Mediterranean Reception in the Americas

The Ancient Mediterranean experience and its transmission throughout the ages has been the main theme of the Western tradition for centuries, helping to shape such a wide set of cultural contexts that we could hardly list them all. Perhaps the best way to perceive the range of Mediterranean influence would be to indicate the non-Mediterranean contexts, in the Orient, Southern Africa, Asia, Oceania, or in the Americas. There are many places outside the Mediterranean that have been exposed to Mediterranean cultural radiation, and developed strong historical and imaginary links, relating places as distant as Brazil, New Zealand, and Denmark to that most powerful cradle of historical meanings. Therefore, to illustrate the outpouring of Mediterranean waters and codes throughout the world, and particularly within the social context in which I live—in Brazil—I will mention two of the most telling circumstances of reception of the Mediterranean experience, presenting key cases that illuminate the whole functioning of a powerful machine of meaning-production. This will take place, firstly, through the illustration of the colonization of collective imageries and, secondly, through a demonstration of the working of an inventive method of palaeographical and epigraphical study, carefully developed to tighten the bonds between the ancient Mediterranean and Brazil, a case which has had wide reverberations from the first decades of the twentieth century until to-day.

Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Meaning (existential) · Mediterranean area · Mediterranean climate · The Imaginary · Theme (computing) · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Computer Science · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History

• Mediterranean heritage

  Open Access•David Lowenthal•Nations and Nationalism•2008

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