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Chania
On bureaucratic essentialism:
constructing the Mediterranean in EUROPEAN-UNION institutions
Vassiliki Yiakoumaki,
Researcher/Mediterranean Voices and University of Crete
yiakoumaki@otenet.gr, yiakoumaki@stud.soc.uoc.gr

Abstract:
In this presentation I shall discuss the issue of "turning back to the Mediterranean" from the point of view of official actors/institutions promoting a certain definition of the Mediterranean as culture area. I focus particularly on the role of the European Union as supra-national agency articulating a discourse of a "Euro-Mediterranean cultural heritage", which emerges officially in the mid-1990s. This emergence involves a subsequent sponsorship, promotion, and advocacy of "intangible" cultural heritage, as opposed to hegemonic, top-down, or elite versions of heritage.

Drawing on experience from our programme, Mediterranean Voices, my specific concern for bringing forth the institutional aspect is the issue of the interplay between the academic and the institutional/bureaucratic, in other words, the question of how an anthropologically-oriented researcher can conduct ethnography supporting an institutionally constructed theoretical framework which promotes a seeming essentialism, i.e., a cultural unity of the Mediterranean. I argue that, in order to be able to address the issue of this interplay, it is of crucial importance to be aware of the pertinent institutional structures and political conjunctures in Europe today which render the EU a locus of production of a heritage discourse.

Hence I shall focus on outlining what I view as events and structures governing the emergence of the discourse of Mediterranean heritage, such as the recent European "enlargement", the immigration towards Europe, and the Barcelona Declaration which generated the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and the Euromed Heritage Programme. I wish to illustrate that the discourse of a Mediterranean heritage is not about a revival of the "area" as anthropologists know it, and that there is no underlying agenda of a Mediterranean nostalgia but, mainly, that there is an interface of political and economic agendas pertaining to European integration over the last couple of decades. There is a (re-)emergence of the Mediterranean in the overall EU agenda, whereby the Mediterranean is becoming a constitutive element in the EU's effort to play a role in global economy.

By discussing this specific historical conjuncture at the European present which governs the emergence of a certain version of the Mediterranean at institutional level, I hope to contribute to an understanding of "what goes on in the field" when seemingly essentialist concepts, such as the Mediterranean, are re-deployed and become institutionally binding. In this process I hope to contribute to a complication of the relationship between the academic and the bureaucratic, while at the same time offering possibilities to think of creative and socially sensitive potentials in what may seem as conformist institutional frameworks.

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