Paul Sant Cassia

This article begins by examining the reasons why anthropology did not develop in Malta in contrast to other ex-British colonies. Two distinct sets of causes are suggested. First, colonial authorities in Malta did not sponsor anthropological research because in a semi­ peripheral European country anthropology risked being ‘contaminated’ by its links with folklore, especially Italian folklore. Folklore was a potentially subversive enterprise be­ cause its search for ‘ethnic roots’ in whatever form had nationalist implications threatening British control of the island and linking Malta either to Italy (through culture and religion) or North Africa (through language). Not only was anthropology not encouraged, but there were few incentives for the development of an indigenous study of local culture in the form of folklore. The three 19th century criteria used to demonstrate links with the past and make claims for a distinct ethnic identity (language, ‘customs’ including religion, and ‘blood’/
descent) did not fit in a harmonious whole, and selective aspects of these criteria were emphasized strategically by local political interests. The study of folklore thus did not receive broad support from the middle classes, but was instead hijacked by linguistic nationalists who sponsored the growth of popular literature dealing with the countryside as an imaginary siting of the nationalist spirit. British colonialism thus did not need to actively encourage antrhopological research as a competing discourse to an indigeneous folklore unabiguously harnessesed to the programme of nation state formation. Anthropological research in and on Maltese society thus commenced relatively late and was conducted by non-Maltese. By contrast sociological research was practiced by local scholars with very different conclusions to the former. The article suggests some reasons for the different agendas and conclusions reached by practitioners of both disciplines. Furthermore both disciplines traditionally did not tackle the thorny issue of Maltese ‘identity’ and its relationship to the practice of different academic discourses. Indeed, the ‘identity’ of Maltese society has always been ambiguous because it fits incongrously within the dominant
categories of the nation state, and because it has constantly been (re)negotiated for internal and international political concerns. Official nation state ideology emphasises both the society’s ‘Mediterranean’character as well as its ‘European’past, manifested in the growth of officially sponsored staged civic rituals. This generates a hidden tension between two levels of legitimation which is far from resolved. In addition in societies such as Malta where literati and intellectuals avidly read texts about their own society (including by anthropolo­ gists), anthropologists ought to be keenly aware that their texts can become part of the folklore a society constructs about itself, in its search for a timeless unchanging exotic world of ritual, festas, etc. The article concludes with a plea for a greater awareness of history in anthropological writing-not just an awareness of the past and of how it is created, but of how ‘imagined presents’ interact with ‘imagined pasts’. To paraphrase Renan, nations require not just common memories and common amnesias, but can also discover their ‘collective memories’ in anthropological texts, and thus manufacture their own folklores about themselves. Maltese anthropology thus provides us with an opportunity to critically examine the categories that underlie the nation state and the anthropological/folkloric enterprise. It suggests that the practice of anthropology in Mediterranean societies can be closely associated with national identity and the folklore supporting it, but it can also critically appraise its role.

Ever since the critiques levelled at a Mediterranean anthropology by anthropologists in the late 1980s and early 1990s (e.g., Pina Cabral 1989; Herzfeld 1980, 1984, 1987), it has almost been politically incorrect for anthropologists working in Mediterranean countries to contemplate pan-Mediterraneanisms. This has certainly not been a problem for historians. Horden’s and Purcell’s recent book The Corrupting Sea, subtitled A Study of Mediterranean History (2000), attempts with some degree of elan to produce a synthesis of some three millennia of Mediterranean history. It is therefore encouraging that French anthropology has not been sufficiently overawed by the new orthodoxy to attempt some degree of critical appraisal of the concept, history and potential of an anthropology of the Mediterranean. In 1966, a dozen anthropologists working in the Mediterranean met at Aix-en-Provence to discuss their findings. Some thirty years later, in 1997, the University of Aix (Marseilles) convened a...

