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CULTURAL INTIMACY Second Edition
Social Poetics in the Nation-State
MICHAEL HERZFELD
ROUTlEDGE NEW YORK AND LONDON
Published in 2005 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 100"16 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, a Division of T&F Informa. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
109 8765432 I Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Herzfeld, Michael, 1947Cultmal intimacy: social poetics in the nation-state I Michael Herzfeld. - 2nd cd. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-94740-5 (pbl. 'all. paper) 1. National state. 2. Minorities. 3. Group identity. 4. Ethnicity. 1. Tide. JC31l.H525 2004 320,54--dc22 2004008898
Fm'Iddo, Yoav, and Daniel
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
lX
Chapter One Introducing Cultural Intimacy
1
Chapter Two New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy
39
Chapter Three Of Definitions and Boundaries
73
Chapter Four Persuasive Resemblances
93
Chapter Five The Daugers of Metaphor: From Troubled Waters to Boiling Blood
111
Chapter Six Cultural Intimacy and the Meaning of Europe
127
Chapter Seven Structural Nostalgia: Time and the Oath in the Mountain Villages of Crete
147
Chapter Eight Social Poetics in Theory and Practice: Regular Guys and Irregular Practices
183
Chapter Nine The Practice of Stereotypes
201
Afterword: Toward a Militaut Middle Ground?
211
Notes
225
References cited
241
Index
269
Preface and Acknowledgments
Smashing huge numbers of cheap china plates across the feet of inebriated dancers is a practice that many a foreign visitor, prompted by popular films, happily anticipates on a trip to Greece. Under the military dictatorship, this practice was prohibited as both dangerous and demeaning in the eyes of foreigners; 5111311 printed notices everywhere announced, with mysterious incxplicitness for the uninitiated, "Breakage is forbidden:' But this turned out to be not just some arbitrary caprice of the colonels. Some years after their overthrow, the ban was revived. And a Greek friend assured me categorically that plate smashing was absolutely not a "Greek custom." This book has grown Ollt of my increasing fascination with the desire for control over the external images of a national culture that these denials and prohibitions express. Such evasive action often flies in the face of all the evidence, but it is sustained by what, to the outsider, can be an infuriatingly imperturbable air of total conviction: if we tell you that these things do not exist, then, as far as you are concerned, they do not exist. But the visitor is still left wondering why so much vehemence should be invested in denying what all the senses affirm. In this book I explore the grounds of this defensiveness. I examine the contrasts that the visitor to many a nation-state encounters between the presentation of the national culturewhat nationalist discourses personalize as "national character"and the presentation of individual selves within the intimacy of the national space. Smashing plates is a personal perfoIlnance of high spirits and unconstrained independence. The Greeks describe their national character in terms of this individualism and disregard for arbitrary authority; yet both the law and the cultural establishment decry the idea that smashing plates should represent Greekness to the rest of the world. What are the political IX
Cultural Intimacy
forces that cause this strain between the creative presentation of the individual self-what in this book I call social poetics-and the formal image of a national or collcctive self? The issue is one that has become increasingly important for anthropologists and other students of culture. While we still study society and culture ethnographically-that is, by describing the minutiae of everyday life at a fairly microscopic level-our work is done in the context of far larger dynamics in which we ourselves are willy-nilly cast as the representatives of powerful and sometimes hated external forces. Nor can we ignore these entailments as our predecessors sometimes did with such blissful ease. To many people throughout the world we are both the signs and the agents of an intrusion, not just into private lives, but also into the privacy of nations-an intrusion into the collective space I have chosen to call cultural intimacy. Many dismiss what we study as trivial, as luere anecdote, and as irrelevant to the large concerns of the nation. But if these matters are so unimportant, why do people invest so much energy in dismissing them? Clearly, these reactions are diagnostic of a politics of significance in which much hinges on what is deemed important and what is relegated to the limbo of mereness. Anthropologists face such charges often, taxed with excessive interest in mere anecdote, mere hearsay, mere minorities , luere marginals and eccentrics. Arguments about the validity of anthropological scholarship take on the character of defenses put up by majority or elite forces against the violation of cultural intimacy. In these pages, I develop the concept of cultural intiluacy as one means of defining and understanding the sore zones of cultural sensitivity and to understand why officials so often seem to connive in perpetuating that sneaky persistence in everyday life. Inevitably for some readers this investigation, like any probe, risks irritating those tender spots even more. But if scholars are to think constructively about how far their responsibilities entail avoiding certain topics, or what kinds of political considerations their responsibilities to host communities and countries entail, they must ask some of these questions. They know from their field experiences that consensus is rare and, when it does fleetingly appear, is an unreliable guide to future reactions. Consequently, my first acknowledgment in the long list that follows must be a generic one. It is to all those who have so warmly accepted me as a virtual insider while knowing that the x
Preface and Acknowledgments
range of my subsequent conversations would not be confined to a narrow circle of knowing cultural intimates, but could casily hecome quite public. Since I began to push tbe compass of my field research beyond the permissible boundaries of officially sanctioned folklore in Greece more than two decades ago, I have been increasingly gratefnl to all those friends, far from few in number, who willingly tolerated and even encouraged such repeated trespasses. I can only reassure them in the language that is often used to defend the ramparts of cultural intimacy: this is not a peculiarly Greek problem. In fact, this book is not specifically about Greece. Although for obvious reasons it is heavily grounded in examples from my fieldwork there, I have made every effort to present the issues in terms of their global implications. My focus here is primarily comparative and analytic, and in this new edition also draws on my field experiences in Italy and Thailand. I have becOlue increasingly grateful over the years to those mentors and peers who shaped my first approaches to many of these issues. I continue to treasure critical advice: some colleagues read earlier versions of segments of this book in other incarnations and contexts and are recognized again here in the notes to the relevant chapters. I offer specific thanks here to those who read parts of the book (especially chapters 1 and 6) and commented on their appropriateness for the overall perspective: Marc Abeles, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, Jill Dubisch, Davydd Greenwood, Stephen Gudeman, Sally Falk Moore, Peter Pels, and Rosalind Shaw. None of the kind people who have offered their gentle criticism over the years should be held responsible for my own peculiar uses of it, but my gratitude to them, eqoally, should not be in dou bt. I am also deeply indeb-ced to Luisa Passerini, whose invitation to address her seminar on European identity at the European University Institute in February 1994, led me to formulate the ideas laid out in chapter 6. Chapters 5 and 6 also received considerable impetus from Margaret Alexiou's warm invitation to deliver the 1991 Christopher Lecture at Harvard University, and chapter 9 was originally developed in the context of a Council for European Studies-sponsored workshop organized by Susan Carol Rogers and Marc Abeles. Portions of this book have appeared elsewhere in various forms. I thank the publishers for permission to make use of the following (now substantially revised) materials:
xi
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"Of Definitions and Boundaries: The Status of Culture in the Culture of the State," from Phyllis Pease Chock and June R. Wyman, eds., Discourse and the Social Life of Meaning. 1986. Washington, D.G: Smithsonian Institution Press, 77-93, now incorporated into chapter 3; "On Some Rhetorical Uses of Ieonicity in Cultural Ideologies," from Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld, and Roland Posner, cds., lconicity: Rssays on the Nature of Culture. 1986. Tiibingen: Stauffenberg, 401-19, now incorporated into chapter 4; "Les enjeux dl1 sang: 1a production officielle des stereotypes dans les Balkans. Le cas de la Grece," Anthropologie et societes 19 (1995): 37-52, now incorporated into chapter 5;
P1'e(ace and Acknowledgments
thanks go to them, to three anonymous reviewers who made generous recommendations regarding the organization of the book, and to a patient in-hoLlse copyeditor who dealt carefully and efficiently with the technical problems created by my stylistic vagaries over the Inany years of writing that have converged here. In the genesis and execution of the new edition, I express my appreciation to Michael Bickerstaff, Priti Gress, Salwa Jabado, Ilene Kalish, and Tao Woolfe, while at Harvard I am particularly indebted to Jenifer Paras, who heroically joined in the practicalities of shepherding the major changes and additions through the vagaries of a busy office in mid-semester. This new edition is appropriately dedicated to the new generation, and specifically to my three nephews, Idclo, Yoav, and Daniel Ussishkin.
"Pride and Perjury: Time and the Oath in the Mountain Villages of Crete," Man (n.s.) 25 (1990),305-22 (published by the Royal Anthropological Institute, London), now incorporated into chapter 7; "The Poeticity of the Commonplace," from Michael Herzfeld and Lucio Melazzo, cds., Semiotic Theory and Practice, vol. 1. Berlin: Mouton de Gruytcr, 383-91, now incorporated into chapter 8; "La pratique des sten'otypes," I;Homme 121 (JanuaryMarch 1992): 67-77 (published by the Ecole des Hantes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris), now incorporated into chapter 9. Some further expressions of appreciation are very much in order here. Alexandra Molnar was a quick-witted and sensitive research assistant whose efficiency, computer skills, and ready understanding made the task of bringing the initially disparate segments of the book together hoth feasible and fnn. At Routledge I am fortunate to have worked with a remarkable series of editors: Ronda Angel, William Gennano, Marlie Wasserman, and Eric Zinner; all, at various times and in various ways, brought unexpected excitement to the task of building a new entity out of the detritus of old thoughts and discarded confusions. Warm xu
xiii
Chapter One
Introducing Cultural Intimacy
The Provisionality of the Permanent In recent years, anthropological interest in the state and in nation-
alism has belatedly taken on focus and inteusity.' Anthropologists have hitherto largely shunned the state as a hostile and invasive presence in local social life and have seen nationalislTI as an embarrassing first cousin to the discipline itself, OilC distinctly prone to public excesses of essentialism and reification. Now they
have at last begun to do what most appropriately falls within their competence, directing their interests to the experiences of citizens and functionaries rather than to questions of formal organization. Even so, they have often seemed to take official ideology as an accurate account of what the nation-state is actually about. This is very peculiar, because talking about "the state" in this way, as I have certainly done myself, reproduces the essentialism against which most of us rail with such predictable piety. Few are entirely innocent of this particular inconsistency. In practice, however, most anthropologists eventually discover that some citizens accept officially sanctioned cultural and legal nonns less willingly than others. Yet the nonconformists are often the most loyal of all citizens in monlents of crisis. Even in more peaceful times, the state commonly relies on a sense of unity that seems to spring from shared irreverence and defiance of the state itself. The current challenge for the discipline, one that I articulate in this book, is thus to probe behind fa~ades of national nnanimity in order to explore the possibilities and the limits of creative dissent. It is to stop treating both the nation-state and 1
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essentialism as distant and unreachable enemies of everyday experience, and to understand them instead as integral aspects of social life. That challenge is formidable. National harmony displays a deceptively smooth surface; it does not reveal the underlying fissures easily. The easy option is thus to ignore these fissures altogether. Many social scientists are consequently impatient with the anthropological interest in local-level detail. We can easily see how this scholarly complaisance with official perspectives develops. Even citizens who claim to oppose the state invoke itsimply by talking of "it" in that way-as the explanation of their failures and miseries, or accuse "it" of betraying the national interests of which it claims to be both expression and guardian. In the process, however, they all contribute, through these little acts of essentializing, to making it a permanent fixture in their lives. Few ever seem able to lnanage completely without it. Except, perhaps, in tilnes of quite exceptional turmoil, most citizens of lnost countries thus participate through their very discontent in the validation of the nation-state as the central legitimating authority in their lives. In this book, I try to get inside that engagement. I ask what advantages social actors find in using, reformulating, and recasting official idioms in the pursuit of often higWy unofficial personal goals, and how these actions-so often in direct contravention of state authority-actually constitute the state as well as a huge range of national and other identities. I aln especially concerned with the uses of cultural form as a cover for social action. This leads me to attempt to show how the control of cultural form allows significaut play with cultural content. In the process, I argue that state ideologies and the rhetorics of everyday social life are revealingly similar, both in how they make their claims and in what they arc used to achieve. Like social actors who use "the law" to legitimize self-interested actions, the state, conversely, uses a language of kin, family, and body to lend immediacy to its pronouncements. It thereby converts revolution into conformity, represents ethnic cleansing as national consensus and cultural hOlnogeneity, and recasts the sordid terrors of emergence into a seductive immortality. Because it is grounded in an idiom of social immediacy, however, this historical stremnlining never quite succeeds in concealing a residual sense of contradiction. That sense may provide opportunities for critique, and eternal truths can have surprisingly short lives. 2
