David D. Gilmore

Varieties of Gossip in a Spanish Rural Community1

Since publication of Gluckmans groundbreaking paper in I963, anthropologists interpreting gossip have split into two camps. The first camp, following Gluckman, is functionalist and approaches the subject from the perspective of methodological holism. It views gossip as a spontaneous collective sanction, as public opinion enforcing conformity to community norms. For Gluckman and his followers, gossip is a group-binding, boundary-maintaining mechanism (Gluck

Towards a Social Anthropology of the Mediterranean [and Comments and Reply]

Daviss People of the Mediterranean provides a detailed survey of the writings of anthropologists who have worked in Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Its author focuses on economic organization, stratification, patronage, family and kinship, and the way anthropologists have dealt with history. He concludes that they have failed to compare, to work in cities, to relate part to whole, and to make use of history. These failures, he argues, maybe the consequences of a mass inferiority complex among Mediterraneanists. While partly admitted, these failures are inherent in the structural-functionalism that until recently dominated most anthropologists, not just Mediterraneanists. Daviss work, while provocative and informative, is limited by his own failure to provide a set of problems that could have placed his abundant data in a meaningful comparative framework. The consequences of variations in the regions geography and economy, dimensions Davis ignores when discussing Mediterranean unity, might well have provided such a framework; they furnish part of the answer to some of the similarities and differences he notes but does not explain.