology. First among them is the rise and fall of claims about the transnational cultural unity of Mediterranean (or any other geographical area): how such notions of cultural unity related to assumptions that Mediterranean societies were ‘frozen in time’, and what traits and modes of thoughts anthropologists claimed this cultural unity to include. A second set of questions deals with patron–client relations and their related patronage and clientelism, which at a certain moment came close to defining Mediterraneanist anthropology. The essay concludes by outlining the sort of theoretical complexity that Mediterraneanist anthropology has articulated. Acknowledging this complexity should urge us to reconsider anthropologists’ aversion to the regional scales of analysis. It will also provide us with a recipe for scaling up our own tools to match the transnational complexity of the projects and processes that demand our scholarly attention.

Introduction

The communities of the Mediterranean possess both more similarities between different countries and more diversities within their national frontiers than the tenets of modern nationalism would have us believe (Pitt-Rivers 1963a: 9-10).

Is there one Mediterranean or are there many? Should we follow those among its travellers and ethnographers who claim that they have found cultural traits that unite the sea’s shores into a ‘cultural area’, or should we instead limit our understanding of the sea’s unity to geographical characteristics? How should we treat any similarities we might find across space and time? Should we consider them as proof of the sea’s existence as an empirical entity? Or should we alternatively treat them as reasons to use the sea as a conceptual gadfly to our landlocked, unity-miring anthropological imaginations? More broadly, what makes regions ‘exist’ in any rigorous or interesting sense – commercial links, overarching political institutions, traversal social relations, or cultural similarities? And how do we know that we’ve shown enough to establish the existence of any of these measures?

It is generally agreed that no area of sufficient coherence today in the zone of the Mediterranean could be profitably compared with contiguous areas that existed in the past or in other parts of the contemporary world; that, in other words, other areas, in the past or elsewhere did have the sort of unity the Mediterranean lacks. Anthropologists had once searched for the cultural unity of the Mediterranean (Péristiany 1966; Pitt-Rivers 1963b), but then dismissed this search as a form of orientalism (Galt 1985; Herzfeld 1980; 1984; 1985b).^[1] The dismissal of Mediterraneanist anthropology severed the aggregate of ethnographies along the sea’s shores from each other as well as from a coherent concept of the contemporary area as a whole. In this, the debate in anthropology aligned with similar judgements about the relationship between modernity and the Mediterranean in history: when one began, the other ended. On the one hand, the contemporary Mediterranean was not supposed to show any cultural unity that would merit calling it a ‘culture area’. On the other hand, the things that people took to mark any Mediterraneanness of people, things, and places also marked them as non-modern.

Historiographical debate

If European modernity includes a nationalist political order, then does the advent of such modernity entail the end of any Mediterranean non-national (imperial, cosmopolitan, or otherwise transnational) order? Is the Mediterranean pre-modern by definition? When we claim to study an object as vast and complex as an entire transnational maritime region – or at the very least to examine trends, similarities, and relationships within that region – we need to pay careful attention to the relationships that both our sources and we draw between that region’s past and present. Modern social sciences have assumed that supra-local units of study follow concentric units of political, social, economic, or cultural order. This sociological imagination, otherwise known as methodological nationalism, actually fits comfortably within a wider set of seemingly homogeneous units, of which nations form only an intermediate scale: from households and villages to the globe. Seas in general, and the Mediterranean in particular, disturb this view of the world as a set of concentric social units of ever-widening, ‘nested’ scales (Brenner 2001).