Tntroducing Cultural Intimacy
The approach described here might be presented as exploring the relationship between the view from the bottom and the view from the top. I prefer, however, to treat "top" and "bottom" as but two of a host of refractions of a broadly shared cultural engagement (a more processual term than the static culture). Simplistic talk of "elites" and "ordinary people" conceals that common ground (as well as the fact that these terms are often themselves instruments in the negotiation of power) and so inhibits analysis. Comparable polarities, such as that between colonized and colonizer, may silnilarly obscure complex processes of creative cooptation in economic, political, and administrative practices-an issue now amply illustrated by the vicissitudes of both colonial and postcolonial regimes in Africa (Mbembe 1991; Pels 1996). We would do better not to privilege either angle of vision. What is the common ground that ultimately dissolves the possibility of clearly defined, immutable levels of power? Here I want to argue for the centrality of cultural intimacy~the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality, the familiarity with the bases of power that may at one moment assure the disenfranchised a degree of creative irreverence and at the next InOlnent reinforce the effectiveness of intimidation. Cultural intimacy may erupt into pu blic life. This can take the form of ostentatious displays of those alleged national traits-American folksiness, British "muddling through," Greek mercantilecraftiness and sexual predation, or Israeli bluntness, to name just a few-that offer citizens a sense of defiant pride in the face of a more formal or official morality and, sometimes, of official disapproval as well. These are the self-stereotypes that insiders express ostensibly at their own collective expense. Among a minority population, their use rests on finding common ground with the encompassing society, as in the self-deprecating Jewish diaspora humor that exerts ironic moral pressure on local outsiders who understand and so can respond. I suggest that the model of cultural intimacy is a particularly apt concept for anthropologists to contribute to the study of nationalism (as well as to other idioms of identity formation), because it typically becomes manifest in the course of their long-term fieldwork, a site of social intimacy in the fullest sense. Anthropologists are in an unusually good position to know the forms of rueful selfrecognition in which people commonly engage. 3
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Central to the several themes developed in this book is tbe proposition that the formal operations of national states depend on coexistence-usually inconvenient, always uneasy-with various realizations of cultural intimacy. In the intimacy of a nation's secret spaces lie at least some of the original models of official practice. People recognize as falniliar, everyday phenomena some of officialdom's lTIDst formal devices, and this generates active skepticism about official claims and motives. Moreover, most citizens may agree that because the state is staffed by rapacious bureaucrats, too much obedience to the law is merely silly. That is hardly the stuff of which the rhetoric of national unity is officially made, yet it informs the lllutual recognition that one finds among a country's citizens everywhereeven among its state functionaries. For its part, a government Inay try to co-opt the language of intimacy for its utilitarian ends of commanding loyalty under what seeln to be the most unpropitious conditions. Indeed, in the face of globalizing processes, defensive domesticity can acquire a persuasive appeal. Domesticity is a common unage in this strategy. Faced with the disruption of its authoritarian control of information by the arrival of the Internet, the Vietnamese government reacted in revealing terms: " '''When we start to open our door, we find that fresh air and dust come in; said Pham Dao, director of the staterun Vietnam Datacommunications Co., which was establishing the country's Internet link at the time. 'We would like to keep the fresh air and prevent the dust''' (Wilhelm 1996). The image of a tranquil, old-fashioned domesticity not only covers a serious ultent to suppress dissent, but also attempts to make it palatable both at home and abroad. In an even nlore egregious exan1ple, Hastings Banda, the former president of Malawi, attempted to mitigate the seriousness of human rights abuses during his tenure of office by saying that he had been "selflessly dedicated ... to ti,e good cause of Mother Malawi" (Boston Globe, 6 January 1996, 7). In an earlier work (Herzfeld 1992a), I developed the thesis that bureaucrats, as citizens thelnselves, participated in a symbolic universe that furnished convenient explanations (a secular theodicy) for the obvious failures of democracy in a less-thauideal world; and I suggested that this universe and its legitimating cosmology were grounded in social experience at the Inost intimate levels-hence the frequency of bodily and familial metaphors as well as the everyday idiom of explaining defects in the system. Here, I examine further the direct mutual engagement 4
Introducing Cultural Intimacy
between the official state and the sometimes disruptive popular practices whose existence it often denies, but whose vitality is the ironic condition of its own continuation. Specifically, I treat the conceptual separation of state and people, so pervasive in academic and popular writings alike, as a symbolic construct, deserving of study in its own right. Why do people continually reify the state? Behind every such invocation lurk the desires and designs of real people. Paradoxically, they blame this ill-defined but all-important preseuee in their lives for their failures as they would a living human being and at the same time appeal to its impersonal "thingness" as the ultimate guarantee of disinterested authority. Conversely, and no less paradoxically, the sometimes suffocatingly formal ideology of the state lays claim to intimacy and familiarity in a series of rather obvious metaphors: the body politic, "our boys and girls," mother country and Vaterland, the wartime enemy as the (sometimes actual) rapist of mothers and daughters, and the tourist as a family guest. Moreover, like any person, the state-actually a shifting complex of people and roles-conceals its iuability to live strictly by its own superordinate rule.s behiud a blustery rhetoric of "national honor."3 In that rhetoric is the clearest evidence of what this book is largely about: that the nation-state's claims to affixed, eternal identity groundc.d in universal truth are themselves, like the Inoves of all social actors, strategic adjustments to the demands of the historical moment. This insistent parallelism with a community of familiar faces is the basis of Anderson's (1983) image of the nationalist goal as an "imagined community." But this justly celebrated formulation requires at least two modifications. First, the metonymic extension of "those we know" to include a huge population is not confined to nation-states; they are not the only imagined communities. 4 Perha ps people everywhere usc the familiar building blocks of body, family, and kinship to make seuse of larger entities. This may indeed be the most purely social demonstration of Fernaudez's (1974) renowned definition of metaphor as "the predication of a sign upon an inchoate [human] subject." The second modification of Anderson's thesis concerns its topdown formulatiou. That Imagined Communities has been warmly received by most anthropologists is largely due to its recognition that understandulg the appeal of nationalism requires us to ask how aud why iudividual citizens respond to it. Why should people be willing to die for a formal abstraction? Some5
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times, as conscripts, or even as taxpayers, for example, they may feel that they have no real choice. But still the question remains: why the uncoerced enthusiasln that this form of self-sacrifice often seems to inspire? Anderson took a major step forward by pointing out that nationalism offered citizens a means of converting their own deaths into a shared iIrunortality. But he does not tell ns why this works so well and so often, nor does he tell us whether the actions of the converted exert a reciprocal effect on the cultural form of the evolving nation-state. This is the classic point of demarcation for the concerns of the anthropologist, and Anderson does not cross that line. He does not gronnd his account in the details of everyday lifesymbolism, commensality, family, aud friendship-that would make it convincing for each specific case or that might call for the recognition of the cultural specificity of each nationalism. In that regard, like Gellner (1983), he seems to assume that nationalisms are fundamentally alike in their debt to a common (European) origin and that they represent the imposition of an elite perspective on local cultural worlds; to the extent that local idioms are used, they bave often been recycled beyond recognition. The irony of this position is that it reproduces the very ideology that it purports to question. It says, in effect, that ordinary people have no impact on the form of their local nationalism: they are only followers. In addition, it usually overlooks the fact that, like the personal selfhood and family membership that provide the models, national identity comprises a generous measure of embarrassment together with all the idealized virtues. It is this rueful self-recognition, this inward acknowledgment of cultural intimacy, that all the top-down accounts of the nationstate miss.
Simulacra of Sociality Embarrassl11ent, rueful self-recognition: these are the key markers of what cultural intimacy is all about. They are not solely personal feelings, but describe the collective representation of intimacy. The less literally face-to-face the society we inhabit, the more obviously cultural idiOl11s become simulacra of social relations. This is less usefully described as a displacement of the real by empty signs, as Baudrillard (1988: 167) has argued,' than as an attempt to project familiar social experience onto unknown and often potentially threatening contexts. The marginal commu6
Introducing Cultural Intimacy
nities that used to be almost the exclusive focus of anthropological study are often the sources of the national-character models entertained by the very nationalists who are most disconcerted by the anthropological gaze-a point to which I return below (and, in more detail, in chapter 6). Those marginal communities are face-to-face societies. For international political and economic audiences, national leaders portray them as atypical of the new, modern reality embedded in a complex nexus of global communications. For the often humiliatingly self-abasing tourist trade, however, and in the romantic folklore of the urban elite, they embody d,e natioual quintessence. This disjuncture creates a perennial embarrassment: how is tradition to be recast as modernity, and rebelliousness as a love of (national) independence? For, as the state appropriates for its own purposes the local idioms of 111orality, custOl11, and the solidarity of kinship, it dismisses the local renditions themselves as conservative survivals, picturesque tradition, and familism, respectivelyall serious obstacles to the European nation-state's rationalist vision of modernity. Indeed, transnational modernity stretches the social metonyms hascd On face-to-face relations to the breaking point. In the United States and elsewhere, the packaging of politeness no longer tries to hide its nonliteral status; instead, it intensmesawareness of it, thereby further accentuating the ambiguity of the social relations that ride on it. This is the source of that frightful politeness with which the airline flight attendant or restaurant employee breathlessly announces an individuating personal name that denies any actual social identity: "Hi! My name's Leslie and I'm waiting on you tonight." Imagine the awkwardness that 111ust arise when some unsuspecting cultural novice responds in kind. Advertising slogans like "USAir begins with you" and "Fly the Friendly Skies of United" exude fabricated sociability. Like state ideologies that derive their reality frOlTI everyday bureaucratic encounters, these cookie-cutter social relations are sustained by an impressive forest of symbols in the form of false indcxicals in daily practice ("How are you today?" "Bye now"). These indexicals are patently false: they show how thinly the image of sociality has been stretched by what HochschiJd (1983: 11, 19) has apdy called the "emotional labor" involved in the "transmutation" of private sentiments into public acts. They are not simple falsehoods, however; they act out a pervasive nostalgia for "real" social relations. Such evocations of a 7
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balanced and conflict-free past are as common in social theory as they are in popular discourse: Mauss's illlage of an age when money had not yet corrupted pure reciprocity clearly rests on stereotypical assumptions about "the West" as much as about an orientalist "rest" (Carrier 1995b, 1995c) and exhibits a similar yearning for a time of pure structure. But social theory here seems merely a specialized case of what is, in fact, a widely popular notion. Thus, Cretan sheep-thieves similarly bemoan the necessity of bringing in the legal processes of the state where once, they say, the word of honor sufficed to establish guilt or innoceuce (chapter 7). But it is also precisely those who bewail the passing of the old ways who find in that process justification for adopting the new: accusing others of violating the ethic of reciprocity opens the way to nonreciprocal acts such as recourse to law. There is a curious symbiosis between the state's argument that it must intervene to prevent a final collapse of civic morality and the rebellious Cretan sheep-thieves' view that the collapse of their morality is wbat has necessitated the intervention of the state. Both are engaged in a symbolism of purity, and it is this connnon ground that makes loyal patriots in wartime out of citizens who in times of peace show rich inventiveness in tweaking the nose of the state.
