The De-Mediterraneanisation of the Mediterranean?

Abstract

This paper uses the issue of tourism development in the Mediterranean as a prism through which to look at more general questions of socio-cultural, politico-economic, and environmental processes in the region. The paper is underpinned by a concern with space and spatial transformations (at various levels including those of the town, the countryside, and of the wider area inhabited by both). The starting point is the acceleration of coastal development, engendered, as much of this has been, by tourism. Tourism related shifts of economic gravity to coasts, particularly obvious in the case of islands, has been accompanied by the deepening and extension of more purely capitalist relations of production in the region. Ethnographic signs of this have taken a variety of forms. One has been the urban demographic and spatial transformations which have lead to a continuing rise of urban individuation and the associated further erosion of historic Mediterranean patterns of relationships within and between different sorts of urban collectivities. Another has been the continuing de-coupling of spatial and kinship boundaries. Movements of populations, particularly of young people, to the coast have increased the autonomy of individual members of kinship structures while decreasing the moral authority of elders and other representatives of kin groups as wholes. Interior landscapes have witnessed a continuing decline in the polyculture characteristic of the historic Mediterranean. Such landscapes are themselves influenced by the rise of the coastal monocrop of tourism. One of the most striking manifestations of this is the growing disrepair and degradation of terraces and dry stone walls. Finally, there is the broadening disjunction between, on the one hand, tourist imagery built on rhetorical references to the traditional Mediterranean, to be found in post-cards (of peasant farming and fishing, for example) or internet advertisements (of second homes in 'unspoilt' island bolt holes, for example) and the daily facts of the overuse and the running down of natural resources. Holding in mind aspects of the historical Mediterranean as they come to be measured against contemporary developments in the region, we are left with the question of whether the Mediterranean is being, to coin a term, de-Mediterraneanised.