WHO NOW READS TOYNBEE? It has been twenty years since Arnold Toynbee's name last appeared in this journal. It was a passing reference, written by Raymond Grew, in a 1994 editorial foreword. If our search engines are to be believed, Toynbee's work has been cited in only nineteen CSSH essays, ten of them published in the 1960s. One would never guess, based on this record, that Toynbee was, circa 1950, the most influential and widely read historian on the planet. In fact, odds are good that you have read not a word by Toynbee, and that all you know about him is that he used to be a famous historian. It is worth reconsidering the ideas of someone who was once so important and is now so decidedly forgotten.
Krishan Kumar provides an insightful account of the rise and fall of Toynbee, which is closely related to the changing fortunes of “civilization” as an object of historical inquiry. If Toynbee ever comes back, Kumar argues, it will mean that historians are ready, once again, to make sense of cultural formations that are larger and older than nation-states. Toynbee was popular, and his worked was eventually abandoned, because he worked on this transcendent scale. Although his main approaches are now dated, Kumar suggests that Toynbee found ways to avoid the principal drawbacks of civilizational analysis: namely, its tendency to rank civilizations and to fixate on the inherent superiority of one over another, and of the West over the Rest. As a source of inspiration, if not emulation, Toynbee might still be of use to historians who want to break out of Eurocentric frameworks and reconnect with a deeper sense of the human past.
THE CONNECTING SEA For over thirty years now, anthropologists and historians have been trying to do away with bounded notions of culture and culture areas. Meanwhile, cultural and area studies proceed at a healthy pace, and certain world regions seem as crisply real as ever. This is especially true of the Mediterranean, which is now a hotspot for avant-garde scholarship in several disciplines. For historians of the pre- and early modern, the Mediterranean was a “real” place until it lost its coherence in recent centuries. For anthropologists now putting their toes back in Mediterranean waters, the region is defined not by cultural uniformity, but by self-conscious cultural and political projects, which can be ecumenical, multinational, or resolutely chauvinist. Across this spectrum of scholarship, it is the Mediterranean's connective potential, seen as historically eclipsed or culturally renovated, that draws our attention. The region stands between the modern and the past, between Europe and Africa, between Christian and Muslim worlds.
Brian A. Catlos and Naor Ben-Yehoyada enter the Mediterranean nine hundred years apart, but their frames of reference are remarkably similar. Catlos is interested in how the Abrahamic faiths shared political space in Muslim Spain, Norman Sicily, and Fatimid Egypt, where men who belonged to religious minorities often exercised great economic and military power. These arrangements did not always end well, but they were common. Catlos attributes them to a cultural style that mixed confessionalism with tactical reliance on out-group elites, a system that worked well only when Christians, Jews, and Muslims could recognize affinities across difference. This theme resurfaces in contemporary Sicily, where Ben-Yehoyada lays out the logic of cousinage that shapes the political language spoken by fishermen who trawl (competitively) in the waters between Italy and Tunisia. Working around the easy discourse of fraternity that dominates national and transnational models of equality, Sicilians and Tunisians rely instead on affinity—on the metaphor of cousin marriage, with its shifting scales of closeness and distance—to connect to each other and to a deep, unevenly shared past. By interacting in this way at dockside, on the decks of fishing boats, and in political projects that link the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, Tunisians and Sicilians engage in a vital process of region formation, one that, according to Ben-Yehoyada, depends on segmentary models of identification that contemporary political analysis systematically obscures.
IMMIGRANT SONG Is Spain a Mediterranean country? From the vantage of Germany looking south, yes. From the vantage of Peru looking northeast, no. Spain, for its new Latin American immigrants, is Europe, a placement that many policymakers in Spain would wholeheartedly embrace. Likewise, for many Spaniards, the Bolivian and the Dominican are both Latino, a new identity awkwardly imposed and adopted as a means to reduce a diverse mix of New World Spanish speakers into a single social type, for greater ease of integration. It is the old song and dance of immigration in the modern nation-state, and it would seem to be playing out in Spain much as it does in other immigrant-receiving countries. But a closer look at expressive culture—at song and dance, to be exact—shows the political limits, and the emotional costs, of the integration game.
Joshua Tucker takes us on a critical tour of immigration in contemporary Spain, with a special focus on the experience of Latin American migrants, who are rapidly morphing into Latinos. The latter term is borrowed from North American usage, and the gaps that separate Puerto Rican and Mexican immigrants to the United States, who are nonetheless Latino in the context of panethnic identity politics, are equally present between different immigrant national groups in Spain. Integration requires streamlining. For Tucker, who comes at Spain from prior work as an ethnomusicologist in Peru, this streamlining effect develops at the expense of Peruvian identity, but it also intensifies it, creating vivid moments of Peruvianness in Spain that are conveyed viscerally in musical performance, among other media. These spaces exist inside a larger field of Latinidad that has little need for Peruvian things, a problem of representation to which integration politics offers no ready solution.