There is a near consensus among historians that the Mediterranean they reconstruct from pre-modern times no longer exists, though some aspects of such pre-modern Mediterranean worlds – as well as the main preoccupation regarding the Mediterranean’s unity and attempts to unify it – have made it to our times (Greene 2010). Historians debate the dating of the shift from a Mediterranean to a modern world, but their accounts contain such a shift. Perhaps the most famous shift is the ‘Northern Invasion’ of Atlantic European fleets into the Mediterranean and the development of national rivalry, which thus ended a bipolar Christian–Muslim world (Braudel 1972: 615-42). This Invasion, which Braudel dates to the turn of the seventeenth century, brought about the ‘waning’ of the early-modern Mediterranean with its binary religious divisions, sails, corsairs, and the slave trade (Tabak 2008). Molly Greene complicated this image of change from a bi-religious to a multi-national order by showing how nationality did not replace religion but joined it as a dimension of commercial and political relations (Greene 2002). This complex image postpones the end of the Mediterranean throughout the seventeenth century. Molly Greene’s analysis of the early modern Mediterranean, based on the balance between Ottoman and European powers, takes us to the end of the eighteenth century with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 (Greene 2014). It thus challenges other attempts to define the Mediterranean as a ‘colonial sea’ – as a maritime region defined by the historical project of European colonial expansion – which would be squeezed between the late eighteenth century and the 1950s – modern and not contemporary at the same time (Borutta & Gekas 2012).^[2] For other historians, the distinctiveness of Mediterranean history – the combination of relatively easy seaborne communications and a fragmented topography of agricultural microregions – lost its central role since the late nineteenth century with the advent of steam shipping and national economic consolidation projects (Horden & Purcell 2000: 3). When the industrial and economic dimensions of modernity are the focus of attention, the Mediterranean becomes northwestern Europe’s pre-1800s periphery, which was abandoned with the Atlantic expansion and colonization (Pomeranz 2000: 24-5). In other words, the ‘Northern Invasion’ anticipated a northern abandonment: northwestern Europe’s turning away from the Mediterranean to ‘the New World’. Whether modernity stands for European transoceanic colonial expansion, nationalization, or nation-states’ sea-shunning consolidation, it is said to have sealed the sea’s fate (Pamuk & Williamson 2000: 4).

Historians date the Mediterranean’s latest death to as late as the 1920s and 1940s, when cosmopolitan port cities – the most recent of its historiographical emblems – perished in the wake of nationalism, ‘a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones’ (Gellner 1983: 1). More generally, because historical accounts define the Mediterranean on the basis of historically delimited characteristics that are said to expire before modernity, applying any conception of the Mediterranean from the historiography of earlier periods to the present runs the risk of anachronism. It matters less whether the aspects or areas of the Mediterranean are believed to be immune to change (as Braudel would have it; 1972: 1239) or to incorporate coping strategies for instability and unpredictability, that is, incessant change (Horden & Purcell 2000: 13). Even for those scholars who study the Mediterranean in modern times, it is clear that modernity came to the Mediterranean (Abulafia 2003; Burke 2010). This sort of diffusionist thesis writ transnationally does not avoid the problematic ascription of modernity to some places and not to others. It rather transforms the question of who is modern to the question of who was so first.

Cultural unity

That historiographical definitions of the pre-modern Mediterranean would not stretch to the present should not surprise us. Anthropologists’ rejection of a Mediterranean modernity, however, raises different questions about our disciplinary imaginary of transnational regions and how we claim to access them ethnographically. How is it that a part of the world that is so famous for its maritime past has not enjoyed any anthropological attention to its brimming transnational present? Is there anything specifically Mediterranean about everything that is happening over the last decade or so in the Mediterranean? When we study unauthorised migration to Europe, path-breaking trans-marine infrastructures, or the Arab Spring and European reactions to it (just to mention the usual suspects), should we treat them as transnational events tout court without any regional specificity? More generally, what anthropological preoccupations made societies around the Mediterranean stand not for transnational or transregional processes but instead emblematise almost their ultra-local opposite?

The Mediterranean is one of those parts of the globe with which anthropologists have had the most productive, provocative, and at times bewildering engagement. As John Davis shows in his book – the most comprehensive account of Mediterraneanist anthropology to date – the Mediterranean ‘attracted anthropologists almost before any other region of the world’ (Davis 1977: 1). The list that Davis cites clarifies this ‘roll-call’: Maine’s Ancient law (1883), Fustel de Coulanges’s La cité antique (1864), Robertson Smith’s Kinship & marriage in early Arabia (1903), Frazer’s The golden bough (1925), Durkheim’s De la division du travail social (1893), as well as several works by Westermarck (e.g., 1899; 1911). Yet after this early phase of interest, the Mediterranean ceded this place.

