Music practices in the Greek islands: insularity, finite space and cosmopolitanism [abstract of the round table]. - The historiographies of the Mediterranean have generally approached this vast space via the ways it dealt, throughout history, with its potential ingredients and meta-geographical connections: East-West, North-South or the triple face – Latinity, Islam, Hellenism –; they have mapped and are still aiming to re-map a vast shared space, a space of covetousness and rivalry between spheres of influence, between confessional and linguistic territories, and a space of prolific encounters. Mediterranean studies count an important and voluminous corpus of bibliography, avec many recent important contributions as well. And one can easily observe that we have had in this conference several sessions on Mediterraneanism. Meanwhile, Greek historiography leans, historically, on a narrative of linguistic and religious homogeneity, forged through a two-headed tension, between ancient filiation and Greek orthodoxy. Between these different narrative perspectives, the fact of being an islander as a specific state in its relation to the world, to its identity (national or maritime). Finite space, and belonging to or being excluded from a group. Based on five case studies from the Hellenic perimeter of the Eastern Mediterranean, concerning both early modern and contemporary temporalities, this round table focuses on insularity as a particular condition for the establishment of musical and poetic practices, in their ritual, social, educational and cultural contexts. We will examine aspects of the conflicting duality in the island condition in these spaces, between finitude and crossroads, in their specific conditions also because as part of a broader ecosystem, an archipalgus turbatus, which has its own equilibria and dynamics in motion, singular for each island, and also in the island versus mainland cultural identities. What musical practices arose in these zones of encounter, fusion, and cultural crossing? How does music evince the cosmopolitanism of the Eastern Mediterranean and the trade routes between Europe and the Levant, North and South, East and West, East and East? But cultural, sociological, confessional, and historical situation for instance of Corfu has nothing to do with that of Naxos or of Cyprus. Far from designing an homogeneous macroscopic state, it seems that we should rather aggregate microhistories of syncretism and acculturation whose terms and parameters are multiple, in order to comprehend the blurred identities in mediterranean insularities. In this finite space mobilities are intense: travels are constant, they create diasporas and thus often generate inverse movement. . The archipelago invites us to consider representations of alterity, of otherness, of imaginary islands (for instance reports on Santorini in the 17th-century classically wonder for Atlantide), as if the volcano fires generated a vortex of new utopias. . This archipelago also promises to resound echoes of Antiquity: thus, the mirologitres (female mourners) are figured as antique bacchantes, chant improvisations as a resonance of classic symposia, monophonic practices regarded as possible permanencies of the antique monody. . The archipelago also cultivates multilingualism and language hybridization, and this is both crucial and amazingly creative. Even as the emerging history of these transmissions and transformations stands to challenge vertical and diachronic narratives of “Hellenic” continuity from Classical Greece through Byzantium, another historiography to be reckoned with, concerns horizontal relationships with the musical heritage shared by Greece, the Balkans, and Anatolia, and which reveal complementary patterns of transmission and exchange. If these commonalities have yet to be fully discovered and discussed, it may owe in part to the way identifying shared heritage can provoke antagonisms along ethnic, linguistic, and confessional lines. Rather than being reassured by a “familiar other”, people have been often experiencing what Gazmed Kapplani calls “the unbearable similarity of the other”. Consequently, micro-historical research is all the more valuable for the way it short-circuits the latent nationalism of these broader comparativist patterns in order to observe phenomena per se in their context. (Théodora Psychoyou)