Pervasive Essentialisms Because the sheep-thieves embody such an extreme position in the argument about representativity, this limiting case is especially central to my thesis that nationalislll and cultural intimacy are entwined in a mutual dependence. Ethnographic accounts (e.g., Gupta 1995)-intimate views of the nation-state in action-show that the realism that most citizens bring to their encounters with officialdom, far from undermining the conduct of state business, renders it cOlllprehensible. Such insight comes, however, at a certain cost to democratic and administrative ideals: citizens (including many bureaucrats) treat rules as though they existed primarily to serve particularistic interests. I do not intend a variant of the equilibrium model here: to say that graft actually helps to keep the state functioning may sometimes be true, but only in the sense that corrupt officials have already made sure that it will be true. But it is also the case that the moralistic ideology of a national culture appeals to people in part because it is usually coupled with the relief of knowing that even (or especially) officials do not always adhere scrupulously to 8
Introducing Cultural Intimacy
its austere principles but may use those principles exactly as other citizens do: as a strategy of self-interest. This is not an issue of determinism but of the practical constraints of social life: cultural intimacy is, above all, familiarity with perceived social flaws that offer culturally persuasive explanations of apparent deviations from the public interest. These flaws may even be used to explain the actions of those who obey the law or work to strengthen its institutions. In the midst of the great anticorruption drive in Italy, for example, even those who risked their lives to clean up the country's political life were often suspected of a particularly devious form of furberia~ a socially respected idiom of cunning (see Bailey 1973: 183-184; Schneider and Schneider 1994: 253), and the prosecution of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi-elected in part for his promises of clean government-as well as the deep suspicions expressed against members of the anti-Mafia nl0vement have only intensified such ambivalences. Serving the public interest, even with the most civic-minded intentions, may confer both specific and diffuse personal benefits as well. Most countries have countless honest and even altruistic citizens. The apparent overdetermination of official moralism, however, may in practice offer an enormous range of play to individual social actors regardless of their individual motives. Methodological individualism-treating the nation as merely the aggregate of its citizens' individual wills-is thus not an adequate description of these processes. It is in fact a reverse essentialism, politically expressed in Ronald Reagan's voluntarism and Margaret Thatcher's attempt-"there are only individuals"to argue the social out of existence altogether. Certainly, citizens engage in the ceaseless business of shaping the meaning of national identity, often in ways that contravene official ideology: politicians, civil servants, professionals, and intellectuals are "ordinary people" too, and anthropologists have been increasingly willing to treat them as ethnographically interesting. 6 But they, no less than the subjects of classic ethnographies, are also constrained by the sense of collective identity, however evanescent, that they help to create. It was not mere whimsy that led Marc Abeles (1989) to treat French politicians as a "tribe." Here the tribe of politicians is a collectivity tbat consists of different people doing a variety of things. SinUlarly, the state is not a monolithic, autonomous agent. I have often been tempted to treat it that way, following exasperated local friends who blame "it" for all their ills. But during fieldwork I also came to know and like a 9
1f I
Cultural Intimacy
host of officials (including police officers), bureaucrats, academic and artistic celebrities, and politicians, and I came to realize that they usually worked with the same assumptions and experienced the same constraints as did other citizens. The point is worth making because some readers have lnistakenly interpreted my insistence on recognizing the cultural force of cynicism as a comprehensive endorsement of that cynicism. 7 But it is important to recognize that bureaucrats who blanle the system-whether to avoid responsibility or because they are genuinely dismayed by their inability to help-participate in the same reification of the state as their most disgruntled clients. Like these citizens , officials both contribute to the creation of standardized views of the state and experience the constraints on action that result frOlu this constant process of reification. The option of blaming the state gives definition and authority to its shadowy power. An anthropology of nationalisms and nation-states lnust get inside this ongoing production of static truths. To do so means looking for it among all segments of the population, for all are implicated. The approach is thus neither "top-down" nor "bottom-up": except in a narrowly organizational sense, there is neither a discrete "top" nor a discrete "bottom." This is far from the perspective of most authorities on the theory of nationalism. Outside anthropology, only Hobsbawm stakes out a critique of the top-down perspective, arguing against Gellner on this point (Hobsbawm 1990: J 0-11). This seems to represent a substantive departure fronl Hobsbawlu's early work on social banditry (1959, 1969), in which he explicitly denies the possibility that "primitive rebels" might develop an ideology of their own, and from his introduction to the edited volume on the study of the "invention of tradition" (Hobsbawm 1983). For Gellner (1983), the ideologies of particular nationalistic leaderships were uninspiringly similar, cut from the SalTIe European cloth, and utterly disconnected from the thoughts and actions of the people each purported to unite under a single banner. While tbat view may be historically accurate for the original formulation of some European national ideologies, it fails to explain what happens thereafter: the continuing appeal (and ceaseless reformulation) of nationalism in public discourse and its shaping by the actual people whose values it claims to invoke. To argue, as Gellner does, that massive education creates the common culture does not account for the predisposition that makes such a process possible. l
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Introducing Cultural Intimacy
Here the historian Hobsbawm, with his construct of "popular proto-nationalism" (1990: 46-79), comes closer to the anthropological emphasis on local-level values. Unfortunately, bowever, the range of models he elects to categorize in this way is, as we should perhaps have expected from his earlier writings; restricted to those in which a self-aware form of ideology building can be detected. This emphasis on conscious intellectual activity eventually leads to a despairing conclusion: "We know too little about what went on, or for that matter what still goes on, in the minds of most relatively inarticulate men and women, to speak with any confidence about their thoughts and feelings towards the nationalities and nation-states which claim their feelings" (Hobsbawm 1990: 78, my emphasis). But innermost thoughts are never accessible, despite the rhetoric of hearts and minds, and so the role of local values is once again elided in a Marxist-derived, top-down understanding of ideology not so very different, in this regard, frmn the strongly anti-Marxist Gellner's. Pragmatically, it is true, Hobsbawm is right: written records are rarely a promising source for popular, "relatively inarticulate" social ideologies. 8 The focus on cultural intimacy works against this static, elitist, and conflationary reading. Its data are ethnographic and are of a kind often summarily dismissed as mere anecdote. But who sets the boundary between importance and mereness? There is a suspiciously close convergence berw-een the refusal to take ethnographic detail seriously and the homogeneity enjoined by nationalist ideologies. In chapter 6, I address in greater detail the political logic that animates such criticisms of anthropology, which in turn, through its resolute insistence on the significance of the particular, is thus able to document how nationalism is understood (and sometimes recast) by living social actors. There is no doubt that luany nationalist ideologies are externally alike, as Gellner and others have claimed, but that is no reason to ignore the highly localized specificities that sometimes give nationalism distinctive meaning in an enormous range of cultural and social settings. These specificities emerge in the intimate social spaces explored by ethnographers. Here it might be useful to consider the role of language learning for anthropological understanding. While the use of interpreters used to be collllllonplace, it has yielded today to a realization that the truly engaged field anthropologist must be able to "listen in" on conversations to which outsiders are rarely privy. Access to such conversations is ethically fraught, and I will 11
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return to the ethical issues associated with cultural intimacy in the concluding chapter. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that there are powerful reasons for seeking that access when, for examplc, we realize that official accounts relegate ordinary people's views and experiences to the margins. Indeed, while I ordinarily oppose the employment of interpreters in the field, they do have one obvious use: when they are officially appointed, a canny ethnographer can learn a great deal from noting what they do not translate. The recognition that local actors may not always agrce with official renditions of history has taken a surprisingly long time to come into focus. Edwin Ardener's (1975) notion of "englobing" did, however, suggest the possibility of a reading that could symbolically subordinate state autbority to local concerns. Studies of archaeological sites such as Masada in Israel (Bruner and Gorfain 1984; sec also Handehnan 1990) and Colonial Williamsburg in the United States (Gable, Handler, and Lawson 1992), and of historic conservation in Greece (Herzfeld 1991a), all suggest the possibility of the subtle recastings of official discourses that we might call counterinventions of tradition, in which local and minority groups variously (and often discordantly) propose a bost of alternative pasts. Oral memories of the Spanish fascists) attempt to incorporatc the population of Galicia through forced labor on a massive road construction program (Roseman 1996), or of events mythologized by the historians of civil strife in both Greece and Spain (Collard 1989; Hart 1996; Mintz 1982), tell a new set of stories. Rethinking the tangle of multiple pasts often happens in the intimate spaces of culture. That such processes often use bodily and kinship metaphors is not evidence of some cultural inability to think beyond immediate social experience but simply shows that members of local communities think about the state through lllany of the same categories as those through which state officials woo local opinion. If public officials adopt familistic rhetoric to command loyalty or court votes-the current debate about family values in the United States offers a striking case in point-it is because that rhetoric demonstrably works. But it also has its price: as many European and American politicians have discovered, they become answerable to the demands of this simulacrmll of moral family leadership. In other cases the image of domestic harmony becomes exposed to its concomitant logic of fraternal strife-as in Lebanon, for example (although King Hussein's farewell to "my 12
Introducing Cultural Intimacy
brother" Rabin showed tbat even the bitterness of metaphorically internecine feuds can be reversed). Indeed, Greek peasants explain civil and international strife in terms of embattled siblings, whose intense mutual affection can all too easily be transmuted into an equally intense struggle over the division of their parents' property; that property becomes territory in the case of the nation-state's relationship with neighboring countries like Turkey.9 David Sutton (1997) has argued that the passions stirred in Greece by the struggle over the name Macedonia only become comprehensible in light of the tight mutual association of affect, land, and personhood in the traditional transmission of names,1° Greek politicians have certainly hoth exploited and been swept along by the resulting tide of popular sentiment. These familial metapbors show that conceptually the nationstate is constructed out of intimacy, which can also recompose its geopolitical claims. Three superficially, very different cases illustrate the principle. First, for the Wakuenai of Venezuelan Amazonia the very idea of nation-states whose borders cut across their own territorial boundaries is both immoral and dangerous. By treating Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela as merely three additional named groups that came, logically and morally, after the Wakuenai's own sibs and even those of neighboring tribes (Hill 1990: 127, 1993: 37-38), Wakuenai incorporate all three nationstate names into their own kinship format, treating them as nothing more than a set of subunits of a local entity, and so symbolically invert the power relations between tbemselves and the intrusive nation-state entities historically grounded in European domination and a European model of the nation-state. In my second example, from New Zealand, some Maori traced national origius to tbe Jews who escaped from Egypt; this not only furnished a parable of deliverance from subjugation but also, by transforming analogy into genealogy, relegated the colonial Christian missionaries to the status of "younger brothers" (Schwimmer 1990: 29-31). Although this kind of inversion does not provide an effective means of resistance in itself, it may furnish the requisite first step in that direction; in the Maori case, it appears to have done so. Sometimes, to turn to my third illustration, this kind of reformulation can appear right in the heart of Europe, where its more direct articulation with the dominant political idiOlll gives it the real potential to make a difference in the struggle for self13
T Cultural Intimacy
determination. Here cartography is a potent weapon, turning linguistic and religious groupings into new national entitiesa visual rhetoric of acknowledged efficacy. Thus, Basque cartography of Southern and Northern Basqueland works "in symbolic defiance of the Spanish/French border, which has divided the Basque provinces into separate states, separate juridico-administrative entities, and separate histories since the sixteenth century" (Urla 1993: 825). These tactics deny the legitimacy of dominant state powers. Again, their actual effectiveness may be constrained by demographic, economic, and institutional limitations, but they do furnish elnergent ethnic solidarities with expressive force and direction within the carefully guarded spaces of cultural intimacy from which they may later emerge in resplendently militant and public form.'l
Disemia and the Coding of Intimacy 1 offer the concept of cultural intimacy as an antidote to the formalism of cultural nationalism. It expresses in more directly political terms the dynamic that I bad earlier sought to clarify through the luore formalistic notion of disemia-the formal or coded tension between official self-presentation and what goes on in the privacy of collective introspection. While the official aspect is a legitimate (and indeed necessary) object of ethnographic analysis, the intimacy it masks is the subject of a deep sense of cultural and political vulnerability. The tension between official and vernacular cultural forms has long been familiar to sociolinguists under the name of "diglossia," a situation in which a national language is split between two "registers" or social dialects: a formal and often deliberately archaic idiom used mostly for official purposes, and the ordinary speech of everyday life (Ferguson 1959). In diglossic situations, the so-called "high" register often requires access to scarce educational resources. It becomes a device of social, political, and economic exclusion; in Greece, the locus classicus for this phenOluenon, peasants sometimes needed interpreters in courts of law. In time, however, these arcane languages increasingly merge with vernacular forms, in which formal archaisms may indeed become a sOurce of popular irony at the expense of the powerful-a reversal that illustrates my central theme. The concept of disemia, however, expands the narrowly linguistic frame of diglossia. It does not ignore language, but 14
