Bøger af Antonio Jose Marques Da Silva

We all love Mediterranean cuisine. We can even say that we all adore our common Mediterranean legacy. However, we are so far to feel the same passion for the fellow human beings, that perpetuate the shared heritage beyond the internal sea. Our reaction to the present refugees' crisis reveals that we are still afraid of the non-European inhabitants of the Mediterranean. We are now building walls and check points to stop war victims out of our frontiers. Inside our countries, the racism against them is growing too. These two facts prove that the exposure to the culture of the Other through World heritage doesn't make us more tolerant to the alterity. Sixty years after the rise of the travels abroad, the expectation that tourism will teach us to embrace human diversity seems to be a total disillusion. At the end, eating kebabs, falafel and visiting Palmyra or Aleppo only turned us into consumers of cosmopolitan experiences and nothing more. This book is written for the readers who wonder about the humanitarian purpose of the World heritage. It addresses the Mediterranean diet's translation into a transnational identity marker, currently underway following the inclusion on the list of the intangible cultural heritage of the Humanity in 2010, in this perspective. The author exposes the reasons behind the present consensus about the heritagization of this nutritional model, which being first an object of scientific discourse like any else, is today converted into an intangible expression of Mediterraneaness. Rather than tell the history of the metamorphose, he adopts here a genealogical approach, which brings him to reconnect this newcomer of the heritage's arena with other series of events, normative acts and ideas, sometimes remote in space and time, that configure the present social existence of the Mediterranean diet. The author tries to demonstrate throughout this less conventional approach that what distinguishes the 'UNESCO regime' of the food pyramid made famous in the 1990s is primarily the fact that its conversion into a cultural element is the direct consequence of the political will to inscribe this scientific invention on the list. He will also reveal the profound changes regarding the UNESCO's heritage doctrine during the last decades, including the rise of the discursive use of notions as cultural diversity, identity and community, to understand the reason of the proposal's success. He will then finally be able to explain the present popularity of the 'UNESCO regime' as a governmentality instrument in areas other than public health, such as the Euro-Mediterranean co-operation, ecology or cultural tourism. The critical analysis of this case study will reveal the lack of the reflection about the effectiveness of the current World heritage policies that UNESCO needs urgently to promote in response to the new challenges of the post-national era we live now.

Castro do Vieito is a settlement of a modest size, situated on the left bank of the Lima river estuary in the north west of Portugal. It was the target of a large scale archaeological rescue operation from 2004 to 2005, one coordinated by the present author. The enormous source of data, completely unpublished until today, that was provided by this unparalleled intervention, is explored here in such a way as to offer the reader a portrait of a village community which lived through the initial phase of the region's integration within the Roman empire. Castro do Vieito's setting on a nautical stopping point, close to one of the region's largest mineral seams, makes it possible to understand the involvement of this settlement in the supply network of the drafted military that controlled the auriferous explorations situated upstream on the river Lima. This privileged relationship with the military occupation force means that this settlement is distinct in many aspects from the others that surrounded it and makes it important in terms of understanding the different dynamics involved in the interaction of the local populations with the Imperial Army. After a first chapter explaining the methodological problems connected with an intervention of this nature and size and spread, as well as the solutions developed to surpass the problems, the following four chapters portray different aspects of the daily life of this community.