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Shifting Boundaries A conference under the patronage of HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal to explore the impact of constructions of the East/West dichotomy on research around the Mediterranean.
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The Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) in collaboration with the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (RIIFS) The Mediterranean world has often been considered to fall into two dichotomous parts, labelled East and West by 19th century western European scholars. This model became accepted as the conventional standpoint amongst many academics until the latter part of the 20th century, and indeed was projected back into the past. It survives today in many media representations, although contemporary definitions of the Middle East often include North Africa within the East, defined in a cultural sense as the countries in this part of the world which are Islamic. It has always existed as a counterpoint to alternative views, which for example represented the Mediterranean as a unified world, the Middle East as the “cradle of western civilization”, the Ottoman Empire as the “sick man of Europe”, or the West as a place of exile. Other constructions see the Near East not as a boundary, but as a bridge to the East, or a crossroads, for example in discussions of the Silk Road, or perceptions of Egypt and the Suez Canal. These reveal a much more fluid situation, more complex than simple geographic division into continental landmasses. In terms of current debates it is hard to avoid the use of politically contested terminology. The proposed conference is situated within this debate and is intended to bring together scholars working from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds to consider the relationship of the East/West dichotomy to other constructions, the development of these constructions over time, and whether the dichotomy has any value, and if so, is it only relevant to specific periods and places. The British Mediterranean Institutes and the British School of Archaeology in Iraq are unusually well-placed to explore the combination of reciprocal exchange and mutual antipathy of east/west encounters in the Mediterranean. We propose five chronologically defined sessions: 1. The Ancient and Classical world – the Phoenicians as the first to link the Mediterranean world, Greeks and Persians, the Hellenistic world, and the Roman Empire. 2. Early Islamic, Crusader and Byzantine – from the Umayyads in Spain to the Crusaders in the Levant. 3. The Ottoman Empire, an Empire that included East and West, but also may have fossilized some concepts of the boundary, despite its own moving frontiers and varied ethnicity. 4. 1918 to the Birth of Nation States: major territorial and technical transformations, and the birth of different nation states all over the Mediterranean. 5. The present: contemporary social, political and religious divisions complexities of travel and migration of labour, relationships through foreign aid, and the debate over the entry of Turkey as a largely Moslem secular state to the EU.
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