Three contradictory images emerge when one examines the disparate works by historians and anthropologists that have taken the Mediterranean world as their subject: a Mediterranean of exchanges and encounters, a Mediterranean of conflicts and hatred, and a Mediterranean made of societies revealing, beyond the schisms that divide them, “family resemblances”. In this article, the author proposes another way of seeing and perceiving the Mediterranean world, neither as an entity united by the same culture, nor as a juxtaposition of heterogeneous blocs, but rather as a system of complementary differences that, according to the context, can result in well-meaning co-existence or bloody confrontation.
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