On the one hand, its shores have served ever since as ethnographic breeding grounds for classic themes like hospitality (Candea & Da Col 2012; Herzfeld 1987b; Pitt-Rivers 2012; Shryock 2012), patronage (Gellner 1977; Gilsenan 1996; Silverman 1965; Weingrod 1968), and networks (Blok 1973; Boissevain 1974). On the other hand, the most ambitious treatises about the elementary forms of kinship stayed away from the Mediterranean (to mention two examples, Lévi-Strauss 1969; Sahlins 2013). Instead, they followed neater examples of what Germaine Tillion called ‘republics of brothers-in-law’ (1983). In this scheme, ‘republics of brothers’, which Tillion called modern nation-state political order, establish unity and solidarity within ‘the same national formation’ on the social relations of sameness, hence ‘brothers’. Anthropological examples from far afield set the logical alternative to this order – of sociality across difference and relationship across it, as among ‘brothers-in-law’ (for a recent version of this alternative, see Viveiros de Castro 2004). Not the Mediterranean. Here a ‘particular endogamy (that is, preferential marriage between the children of two brothers)’ and the ‘debasement of the female condition’ are widespread across religious and national borders (Tillion 1983: 16-8). Her argument focused on parallel cousin marriage and patriarchal family structure, but the relationship Tillion drew between the Mediterranean and anthropology’s geography of disciplinary interests holds more widely. This complexity ended up marginalising the Mediterranean’s role in anthropological scholarship (Herzfeld 1987a).

The Mediterranean as frozen in time

During the heyday of Mediterraneanist anthropology – roughly 1960s–1980s – the debate pitted against each other three general positions about the anthropological making of the Mediterranean. Some anthropologists followed Braudel in viewing entire swaths of the Mediterranean rim as ‘museums of Man’ (quoted in Horden & Purcell 2000: 463), which survived to the present because they were detached enough from their modernising surroundings. Social institutions like the hamoula in Palestine (Cohen 1965),^[3] patronage, honour, and family among the Sarakatsani in northwestern Greece (Campbell 1964), and the complex of norms, values, and social structure in rural Andalusia (Pitt-Rivers 1971) were depicted as timeless emblems of an erstwhile social world (Davis 1977: 242). This approach implicitly claimed that some places around the Mediterranean froze in time.^[4]

This view of places out of time soon encountered its critique: absolute seclusion is historically impossible for long periods of time, definitely in this part of the world (Wolf 1982); the same people who declare pristine removal from history and human contact often live in complex relationship with those forms of contact exactly (Candea 2010; Driessen 2005); and their declarations often mesh with nationalist attempts to locate the nation’s essence out of foreigners’ reach, however the latter may be defined (Herzfeld 2005a). To claim the Mediterranean remoteness of such places amounts to adopting their residents’ self-proclamations and the latter’s echoes in nationalist discourse, but it could not serve as an anthropological perspective on the entire region.

If we rule out the possibility of defining the Mediterranean on the basis of seemingly emblematic entire contexts – of locating it in ‘places out of time’ – how may we define it? In what dimensions of social action and relations could we locate the ingredients of a regional unity, if we should locate such unity at all? A significant part of the Mediterraneanist debate revolved around this question. In the volume that initiated the debate, Pitt-Rivers combined the role of historical contact with the plea for a comparative analysis of circum-Mediterranean ‘problems of social organization’ under ‘social change’.^[5] In his words, since ‘there are few points on the Mediterranean coastline which have not long enjoyed contact of one sort or another with the opposite extreme’, and since ‘the greater part has been, in one century or another, subject to both Islam and Christianity’, then ‘such observations … must lead us to question here the popular conception which assumes, at the same time, that peoples can be studied under the title of their national flag as geographical entities, and explained in terms of their history. The communities of the Mediterranean possess both more similarities between different countries and more diversities within their national frontiers than the tenets of modern nationalism would have us believe’ (Pitt-Rivers 1963a: 9-10). This phrasing of the Mediterraneanist pursuit differs significantly from the ‘time immemorial’ approach.