Starting with Aristotle's suggestion that thought plays a central role in emotion, this chapter explores how in the absence of the bodies of missing persons, mourners find it difficult to express their emotions by 'conventional' means, either through ritual, however inadequate, or through spectacles, however cathartic. In such situations there is a strong tension between emotions-as-beliefs (that the person might return) and intuitive knowledge (that the person is lost forever). The consequent anaesthetization of thought and emotion in attempting to resolve this aporia (the recovery of something which has disappeared) is nevertheless a particularly fertile domain for the cognitive manipulation of the two concepts of "loss" and "absence" through (popular) "naive" art, especially where conventional religion cannot offer soteriological solutions to emotional and symbolic collapse. Emotion, therefore, is not just personal, but sustained through ...

List of Figures and Maps Acknowledgements Chapter 1. Heirs of Antigone: Disappearances and Political Memory Chapter 2. Suppressed Experiences Chapter 3. Testimonies of Fragmentation, Recollections of Unity Chapter 4. The Missing as a Set of Representations Chapter 5. The Martyrdom of the Missing Chapter 6. L'image Juste, or Juste une Image? Chapter 7. Painting Absences, Describing Losses Chapter 8. Antigone's Doubt, Creon's Dilemma Chapter 9. Power, Complicity, and Public Secrecy Bibliography Appendices Index

... Sales of Indivisible Property I7 8i.9 donums .53% I.0% Sales of Mortgaged Property 486 II 2 I. I donums I5.35% I4.3% TOTAL 3i83 7733.5 donums 99.96% 99.6% *Source: Records of the Land Registry Office, Paphos The table needs explanation. ...

... Modern Greek lessons. Princeton: Univ. Press. Fentress, J. & C. Wickham 1992. Social memory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ... London: Routledge. MacDonald, M. 1987. Tourism in Brittany. In Who from their labours rest? (eds) M. Bouquet & M. Winter. Aldershot: Avebury. ...

This is my PhD thesis on the study of a Paphian village, completed in 1981 at the University of Cambridge, that examines the evolution of political organization and discourse between 1920-1980. It attempts to show how patterns of politics can best be understood by reference to kinship organization.

T H I S P A P E R examines the relationship between religion, ethnicity and politics in Cyprus during the Turkocratia (1571-1878), the period of Ottoman rule. Its major thesis is that in the pre-industrial frame- work of Ottoman rule in Cyprus neither religion nor ethnicity were major sources of conflict in a society composed of two ethnic groups (Greeks and Turks) and following two monotheistic faiths (Christian- ity and Islam) in marked contrast to the recent history of Cyprus. It seeks to show that the major cleavages in Cyprus were mainly intraethnic rather than interethnic. It shows that in pre-industrial, agrarian, pre- national polities more attention must be given first to the political economy of interstitial institutions such as the Church in the case of Christianity (or the clerisy in Islam), and second to the way religion and intermarriage, including the complementarity of different prop- erty transmission systems, regulate relations between groups.

This paper has two purposes. First, it summarises the various papers presented at a Pluridisciplinary Conference on the Mediterranean treating the region from a variety of perspectives, a selection of which are published in this issue of History and Anthropology. Second, it attempts to explore some of the tensions between historians and anthropologists, and political scientists and geographers, in the treatment of the region.

Walter Benjamin once famously remarked that we write books be~ause we wish to read them. Not being able to read them, as they have never been written, we write them. In the case of history, we write books perhaps because we wish someone had then written an account of what we now wish to explore. Lacking that, we write such books for the people of, and from, the past At least we can give them a voice their contempordIies and time had denied them.