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contextualizes it as part of a semiotic continuum that includes silence, gesture, nlusic, the built environment, and economic, civic, and social values. Architecture may well be its most obvious expression: stylized stucco Ionic columns may mask the simple intimacies of a Turkish-style domestic space or the more bodily and gendered ones of a lingerie shop. And while this model may still superficially appear to support a binary split betweeu elite and ordinary people, that division is part of the code itself, not of the social world that uses it: anyone can claim elite or hUluble status, but these attributions are always contested in the play of social interaction. The binarislu belongs to the code itself; it does not describe the heterogeneous and shifting social world in which people nevertheless use it to establish their own claims to power and distiuction. 12 Above all, its very formality makes it capable of conveying the most exquisite irony; literal readings often compound that irony by falliug into the traps it sets. A historiau of China, Charlotte Furth, has made the point that not all binarism arises from the imperial project of orientalism, but that billarism may in fact prove useful for describing the consequences of that project: "Binaries come with the. necessary activity of making distinctions, and narrative strategies give linguistic distinctions entitivity" (Furth 1995: 998)-a point that demonstrates the material significance of the symbolic. Within a political structure defining the shape of cultural identity, people are constantly and ineluctably drawn into binary choices. Nationstate ideologies tend to divide the world into Manichaean pairs and to coerce or seduce their citizens into adopting the same rhetoric for the moral organization of their own everyday social relations. But people's actual uses of that rhetoric may be deliberately irreverent or even su bversive. Binarism often is, in fact, a key ordering principle of political inequality.13 Gelles (1995) has cogently argued that the dualistic systems of Andean societies, long associated by structuralists with ritual and with marriage rules, actually derive from indigenous ideas about political hierarchy, possibly even reinforced in the colonial period by similar features in Spanish social ideology. Political relations are in any case oppositional virtually by definition. Political identities, including nationalisms, are contrastive with regard to each other; this, as Spicer (1992) and others have argued, is the basis of ethnogenesis. Concomitantly, such identities also become contrastive in the tension between self-promoting 15
T Cultural Tntimacy
and introspective stereotypes. The content of thcse stereotypes is unstable. This is because what gives theln their significance is not so much their actual form-what Gellner mistook for the unifonn content of nationalist ideologies-as the social uses to which they are put. The confluence of stereotypes, their use in social interaction, and their necessarily unstable evocation of competing histories is the defining object of a social poetics, especially of a social poetics coucerned with life in the context of the nation-state. The disemia concept may work best for countries with an ambiguous relationship to ideal images of a powerful culture, in which both formalism and irony provide important resources for political negotiation. The foreign-dominated Greek state adopted the glorious name of Hellenes, as a more powerful evocation of great power interests than the more intimate and little-known Romii. 14 State formation often gives rise to this Janus-like adoption of a dual identity, balancing foreign-directed display against sometimes rueful introversion. Spicer (1992: 32) notes examples of native American peoples whose self-designations (ethnonyms), hidden from the supercilious inspection of encompassing state structures much as the identity of the Romii was concealed from the "phil hellenic" great powers of Western Europe, evoke precisely this sense of intimate self-knowledge. Such categorical shyness mocks the failure of the powerful to penetrate the innermost lives of the dominated. These pairings of external and internal ethnic names signal an important consequence of conquest and other forms of domination. Pnt quite simply, it is that the official devalnation of the culture of the conquered may become a source of secret pride. This may lead to the adoption of once derogatory group names during a period of collective regrouping, as has happened with several of the designators for Mrican-Americans (notably Blacks) and with the contemptuous term Turk, adopted as a matter of state policy in the aftermatb of the overthrow of the Ottoman rulers of what then became Turkey}5 Subnational strivings for greater autonomy may give rise to other, related articulations of disemia. Bretons) rejecting both French state control over tbeir persons and the authority of the official medical establishment, turn for the curing of a wide range of a'ilments to New Age formulations that combine arcane local knowledge with the scientistic rhetoric of rays and waves (Badone 1991). These are practices that make interior knowledge a mark
16
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introducing Cultural Intimacy
of intimacy as well as security. In Sicily, as Jane and Peter Schneider (1994) have argued, the widely approved cultural doctrine of sicilianismo rejects the national (Italian) condemnation of Mafia values as both peculiarly Sicilian and thoroughly wicked, and tries to reframe these as a trenchantly local moral response to domination by the manifestly corrupt Italian state. This is a defensive posture vis-a-vis the central authorities, but, very Inuch like "interior ethnonyms," it is proactive in promoting a sense of local cultural and moral autonomy and dignity. Such devices disturb externally imposed models of cultural superiority. Yet they may also long outlast the force of arms or wealth that elevated those models to dominance in the first place. In the Balkans and southern Europe generally (see Maddox 1993: 14), the Caribbean, and parts of Latin America and the Middle East (see Orlove and Bauer 1996)-places where the Once monolithic authority of northwestern Europe has lost much of its practical force-the touchstone of cultural hierarchy is still commonly a generalized notion of Europe. In Greece) Romania, and Spain, the idea that these countries are today supplicants for fully European identity is a raw expression of international cultural politics supported by powerful local elites. The allure of "Euro-style" imports (including Parisian intellectual fashions) follows a similar logic even in the fanner colonies of the United States, demonstrating how tenaciously hierarcnies of style lllay survive the collapse or inversion of hierarchies of military and economic power. Globally reproducing the dynamic described by Friedl (1964) as "lagging emulation" (which for her meant peasant imitation of city fashions), the changing global meanings of disemia may thus show great sluggishness through time. In England, the defeated Anglo-Saxons gave their name to a cultural ideology of blunt common sense and four-letter words, set against the elegance and formality of its imperial Latin precursors and soon-to-be-aristocratic French conquerors: as with the Greek play of Hellenic and Romeic, the Saxon Kuh- and Sehweinherds who assured their Norman masters a plentiful supply of breuf and pore stand metaphorically for ideologically contrasted cultural identities, both of which all social actors internalize and selectively deploy. In the American example, again, the poles of di.semia are an almost sycophantic adulation toward the cultures of the European anciens regimes on the one hand, and contempt for Europeans' alleged stuffiness and rigid sense of hierarchy on the other.
17
Cultural Tntimacy
Context determines which side of this uncomfortable ambiguity predominates. Any European who too eagerly or literally accepts American friends' cultural obeisance soon learns due caution. While American admiration for "Europe" is often couched in terms of nostalgia for a time of cultural finesse-the OldJNew World doublet nicely conveys the conversion of historical time into cultural space 16-it is matched by an equally powerful nostalgia for the communal simplicity emblematized by the paintings of Norman Rockwell and the artifacts of near-defunct groups such as the Shakers.l7 Such ambivalences may also appear in countries, such as Portugal and Russia, that are simultaneously recent colonial powers and impoverished members of the global community of nations. Russians are often ambivalent about the European aspect of their identity, while their neighbors in Finland have challenged their claims to civilization itself (see Wilson 1976: 132). 1u Spain, too, the proximity of ~
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wielded by botll sides in a contest over the future evolution of the national polity (see Verdery 1996: 104-29). Here, too, as Kligman (1989: 326-27, n. 4) has pointed out, the tension between Orthodox east and Catholic west surfaces as a peculiarly reversed "religious disemia," in which older practices associated with Catholicism pervade most of the intimate spaces of everyday life despite a surface adherence to formal Orthodoxy. Kligman's example in fact illustrates the instability and negotiability of the disemic extremes. In Greece, Orthodoxy has had a distinctly uncomfortable relationship with the neoclassical vision of Europe, from early fulminations against the perceived threat of a pagan revival in the early years of the state to the current anti-Western and largely left-wing "neo-Orthodox" movement of today. In Romania, by contrast, the Orthodox faith appears to have represented cultural orthodoxy as well, even under the officially atheist Ceau§escu regime; that government's perceived favoritism toward the Orthodox church has led citizens from formerly Catholic communities to claim Orthodox identity as a matter of self-presentation. The result is an intensified public-private dichotomy marked by contrasting religious attitudes and ritual habits-Kligman's "religious disemia." It is important to note here that while disemia can be treated as a pairing of codes, what matters socially is how these codes_are actually used; and that use is often affected by historical processes of which the actors may be only partially aware. The Ceau§escu regime's pro-Orthodox stance decided the public face of religious disemia, but use and choice of these now "overcoded" symbols (see Eco 1976: 133) would depend on particular actors and could perhaps influence future events. In much the same way, the original Greek nationalist binarism-classical Greece as the fount of Europe and the official face of the modern nation-ran into SOlne opposition after the huge influx (nearly a quarter of the existing population) of refugees from Asia Minor after the disastrous 1920-22 war with Turkey. Although the refugees maintained close contact with the West as well, they were quick to dismiss the mainland Greeks' bond to the West as arising from inferiority and subordination to the European powers. Furthermore, the refugees noted with disappointment what they perceived to be a serious cultural anachronism within Greek society. In pursuit of Western ways of modernization, mainland Greeks neglected their more recent Byzantine heritage and sought to
19
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Cultural Intimacy restore the secular ideals of the distant pre-Christian classical past. Moreover. native Greeks projected ... a very unfavorable image as narrow-minded, parochial, and unsophisticated people (Giannuli 1995: 277; see also Hirschon 1989: 22-35).
Further complicating the static West-East formulation of Greek identities was a strong element of modernist occidentalizing among many nonelite Greeks, as Bakalaki (1994: 76-77,97-102, and passim) has argued in a persuasive modification of my own earlier argument. Since Greeks could always internalize images of Europe as their own, Bakalaki points out, we may find that, for example, the apparently Ioealist preoccupation of women with handicrafts actnally masks their absnrption of fashions from Western Europe, while informal dress-easily read as a mark of dOlnestic introversion~may in fact signal, perhaps even simultaneously, the desire for European comfort and the pervasive presence of a culturally and politically powerful model of the self. These shifting locations of binary tension are not always easy to spot. Because they appeal to notions of eternal verity, their strategic uses are well concealed: tllls is what invests the binarism of the code with a spurious sense of social actuality. Architectural arrangements, in which physical permanence easily overshadows the significance of variable use, share with the idiom of morality the semiotic illusion of invariance: constant signifiers mask shifting signilieds. The more fixed the semiotic forms, the greater is tbe play of ambiguity and the more surprising are the possibilities for violating the code itself. Skilled actors use tbe appearance of rigidity to get what they want (Herzfeld 1983b). Unskilled (or simply unsuccessful) actors blame the system; this is the worldview whereby tbey also blame the state and so conlirm its power. IS The most permanent-seeming devices are perhaps the most literally physical. In societies where the architectural screens tbat divide the intilnate £rOlll the public are gendered, as in much of the Islamic world, these moral imperatives may reappear in local practice as gender and body metaphors of the contrasted ideologies of national identity. Even in societies where that separation is less palpable, however, women often bear tbe brunt of selfknowledge, men of self-display. In everyday practice, these symbolic roles are strategically reversible, and this nlay constitute a further dimension of cultural intimacy: there arc aspects of their actual roles that men may prefer not to reveal to strangers 20
Introducing Culturallntimacy
except under highly formalized or ritualized conditions (Almeida 1995: 229). But the oflicial use of gender stereotypes still has quite remarkable staying power. In the United States, where sensitivity to gender bias in public contexts is at least fornlally well articulated, nationwide patterns exhibit an arresting conservatism. Among the airline crews whose conventions I discllssed earlier, the frequent practice of introducing the cabin crew (usually overwhehningly female) by lirst name and the pilots (usually male) by rank and surname serves as an additional prop for the commercial charade of domesticity in the passenger cabin. Here, official organization uses the intimate side of disemia for public purposes. At the other end of the scale, the human body may endure the greatest disemic tensions. There it is sometimes expressed through the somatization of enlbarrassment as pain, especially where state brutality leaves few private spaces uninvaded and so makes the self the only available refuge for any sense of intimacy (Kleinman 1995: 106-107). The body is exposed to such extremes because it is the primary site of both privacy and display. Sometimes, too, shame can also be fought back through the ambiguities of embodiment. Thus, for example, colonized peoples may resort to sign languages in which external form remains obdurately indecipherable to those for whom verbalizing is the highest, and often the only, mode of communication (Farnell 1994, 1995b; Kendon 1995). Silence and irony, too, both provide a sbield for subversive mockery and set limits to its capacity for generating change (Chock 1987; Herzfeld 1991b; Norman 1994). Whether anything actually does change as a result of such subtle performanceswhether, for example, the balance of power between genders or classes shifts-is an empirical question to be asked of the social poetics to which I now turn.