Mediterranean traits

Ultimately, social comparison gave way to cultural unity (Silverman 2001: 45-50). Some anthropologists argued that habits of thought and action continued from the past while the contexts of action changed. There was no road to take or wall to pass that would take us into veritable Mediterranean worlds. Mediterranenity resided in traits, not in places; ‘a bundle of sociocultural traits’ that served as emblems of the Mediterranean: ‘“atomistic” community life; rigid sexual segregation; a tendency toward reliance on the smallest possible kinship units (nuclear families and shallow lineages); strong emphasis on shifting, ego-centered, noncorporate coalitions’ (Gilmore 1982: 178-9). Other such traits included ‘an intense parochialism or campanilismo’, inter-village rivalries, communities’ local cults of patron saints who are identified with the territorial unit, ‘a general gregariousness and interdependence of daily life characteristic of small, densely populated neighborhoods’, and ‘a widespread belief in the evil eye’ (Gilmore 1982: 179).

Beyond a mere consideration of ‘continuity and change’, the discussion of ‘Mediterranean modes of thought’ contained a double move: it revealed similarities between circum-Mediterranean societies and it distinguished them from other places, most clearly Northern and Western Europe (and less so with other of the region’s ‘corners’). The axis for this charting was the above list of traits, which at times apparently contradicted each other (e.g., ‘tendency toward reliance on the smallest possible kinship units’ vs. ‘strong emphasis on shifting, ego-centered noncorporate coalitions’), and nonetheless provided sufficient anthropological material to sustain a heated debate about the cultural unity of the Mediterranean in modern times.

Modes of thought

Most of all, social anthropologists found the strongest sense of similarity in ‘the continuity and persistence of Mediterranean modes of thought’ (Péristiany 1966), specifically the ‘honour-and-shame syndrome’ or ‘the flamboyant virility complexes of Mediterranean males’ (Gilmore 1987: 16). As an analytical category in anthropology, honour was fixed at the regional scale: above the various national-language or dialectical names and the local instances of its observation, and below the universal scale of abstraction – of prestige, a category claimed to contain no socio-cultural specificity (‘There is of course no society, anywhere, without prestige’; Davis 1977: 89). As such, they were later critiqued (Herzfeld 1980): why should we gloss onore, nif, and egoismos as the English honour? The honour and shame complex was defined as a behaviour of ‘competing to remain equal’ (Bailey 1971: 19); as an ‘emphasis … on the virginity and the chastity of women’ (Schneider 1971: 2); and as ‘a system of stratification [that] describes the distribution of wealth in a social idiom’ (Davis 1977: 98), to cite only key examples. The first of these definitions makes honour an egalitarian struggle up a hill of material or other forms of stratification: the poor and the rich can both be honourable; better yet, in some situations, the poor can emerge as more honourable than the rich (Bourdieu 1966; Herzfeld 1985a). The second definition explains regional prevalence of an attitude by a recurrence of a structural feature of its political economy: ‘a highly competitive relationship between agricultural and pastoral economies’ and ‘the absence of effective state institutions’ (Schneider 1971: 2-3). The third definition claims the opposite: it reduces a form of behaviour to the social standing that it is claimed to mark.

The second and third approaches share an important feature: they locate their object of study – honour – in the relationship between an attitude and a social structure. If every form of society has prestige, then in those societies in which honour is emphasised, the patriarchal pursuit of the maintenance and enlargement of patrimony links certain emblems (patrimony, female chastity, and virginity) into the joint objet of entire sets of those societies’ members. Whether the emblems of honour marked social stratification or the integrity of patrimony, the social conditions for such marking were observable in the ethnographic present and its (equally observable) historically-dependent context.

Patrons and clients, mediators, power brokers

Our Mediterranean has by now changed significantly from the Braudelian ‘museum of man’: it is neither patches of a world out of history nor a set of behavioural relics from a pre-modern past. What if the social situations that anthropologists observed stemmed from people’s reactions to the changes modernization had wrought on societies around the Mediterranean – a part of the process, not what preceded it? For such an approach to maintain a specifically Mediterraneanist dimension, the regional unity should reside in a shared historical context. This was definitely the case for the various national semi-peripheries that hosted many anthropologists during the 1960s and 1970s: provincial capitals, agricultural centres and, more generally, social settings that echoed the Mediterranean’s own role in anthropologists’ imaginary map of world cultures – somewhere in the middle between the modern ‘We’ and those radically-different ‘They’. The kinds of patriarchal actors under consideration did share several historical and political economic conditions, which made them all accessible and interesting subjects of anthropologists’ work, roughly during the Cold War (Schneider 2012). Yet would such a regionally shared historical moment suffice for constructing the Mediterranean as an anthropological object? Should our definition of the Mediterranean be made of elementary units that are unique to the area? Or should the region’s definition emerge only through the specific combination of otherwise universal anthropological elements?

