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The ethnological interpretation of Mediterranean culture

MUCEM in Marseille

The museum reminds of a similar one in Paris. Also the term 'civilization' can be linked to values which differ from the Western world. They prevail over a longer period than what a culture can assume to claim, time wise but also in terms of use of space. Hunting societies were succeeded by agricultural ones and only much later by industrialized society. Today, in a world marked by the Internet, there is reference to virtual worlds which bridge but also erase all real borders, while in reality they continue to exist even if in silence.

Certainly the museum is the consequence of some ambition and has given Marseille the chance to take up once more the dialogue with all those countries bordering on the Mediterranean. For it has deep roots as remarked once by Borges who traced the Latin American culture back to the Afro-Mediterranean roots.

Temporary exhibition / Exposition temporaire.

For instance, there is the gender theme expressed as a bazar of gender and reminds of slave trade and the selling off of girls and women, and which feeds today into sex trade.

Au bazar du genre, Féminin – Masculin en Méditerranée
J4 | 7 juin 2013 - 6 janvier 2014
 
Other temporary exhibitions around the same time period are as follows:
               
 
               
 
               
 
               
 
 

Altogether four thematic subjects structure the exhibition at the MUCEM to reveal what the Mediterranean world looked like over and beyond the different cultural epochs, in order to make up the Mediterranean civilization.

Prior to entering the specific exhibitions on display, it should be recalled what Ferdinand Richard remarked about the term 'Mediterranean', namely that while the European side has an one sided version of Mediterranean culture, likewise this concept has a different meaning in Tunesia, Libya, Egypt, Malta, Cyprus etc. Here Valletta in Malta will also play a pivot point in future when it comes to defining the bilateral and multilateral influences exerted by the Mediterranean Sea on the respective landscapes and countries bordering it. 

Moreover it is presumed that the Museum will follow directives issued by the French Ministry of Culture and rather than being a European one, it will continue the French approach to the Mediterranean as attempted already under the Presidency of Sarkozy. President Hollande opened the Museum on 4th of June 2013, and opened to the public on 9th of June.

While the permanent exhibition shows the transition to agricultural societies, followed by religions making themselves be felt, and then leading on to the enlightened citizen, the themes of the temporary exhibition focus on such ancient, equally current themes like Gender and Travel.

 

 

The space for the temporary exhibition is small in scale while the objects on display seem not merely not unusual, but have been restored so well that they appear to be ready to use in the fields or for fetching water. There is too much a touch of modernity on these objects that they have lost traces of the stories they could reveal. They are nearly too clean as to show any rough edges history may have left as marks on them.

 

There is a need to understand from where the items came from, in order to be able to locate them on the imaginary map of the Mediterranean Sea. As they are exhibited, not only their dating but their location may prove to be difficult from the point of view of an ordinary visitor. Unsure what these items are meant to convey, it is like walking from one uncertainty into the next uncertainty.

Beautifully arranged, the angle to be perceived is one of an outside view pressing home what is meant to be put on display, namely anthropological relationships. Michel Foucault had called this a critical tension if between the anthropological and ethnological dimensions there can evolve a self understanding which reflects as well as shapes the social structure in which people move. He would name the items representative symbols of an order to things: les mots et les choses! Yet without reference to the exercise of power in these anthropological domains, there cannot be made out how from Egypt to Ancient Greece the colonisation of the Mediterranean had its first impact also along what is today the French coast. Later came the Romans and then the Italian city states, including Venice. They left in turn their traces in far away places even though that crossed what Christianity and epecially crusades had evoked and left behind. By that time, and it could be well the 15th century, Greek pillars and Roman acquaducts were confronted by the early phase of the Renaissance which broke out of a certain fixation upon modern, equally permanent times. The breakage thereafter would be interested to follow up in terms of simultaneous happenings, equally different kinds of break-ups of system when a benevolent dictator would die and Leonardo da Vinci had to flee. Always it should also be kept in mind that Genoa was the departure point of Christos Columbus. But while the latter discovered the new world, sea voyages within the Mediterranean Sea counted differently. It was not so much a part of colonisation as a repeated fight between pirates and formidable powers which used the different islands and locations as way stations for trade and for gaining influence over time. But again the Mediterranean was marked by a much greater uncertainty in which direction to face. The Muslims would decide this in a religious way. The Venetians tended in the direction of the Black Sea as if they wanted to retrace the Argonauts and what route they had taken. But these eternal blue waters have carried many a boat with men eager to seek more adventure than to discover new land. That made the Mediterranean more into a kind of navel without knowing if looking at it would allow for a more civilized understanding of the world to be lived in.

Objects speak when listened to. The same goes with every item on display. Of course, those huge

 

 

The board with stones is a most familiar objects to be found in many local places around the Mediterranean.

 

 

 

 

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