Social Poetics The nation-state is ideologically committed to ontological selfperpetuation for all eternity. Wbile it may seek to embrace technological or even social change ("modernizing states"), it perpetuates the semiotic illusion of cultural fixity and may well try to impose a static morality on others ("moralizing states" [Moore 1993: 4]). The technology for the construction of tbis timelessness pragmatically connects a mythologicaillotion of pure origins with respect for perfect social and cultural form; 21
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Cultural Intimacy
innovations are co-opted by being treated as the realization of an eternal essence. Yet in practice they are often debated: Americans' "rights" to health care are pitted against their supposedly inherent self-reliauce, for example. On the other hand, attacks au the essentialism that grounds these debates are less easily tolerated: they disrupt moral purity, temporal searnlessness, and cultural homogeneity. The nation must always be one and indivisible. National history, like Levi-Straussian myth, retroactively elides (experiential) time in the name of (generic) time. This adherence to a static cultural ideal has a surprising and presumably unintended consequence: not only does it ground certain permissible forms of debate, but also it pennits and perhaps even encourages the day-to-day subversion of nonns. This comes about because the very rigidity of outward forms provides some actors with a mask with which to conceal a variety of messages, just as a strict morality may S0111etimes cnablethrough the mastery of its codes-remarkable freedom of individual action. This is why official ideologies generally deny semantic lability: acknowledging that lability would lead to the realization that official meanings were thelnselves unstable. Perhaps the most dramatically paradoxical demonsttation of the state's self-generated predicament is the structural nostalgia-the longing for an age before the state, for the primordial aud selfregulating birthright that the state continually invokes-that citizens can turn against the authority of the state itself, along with all the other similarly vuluerable symbols of official fixity (see chapter 7). hl the United States the so-called militias' appeal to primordialist notions of frontier justice and self-reliance, for example, has already significantly embarrassed the U.S. federal government. And populist appropriations of nationalist rhetoric about the ancient glories similarly embarrassed the Greek government when it wanted to exhibit Cretan antiquities abroad (Hamilakis aud Yalouri 1995: 126). A critique of state ideology should render this sleight of temporality visible. Fixity of form does not necessarily entail a corresponding fixity of meanings and intentions; exaggeration, parody, and other deforming practices both perpetuate the sense of enduring cultural form and cause substantive change. The analogy in language is with poetic diction, which, as ]akobson (1960) recognized, permeates everyday as well as "set-apart" usage: the sometimes disconcerting ambiguity of language in use as well as the shock of brilliant metaphor may equally unsettle tl,e
22
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Introducing Cultural Intimacy
semiotic illusion of a culture and a moral universe that claim never to change. It is crucial not to mistake this nlove toward ambiguity for the romantic mysticism of seeing poetry in social life (see chapter 8). It is not about poetry (except as a special case), but poetics-not the mystically endowed semiosis of a genre, but the technical analysis of its properties as these appear in all kinds of symbolic expression, including casual talk. Social poetics, however, can all too easily be conflated with the aesthcticizing of social relations (Gilsenan 1986; Vidal 1988). In The Poetics of Manhood (Herzfeld 1985a), I clearly slipped into an aestheticizing idiom when I contrasted the poetics of swashbuckling masculinity with the "more prosaic vision" of sedentary, law-abiding modernity (272)-a formulation that conflicts with the claims I was making for the approach, and one that I would not now endorse. But it is not central to the main argument; on the contrary, it misuses that argument. Several critics (e.g., Damer 1986) have argued that the poetic approach appears to celebrate only the politically successful; in the context of highland Cretan masculinity, for example, I said little about the situation of women or of politically weak men. I have made partial attempts (especially Herzfeld 1991b) to correct this imbalance. But a suitably deromanticized notion of aesthetics, as of poetics, does not automatically entail the whitewashing of unpleasantness, brutal power, or the small and large agonies of oppression. If I have been guilty of ignoring some of the more grossly material aspects of inequality, this may be due to my initial, too narrow application of the approach, rather than to the approach itself. Moreover, the conventional alternatives of symbolism hashing and economic reductionism do at least as much violence to people's lived experiences. The idea that symbolic activity is irrelevant to material analysis is pernicious. This Cartesian division of labor underlies serious gaps in earlier ethnographies: the absence of narrative, gestural (see Farnell 1994a, 1994b), musical (Feld 1982), and many other supposedly nonmaterial aspects of social life show what sanctimonious nonsense the holistic ideal of ethnographic research has always been. It is itself the product of an ideologically laden binarism opposing anthropology-as-"morality" to anthropology-as"science" (D'Andrade 1995). The positivistic illusion of an unbiased and comprehensive description necessarily ignores the higWy charged binarism that undergirds it. Often those who-in
23
Cultural Intimacy
defiance of the vast indeterminacies of social life-clailll that their ethnography is comprehensive are the most hostile to the inclusion of lengthy passages of narrative, informant exegesis, and what they contemptnously dismiss as folklore in ethnographic accounts. It is easy to be holistic when one has predetermined the parameters of the "whole.» For that matter, the writing of ethnography itself is both a social and a poetic act. Kenna (1992) correctly notes that my ethnography of the Cretan highlands was a performance, hut one must ask whether any ethnography is not a performance, as I pointed out in an earlier response (Herzfeld 1992b). That a written text is more permanent than a spoken utterance is no more relevant in this context than that architecture is an ostensibly less ephemeral social gesture than a wink or a nod. Like the shepherds I was studying, I deformed a social and cultural convention: this was the ethnographic style of my own intellectual lineage, that of my teacher (Campbell 1964), who had in effect deformed EvansPritchard's (1940) model, designed for the presentation of an African society, by applying it to a European one. Performance is always embedded in "real" events: every performance has antecedents. Victor Turner articulated the embedding of present social life in the experiences of the past in his concept of "social drama" (Turner 1974). This can be grand theater, as when the actions of public figures feed on glorious pasts or central religious myths. It is no less suggestive, however, for the analysis of humbler moments-of the stuff of the stories ethnographers tell, "mere anecdotes" that reveal what moves people to action. A social poetics recognizes that people deploy the debris of the past for all kinds of present purposes. No less thau the Mexican revolutionary Hidalgo or tl,e medieval cleric Thomas it Becket, whose respective personal trajectories evoked, according to Turner (1974: 60-155), the worship of the Aztec gods and the drama of the Passion of Christ, the grieving Greek mother who finds solace by identifying with the bereaved Mother of God is reproducing, if on a smaller social stage, a universalizing drama through which she transcends her own inunediate grief (see A1exiou 1974: 77). In the outpourings of nationalist historiography, moreover, ordinary people find the materials to construct a potentially infinite range of personal and collective pasts, some of which may fun counter to the intentions of their nationalist exemplars. The repeated reuse of masonry in towns of great antiquity-as when the remnants of a pagan temple reappear in the most important
24
Introducing Cultural Intimacy
national pilgrimage site of Greek Christianity19-is a telling metaphor that embodies this semiotic bricoIage, and is all the more so when, as so often happens, such reuse is actively prohibited by state and civic conservation authorities. For them the practice of a living history, as opposed to rhetoric, is a threat to their most treasured as well as their lllost concrete essentialisms. 20 The state is caught on the horns of its own reification. To achieve at least an illusion of stability it must command the active involvement of ordinary people; and ordinary people reify, all the time, everywhere. They, too, invoke solidified histories, rediscovering in the official mythology some aspects that will serve their oWn cause. It is not only the postcolonial subject who, as Mbembe (1992: 25) observes, "by compromising with the corrupting control that state power tends to exercise at all levels of daily life ... is reaffirming that it is incontestable-precisely in order the better to play with it and modify it whenever possible." Nor, as he observes, are obscenity and the grotesque simply subversive "weapons of the weak," to use Scott's (1985) celebrated phrase; the play of power, while often oppositional, draws on shared symbols that are then differently used and interpreted according to the interests, resources, and desires of the actors. Like the commanding/grotesque body of the postcolonial despot-Mbembe's model is the West African state of Cameroon, but he insists that there is nothing uniquely African about what he describes-it is the signs of power "that have force, that get interpreted and reinterpreted, and feed back further significance into the system" (Mbembe 1992: 8). Given that virtually no polity is immune to some degree of power abuse, I would add, such ambiguities are also richly present in the humbler reaches of political life, where exaggerated displays of bodily might may be rendered still more contestable by the ridicule of intimate acquaintance. Thus, the Glendiot shepherds contemptuously describe the bureaucrats and politicians whose patronage they enjoy as "eating," a common metaphor for rapacity and theft; yet each one of these lean, tough men wants his sons to acquire-and display-a paunch that signifies access to precisely the same sources of enviable abuse. The disreputable components of power that comprise cultural intimacy are drawn from everyday life; and, in dictatorships like those described by Mbembe (1992: 25-29), the state so fully adopts the cultural signs of that intimacy in order to permeate the oppressed citizens' every sentient moment that it exposes itself to greater day-to-day manipulation 25
Cultural Intimacy
by these saIne citizens, who are familiar with the capacity of those signs to bear subversive interpretations. Social poetics is about the play through which people try to turn transient advantage into a permanent condition in this socially comprehensive sense. It links tbe little poetics of everyday interaction with the grand dramas of official pomp and historiography to break down illusions of scale. I would not want to claim that this perspective completely displaces other approaches. Rather, it occupies a militant middle ground between the twin denials of social experience-the extremes of positivism and deconstruction ism-allowing neither to elide the intimate concerns of ordinary people in the name of fatuously self-serving abstraction. In this, it remains faithful to the poetic vision of Vico. He decried both the rejection of direct observation and the idea of pure literalness o{ pennanent meaning. It was also Vico who pointed out the parallel stupidities of tyrants who forgot the fragile popular basis of their power, and of scholars who forgot that all their arcane language was derived from images grounded in bodily knowledge and transmitted tbrough the popular langnage of peasants. 21 Following tbis powerfully antireductionist lead, it is the specific task of social poetics to reinsert analysis into lived historical experience and thereby to restore awareness of the social, cultural, and political grounding-the cultural intimacy-of even the most formal power and the most abstract knowledge. Practical Essentialism: Creating Resemblances One of the most cominon social poetic concerns is the use of stereotypes in social interaction. Most anthropological discussions of stereotypes have addressed them from the perspective of group boundaries and mutual hostility. But these approaches are liable to the charge of static binarism unless they are contextualized as social action. Who uses stereotypes? Under what circumstances? How stable are the forms of stereotypes and the meanings people attribute to them? Racial stereotypes offer a particularly good illustration of how use can appear to convert transient perceptions into self-evidence. Such questions underscore a key point of this book: social life consists of processes of reification and essentialism as well as challenges to these processes. This is the corollary to recognizing 26
Introducing Cultural Intimacy
the strategic character of essentialism. Distrust of essentialism in social theory should not blur our awareness of its eql1ally pervasive presence in social life. Essentializing essentialism is pointless. At this point, too, the social sciences come under their own comparativist lens. As Richard Handler and I have both argued, recognizing the cssentialisms shared by nationalism and anthropology provides both historical insight and critical distance.22 What I have just remarked about essentialism can also, a fortiori, be said about binarism. A social poetics Inakes no assumptions about the structure of human cognition but asks where people find the binary oppositions that they actually deploy and examines how they use them in their negotiations of power. Let us recall Furth's observation, which if extended beyond the linguistic domain wonld virtnally define what I mean by social poetics: "narrative strategies give linguistic distinctions entitivity" (Furth 1995: 998). All social performance reities people in culturally coded roles or identities. This is why the achievement of national statehood constitutes perhaps the most dramatic example of the strategy of essentialism, although sonle religions, those that pro~laim both ecumenical inclusiveness and universal truth, can justly claim even greater success in terms of sheer scale. Recent work on critical media responses, however, suggests that such monopolies _may now be outflanked. Writing of Basque youth culture, for example, Urla (1995) has suggested that alternative media can challenge the relentless production of unitary truth even within movements that are themselves conceived in opposition to-but therefore often initially assume the monolithic cultural logic of-nationstate systems. The factionalism that can arise from such situations, as van Meijl (200: 91,103) has demonstrated for the predicament of the Maori in New Zealand, is expressed through attempts to control the nlanagement-indeed, the reification-of cultural identity, and is much more complex than a simple binary model of oppressor and subaltern would suggest. As internal critics gain access to nl0des of self-expression that were hitherto denied them, they also complicate the ethical dilemmas of anthropologists anxious to avoid siding with the powerful and validatiug their monopoly over the determination of identity (see especially Jackson 1995). The original publication of this book elicited legitimate concerns that too wholesale a focus on symbolism and representation could occlude other, equally material dimensions 27
Cultuml Intimacy