Before we delve into the debate about it, we may construct a composite image of the kind of social relations that captivated anthropologists in those years, and which made patron–client relations a famous Mediterraneanist theme. Patrons and clients were often people from different social strata, who forged an enduring relationship of mutual, albeit diagonal, obligation; in some cases one side attempted to forge such a relationship and failed to do so or to attain the wished-for outcomes from it (Silverman 1968; Weingrod 1968). The relationship often received justification and shape from idioms of fosterage, baptising, Godparenthood, and the like – with the patron serving as co-parent of the client’s child (Campbell 1964; Parkes 2004). On the basis of such a relationship, clients expected to receive access to resources that patrons controlled and patrons expected to receive their clients’ allegiance in matters ranging from political support to armed conflicts (Palumbo 2004). In terms of circulation and distribution of resources, patronage facilitated redistribution through the construction of a social relation that was supposed to sustain it. This is not to say that patronage is antithetical to relations of employment or fraternal reciprocity. On the contrary, this social relation could be used by both sides in an attempt to frame as redistributive relations of exchange or reciprocity (or its violent opposite: Gilsenan 1996; Schneider & Schneider 2005). This reframing capacity served people located at the nodes of post-war redistributive administrations: the entwined threads of party apparatuses, national development and reconstruction funds, and government offices (Boissevain & Friedl 1975; Pitkin 1967). The same persons who appear here in their role as patrons play the roles of mediators or power brokers in other perspectives on the same political scenes during the same period (Schneider & Schneider 1976).

Scholars have discussed these issues in varying degrees of explicitness regarding issues like local-patriotism (campanilismo), tribalism, patronage/clientelism, and ‘amoral familism’. Patronage occupied a particularly distinct place in these debates. It foregrounded the social structure of political action in such settings, which scholars contrasted with their image of European modernity. Here again the question of modernity surfaced: was patronage an ancient obstacle in the modernising spread of state institutions and national hegemony? Or was patronage a reaction to these trends – which subject groups or their leaders might have experienced as external infringement on their local autonomies? Here, the opposition between Mediterranean and modern/European/‘our’ politics was explicitly phrased at the outset:

The kind of patronage which does concern us is a form of power. In part, it intrigues us because we disapprove of it. Why? It offends both our egalitarianism and our universalism. Patrons and clients are generally unequal. Patronage relations are highly specific. They fail to illustrate the principle that like cases should be treated alike (Gellner 1977: 1, original emphasis).

Gellner’s preface does not exhaust the varying approaches to patronage in the volume that it opens. Some scholars focused on dyadic patron–client relations as instrumental ‘lop-sided friendship’ between peasants and their patrons (Pitt-Rivers 1971: 140; Campbell 1964; Wolf 1966). Others treated patronage structurally as a gap-filling mediation between communal and national scales of politics (Silverman 1965). Finally, some works explained actual patron–client relations through their conditioning by ‘a self-perpetuating system of belief and action grounded in the society’s value system’ (Boissevain 1966: 30). These different anthropological takes on social action and relations more generally materialised in disputes regarding every axis of the analysis. Some authors emphasised ‘personalized, affective, and reciprocal relationship’ (Lemarchand & Legg 1972: 151), while others stressed the workings of power in party politics in ‘developing areas’ (Weingrod 1968). Students of national political systems used patronage as an analytical concept to understand clientele systems as extended forms of relations in states’ political cultures (Powell 1970), while others compellingly argued that a ‘local ideological-normative model cannot be used to analyse itself’ (Gilsenan 1977: 168). If some focused on clients’ point of view to explain patronage as a strategy for securing protection and subsistence (Campbell 1964), others cautioned that clients’ compliance with their relations to patrons should not be confused with patrons’ legitimacy, which would otherwise be smuggled into our definition of what is structurally clients’ forced compliance with their exploitation (Scott 1977; Silverman 1970).

