A Seaward View on a Transitional Region

Abstract

In the last few years there has been an upsurge of scholarly interest in the circum-Mediterranean area as part of a wider academic movement to rethink and revitalize area studies. As a transitional zone the Mediterranean area has always had a somewhat uncertain, marginal, and ambivalent position in the field of established area specializations, which until recently were defined by rather rigid and arbitrary geo-political boundaries. 'The Middle East', a product of the strategic thinking of 19th-century 'Europe' (itself a problematic category), is a case in point. Scholars, in particular anthropologists, working in the Middle East and North Africa have often studied this region as detached from the wider Mediterranean world. One good reason to correct this myopic perspective is to be found in the basic fact that the Mediterranean region has been the breeding ground of globalization and cosmopolitanism in which the sea played a major role.