of the state's presence in people's lives (Smith 1999: 197,227). I remain convinced, however, that these aspects are not less material than economic, military, or political ones. The trivialization of representational practices should itself serve as sufficient warning as to how state power makes extensive use of the symbolic while rejecting its nse hy critics of that power. To deny the materiality of the symbolic thus entails surrender to, or even acquiescence in, a global imbalance of power. One task, central to this book, is instead to see how representation actually works. The strategies of essentialism all hinge on creating the semiotic effect technically known as iconicity, the principle of signification by virtue of resemblance (see chapter 4). An icon is not, technically speaking, just a popular image that typifies a culture (as in the phrase "American icon"); indeed, that common misuse of the term suggests how muddled much public rhetoric about the creation of national identity continues to be.I 3 An icon signifies something hy virtue of a perceived similarity: a photograph is an icon of its subject, a Vivaldi flute passage of bird song. !conicity seems natural and is therefore an effective way of creating self-evidence. But it is in fact culturally constituted in the sense that the ability to recognize resemblance depends to a large degree on both prior aesthetic criteria and the politics of the situation: people often indignantly deny any resemblance with their own portraits, with parents, or, indeed, with certain politicians. Perhaps because persuasive visual images possess a "redemptive power" by virtue of their reproducihility (Freedberg 1989: 440), they directly serve nationalisln's twin preoccupations with infinite human reproduction and collective immortal ity. Visual and musical iconicities have been especially effective in rallying entire populations, but others-those of taste and smell as marshaled in national gastronomies, for example (Appadurai 1988)-may achieve to an even greater degree the surreptitious obviousness that the process of naturalization requires. Even where iconicity is explicitly foregrounded, as in the religious (and political) use of visual images, its immediacy "significantly democratizes their rationale" (Freedberg 1989: 401).24 Nationalism is directly predicated on resemblance, whether biogenetic or cultural. The pivotal idea is that all citizens are, in some unarguable sense, alike; this is what Benedict Anderson's (1983) "imagined community" implies. Most natioualists fear variant cultural readings-minority self-determination, youth nonconformism, cultural dissidence-that might undermine their 28
TI
introducing Cultural Intimacy
universalist claims. In fact, not only do alternative readings coexist with the dominant interpretations, but most nationalisms would have a hard time keeping popular support without such disruptive familiarities. National embarrassment can become the ironic basis of intimacy and affection, a fellowship of the flawed, within the private spaces of the national culture. That is why I wish to move the discussion of stereotypes to the realm of practice, bringing it to bear on the totalizing iconicitycitizens with a homogeneous national character-of nation-state ideology. This is closely related to Gellner's (1983: 37) perceptive observation that culture moves from being an "adornment, confirmation and legitimation of a social order" to the status «of a necessary shared medium." I have elsewhere argued that tIus ideological change-which, unlike Gellner, I regard as one of degree rather than of kind-entails reducing a set of relational (or indexical) signs, the recognizable fragments of the flow of social life, to the static and therefore timeless iconicity of national culture (Herzfeld 1992a). The metonymic extensions of intimacy are not so much transformed, as Gellner thought, as they are stretched beyond any serious possibility of literal meaning. In their ubiquitous triviality, the airline courtesies I briefly discussed above similarly exemplify this process, while Andrew Strathern (1996) has noted its salience for nnderstanding the transformation of local exchange items (pigs, shells) into the iconography of the national currency in Papua New Guinea-a country where nationalism must constantly seek to overCOlne the perpetual tension among the huge variety of local cultural idioms competing to inform it (see also Gewertz and Errington 1995). In New Zealand certain art forms becalne a means of expressing an emergent Maori national identity grounded in the evocation of ancestors now claimed as common to all; as a result, a single form was then also emblematically expropriated hy the New Zealand government to "express a joyous and comforting message-of just what it [the message] is not too clear: life in general" (Schwimmer 1992: 70-71). Such conflation is the reverse of the factional process noted above, but it partakes of the same fundamental principle: the reification of collective culture, no matter at what level, serves as an instrument of social consolidation. Social relations on the ground disrupt these timeless fictionsor eternal images-of national culture. Margaret Thatcher recognized this when she sought to deny the very existence of the social, insisting instead that there were "only individuals" who 79
Cultural Intimacy
shared a common culture on which she proposed to perform prodigies of streamlining. It wonld be hard to find a better example of the way in which nationalism shifts emphasis from indexicality to iconicity-from social relations refracting cultural difference to a socially atomized cultural hOlnogeneity. The analytic challenge is to reverse the process, to see what indexical social ploys lurk behind the seemingly imperturbable icomcities of an officially unified culture. I particularly wish to take the nsefnI concept of "orientalism" (Said 1978) beyond its hitherto much too narrowly textual sense, as Carrier (1992) has effectively done already for his parallel coinage of "accidentalism." Let us speak, then, of practical orientalism, practical accidentalism, and practical essentialism in generaL2s The pragmatic reification of people as representatives of fixed categories is in part what Althusser (1971: 162) has dubbed ('interpellation," of which the oft-quoted illustration is the hegemonic act of a policeman who stops a passerby with a peremptory "Hey, you!" According to Althl1sser, the policeman acts as the agent of ideology. which at that moment constitutes the passerby as a "subject." But tllls formulation, concerned as it is with the exercise of state power, is still top-down; it is also explicitly atelnporal in that the passer-by has in fact "always-already" been a subject of ideology, which Althusser represents as existing outside history (Althusser 1971: 150,164). In this way, Althusser, for whom the only freedom is that granted by powerful institutions to accept their total control, reproduces and reinforces those institutions' power. He rejects the possibility that such mOlnents of social interaction might have palpable performative ilnpact on the state ideology and culture in turn. While this may be an empirically accurate account of specific moments, it is too deterministic. In this regard it follows a long anthropological tradition in which social actors seemed to be locked into an ideational predestination, the possibility of independent agency all but precluded (see also Fardon 1985: 6). Ethnographic evidence does not support such comprehensive determinism. In a recent study of Salvadoran politics and gender, for example, Stephen (1985: 812) shows how the state empowers a sixteen-year-old in uniform to "interpellate"-she does not herself use this term-an old woman as subversive, although he would have treated her with respect had he met her in his own neighborhood and had he been out of uniform. Since the military
30
I I
Introducing Cultural Tntimacy
cultivation of the machismo ethos predicates women's social identities on the "traditional" categories of virgin and whore, Stephen's example shows that the state's power to exercise this kind of control through its agents depends on the selective manipulatiou of stereotypes already in popular circulation. This familiar model, however, is "good to think" for both sides. The prominent role of women in some Latin American revolutions allowed them to seize on other selections from the repertoire of generally received gender stereotypes to reverse a long-standing pattern of collective abuse and to bring about substantive social and cultural change. Stephen's description of how women are absorbed into a category fits the argument I have advanced elsewhere about the bureaucratic uses of categorical ascription (Herzfeld 1992a). She demonstrates, moreover, that the weak can fight back by recasting the original ascriptions by which they were consigned to the margins. In so doing, they challenge the prevalent interpretation and use of key categories. Consequently, their small acts of resistance may lead, at least incrementally, to some degree of change in the larger distribution of power. Because it is practice-oriented and performative, Stephen's demonstration is a welcome contrast to excessively textualist accounts of "resistance" currently in vogue. Female engagement in politics, which men at first strenuously resisted, led to a revaluation of gender roles; this in turn led men as well as women to new understandings of violence and power, and the resulting awareness may still further affect the state's ability to get away with injustice. Such is the provisionality inherent in all official forms of permanence: because national ideologies are grounded in images of intimacy, they can be subtly but radically restructured by the changes occurring in the intimate reaches of everyday life-by shifts of meaning that may not be registered at all in external cultural form. Sometimes the effects of local reappropriation can be hilarious. Cretan sheep-thieves, drawing self-consciously on the flamboyant lawlessness of the revolutionary guerrillas of the War of Independence (kleftes, literally thieves) and dismissing the Athenian authorities as virtual Turks, delight in treating the investigating policemen to ritualized hospitality, informing them afterward that they have now eaten the evidence (Herzfeld 1985a: 220-22). These sheep-thieves' ironic relationship to national historiography may not be as unusual as statist ideology has led us to think: many a "liberator" began under the label of "bandit" or 31
Culturallntimacy
"terrorist," only to face the embarrassments of real power and the need to curb erstwhile colleagues. Yasscr Arafat springs immediately to mind. Often such inversions of legal status have more obvious implications for the state's capacity to define the terms of incorporation, as when Wakuenai reduce to the intimacy of kinship units those nation-state entities whose borders have arbitrarily violated the Wakuenai people's own territorial integrity. Nor should we forget that those uproarious Cretan sheep-thieves' actions also have immediate political consequences, for they remind the hapless local authorities that these shepherds electorally command the protection of parliamentary patrons who not only set up both the relevant legislation and its implementation but also may achieve very high office indeed-partially through their access to the bloc votes controlled by client sheep-thieves belonging to tbe larger clans. 2 • In effect, such tactics call the bluff of formal power and its selfessentializing strategies. They force recognition that essentialism is always the one thing it claims not to be: it is a strategy, horn, no less than these subversive tactics, of social and historical contingency. The agents of powerful state entities and the humblest of local social actors engage in the strategy of essentialisin to an equal degree, if not always with the same visibility Dr impact. Social poetics can be precisely defined as the analysis Df essentialism in everyday life. The essentializing strategies of state legislators and ordinary citizens alike depend on a semiotic illusion: by making sure that all the outward signs of identity are as consistent as possible, they literally create, or constitute,27 hOlnogeneity. They produce iconicities of both national culture and national law, the latter exemplified by the kind Df fundamentalist ethic that in the United States is called strict constitutionalism and appeals to certain "truths" as so "self-evident" as to be beyond semantic or political analysis-to be, in a word, sacrosanct. Essentializing is thus not exclusively a state activity. Indeed, "strategic essentialism" has entered our vocabulary through the programmatic discDurse Df feminism (Spivak 1989). But state Dfficials do have access to an exceptionally rich variety of devices for cssentializing: law, censorship, an immigration bureaucracy, and so on. Iconicity is central to this endeavor because it backgrounds its own operation. That makes it the perfect instrument for performative nonperformance-here the invisible historical 32
Introducing Cultural Intimacy
processes of local universalizing that underlie all so-called common sense. Stereotypes appear correct to those who espouse tbem because they reduce all the members Df a populatiDn tD a manageable iconicity, while tbDse whD apply stereDtypes tD themselves may, as CbDck (1987) suggests, be irDnically ridiculing the majority population's blithe assertions of superiority to those whD are simply dillerent and tberefDre stereDtypically all alikea classically Eurocentric view. 28
OrganizatiDn Df This Book The chapters Df this bDok did not all spring directly from the concept of social poetics. At times, I preferred to focus Iny investigatiDns less Dn the day-tD-day negotiation of status and identity than on the extraordinary claims of permanence that so Inany nationalist ideologies have macle. In time, however, these interests converged. Greece was an ideal catalyst: in a country claiming at once to be the ancestor of Europe and yet also widely seen as one of the continenfs newest and least European states, the paradoxes of permanence came easily into critical focus. Thus, while many of the case materials presented here are drawn from my fieldwork and other research in Greece, the resulting mDdels, including that Df cultural intimacy, sbould be seen as heuristic in a morc general, comparative sense. Their relevance to other cases is probably quite uneven. Many na,tionalists wDuld argue that these mDdels had nD relevance at all to their respective countries, including Greece. That alone, however, shDuld be reason enougb nDt tD dismiss them ont Df hand. Witb tbe exceptiDn Df this introdnctory chapter, the second chapter, and the afterword, none of the essays that comprise this book was originally conceived for inclusion in it, and most were presented elsewhere in anDther form. In bringing these papers tDgether, however, I intend sDmething decidedly more tban a retrospective collection. For that reason, I have taken the task of revision seriDusly. Instead of simply supplying bridge passages lDDsely linking the single chapters tD a broad scheme Df autDbiographical rather than conceptual scope-a self-indulgence that became increasingly distasteful as this project tODk form-1 have identified earlier and sDmetimes ill-defined echDes of the tbinking nDW laid Dnt in these intrDductDry paragraphs and have reworked those echoes into a stronger, more explicit, and internally more consistent line of argument thrDughDut the bDok. Like iron filings 33
Cultural Intimacy
brought into alignment by a magnet, the several subthemes of the original formulations will now, I hope, work to support my central understanding of anthropology's task in moving from its once determinedly local focus to a perspective that can also convincingly incorporate the ethnography of nation-states. In the second chapter, written specifically for this new edition, I attempt a response to some of the elaborations and permutations that the concept of cultural intimacy has undergone since the original appearance of the book. I had originally thought of writing a new introductory chapter, but, with the exception of an added bridging segment at the end and a few small but potentially useful adjustments, I decided to leave the initial declaration of the theoretical stakes intact) and instead to offer my reflections and reactions as a separate chapter. I hope that one result of that decision will be an appreciation of how a more historically sensitive approach might allow us to expand the idea of cultural inti111acy into a reasonably effective heuristic device for locating the specific dynamics of cultural em barrassment and solidarity. It has become clear that too heavy a focus on the nation-state is unnecessarily restrictive, but that 111uch can be done with the concept of cultural intimacy by analyzing performances of selfhood-collective and individual-in the interstices of many another institutional fral11ework as well. Nonetheless, the role of the nation-state remains central; the remarkable persistence of this institution, especially in the wake of so many predictions of its ilnminent demise, clearly calls for a re-examination of the fouudations of its appeal and durability. In particular, its deep entanglement with familial metaphors has consequences both for everyday social experience and for the ways in which its dictates are understood. The norms of selfpresentation at the boundaries of the state conflict with the daily experience of social tension, in the family as much as among the segments of a complex nation-state. In that tension, the rhetoric of state power is both a tool and a liability for those who wield it, since its expropriation by skilled tricksters always threatens to expose the intimacies within. In chapters 3 and 4 ("Of Definitions and Boundaries" and "Persuasive Resemblances") I begin to address the uses of formal discourse in informal aspects of social life by offering a critical appraisal of the spatial and representational rhetorics of state nationalism. While these chapters are partly grouuded in the ethnography of Greece, this specificity becomes more central to 34