TIle publicationof 'llle Intem.1tional Dictionaryof Artists who patllled Malta' by Nicholas de Piro (Malta, 1988) deserves our warmest welcome. Here for the n~1 tinle til a lavish presentation are grouJX!d a large number of pallliings produced hy tile most varied artists and di leltanti (bolh Maltese and foreign) depicting M1lta on.:r a cOIlsldcrahle time period, 001 mallliy from the 19th century. 11lis i", the typcof coffee-tahle boo'" likely to grace the s.1lonsof the most varied of people ranging from the declining aristocracy to the mO'it arriviste rourgCOI<t. Th11 II can have such acmholicappcal must heallnootcd totwo foctors: many are Interested m thc:lro .... n historical culture, indeed there is much here to reUiforcc the wildest <.;OCret fantasies of many Maltese aboutlhe natw-c oflheir island and their society, although illS certamly not a "isO<.II equivalenl of a BrantOme, Second, this publication isa tangible manifcst;.lIion of a c...

This paper examines the relationship between religion, ethnicity and politics in Cyprus during the Turkocratia (1571–1878), the period of Ottoman rule. Its major thesis is that in the pre-industrial framework of Ottoman rule in Cyprus neither religion nor ethnicity were major sources of conflict in a society composed of two ethnic groups (Greeks and Turks) and following two monotheistic faiths(Christianity and Islam) in marked contrast to the recent history of Cyprus. In broad outline it closely parallels Gellner's thesis (1983) that nationalism is a by-product of industrialization, extensive education literacy and geographical and social mobility, and it seeks to show that the major cleavages in Cyprus were mainly intraethnic rather than interethnic.

Interfaith marriages in the Mediterranean constituted transgressive challenges to the social order and oriented scholarly reconstructions of the past to view them as 'exceptional' and not meriting scrutiny. But it is precisely because they were bracketed as 'exceptional' that they reveal themselves as visibly invisible tactics of social amelioration. Linked as they are to conversion and the policing of group boundaries and membership, this paper argues that the question of what constitutes interfaith marriages differed between the various prophetic religions and between religious elites and the grassroots. This created 'gaps' for social mobility through interfaith marriages. Ironically, a significant number of interfaith marriages in Medieval al Andalus and the Ottoman Balkans were between male converts and non-converted women, resulting in the cultivation of aggregated religious practices. Interfaith marriages challenge dominant national and scholarly constructions of the past as consisting of discrete, mutually exclusive, religious and social strata.

Interfaith marriages in the Mediterranean constituted transgressive challenges to the social order and oriented scholarly reconstructions of the past to view them as ‘exceptional’ and not meriting scrutiny. But it is precisely because they were bracketed as ‘exceptional’ that they reveal themselves as visibly invisible tactics of social amelioration. Linked as they are to conversion and the policing of group boundaries and membership, this paper argues that the-what-constitutes interfaith marriages differed between the various  prophetic religions and between religious elites and the grassroots. This created ‘gaps’ for social mobility through interfaith marriages. Ironically, a significant number of interfaith marriages in Medieval al
Andalus and the Ottoman Balkans were between male converts and non-converted women, resulting in
the cultivation of aggregated religious practices. Interfaith marriages challenge dominant national and
scholarly constructions of the past as consisting of discrete, mutually exclusive, religious and social strata.
Keywords: Interfaith marriages, Conversion and Religious Syncretism, al Andalus, Cyprus, Crete.

