Mediterranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity by Irad Malkin

Author:Irad Malkin [Malkin, Irad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Ancient, Rome, Social History
ISBN: 9781317999003
Google: tTLcAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-09-13T16:15:17+00:00

Cultures, Landscapes, and Identities in the Mediterranean World

LIN FOXHALL

Mediterranean landscapes are human artefacts in which complex cultural histories are firmly embedded. These landscapes should be interpreted as manifestations of historically specific identities shaped by different human societies over many millennia according to deep-seated cultural principles. However, without privileging environmentally based explanations or taking refuge in environmental determinism, it is clear that these landscapes are also shaped by the practical constraints of climate, geography and geomorphology, and the biology of plants and animals. Technological practices and developments — complex combinations of culturally shaped elements and practical constraints — are critical for understanding how human societies exploited these landscapes. Technology can be viewed as one kind of mediation between people and the environment in which they live: a means of interacting via material culture with the natural world, which is formulated within human social institutions but is simultaneously moderated in form by factors external to any particular society. Within complex societies different technologies (or different modes of utilizing technologies) are often associated with different wealth and status groups: technology is not politically neutral. This paradigm generates the question of whether we can legitimately connect particular kinds of landscapes with the social and economic practices and the cultural identities of specific groups. For example, can we find specifically ‘Greek’, ‘Roman’, or ‘Ottoman’ landscapes? Can we find ‘peasant’ or ‘elite’ landscapes? Or should we be seeking to understand these landscapes as an interconnected whole, diachronically and culturally, through the features they have in common?

These issues have been at the heart of the study of Mediterranean paradigms since Braudel's great study1 and remain critical to our interpretations of cultural, social, and economic history in the Mediterranean. In this paper I want to explore these issues through a single case study: the problem of understanding sociocultural perceptions of agricultural land and its exploitation by élites and non-élites in archaic Greece. Utilizing comparative data from a range of Mediterranean societies, I will focus particularly on the matrix of relationships between the socially and politically constructed exploitation of labour, technology, and the environmental context of agriculture.

There are, of course, many different kinds of landscape, and any particular landscape embodies a multiplicity of facets. My focus here is primarily on agrarian and productive landscapes in a broad sense. In no way should this perspective be understood to indicate that these are the only kinds of landscapes or aspects of landscape sensu lato which are significant in the examples I cite.2

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