Introducing Cultural Intimacy
"The Dangers of Metaphor: From Troubled Waters to Boiling Blood." Here the reliance of nationalist rhetoric on local-level idioms of social solidarity is explored in relation to current Balkan conflicts, in order to make the key point that larger events draw sustenance from highly intimate and localized values. This, I suggest, is the distinctive contribution of anthropology to the understanding of the larger picture. For that reason) in the chapter that comes next ("Cultural Intimacy and the Meaning of Europe"), I respond to some nonanthropologists) testy dismissals of anthropological insights as trivial and irrelevant, pointing out that these attacks on the discipline are themselves symptomatic of the key problem: the discourse of foreign affairs rests heavily on the symbolism of stereotypes, and it is a symbolism that belongs more embarrassingly in the realm of cultural intinlacy than its purveyors would ever want to admit. Nationalistic resentment of authropology's concern with supposedly marginal populations forces an interesting and important ethical choice. Nationalist objections rest on the view that such groups are numerically insignificant and therefore atypical. While this view does not answer, for example, concerns over human rights, anthropologists must be aware that nationalists can point to great-power interest in minorities as yet another example of international bullying-of which foreign anthropologists then find themselves represented as the agents. 29 But those who make such arguments are often themselves elite conservatives whose modernist arguments about national homogeneity reproduce the same hegemony at the local level. By that token, recognizing national grievances over cultural and political marginalization would seem an oddly inconsistent reason to concur in the suppression of minority demands for self-determination within the nation-state. The following is an example that concerns a lnajor international dispute. It is indicative (if perhaps unsurprising) that those who most deeply resent any foreign recognition of a Macedonian or a Turkish minority in northern Greece are the most disposed to argue in the course of everyday conversation that the population of that area consists of "impure" Greeks-for such hierarchies of national purity are admissible within the spaces of cultural intimacy, if not in the public arenas of diplomacy and scholarship (and the importance of those casual conversations can be conveniently belittled with the usual dismissal of "mere anecdotalism"). There is an obvious parallel here iu anthropology with the positivistic invocation of holism to exclude supposedly 35
Cultural Intimacy
Introducing Cultural Intimacy
unscientific data (mere anecdotes again): symbolisms of purity operate in both cases. And I have already noted how, in the purity-based logic of structural nostalgia, the very people who most decry the necessity of state intervention are those who are most likely to have recourse to it. In all three cases we see a strategic move to esscntialize pragmatically impossible ideals for pragmatically possible purposes. This is a perfect illustration of social poetics in action. The next chapter, "Structural Nostalgia: Time and the Oath in the Mountain Villages of Crete," which now has a new ending designed to reflect in a more comprehensive way the relationship between structural nostalgia and the pragmatics of cultural intimacy, works from precisely this parallel between anthropology and its multiple objects. It deals with the kind of population whose prominence in my own and other anthropologists' writings has so irritated nationalists and other critics. In it, I explore the Cretan villagers' view of church and state as intrusive and demeaning. In so doing, I suggest that the symbolism of official history as well as that of modernist social theory is drawn from the same sources as their own rebellious inversion of official ideology. I thus use the chapter as a two-pronged probe of cultural intimacy: to explore the embarrassing practices of a marginal population but also to investigate the elite values whereby that elubarrassment and that marginality are constituted. The villagers' view of the state is indeed a considerable embarrassmentl for the state appears to them as the antithesis of trust and as an alien source of authority. The prominence of the state's legal institutions in their lives signals a fall from social harmony, and the state is itself the target of all sorts of criminality-tax evasion, bribery, perjury-that the villagers represent as fair revenge for its interfering rapacity. From the villagers' standpoint, however, these marks of sinfulness are an important part of what luakes the state itself more human and the nation worth defending. Its formal face is merely the defensive posture, not what is actually defended. People do not fight for abstract perfection but for the intimacies that lie behind it; these unruly shepherds recognize the humanity of the politicians who seek their votes, the bureaucrats who expect to be bribed, the police who can be neutralized and turned into likable dupes by an act of sheer cheek thinly disguised as hospitality. Such creative mischief both subverts and sustains the authority of the state. l
36
This contradictory duality, the defining ambiguity of disemia in social practice, is also the core proposition of social poetics: norms are both perpetuated and reworked through the deformation of social conventions in everyday interaction. At this point in the book, I layout the technical features of a social poetics and l in order to flesh out its practical implications, illustrate its possibilities from the contrasted cases of Greek and American displays of gendered stereotypes ("Social Poetics in Theory and Practice: Regular Guys and Irregular Practices"). While this chapter is less immediately concerned with the nation-state as such, it may be helpful as a more precise description of social poetics and, more specifically, as a closer look at how both normative and subversive forms become incorporated into everyday social repertoires. It is also an examination and explanation of the relationship between cultural forms and social deformation, which, as I have indicated, provides the pragmatic means for official discourse to penetrate the intimacies of everyday life. This dynamic provides a model of the larger intimacies to be defended against the prying hostility of the nation's critics and enemies. That play of images in everyday life is the subject of "The Practice of Stereotypes." Centrally at stake are the disemic confusions of conflicting self-ascription. Are we "European" or "Third World?" When do we claim which identity? In what contexts do these discriminations matter, and what larger geopolitical realities do they iudex? While these issues are perhaps unusually acute for the Greeks whose cultural predica-· ments form the bulk of my illustratious, they are indicative of more general issues concerning the relationship between international politics and everyday social life. It is this mutual reproduction of different levels of identity that gives the model of social poetics its distinctive analytic usefulness. In this chapter I particularly address the local consequences of the global-a complement to, and inversion of, the earlier discussions of how local values may affect global events. Finally, in "Afterword: Toward a Militant Middle Ground?" I return briefly but practically to the issue of cultural intimacy and its violation. What are the ethics of anthropological reporting? Given the long-standing preoccupation of anthropology with gossip, are we simply to accept the role of the academic tabloid? I think not. For the moment, however, suffice it to say that nationalists' irritation with anthropology suggests 37
Cultural Intimacy
a more serious ethical dilemma than whether to suppress the sensationalist aspects of ethnographic description to suit the demands of modesty. To preteod that anthropology escapes moral imperatives, as some advocates of "scientific" approaches desire, is a rejection of the discipline's engagelnent with socially experienced reality. Bnt to pretend that the discipline can offer unequivocal solutions to such dilemmas is an equally poor substitute for taking responsibility for our own respective positions and for actions, including writing, that flow fronl those positions. The exercise of bringing the ideas in this book to some attempt at coherence, conducted over two editions, has permitted some reappraisal and a good deal of systematization. But it is still a perfonnance, and it may well be a more self-conscious one than were the several short pieces out of which it has grown. Does this Inake it somehow more suspect? Or does it deliberately make it part of what it represents, the practice of social life? That, at least, is what I hope has happened. For me the pleasures of writing have throughout sustained an absorbing tension between the essentialism entailed in giving shape to ideas and impressions, and the taunting vertigo of skeptical doubt without end. This has been the "militant middle ground" on which I have engaged with the conventions and assumptions of my profession. If I appear to want to turn everything, including that profession, into an anthropological issue, I can only reply that for me there is no anthropology separate from social life. Nor can I imagine any aspect of social life that does not partake of the social poetics I have tried to make central to the anthropological task. Even the silence of withdrawal is a performance: it has an audience, and that audience will pass judgment. Paraphrasing the Roman poet Terence, we might then observe that nothing human is alien to this perspective. Or, conversely paraphrasing Samuel Johnson, we might assert that when humans tire of the concerns that animate an anthropology so conceived, they are tired of life.
38
Chapter Two
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy
Revisionist Reflections When the first edition of Cultural Intimacy appeared, I entertained what in retrospect seems a reasonably modest ambition for the book: I hoped that it might help to frame certain issues that I had encountered in working on the anthropology of Europe. The late 1990s were an important phase for anthropology, because the urge to reflexivity had coincided with an intensified and critical interest in ethnography and, especially, with the ethnography of Western societies (both in Europe and in North America). The dangers of self-indulgent wallowing in remorse were thus ceding space to a calmer reflection on the relevance of Europeauist and North American ethnography for the development of anthropological theory. That new areal focus has yet to encounter postcolonial theory in any significant degree, a necessary move if both domains of study are to escape the kind of parochialism that is only possible in powerful regions and huge topics; one can envisage a substantial rethinking of colonialism, for example, once it becomes clearer what that process looked like from "below stairs"-the stairs of the conquerors rather than of the obvious subalterns. Yet the fact that an anthropology of Europe emerged at all helped to set that synergy on its way by making reflexivity a more practicable and empirical task. In the process it did much to weaken those profoundly silly oppositions-far too long sustained for the purposes of academic politics- between the postmodern and the positivist, the textual and the social, the symbolic and the material, and even "them" and 39
Cultural Intimacy
"us" tout court. My plea for a militant middle ground was thus becoming gratifyingly redundant. At the same time, numerous authors have made use of the cultural intimacy concept. Some have engaged critically with it; others have turned to some of the associated ideas such as structural nostalgia and social poetics. In some cases, these allusions have been adaptations to particular ethnographic cases; in others, a more critical engagement has helped to develop the framework. At this juncture, some seven years after the first edition of Cultural Intimacy, the temptation to reposition my arguments and to respond to these useful elaborations has proved impossible to resist. The present chapter is what might more familiarly be known to French or Italian readers as an "intervention." I intend it as an intervention, not only in debates I may have helped to launch, but also in the flow of this book. That is why the present chapter appears after the opening chapter of the original. It is not so much that I am satisfied with that opening salvo, as that it is important to Inaintain the sense of an ongoing discussion. If I initially thought to layout the basic concepts iu that first chapter, it will now be apparent that I have also, more obviously after the passage of years, exposed their defects and loose ends. For those who have not read the original version, the opening chapter will still serve its intended introductory function; for other readers, it may serve more as a reminder of unsolved problems. In the present chapter, however, it is not my intention to address these weaknesses exhaustively and conclusively-surely a vain goal. It is, rather, to help situate the arguments historically; to build constructively on the suggestions (and the occasional misunderstandings) of others to clarify the argument and make it more flexible; and to make the work as a whole more accessible to those who might not have a direct interest in the particular ethnographic cases on which my original thinking rested. If in the process such readers begin to appreciate the significance of these cases for anthropology as a whole-and particularly the peculiar position of the ethnography of Europe for a repositioning of debates on the postcolonial position-I should be well satisfied. To increase accessibility still further, I have also lengthened the final chapter, and I have also made some substantive changes at the end of the chapter on structural nostalgia, in an attempt to remind the reader of the wistful evolutionist thinking that seems to resurface in every generation of anthropologists despite their
40
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy
best efforts to be rid of it-a form of structural nostalgia in itself, the pervasive prescuce of which in our own thinking might help to explain why we find the phenomenon so hard to spot in the field. My hope is that the ensemble will now flow more smoothly, articulate better with recent developments in the ethnography of nation-states (such as recent work by James C. Scott [1998]), and reflect my own widening ethnographic interests and the already observable effects that the notion of cultural intimacy has evoked. It is also an opportunity to broaden the discussion, to which I return at the end of the book, of the ethics of ethnography in the age of what we are learning to recognize as· "audit culture."1 If ethnography entails probing the inner secrets of others' social lives, we should not be surprised if-especially at a time when reflexivity is all the rage-others want to inspect the interior spaces of our own ethics and practices. At the same time, some of the concerns expressed in the routinized questionnaires that ethics committees administer are inappropriate to anthropological work; most of our informants, for exalnple, would be outraged at the very idea that our data-their gifts to us-should be destroyed at the end of the research period. It is thus important that we ponder our own ethical COffilllitments very clearly. Many of us are engaged in forms of community activism that provide a clear answer to such concerns. But when it comes to ethics, then; is certainly also some dirty laundry in the anthropological closet. A fully reflexive ethics entails asking ourselves whether we are defending an ethical position or being defensive-whether, in other words, we are engaging in a productive public debate to enlarge the understanding of etrucs in a multicultural age or, unacceptably by our own standards (as I firmly believe), defending our own "professional intimacy" from the legitimate curiosity of wellintentioned colleagues.
