Paper Short Abstract:

During my years of research and life on the island of Crete, concepts such as hospitality, honor, and shame have often accompanied me on my journey. However, the Mediterranean, as an analytical category expressed by my informants, has been prominent by its absence, not the sea.

Paper Abstract:

Over the course of more than a decade, I have resided on and engaged in anthropological research on the island of Crete. My inquiries have spanned various topics, with a primary emphasis on the exploration of its traditional music and intangible heritage, alongside an examination of elements associated with retributive justice. Notably, conventional anthropological categories, such as hospitality, honor, and shame, have frequently manifested with heightened prominence through the discourses articulated by my informants, all from an emic perpespective.

Nevertheless, the invocation of the Mediterranean or an asserted sense of Mediterraneanness among the Cretans, as a category articulated by the islanders themselves, remains conspicuously absent within my researches. The sea remains nameless; it stands as a boundary (Doñate and Romero 2008), devoid of the cosmopolitan connotations of intersectionality but rather identified as the point of origin for challenges and dangers.

As a Catalan, and thus hailing from a region along this very shores, where, in contrast to Crete, allusions to the Mediterranean persistently permeate various facets of life (festivals, research institutions, museums, publications, beverages, conferences, ...), I harbor a suspicion that those who expound most fervently upon the Mediterranean are often the furthest removed from the prevailing stereotypes that have historically underpinned this designation—an ideal that, in reality, remains elusive.