This paper explores representations of suffering in Cyprus, a divided island. It examines differences between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in their official publicity/ propaganda photographic material in representing the issue of missing persons in Cyprus. It attempts to show that the differences are relatable not just to their different persuasive strategies, but also to different approaches to photography, to experience and memory. For the Greek Cypriots, the sacrifice of the person has to be represented as an absent body, the quintessential example being Christ. By contrast, for the Turk- ish Cypriots it is the presence of a (dead) body, the body of the dead hero/fighter, that signifies a sacrifice and transforms him into a shehit (martyr). Such differences can be related to differences between the two groups in the political fabulation of the past and its appeal to "memory" and "experience". The Turkish Cypriots because of their pressing political problems, especially between 1963-70 when they tended to view their survival as being at stake, use photographs in a relatively "realist" matter- of-fact way although their aim is highly emotionally charged. Greek Cypriots use photographs as representations of what is in effect an iconic predicament: repres- entation as participating in some fundamental way in that which it represents. After examining the predicament of depicting suffering through photography, the paper suggests that to respond effectively to suffering we may have to approach it not through the seductive realism of the photograph but through its means of represent- ing the symbolic and the imaginary.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between history, memory and experience in Cyprus by reference to the 1955–59 EOKA armed nationalist struggle, and its subsequent interpretation by Greek Cypriot villagers. While ethnic remembering as sponsored by political authorities was unambiguous, personal villager accounts of the past are constructed differently, according to notions of witnessing, experience, suspicion, attribution of motives, etc. Villagers evoke memory and witnessing of the past, and of themselves, to make statements about morality, responsibility and merit. The tension between official accounts of the past ('history') and experience ('witnessing') suggests that the nation state in Cyprus has been an imagined community, but in a completely different sense to that outlined by Anderson. It has always been an imagined community in the past, or in the future ‐ never in the divisive present.

ABSTRACT This book chapter explores both the conditions that led to widespread violence and banditry in the Mediterranean up till the early 19th century, and the mechanisms operative to extract consent and complicity at the grassroots. It then examines how in popular imagination the brutal state execution of bandits turned them into popular figures of peasant suffering. It concludes by exploring the reasons for the polyvalence of banditry at different social levels.

ABSTRACT This article tackles the problematic notions of ‘difference’ (and ‘similarity’) between Greek and Turkish Cypriots with special reference to their perceptions of their Missing Persons - persons who disappeared in the course of hostilities between the two groups, and as a result of the 1974 Turkish invasion, and whose bodies have not been recovered. The article borrows Derrida’s notion of differance who suggested that at the heart of existence is not “essence”, but an operation of differance: difference is more than just socially produced. Differance ontologically makes the world social. If this is accepted, then two conclusions follow: first, we need to problematise difference, rather than nationalising and naturalising it. Second, the State is part of the phenomenon of the generation of differences rather than a rationalisation or resolution of them. It concludes by exploring how Missing Persons have become metaphors of differance between the two groups.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between history, memory and experience in Cyprus by reference to the 1955–59 EOKA armed nationalist struggle, and its subsequent interpretation by Greek Cypriot villagers. While ethnic remembering as sponsored by political authorities was unambiguous, personal villager accounts of the past are constructed differently, according to notions of witnessing, experience, suspicion, attribution of motives, etc. Villagers evoke memory and witnessing of the past, and of themselves, to make statements about morality, responsibility and merit. The tension between official accounts of the past ('history') and experience ('witnessing') suggests that the nation state in Cyprus has been an imagined community, but in a completely different sense to that outlined by Anderson. It has always been an imagined community in the past, or in the future ‐ never in the divisive present.

ABSTRACT This book chapter explores both the conditions that led to widespread violence and banditry in the Mediterranean up till the early 19th century, and the mechanisms operative to extract consent and complicity at the grassroots. It then examines how in popular imagination the brutal state execution of bandits turned them into popular figures of peasant suffering. It concludes by exploring the reasons for the polyvalence of banditry at different social levels.

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Maltese archaeology has long been bedeviled by the Mother Goddess debate pitting Mother Goddess (MG) adherents against professional archaeologists. Both groups largely talked past each other without deriving much mutual benefit. This contribution argues that despite their indubitable differences, both MG adherents and academic archaeologists shared a common tendency: they adopted contemporary representations (works of art by the former, other examples of social formations by the latter) to read into their material. The former did this largely through metaphor (e.g., a temple plan is the outline of the Mother Goddess, a temple entrance is a vagina, etc); the latter through analogy (Malta’s Temple society is similar to Easter Island: small, monumental, and terminal). Oversubscription to our models impedes us from adapting them. On the one hand, MG theorists failed to consider that far from being ‘natural’, female corpulence and sexuality may have been harnessed for matrimonial alliances and reproduction. In short, it had a this-worldly politico-aesthetic component, rather than an other-worldly numinousness. On the other, professional archaeologists may not have appreciated that artistic renditions based upon metaphor employ an “imaginative rationality” that can provide provocative insights. This chapter argues in favour of  modifying the ‘Chiefdom model’ to entertain alternative modes of political mobilisation and surplus extraction, such as an oscillating ‘big- manism’ as a reaction to the declining resources.