As often happens, the debate about patronage waned without conclusion. Yet the attention to national party politics and bureaucracies, as well as to the inter-classist role that client–patron chains played in articulating peripheral social settings to national centres (Gribaudi 1980; Schneider & Schneider 1976), already diminished patronage’s role as a Mediterraneanist emblem. Unlike the honour and shame theme, which persisted as a culturalist emblem of Mediterranean unity, patronage turned from a delineator of ‘non-modern’ places and peoples into a geographically unbound dimension of socio-political action (Gilmore 1982: 194). Perhaps because of that, anthropologists’ search for the Mediterranean continued elsewhere, and the analytical questions that had once gripped social anthropology of patronage remained unanswered (Piliavsky 2014; Waterbury 1977).

This issue repeated itself in other aspects of Mediterraneanist anthropology. One of the leading figures in the development of practice theory and in importing its nascent conceptions from anthropology to sociology was Pierre Bourdieu, whose early work on Kabylia contributed to two of the pivotal volumes in Mediterraneanist debate (Bourdieu 1963; 1966; and, see Scheele 2008). Yet once culture turned from code (or values, or norms) to logics of practice or a practical sense, it stopped being fixable either as modern or as Mediterranean. In other words, Mediterraneanist anthropology disowned the theoretical advances it had begotten, because the latter replaced the object of dispute with tools of analysis that were no longer useful in declaring whether people, places, or relations were Mediterranean or modern. The same could be argued also for the development of network theory, especially through its expansion on both sides of the Mediterranean, and always in pursuit of methodological ways to analyse social relations in ‘complex societies’ (Blok 1973; Boissevain & Mitchell 1973; Geertz, Geertz & Rosen 1979). Here too, the higher the theoretical purchase and applicability of the concept, the shorter its life among Mediterraneanists.

Aftermath of the patron–client debate

The resulting image of the Mediterranean that emerged from the heyday of anthropological interest was based on cultural similarities across the region, most of all ‘honour and shame’, for which Mediterraneanist anthropology is remembered to this day (Bromberger 2006; Sant Cassia & Schäfer 2005). For the few studies that did focus on cross-Mediterranean connections and comparison, it was connections between ‘cultures’, rather than the cultural conditions of connection: similarities between discrete entities rather than graded resemblances in practices across time and space (Davis 1977). With the exception of Jane Schneider’s classic ‘Of vigilance and virgins’ (1971), anthropologists circularly concluded that connections and proximity both generated and were based on cultural unity (Galt 1985). British social anthropologists ‘turned cultural’ not once they had encountered their transatlantic colleagues, but when they found ‘values’ and ‘modes of thought’ – like honour and shame conceived as the cultural traits shared by individuals – more fitting than underlying structures for the craft of regional comparison (Schneider 2012).

This ‘cultural shift’ towards unity and its flattening effects were gradual. The advocates of the cultural unity approach abandoned the view of the Mediterranean as a breathing, negotiable zone, in which people acknowledge their similarities as they make and break political relations among themselves and together against others. Their opponents denounced this reification altogether, rather than search for the underlying structural processes that made the Mediterranean into a transnational constellation and the idioms that inform political relations in such a constellation. In other words, the ‘culture area’ argument constructed transnational regions like the Mediterranean not on the basis of the dynamics that their diversities permit, but on the common denominator the observers drew, and then fixed that denominator as the essential character of the area.

Moreover, the debate among Mediterraneanists ended up reaffirming notions of inherent difference between the West and the Rest. If the Mediterraneanist debate entertained similarities between some parts of the three continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the dismissal of such similarities fixed Europe as culturally incomparable with its Mediterranean neighbours. By preferring Europe and its post-war nation-states as spatial categories over the Mediterranean, anthropologists opted for a scientific imagination made of discrete spatio-political entities, not structural relationships. This choice reiterated the reifying fallacies wrought on tribes, then on nations, only now on national and supra-national scales. As a result, the Mediterranean has become a favourite case in historiography of past maritime worlds of cultural contact and exchange (Abulafia 2011; Armitage 2009; Subrahmanyam 1998; Wigen 2006), as well as a frequent example in critiques of orientalism (Herzfeld 2005b).

Conclusion: Theory from the Mediterranean?

