+++
title="Transcript of Iain Chambers' seminar"
editors=["valeria.md"]
+++


![](author:iainchambers.md): The idea is to try to think about to not think about the Mediterranean an object of study, neither anthropological or historic, but as a critical space, to think with the Med, with its complexities, historical, linguistic and cultural complexities, to dismantle the hegemonic view over it, the European gaze which has framed the Mediterranean.

This begins with the idea of Greece as the origin of the Western thought, but we know about the Eastern influences, and yet they are ignored...

Then there are the Balkans, which are omitted from this hegemonic gaze, but we think only of Spain and French coasts, skipping over certain areas...

While France Germany and the UK think of a specific South of Europe...there are many Souths...

To think with the Med means realizing that 2/3 of Mediterranean are actually Asian and African coasts...

We want to reintroduce these histories at the margin of the European version of History.

We must remember that until not long ago, the northern coasts were minoritarians, until the Ottoman empire ruled over the Med...

The first important thing is not to add these histories, but to think again about the very premises about who has the right to narrate the Med...

Who has the right to narrate?

To begin from these other cultures might allow to reformulate dominant narrations over the Mediterranean Sea.

Yesterday evening, I did not manage to speak about this but the idea of thinking with music: to treat music, as well as other arts, visual arts or poetry, not as illustrations of other historical processes, but as critical languages themselves, to go beyond traditional premises of sociological and anthropological traditions..to follow sounds, and here we can also ask how to give a body to these other subaltern cultures, insisting on this aspect.

For example, the feminist discourse narrating women not as submissive, but as protagonists...such as in the case of Umm Kulthum - a female Egyptian singer, performing folk Arabic Egyptian music, is using songs composed for her by poets, introducing a different divisions between high and low cultures, pop and poetry - she makes this divisions fluid, she sings the compositions of high Egyptian poets in a popular music fashion...

There are other ways to live modernity in ways that are not authorized by the Eurocentric version of modernity - this is a Gramscian perspective, if you like...

![](editor:beatricec.md): I'd like to start from Umm Kulthum, for her she is a divinity in the Arab speaking countries - I used to wake up and have to listen to her for one hour every morning ...Isn't it a new hegemonic gesture, the one to try and identify those different gazes, there are already other gazes that do not need our permission to exist...This attempt to find other framings for speaking with, to become closer, it is deeply a problem that is OUR problem, not that of others...

![](author:iainchambers.md): For sure, it is easy to continue to colonize those other realities...to appropriate..there is no such thing as Arabic culture, there are many....An important Algerian writer, [NAME??] spoke of the importance to speak not in the name of the other, but with the other...

The Arabic language is the first language of the Mediterranean, in all of its different dialects.

Distinction between representing and registering. Where representing is often a way of appropriating. This is connected with the hegemony of the ocular, the history of eye in the West, so that anything that cannot be represented is not considered valid knowledge, this is true in the West form the Renaissance to our contemporary computer/screen culture.

The eye structures knowledge starting from centering the subject who looks out. The subject is therefore at the centre of the universe. Sound instead returns, it comes back, it organizes knowledge in a different way. There are different elements for getting out from such visual hegemony - which in the West is part of colonization. After all, the first instrument of this colonization process was the map.

In what I am saying now, I am not of course trying to cover this complex topic exhaustively, but just to introduce the problematization of this organization of time and space, to reorganize these in ways that not only serve my own needs and wishes...

The Mediterraean is today a laboratory of modernity. There are other practices and lives that are part of modernity. We might not like to accept them, but they exist and persist.

Today we speak much about the problem of Islam. As a provocation, I'd like to point out that Islam is a European religion...in some parts of Europe, it was present for longer than Christianity - until the 1492 expulsion of Islamic populations from Spain,  and these populations persisted in the Balkans. Until the 12th c. there are part of Europe that are still pagan, in Uppsala, until the 11th century there have been human sacrifices. I mention these element are more a way to disseminate some questions around things that might escape our forms of appropriation. How to go beyond the premises that have allowed colonization?

![](editor:nicoletta.md): A question around the use of music. In western music, in harmonic music, intervals that are monotonal are considered dissonant, this is rooted in the definition of dissonance in our musical grammar, whereas the Arabic tradition is based on these microtonal intervals...so such negative or positive value of consonance or dissonance is very relative...


IAIN: This was imposed by a institutional music logic, because in Europe too, folk musical traditions are not conforming to this dictate. Minoritarian ways of making music across the world often use these microtonal intervals, but why are they considered less important? It is all connected to a specific logos that is Western...blues and Arabic music are more focused on the development of the melody: it begins, but we do not know when it will end. Another aspect is repetition, where repetition is always a modification of what you already heard, so that complexity and density emerges out of the thickness of harmonic depth, a stratification of sounds repeated in the time-space of music. This is again a different way of thinking than linear thinking, which is our way of thinking time. We assume that time is linear, but time is not progressive, there are folds and densities in time, and concepts such as progress or development do not deal with this, this is the price we paid for these concepts. Introducing this idea of making more complex our way of explaining is not about adding more voices to the mix, but to undo the premises of thought.

![](editor:giacomo.md): What I was thinking about yesterday is how does the anthropologist can abandon (IAIN: I am not an anthropologist! Alessandra: We are all anthropologists! 🙂)
If we move away from the desk and the printed paper, as Victor Turner who dreamt of an anthropology freed from the need of the printed page. If anthropologists (or academics) want to get out form their closed circles they must find new ways of dealing with embodied knowledge.

this sis waht i thought yesterday as i was listenening - DO you think this is a direction for academic thought for a revolt? Is this a necessary or useful, what are the risks of trying to become a sciaman in the diffusion of knowledge?

At the beginning yesterday you said 'have a good trip' at the beginning of tour performance

IAN: there is a distinction to be made, there is an underpinning question to what you just said...there is a mean of communication called writing but very few are ready to aknowledge the weight of writing itself...they treat this as a transparent medium...but writing has a weight....even in aglophonic anthropology when we started to give importance to the ways in which we communicate, especially importnat cultural turn in Aglo antrhop cause of its empiricist tradition...
i am saying something banal maybe, but there is an attempt to introduce a politics of poetics to account for...my language is never transparent, but i am immersed in language...we must question 'scientific' knowledge, here we must expose and question scientific claims within disciplines, starting from the language they use...

Your question is importnat about how to think with language, not just through language...we must dismantle the houses of knowledge that do not question themselves. Quotations and citation are not universal ways of writing, but aglo american traditions...

Michale Taussig - Kev's cousin , is one of the anthropologists- sciaman...


![](editor:alessandra): Spivak - can the subaltern speak? thsi si not a question of the subalterns of course, they know they can speak...
There is no arabic culture, but cultures, this is in itself a colonial and hegemonic language/religion/cultre....we do not read southern authors enough...this is a fact,

But the north is the one that decides that the south is global, but what is the north?

IAIN: I agree. I often think of the med as an archive, not a clear one. thinking of 8 centuries of formation of med cultures, of course i am simplifying here, we must open this archives not as if they are not part of history or part of modernity...
it is only during this 2 centuries that th emed is been transformed into this colonial lake...
non authorised maps are possible and there and needed...

BEA: Azulai - Israeli historian - the role of museums and archives what is this archive?

IAN: when i say archvie this is a provokation against the historians - but we need to think about a fluid archive