The assassination of the investigative journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta in 2017 generated local activist claims that Malta is a 'mafia state'. More than a ‘mere metaphor’, it expressed deep anxieties about the distribution of patrimonial resources that I characterize as ‘sibling or fraternal rivalry anxieties’: the product of a tension between an historically embedded popular expectation of the Maltese State as paternal benefactor dispensing resources, and an imagined national community of common heirship in scarce national resources susceptible to political capture. The ‘Mafia’ discourse, however, did two things. First, it retroactively framed the assassination as having been ‘predictable’, hovering between the ‘unspoken’ and the ‘unspeakable’, turning the ineluctable victim into a predestined martyr. Second, it elided over the shadowy genealogy of the postcolonial state itself as a ‘protection racket’, which I argue merits scrutiny.

Rather than looking at the Mediterranean in terms of conflicting religions, this book chapter explores some common elements in religious cultures in the Mediterranean: from a common reliance on apotropaic protection in order to deal with vulnerabilty, to the implications of writing and coinage on Mediterranean religions, to syncreticism and grassroots religion in the eastern Mediterranean.

In this chapter (Ch 5, of "Bodies of Evidence", Oxford: Berghahn, 2005) I examine how both Greek and Turkish Cypriots have turned their Missing into martyrs, though with significant differences, as much due to cultural symbolism as to the different political agendas of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot political leaderships. Briefly put, the Greek Cypriot missing have become metaphors or signifiers for the recapture of a past and a lost territory. As they possess an ambiguous liminal identity, being neither legally dead nor experientially alive, they share certain characteristics with saints or even with Christ. Turkish Cypriot missing persons are signifiers for a future for which they sacrificed their lives. They are therefore associated with the spilling of blood for land and security. There are political differences between the two groups in their attitudes towards the recovery of the bodies of the missing. This can be attributed to their different political agendas, as well as formal differences between Christianity and Islam in the theological significance of the body in the economy of salvation. Nevertheless I show that despite these differences between the political exploita- tion of the missing by their leaders, at the grassroots there are many similarities between Greek and Turkish Cypriot relatives towards the recovery of the bodies of their loved ones.

The Book Chapter (Chapter 4) from my book "Bodies of Evidence. Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus" (Oxford: Berghahn. 2005) deal with the radically different ways Greek and Turkish Cypriots have represented their Missing Persons. Briefly put for the Greek Cypriots the Missing (agnoumeni) function on a double level as both signifier and signified. As the Missing they function as a signifier of the invasion. As the not socially dead/not buried/not socially mourned, or more precisely as ‘the unknown’, they function as a displaced symbol of the non-extinguishable hope, both of their own return south, i.e., their recovery by their loved ones (the ‘South’/Republic of Cyprus), and their recovery ‘as temporarily occupied North’ by the South. For the Turkish Cypriots by contrast they are martyrs (shehitler), signifiers  of sacrifice, and signifieds of having achieved some sort of hard-won security whose losses must not be betrayed.