The Mediterranean is triply absent as an anthropological subject nowadays. First, it is rarely considered as an adequate scale of analysis (as are most, if not all, other candidate-regions: Ho 2006; Matory 2005). Second, it serves as a theoretical morality tale for what kinds of generalizations we should not pursue. Third, the category of the region is absent even from the analyses of processes and situations that are taken to be Mediterranean by other disciplines and wider treatments. In the absence of a vibrant Mediterraneanist anthropology, ethnography in the region blooms. After all, unauthorised migration, conflicts of various types and scope, transnational infrastructural projects (like pipelines and highways) and other events and scenes known to raise anthropologists’ interest abound (for key examples, see Ballinger 2003; Cabot 2014; Cole 1997; Feldman 2011; Green 2005; Rogozen-Soltar 2012; Silverstein 2004). Nevertheless, we rarely examine these situations in relation to each other and to the wider transnational constellation. Can we find a way to use the social-historical complexity that the current state of affairs across the Mediterranean offers for a wider anthropological lesson? Do we need to sacrifice the area’s specificity – however we choose to define it – on the altar of such a broader lesson, or is there a way to harness such a specificity, perhaps even to harness its specificity theoretically?

A possible answer to these questions comes out of a consideration in an earlier section – the Mediterranean seems to have fared best in anthropological literature not through radical alternatives to anthropologists’ perceptions of the way of life in their own societies (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1940; Malinowski 1927; Mauss 1923), but through baffling variations and permutations of them. This anthropological view of the Mediterranean as a repository not of radical alternatives to modern/Euro-American sociocultural settings but as a much closer cognate is perhaps most lucidly reflected in the conceptual relationship between anthropologies of gifting and of hospitality (Candea & Da Col 2012: S1-2; Pitt-Rivers 2011; 2012). Anthropologies of both hospitality and gifting have focused on turn-taking acts. Yet work on hospitality includes another key element: the notion of the mastery of the spatial realm, adding questions of sovereignty to those of reciprocity (Shryock 2012: S24). The skeletal gifting scene includes two persons and things that they ritually pass to each other. The relationship between gifting as an institution and reciprocity as a principle is one of the most famous issues in anthropology (Algazi, Groebner & Jussen 2003; Bailey 1971; Godelier 1999; Laidlaw 2000; Lambek 2011; Munn 1986; Parry 1986). Yet this theoretical thread privileges the role that gifts themselves serve in constituting the identity, fame, price, reputation, prestige, or otherwise social worth of the gifting parties. In contrast to this, the skeletal hospitality setup includes two persons and things that pass between them, at least those things that the host gives to the guest (food, famously), but they also include all persons coming under the host’s authority as well as the space into which the guest enters. Through these added elements in the ritual staging of social relations, the hosts’ reputation comes to depend not only on what he or she gives, but also on how intact they manage to maintain the spaces they claim to control.

This double preoccupation is illustrated in the different emphases that Pitt-Rivers and Herzfeld stress. Pitt-Rivers focuses on ‘the law of hospitality’, which he defines as ‘the problem of how to deal with strangers’ (1977: 94). Herzfeld focuses not on the relationship of household-stranger but on the homology among the levels of the wider set of collective identities, from the village to the nation (1987b: 76). As hosts and guests demand, enact, and recount scenes of hospitality, they move along this set of concentric identities, in a way that permits ‘moral englobing of political asymmetry’ (1987b: 86). Hospitality conjoins reciprocity and power, morality and politics, generosity and sovereignty (Dresch 1998; 2012; Herzfeld 1987b; Pitt-Rivers 2011; 2012; Shryock 2008). Where hosting is a key ritualised scene for claiming the moral high ground and staging political relations, people’s careers as leaders rise and fall through the stagecraft of hospitality, and is definitely so narrated (Shryock 2004). As a result, gifting is still an anthropological classic emblem of reciprocity tout court, presenting it as a pure aspect of social life, while hospitality – exactly because it combines spatio-political issues with those of reciprocity – has had a rockier path in anthropology and is also a theoretical matter of a double, not sole thread. It should not surprise us at this point that Mauss discusses societies far afield, while Pitt-Rivers concentrates on societies from around the Mediterranean.

