Developing Sustainable Tourism Destinations Offering Authentic Folk Experience

This essay, at the crossroads of historical sciences and social sciences, aims to explain how the epistemic community which had prompted the UNESCO’s recognition of the Mediterranean Diet in 2010 succeeded in turning this nutritional model into an instrument of governmentality in very diverse areas of governance. The author argues that the Mediterranean transnational community, supposedly unified by a common identity based on a shared food tradition, is at the moment primarily a political project legitimizing the existence of the heterogeneous, cosmopolitan collective that has given emphasis to the preservation of the Mediterranean Diet after its inscription on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Indeed, the UNESCO does a lot more than elevating the Mediterranean identity. By inscribing the Mediterranean Diet on the list, this international body objectified the invention of the idea of ‘the’ Mediterranean community as a homogeneous whole. The purpose of this reflection is to shift away from the methodological nationalism on which the unifying paradigm of this epistemic community is based by adopting a more ‘emic’ approach. This ‘emic’ path will allow for a new understanding of the current governmental usage of the Mediterranean food heritage, since it places more value on the point of view of the members of the Mediterranean communities than on the account of the epistemic community that has busied itself with the safeguarding of their identity and their food culture. The perspective of the historian will also be considered. The goal of this change of paradigm is to promote dialogue and mutual understanding between Mediterranean communities and, at the same time, to reconcile the praxis in the UNESCO’s fields of intervention with the current heritage doctrine and the constitutional mission of the organization.