In this chapter I explore emotion partly, but not exclusively, in terms of its cognitive dimension. I am interested in emotion in terms of its relationship to thought, and the impossibilities or difficulties in following logical reasoning through to its inevitable conclusions.  My starting point is some observations by Aristotle. In his writings on rhetoric, poetry, and tragedy, Aristotle suggested, contra Plato, that thought played a central role in emotion. Aristotle was interested not in emotions per se, but rather in affective effects, especially through the operations of rhetoric, poetry (and in a more complex form with tragedy, where he introduces the notions of mimesis and katharsis), in short with the affects on an audience or a receiving public. He suggests that the effectiveness of rhetoric and poetry is that they move us through thought, which alter or stimulate our emotions. I wish to explore some of these insights, but give my interpretation a more anthropological turn. I suggest that emotions, as in the situation I shall be dealing with (the traumas surrounding Missing Persons in Cyprus), are embedded in social frameworks that sets limits to, as well as providing common interpretative frameworks to, the cognitive linkages that are made.

The Malta Government's White Paper on Agricultural Land Reform argues for state control over the acquisition of rural land in the interests of "guaranteeing an adequate food supply". This submission argues that Malta has never food self-sufficient and the White Paper gets dangerously close to a protection of an antiquated transmissible rural rents regime that has (i) encouraged  land fragmentation, (ii) dispersed such fragmented land to part-time hobbyist cultivators, (iii) discouraged investment (iv) strangled any access to land by the young from non-farming families , as arable land is now hoarded by part-time cultivators for whom its capitalisable value as building land is greater than any anticipated agricultural income. Malta's private lease agricultural sector now merely  attempts to compete on price with inexpensive vegetable imports from Sicily rather than concentrating on niche markets. The indiscriminate Government protection over three generations given to Malta's private agricultural sector has been a major factor of its decline. Malta Neo-colonial patrimonial state oscillates from 'Governance through Special Group Protection to Public Compensation'.

This book chapter submitted for a Festschrift in honour of the Cambridge anthropologist, Esther Goody, explores the relationship between religious conversions, crypto-religions and mixed marriages in the Eastern Mediterranean. Its main aim is to show that so-called crypto-religions should probably not be seen as the sel-conscious retention of a distinct faith across time, but rather as an adaptive strategy, and that they are only flagged as specific identities at specific historical junctures in the 19th century. They can thus be seen more on terms of a transient 'ethnogenesis'.

The assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia presents us a number of important 'lessons' that bear intense reflection and introspection by all of us. The following is my modest contribution and analysis. 1. How small-scale societies (and particularly islands) have an inbuilt conservative tendency, based upon a conscious culture of isolation and localised exceptionalism, to adopt a denial of recognition of certain local cultural features, especially when faced massive structural change. 2. Why commitment to smaller groups (such as family and political party) is historically greater and far more visceral than to civil society, and (in Malta's case), is partly due to Catholicism and neo-colonialism that persists in local culture. 3. Small, island-state, economies tend to take advantage of gaps or disjunctures in the international flow and regulation of legal and illicit capital to create particular economic niches for themselves, but in the process render themselves particularly vulnerable to semi-legal, and outright illegal flows of global capital. These can range from offering preferential tax-breaks to global companies, the hawking of passports in Arab Bazaars, gaming (i.e taking advantage of losers' addictions), the setting-up of shell companies and Banks, the parking of funds by neighbouring dictators and their families, and the laundering of international criminal money. This phenomenon is not particular to small states; Malta and other small EU states have nestled under the protective resistance of heavyweights in the EU, such as pre-Brexit UK, to jointly resist EU tax harmonisation. But given their minute size and un-diversified economies, their dependency on these comparative advantages may be much greater and more compromising. The State depends upon them to generate external income thus alleviating the tax burden and distributing largesse and patronage, the tightly-knit and 'intricated' administrative and political elite may be more easily and effectively compromised, and public opinion may not have the autonomy, political sophistication, and effectiveness found in larger more diversified polities to express disquiet about the social effects and implications of national economic policy. 4. The consequent changes in the local economic structure renders the State a new active and complicit economic agent, initiating novel, complicated, previously uncharted, sources of wealth that create new hidden alliances of local politics, facilitating administrative personnel, and local and international capital. Such alliances are difficult to scrutinise by their very fluid, camouflaged, nature, and to dislodge because of the immense economic interests involved. 5. Because of a local historical culture of " living off the crumbs of a rich man's table " (from legalised piracy in the early modern world, to entrepôt trade and military expenditure in the 19th-20th centuries, to preferential tax rates to multinational companies, the sale of passports, and eGaming, in contemporary times), Maltese society perceives this as merely the continuation of a 'traditional' economic culture. Thus packaged, it is sold to the public by the Patrimonial state, traditionally relying on party-controlled patronage to boost populism fed by a traditional culture of dependency. Yet the apparent continuities disguise discontinuities. There are four major differences between the new economic and political formation and the traditional one: (i) the resources involved are now varied, immense, and liquid, merely changing their instrumental vehicles, (ii) they are almost completely externally generated, transiting locally to other destinations, (iii) their administration, packaging and funnelling, are immensely complex, scrutinisable only by specialist bodies, and largely invisible to the public, and (iv) new shadowy, inscrutable, alliances by new elites have emerged to manage, repackage, conceal, and benefit from, such liquid circuits.