We started this discussion with the Mediterraneanist interest of anthropology’s early generations, yet the Mediterranean has also served in complicating anthropological theories beyond the theme of hospitality, when scholars performed a sort of theoretical doubling of mono-thread theories developed elsewhere. If Mauss’s gift met its Mediterraneanist counterpart in Pitt-Rivers’s hospitality (and grace), then the same could arguably be said for Lévi-Strauss’s ‘savage mind’, which Bourdieu’s habitus began to complicate between Algeria and southern France (Bourdieu 1966; 1972; 1979); Goody’s work on the family and marriage in southern Europe (1983); De Martino’s historical anthropology of magic and religion (2005; 2015); as well as Campbell’s and Herzfeld’s formulations of Evans-Pritchard’s segmentation strand of segmentation theory (Campbell 1964; Herzfeld 1985a; 2005a). If the Mediterranean has actually inspired welcome theoretical complexity (of kinship, magic, perception, political structure), then perhaps both the scale of analysis if offers and current events in and around it could also benefit from our analytical attention on similar terms?

An anthropological approach to the current affairs around the Mediterranean can achieve both goals: show how we can reconstruct the ethnographic relevance of regional scale of action and examine current affairs in the Mediterranean using the tools of analysis that Mediterraneanist anthropology has honed over the years. In contemporary accounts of the Mediterranean, the two most frequent features are tourism and unauthorised migration. Authors discuss both under the theme of locals’ xenophobia, which faces north and south respectively (Abulafia 2003; Boissevain & Selwyn 2004; Feldman 2013). Yet accusations of xenophobia fit within both threads of the anthropology of hospitality we’ve examined: it is one prescribed solution to ‘the problem of how to deal with strangers’ as well as a moral judgement of those who pursue it (through either commission or omission). Anthropologists of hospitality in close quarters have shown how hosts try to prove their honour by showing the integrity of their domestic spaces and their mastery over ‘the threshold of welcome or trespass’ (Shryock 2012: S24). Anyone following the international news cycle over the past four years will have noticed that the same splitting of the world into the moral and the political has been unfolding on a much vaster scale, in European management of unauthorised migration in the Mediterranean. The transnational dynamics of hospitality provide us with an outline for a historical anthropology of how the scales of action, responsibility, and sovereignty shift both upwards and downwards. Here, European states promote their own national pride and are members of a union that holds universalist pretensions as a beacon of universal hospitality. These states’ governments both try to collaborate with each other (as members in that union) and exchange accusations of xenophobia, bad hospitality, and irresponsible management of their domestic realms. Such an analysis may provide us with the Mediterranean neither as the unchanging structure of cultural unity nor as a time-bound historical object, but rather as the ever-changing constellation that emerges from the various political projects and moral proclamations that clash and combine with each other. If we revisit the fruits of the region’s past anthropology, if we expand its scope, first to construct and then to address processes on a transnational scale, then we may regain both a Mediterraneanist anthropology and an anthropological Mediterranean.

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Note on contributor

Naor Ben-Yehoyada is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and Associated Researcher at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche–Iamc, Sicily. He received his MA from Tel Aviv University and his PhD from Harvard University in 2011.

Dr Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, United States. nhb2115@columbia.edu

[1] The term ‘orientalism’ comes from the title of Edward Said’s book, in which he critiqued the set of fictional representations of ‘The East’, which reduced it to stalk figures of ‘Oriental peoples’ and ‘places’ (Said 1978). Herzfeld explicitly adapted it as ‘practical Mediterraneanism’ (Herzfeld 2005b; see also De Donno 2010).

[2] Edmund Burke III remains one of the only historians to insist on extending the Mediterranean into modernity. Yet, his opposition to culturalist explanations notwithstanding, the unity of the modern Mediterranean that he proclaims requires significant historical leaps and ends up reiterating old claims about some sort or another of the region’s backwardness (2012: 920).

[3] In Rosenfeld’s terms, ‘a patrilineal descent group or patrilineage, related families or extended families being organised in a lineage of the segmentary type’ (Rosenfeld 1974: 243).

[4] See Carlo Levi’s (1947) account of his obligatory sojourn in a couple of villages in Lucania in 1930s fascist Italy for a most poetic rendition of this point.

[5] This formulation survived not within the culturalist direction that the Mediterranean unity debate took, but rather in the works of scholars like Jane Schneider (Schneider 1971; 1990) and Jack Goody (Goody 1983).