POLITICAL YOUTH Nothing is more easily politicized than maturity. The distinction between adult and child is the basis for all legal and demographic concepts of majority. If adolescence is now assumed to be a necessary stage in the transition to legal adulthood, it is not hard to assume that rebellion, radical or tame, will be a standard feature of the shift from pre-political minority to politically engaged citizenship. This maturation process draws its symbols from contradictory sources: a romantic tradition that extols youthful self-expression and experimentation and an authoritarian tradition that sees youthful resistance as disobedient, transitory, and irresponsible. Heavy reliance on this binarized imagery can cause us to overlook aspects of youthful politics that seem too deliberate, disciplined, and sensible—in short, too mature. It can also predispose us to valorize or delegitimize political action by associating it too closely with the aspirations of youth.
Niall Whelehan and Craig Jeffrey and Jane Dyson explore these themes in cases ranging from nineteenth-century Italy and Ireland to contemporary India. The radicalism that characterized Irish and Italian politics in the 1800s is often attributed to the active participation of young men. Using a variety of demographic and judicial records, Whelehan shows how the participation of young men in independence and anti-colonial movements, like their role in banditry and faction-fighting, varied in response to multiple political and economic factors. More uniform, he concludes, was the tendency for those in government to juvenilize rebels by exaggerating the role of young men, and childish motivations, in oppositional forms of popular politics. Jeffrey and Dyson, working in a Himalayan village in India, introduce us to a generation of young community activists who pursue a low-key, service-oriented politics with none of the stereotypical qualities of adolescent rebellion. These “good politicians” define themselves in opposition to local patrons and party bosses; they are seldom elected officials, but they embrace the ethos of citizenship and civic participation preached in government-issue textbooks, a worldview that is so divorced from the practical realities of power in India that any attempt to act on its key principles will have both subversive and progressive effects. Grassroots politics of this kind, Jeffrey and Dyson note, is increasingly common throughout the developing world, but its modest ambitions make it easy for scholars (and professional politicians) to ignore.
LIBRARY LOST AND FOUND The archive and the library are places of safe keeping. They hold things of value, and the proof of this value is the fact that access to libraries, even the most public ones, is limited. How these limits are defined tells us much about how value is measured, by whom, and how valuables can be properly gathered and organized in a single space. Technologies of concentration insure that libraries will be places where intellectual treasures can be found and made richer through use, but they also insure that libraries will become sites of cultural loss. Their contents are steadily being stolen, burned, confiscated, misfiled, auctioned off, and carried away. Global hierarchies of value insure that these losses will occur more frequently in peripheral countries, and that valuable texts and images will consistently move toward the political center. Reversing this flow by creating new archives on the periphery creates repositories that are even more vulnerable to loss. If their holdings have greater value elsewhere, they will be prone to move (through clandestine or legal sale). The keepers of these desirable objects will be tempted to remove them from circulation to protect them, to impose taxes on their value, or to prevent political rivals from using them. Collecting and sharing are contradictory goals, even in the open stacks.
Ricardo Salvatore and Lucie Ryzova discuss the logistical, political, and ethical challenges that beset library science, especially when collectors from core and periphery cross paths. Salvatore charts the careers of Hubert Bancroft, a wealthy American book collector who created a massive library dedicated to the study of the western half of the North American continent, and Jorge Basadre, a Peruvian historian who rebuilt the National Library of Lima after it was destroyed by fire. The differences in the abilities of these two men to accumulate and preserve books were vast, and Salvatore catalogs them in fine detail, showing how they conform to larger patterns of capital accumulation that distinguish global north and south. Ryzova, working in new photographic archives in Egypt and Lebanon, offers an honest and critical account of the curatorial practices that prevail in these institutions. Here, a public rhetoric of preservation and free access to national heritage masks a collecting regime in which valuable information about photographs—their histories and their qualities as objects—is lost or destroyed as institutions pursue strategies of hoarding and exclusive control of originals, which are being replaced by digital copies. This predicament, Ryzova contends, is the result of neoliberal initiatives in cultural resource management that have combined with local understandings of what photographs are and how their value should be determined. It is an unfortunate union, one that will lead, in Ryzova's view, to a massive loss of cultural assets and yet another demonstration of how attempts at corrective accumulation on the periphery can be quickly, and tragically, undone.