This draft paper examines the recent assassination of the Maltese blogger/journalist, Daphne Caruana Galicia, in Malta in October 2017. It explores the relationship between double assassination by State passive complicity, and murder by public disengagement. This is an initial exploration of what will subsequently be examined, namely how unexpressed climates of anticipation  and the what is imaginable and inchoately anticipateable,  can have a certain agency in facilitating the realization of events.

This Conference Paper, a contribution to a Symposium on the work of the Maltese architect Giorgio Grognet de Vasse (1774- 1862), poses the question: why did such an eminent architect fabricate a whole set of documents, drawings, and an imaginary script purporting to depict the lost world of Atlantis and situate it in Malta. It locates this phantasmagorical simulacrum in the growth of 19th century nationalist archaeology and anxieties of identity

A. 1. This short presentation presents some insights derived from anthropological fieldwork conducted by students at the Department of Anthropological Sciences at the University of Malta over the past 3 years with a view to enhancing and contributing to the preparations for V18. Our primary aim was to explore different aspects of life in Valletta, to increase understanding of the social conditions, quality of life and concerns of the inhabitants with a view both to give these often 'invisible' individuals a voice, and to embed the projections, aims and intended consequences of V18 in a social framework-for we view 'Culture' not merely as something produced by specialists or even interlocutors, animators, etc, but as produced by individuals and groups in the normal processes of living, livelihood and everyday interaction, often the most mundane. Our students researched a wide variety of topics ranging from studies of National Identity as manifested in displays at the Archaeological Museum, poverty, parish activities and religiosity, popular memory, to studies of various traditional economic sectors: the suq, small shopkeepers, traditional jewellers, etc. 2. The inescapable challenge that V18 faces, and in a way precipitates, concerns the relationship between the urban and architectural fabric of Valletta and the Grand Harbour conurbation (the 'envelope' if you like), and the social, economic and cultural quality of life of its residents. More precisely the following questions pose themselves: i. Is V18 designed to enhance 'local' (Valletta and Grand Harbour (GH) conurbation) culture generally, or is it designed to use this particular urban setting as a showcase and 'cockpit' for a National regeneration of local art and culture? The two are quite different and necessitate different strategies and outcomes. The facile optimistic answer of 'both' is not necessarily convincing. ii. Even if an emphasis were to be placed on the location (Valletta and GH area), what is likely to be focussed on? The urban fabric or the quality of life of its residents? Even an enhancement of the urban and architectural fabric (i.e. material precipitations of 'High Culture) may be differently valorized by the inhabitants (e.g. 'play schools' may be considered more useful by the residents than, for example, new public monuments). iii. If V18 aims to leave a 'legacy', how is it sustainable, measurable and evaluateable? iv. Are we clear and agreed in our minds as to what we want V18 to achieve? Does it represent 'merely' a rare opportunity for Malta to be in the European limelight? Is it ! 1