Abstract

Tunisia has forged a close relation with the sea over ages by dint of its geography and history. This space of navigation, trade and conflicts, etc. nourishes the collective memory and imagination. The Mediterranean is ultimately a historical abstraction of a multiple space. In this paper I analyse an official corpus, the four volumes of history textbooks which are used at the Tunisian secondary level by the humanities and economic sciences and management sector to examine how the Mediterranean is a framework for observing human action in space and time and as a vector for constructing identity. Textbooks design is conditioned by a socio-political and economic context and by the guidelines prescribed by July 23, 2002, law pertaining to education and school teaching. The Mediterranean appears with this prism, on the one hand, as a space of exchanges and cultural interactions and, on the other hand, as a field of conflicts and competitions. As a corollary it is viewed as a vector of belonging to a fragmented space with diverse interactions, but it is far from constituting a substantial identity component