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The Mediterranean is a cradle of civilization which is combined with Asian, African and European culture and now being newly re-created through mutual relations of various civilizations that had existed in the past. Furthermore, the Mediterranean is not Mare Nostrum of Rome any more, but the womb for European multi-identities and coexistence.
Geographically and Culturally, Sicily is a core of the Mediterranean. As a center of the Mediterranean civilization, Sicily is bearing whole civilizations around the Mediterranean according to the Fractal Structure(Concept).
It is not an easy task to define the Mediterranean civilization in a broad and receptive term. Moreover, the Sicilian civilization is not acknowledged as the microscopic sample for the Mediterranean civilization even though it was a representative one that the factors of Mediterranean civilization were intertwined and progressed.
Sicilian cultural identity can be characterized with its symmetrical and coexisting features. In other words, two conflicting identity factors are coexisting in their society. The first example to this is the co-existence of masculinity and femininity in Sicilian society. On the one hand, the society of Sicily had been developing patriarchy as the androcentric tradition within their agricultural- centered economic structure that had been acquired from Greek-Roman control.
However, on the other hand, femininity influenced by their cultural worship toward the Virgin Mary as a symbol of maternal instinct is also inherent in Sicilian society.
The second example of the symmetrical identity is co-existence of an identity of collectivism (high-context culture) and individualism (low-context culture) in its society. Since collectivism in Sicily is affected from Arab nomadic society’s ‘Murah’ (the principle of ‘honor’ and ‘disgrace’), it is collective, hierarchical, competitive, and extrovert. Sicily’s male-dominated society, however, allows coexistence of historical individualism at the same time. Historical individualism develops to defeatist individualism, disrupting and violent individualism, and individualism that people played their lives.
Finally, Sicilian society shares being-oriented identity and behavior-oriented identity. The former signifies the reality which accepts and discredits control simultaneously, while the latter is the identity of creativity and imagination diffused from Sicilian culinary culture.
The exertion to understand Sicilian cultural identity as the principle of the symmetrical identity is because of this island is the symbol of cultural value. In addition, the social obligation of Sicilian economic value guarantees the futurity of the culture.