Download Free Mediterranean Culture Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Mediterranean Culture and write the review.

Food that originated from the Mediterranean area is incredibly popular. Pasta, pizza, gyros, kebab, and falafel can be found just about everywhere. Many people throughout the world have a good idea of what Mediterranean cuisine and diet are all about, but they know less about the entire food culture of the region. This one-stop source provides the broadest possible understanding of food culture throughout the region, giving a variety of examples and evidence from the southern Mediterranean or North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt), the Western Mediterranean or European side of the Mediterranean (Spain, France, Italy, and the French and Italian islands), to the eastern Mediterranean or Levant (Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel). The Mediterranean region region is home to three of the world's major religions, and for centuries, the Mediterranean Sea has been an invitation to trade, travel, conquest, and immigration. Where different cultures, beliefs, and traditions mix there is always volatility and tension, but there is also great energy. Understanding the food culture in the Mediterranean is one way readers can see how people of different regions come together, share ideas and information to create new dishes, meals, traditions, and forms of sociability. This volume answers questions such as Do people in the Mediterranean still eat the Mediterranean Diet or do they eat American style? Why is it that the same ingredients can be prepared in so many different ways, even in the same country? Why would cooks take the time to make foods like zucchini, lentils, or figs into dozens of different dishes? How and why do religious rituals differ regarding food preparation? What do Jews, Muslims, and Christians eat on religious holidays? Do people eat out or eat at home? Why is hospitality so important to Mediterranean people and what do they do to demonstrate hospitality and good will through the preparation and serving of meals?
Cataloging the sights, smells, sounds, and features common to the many peoples who share the Mediterranean, this fascinating portrait of a place and its civilizations is sure to appeal to active and armchair travelers alike. 58 illustrations.
Cultural identity in the classical world is explored from a variety of angles.
Between the 1890s and 1920s, cities in the vast region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean were experiencing political, social, economic, and cultural changes that had been set in motion at least since the early nineteenth century. As the age of pre-colonial empires gave way to colonial and national states, there was a sense that a particular liberalism of culture and economy had been irretrievably lost to a more intolerant age. Avoiding such dichotomies as East/West and modernity/tradition, this book provides a comparative analysis of contested versions of the concept of modernity. The book examines not only the "high" culture of scholars and the literati, but also popular music, the visual arts, and journalism. The contributors incorporate discussion of the way in which the business in both commodities and ideas was conducted in the increasingly cosmopolitan cities of the time.
Studies of the pivotal historic place of the Mediterranean have long been dominated by specialists of its northern shores, that is, by European historians. The seven leading authors in this groundbreaking volume challenge views of Mediterranean space as shaped by European trajectories, and in doing so, they challenge our comfortable notions. Drawing perspectives from the Mediterranean’s eastern and southern shores, they ask anew: What is the Mediterranean? What are its borders, its defining characteristics? What forces of nature, politics, culture, or economics have made the Mediterranean, and how long have they or will they endure? Covering the sixteenth century to the twentieth, this timely volume brings the early modern world into conversation with the modern world in new ways, demonstrating that only recently can we differentiate the north and south into separate cultural and political zones. The Making of the Modern Mediterranean: Views from the South offers a blueprint for a new generation of readers to rethink the world we thought we knew.
“An important new book...offers a powerful call for historians of the ancient Mediterranean to consider their implicit biases in writing ancient history and it provides an example of how more inclusive histories may be written.” —Denise Demetriou, New England Classical Journal “With a light touch and a masterful command of the literature, López-Ruiz replaces old ideas with a subtle and more accurate account of the extensive cross-cultural exchange patterns and economy driven by the Phoenician trade networks that ‘re-wired’ the Mediterranean world. A must read.” —J. G. Manning, author of The Open Sea “[A] substantial and important contribution...to the ancient history of the Mediterranean. López-Ruiz’s work does justice to the Phoenicians’ role in shaping Mediterranean culture by providing rational and factual argumentation and by setting the record straight.” —Hélène Sader, Bryn Mawr Classical Review Imagine you are a traveler sailing to the major cities around the Mediterranean in 750 BC. You would notice a remarkable similarity in the dress, alphabet, consumer goods, and gods from Gibraltar to Tyre. This was not the Greek world—it was the Phoenician. Propelled by technological advancements of a kind unseen since the Neolithic revolution, Phoenicians knit together diverse Mediterranean societies, fostering a literate and sophisticated urban elite sharing common cultural, economic, and aesthetic modes. Following the trail of the Phoenicians from the Levant to the Atlantic coast of Iberia, Carolina López-Ruiz offers the first comprehensive study of the cultural exchange that transformed the Mediterranean in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Greeks, Etruscans, Sardinians, Iberians, and others adopted a Levantine-inflected way of life, as they aspired to emulate Near Eastern civilizations. López-Ruiz explores these many inheritances, from sphinxes and hieratic statues to ivories, metalwork, volute capitals, inscriptions, and Ashtart iconography. Meticulously documented and boldly argued, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean revises the Hellenocentric model of the ancient world and restores from obscurity the true role of Near Eastern societies in the history of early civilizations.
Was there a distinctive Mediterranean urban culture in the early modern period? This collection demonstrates both the range of collective urban experience in the Mediterranean and the complexity of the nature of urban culture at that time.
The essays contained in this volume explore the historical trajectories along which the Mediterranean has been conceptualized as a cultural, religious and economical resource and how these various aspects are intertwined. While staying clear of a merely “imagological” or “representational” point of view, the authors consider the interplay between culturally shaped attributions (for example the longstanding desire for a Mediterranean “Otherness” as expressed in German literature), their testing in empirical encounters, and the effect these encounters produce on both sides. Although focused particularly on 19th and 20th century culture, this volume offers a timely contribution to conceptualising the challenges of the 21st century. The conjunction of both provinciality and universality, the connectivity and fragmentation of the Mediterranean continues to be at the basis of the European matrix of all possible (hi)stories.
Mediterranean islands exhibit many similarities in their biotic ecological, physical and environmental characteristics. There are also many differences in terms of their human colonization and current anthropogenic pressures. This book addresses in three sections these characteristics and examines the major environmental changes that the islands experienced during the Quaternary period. The first section provides details on natural and cultural factors which have shaped island landscapes. It describes the environmental and cultural changes of the Holocene and their effects on biota, as well as on the current human pressures that are now threats to the sustainability of the island communities. The second section focuses on the landscapes of the largest islands namely Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Cyprus, Crete, Malta and the Balearics. Each island chapter includes a special topic reflecting a particular characteristic of the island. Part three presents strategies for action towards sustainability in Mediterranean islands and concludes with a comparison between the largest islands. Despite several published books on Mediterranean ecosystems/landscapes there is no existing book dealing with Mediterranean islands in a collective manner. Students, researchers and university lecturers in environmental science, geography, biology and ecology will find this work invaluable as a cross-disciplinary text while planners and politicians will welcome the succinct summaries as background material to planning decisions.