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The Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape. By PREDRAG MATVEJEVIC. Translated by MICHAEL HENRY HEIM. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. 218. $29.95 (cloth).
For decades, Fernand Braudel has dominated the study of the Mediterranean as a historical unit (Fernand Braudel, La Mediterranee et le Monde mediterraneen et l'epoque de Philippe II [Paris: Armand Colin, 95th ed., 1990]). While regional studies have followed his monumental work, few have re-attempted Braudel's feat. Over the last decade, however, a number of scholars have emerged to build upon his work. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell have analyzed the microenvironments of the Mediterranean, and have traced Braudel's longue durie to antiquity (Peregrin Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000]). Predrag Matvejevic offers a subjective perspective on the history of the Mediterranean, arguing that it cannot be reduced to prescribed categories. Matvejevic contends that Braudel was the first to realize that his model got away from him as he was writing about the sea, overwhelming the reader with a barrage of information. This is precisely what Matvejevic attempts to avoid. His task is one of poetically evoking rather than tightly representing the Mediterranean. More than a defined place on the map, the Mediterranean becomes a cultural and intellectual product. It is a sea of promiscuity where the ideas, religions, traditions, and languages have shaped history. The author describes the Mediterranean as the basis for history and culture, and his philosophy of the sea tries to encompass everything.
Definitions, of course, are slippery, and the author sets out to limit the scope of the Mediterranean. For Matvejevic the sea stretches as far as the olive tree grows....