Flights of passion : hunting, ecology and politics in Malta and the Mediterranean

Abstract

If love, as Prince Fabrizio laments in The Leopard, is ‘flames for a year, ashes for thirty’, all is not lost for Mediterranean men. At least 10 million of them are consumed by a lifelong passion, a folly that appears all but incomprehensible to the casual observer. I refer to the relentless pursuit of birds, the fact that, as Woldhek (1980: i) puts it, ‘everywhere in the Mediterranean, guns, air-rifles, lime-sticks, nets and snares are ready to take a bird’s life’. The idea that there may be something particular about Mediterranean attitudes toward birds occurred to me while watching Emanuele Crialese’s film Respiro, shot on location in Lampedusa in 2002. The film captures very well, albeit indirectly, the Lampedusan islanders’ obsession with catching birds. I found myself drawing parallels with Theodossopoulos’ descriptions of hunting on the Greek island of Zakynthos (2003), Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter lemons of Cyprus (1957), and the hunting rituals of the Straits of Messina. My key question is: are these merely casual associations, or is there a case to be made, with respect to hunting, for conceptualizing the circum-Mediterranean as a ‘culture area’ (see Magnarella 1992)? Bird conservation organizations like BirdLife International certainly seem to think of it as such, to the extent that they see the Mediterranean as a ‘black spot’. But do these generalizations stand up to anthropological scrutiny?