New Interpretative Approach to the Mediterranean Cultures

This essay examines most of the imagological reflections on the Mediterranean and the Balkans (as a sub-region of the Mediterranean), with the thesis that the Mediterranean cultural identity can be defined as a regional, transnational, and intercultural identity, and even as an active cultural intertext. Although the Mediterranean is a synonym for mixed races, religions, ethnicities, nations, and languages, it has its own-shared memories, its ‘locus communi’, and they are the foundation of the regional Mediterranean identity. Since spiritual, immaterial and movable culture does not know of state, ethnic, racial, or religious borders, it is shared by most Mediterranean peoples in the form of collective memory, mythical memory, folk traditions, folk culture, or folklore.

The author concludes that Mediterranean cultural inheritance has the character of an intercultural inheritance with dialogical, cross-cultural, and trans-cultural dimension, and calls for a new, sustainable interpretative turn in the sphere of the Mediterranean cultural hermeneutics, concerning the inherited cultural history and new cultural reality (linguistic, ethnic, and religious). The author sees an urgent need to actualize certain aspects of the inherited and the contemporary Mediterranean cultural identity, and to introduce a new, trans-national mapping of cultural identities/ existences, since the actual cultural process transcend the traditional ethnic and state borders. The national Academies of Sciences and Arts of the Mediterranean could sign a Mediterranean Charter for Shared Cultural Heritage (a UNESCO project) and could design an actual map of the contemporary Mediterranean cultural existences, migrations, acculturations, and social integrations. The scientific dialogues or consensuses may introduce better-shared cultural policies and interpretative paradigms. This would be of a strategic interest, particularly for the development of the Balkans in the Mediterranean and the European context.