Shifting Orientations Two other very specific and contextual changes have occurred since the first edition appeared. The first is that, after many years of research on Greece, I decided to extend my field research, first to Italy, and later, also to Thailand. Some of the reasons for these shifts should become apparent in the present chapter; for the moment, suffice to note that although the first foreign edition of Cultural Intimacy appeared in Italian, colleagues working in Thailand were also among the first to experiment in teaching and
41
I
!I
I "
Culturallntimacy
I
research with the ideas expressed therein. 2 Tllis suggested that a model initially grounded in Europe had some relevance elsewhcre, despite the increasingly clear historical circumstance that these IllodeIs derive fronl the surprisingly indestructible dominance of Europe as the cultural standard of excellence. It is useful to think specifically about why a model developed in Greece might resonate especially well in these two countries. The answer begins to emerge fronl a reflection on the cultural context of our own disciplinary practices and history. The extent to which colleagues treated the shift to Italy as somehow natural but that to Thailand as very odd served to highlight the extent to which we remain constrained) 110t so much by assumptions about culture areas, as by both the mortal limitations of our own time for active work and the conceptual limitations of that seemingly inescapable division of the world into Western and Other. Both of these factors are forms of contingency that are very much part of what I mean by cultural intimacy. The eccentric, respective relationships of Greece, Italy, and Thailand with that entity we imagine as "the West" all furnish an angle of vision, especially given the socially grounded nature of ethnography, that is not accessible frmll the more conventional areas of European Studies. They force us to realize that the idea of the West cannot be understood independently of its ramifications, internal and external, through global struggles for cultural and political dominance, or of a historiography that recognizes the mutability and mortality, not only of colonialism's foot soldiers, but also of the grandiose ideas and cultural values that they were drafted to impose on the world. Greece emerged from the shadows of colonialism, and in its geographical and political margins, as an apparently "orientaP' land that was also the "birthplace of rhe West." Italy, securely located in the western part of the continent, struggles with a complex relationship with an equally nebulous "Africa" while at the same time seething with tensions between its regional cultures and dialects on the one hand and the utopian vision of a national culture on the orher. As for Thailand, unambiguously an Asian country in the geographical sense, the history of its engagement with the Western powers-in many respects parallel to that of Greece-is reflected in a long sequence of cultural compromises and adaptations that continue to this day. Each of these places recognizes different refractions of the idea of the West, and each, in its own complex ways, poses challenges to the West's impenous permanence. 42
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy
These are intimations of a collective mortality, the suppression of which Benedict Anderson (1983: 18) has pinpointed as a key goal of nationalism. Mortality similarly challenges the dream of achieving absolute rationality. Whether as scholarsllip (Tambiah 1990) or as administrative practice (Herzfeld 1992a; Rabinow 1989), an eternally valid rationality is a dream that evaporates in the crucible of practical experience, with its constant reminders not only of mortality but also of its unpredictability-such being the inner face of what we might call epistemological intimacy. The outer, public face is precisely that area of enormous power where administration and science join forces to deny the relevance of contingency in the dominance of the West and to claim a timeless ethics, a timeless aesthetics, and, ultimately, eternal dominion over the world. The protests of the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico against this universalist hubris rest precisely on his recognition that the idea of pure abstraction was an illusion born of the idea of absolute power; the rarity with which he is now read is the clearest index of the enormous power against which he dared to voice such corrosive ideas. Vico's perspective implicitly acknowledges what I am calling cultural intimacy; it is a recognition of that deep sense of a shared fatality, something to be treasured precisely because it is at once impermanent and private, that seems common to virtually all intimacy. Assumptions about what should be hidden from other countries flow from prior assumptions about cultural value-about what is proper, just, and elegant. Even in the United States the obsession with "European" style betrays an obsessively subaltern glance over its shoulder by a country that has already in turn become perhaps the mightiest colonial power in human history. There is an uneasy feeling that "regular guys" should not be disporting themselves in the mocking gaze of disdainful Europeans such as Gerhard Schroeder or Jacques Chirac, but that the one way to claim some measure of comfort in cultural intimacy is to boycott French wines and celebrate "liberty fries"-an act of resistance that may simply serve to confirm the cultural order it is designed to contest. By extension, and all the lllore persuasively, weaker countries that have labored long and hard to achieve "European" status-Romania, Turkey, Russia-or to imitate the trappings of its self-proclaimed high culture-here Japan and Thailand come especially to mind-define their cultural priorities in relation to "Europe." While some, such as Singapore, may choose instead to emphasize the alternative of "Asian values," this 43
Cultural Intimac)'
rather too obviously defensive strategy also smacks of what Australians appropriately dub the "cultural cringe." Thus, my decision to work in Italy (an obviously "European" country but one whose capital is internally viewed with some disdain by the rest of the country) and Thailand (a clearly Asian country with a long and sometimes humiliating engagement with the West that has not prevented it from achieving a much-admired record of successful enterprise and aesthetic self-presentation) has amplified my growing awareness of these larger entailments, itself already fueled by the work I was doing on the management of artisanal "tradition" in Greece. The other notable change in the context in which I am writing is a particular engagement with the concept of cultural intinlacy itself. A volume on cultural intimacy and mass mediation, edited by Andrew Shryock (2004), appeared shortly before the publication of this edition of Cultural Intimacy. While I can only briefly allude here to the excellent work contained therein (I have responded in detail in the volume itself), the emergence of this collaborative effort has added enormous excitement to the topic by expanding its horizons both geographically and through the amplification of the mass-mediated public stage. The idea of cultural intimacy grew out of my early and somewhat uneasy awareness that the social intimacy good ethnographers achieve in the field, sometimes in very small-scale encounters, opens up the politically sensitive and culturally neuralgic concerns of entire countries (and, 1 would now add, of other enconlpassing entities as well). Shryock's volume provides a much-needed amplification of that crucial point: by showing how the intimate seeps into public spheres that have themselves been magnified by tbe technologies of mass mediation, the authors in his collection supply a specific, material, and absolutely central explanation of how both ideologies of belonging and the discontents that they (so it seems) inevitably spawn have spread, permeated the interstices of everyday living, and enmeshed human bodies ever more inextricably in the tensions among the many levels at which people manage the sense of distinction between themselves and others.
Complicating Concepts A major purpose of this chapter is to take advantage of some of the new work on cultural intimacy. Drawing from this work, I propose to show how some poorly developed arguments on my 44
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy
part, regardless of whether I think my intentions were correctly interpreted, can be productively deployed toward strengthening the original model and making it more useful. These extensions take three major forms: historical (the original model was simply too static); institutional (the original model was too tightly focused on the nation-state, which in respect of cultural intimacy turns out to be a strong example but by no means uniquely relevant); and geographical (it is not only applicable to countries in the periphery of Europe). One temptation here is to increase the nUl11ber of "types" of intimacy that we recognize. Something of the sort has already happened with nostalgia: we have "imperialist nostalgia" (Rosaldo 1989: 68-87), "practical nostalgia" (Battaglia 1995), my own formulation of structural nostalgia, and the commonly encountered "folkloric nostalgia," to name some obvious cases in point. Obviously one could do the saIne for cultural intimacy. Richard Maddox (2004), for example, lists several modalities (skeptical, communalist, and exclusionary). But these are all aspects of cultural intimacy, brought to the fore by the volatile politics of the moment: hospitality and the exclusion of outsiders from inside knowledge are not mutually incompatible, for example, while both mesh well with skepticism about the viability of group institutions. Maddox's classification is thus not an instance of what Edmund Leach (1962) famously called "butterfly collecting" (classification for its own sake). It could easily be read in this way, however, and that would undermine its heuristic flexibility. His work should instead prompt questions about the conditions under which cultural intimacy acquires each of these emphases-for that is what they are, rather than l11utually exclusive types. There is nevertheless a serious temptation to allow the classification of cultural intimacy to proliferate out of hand. The reason for this probably lies, at least from a historical perspective, in the growing antipathy of both anthropologists and their critics to the kind of simplistic binarism that characterized ti,e heyday of structuralist thought. Indeed, my own move from disemia to cnltural intilnacy was motivated, as I have already noted, by a desire to resist that kind of reductionism-to avoid the temptation to multiply the refractions of binarism, instead of challenging its allure by asking awkward questions about its political and historical implications. Clearly that bid was not entirely successful. Some readers have either taxed me with needless dichotomizing, or have taken that path themselves. 45
Cultural Intimacy
While I share the general suspicion of structuralist assumptions about the binary organization of thought and culture, we cannot ignore the fact that in the West-the world-dominating cultural presence, however we choose to delineate it-human society is often conceptualized in clearly binary terms. Even today, for example, starkly simplistic oppositions between developing and developed nations translate the before-and-after discrimination of evolutionism into policy and practice. For evolutionisln, masquerading as history) offered only a single incline, at the summit of which sat those who could be said to have "alwaysalready" arrived. Had I explored to the persistence of evolutionism in anthropological thought as cOlnprehensively as Johannes Fabian does in Time and the Other (1983), I then also Inight have been quicker to spot its remarkable tenacity i:p. everyday talk around d,e world, and thus to identify what I have more recendy come to call "the global hierarchy of value"-of which I will have more to say below. AB it is, the idea was there for the seizing: Greece, one country that has internalized the West's binary view of the world to a striking degree, is also conspicuously (as I had often commented) one country that displays a dual sense of its identity, with historically different names for its people when they commune among themselves and when they are asked to display their culture on the iuternational stage. 3 I have dealt with this issue in the previous chapter, but raise it again here to emphasize that some residual binarism is probably inevitable: however successful we are in throwing off the trammels of colonialist ways of thinking, they remain a significant historical presence and, as such) an influence on present-day geopolitical configurations. Cultural intimacy will thus always echo this residual binarism; indeed, the very notion of a private cultural space shielded from the critical view of the powerful is inherently binary and explicitly an expression of hierarchy resented but, ipso facto, acknowledged. Paradoxically, as it may seem to some) a more historical appreciation of the model has made it possible to avoid wowing out the baby of historical context with the bathwater of binarism-asabsolute: we can sec how and where binarism actually crept into our collective discourses. The two, mutually interdependent factors that enable this conceptual adjustment are time and agency. The transformative principle, moreover) is that of social
46
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Culturallntimacy
poetics. Social poetics here allows us to analyze strategic or tactical deployments of ideal types-stereotypes, laws and regulations, representations of culture, nostalgic folklore, class markers such as speech and dress-so that we can understand cultural intimacy as a complex process rather than as a static type of insiderhood characterized by one institutional framework (such as the nation-state, especially), one idiom of representation (in which embarrassment is the only mode of response to revelations of its content), and one orientation (specifically to "the West"). By recasting such pretensions to eternity in temporal and experiential terms, we can ask why the nation-state has seemed the 11Iost obvious site for the operation of cultural intimacy, why certain features are deemed einbarrassing at particular historical moments, and why "the West" remains, if not the only external referent, a dominant one for the time being. Drawing attention to changes in my own cirCUlnstances and interests since before the original publication of the first edition is not an attempt to lay claim to some sort of intellectual patent so much as to contribute to this historicizing process. The paradox of history written in anything other than the first person singular-a style that many historians abhor as unscholarlylies precisely in a Cill"ious denial of agency and of responsibility for perceptions that are, after all, grounded in personal observation and experience. I suspect that most historians, reading what I have just written, would deny that they were trying to avoid embarrassment, but would instead claim for their discipline an idiom of modest decorum. The anthropological dissection of cultural intimacy, however, grounded (as it must be) in intimate ethnographic encounters, does not logically permit us the same grammatical fig leaf. As I argue later in the book, some of what we write has material consequences, and we must be prepared to take responsibility for these. To do so entails recognizing the entailment of our personal agency in a temporal process, and it seems wise to signal that in the way in which we write. Yet the assumptions of intimacy should also not becolne grounds for holier-than-thou complacency. In an argument reminiscent of Iny own call for a "militant middle ground," and similarly recognizing reification as an aspect of social life, Keane (2003: 238-41) warns that "we" are not constitutive of a clearly defined category and should not shelter behind simplistic reductions of agency to the level of "comnlon sense/' a common sense 47
Cultural Intimacy
that is no less culture-specific or historically contingent than that of more positivistic social scicntists. This would appear to lend support to a grammatical style that maintains the tension between what Keane labels the simultaneous intimacy and estrangement of the ethnographic encounter. That being the case, there is much to be said for maintaining the awkwardness of dislocating scholarly pretensions that the syntactical idiosyncrasy of the first pcrson singular generates for readers from outside the discipline. This is an instance of what T have called "productive discomfort" (Herzfeld 1992a: 16). The practice of fieldwork has always posed challenges to the complacencies of anthropologists; but, by the same token, it has sometiInes seemed to generate them, too. The ironic portrait of "the anthropologist as hero" (Sontag 1970), for example, is often replicated in celebration of ethnographic suffering, embarrassment, and even stupidity, converting the side effects of claiming intimacy with the strange into essential features of the professional persona. This is an instance of what, later in this book, T describe as the performance of stereotypes; indeed, I have also insisted that the very act of writing our ethnographies is similarly a performance (Herzfeld 1992b). Viewed in these terms, our mode of production must be examined for the effects, intended and otherwise, that it triggers both in the field and in our larger professional universe. These considerations are inseparable from questions of ethics. Several of d,e essays in the Shryock volume tackle this issue head011, focusing on the politics of engagement, but I think we can also pursue the issue in a more technical direction as well. Like Keane, I see the self-reification of the anthropologist-what Keane, in an examination of the materiality of language that derives from his careful dissection of ritual practice in Indonesia (Keane 1997: 9-14), usefully labels "objectification"-as a largely unexamined aspect of currently fashionable claims to a reflexive posture. 4 Calling such claims fashionable is itself problematic (and arguably an act of stereotyping and thus of objectification). Although many would see this as a necessarily pejorative criticism, I intend simply to call attention to the embeddedness of such self-stereotyping in the particularities of anthropologists' own cultural and historical moments, and as a means of making our discomfort more productive still. My work in Greece led me to appreciate at an early stage that the supposedly intimate inlages of national culture that critics directed against the nationalists' rhetoric were themselves, to an
48
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equal degree, reifications, stereotypes, objectifications in Keane's sense. Literary scholars had begun to ll1ake very similar observations and to situate these essentialisms in their historical contexts (Tziovas 1986). It is particularly important not to surrender to the temptation-which for all sorts of professional reasons can be quite alluring-to regard the portrait of intimacy that emerges in such confrontations as the zone of a kind of agency that could easily be equated with such equally nebulons and ideologically laden ideas as freedom of choice and individualism. Individualism is itself the product of a very peculiar historical development, grounded in ideas of property ownership and thus fundamental to emergent ideas of nationhood, heritage, and tradition (see Askew 1996; Handler 1985). Agency is no less problematic; the notion of agency all too easily slides into romanticized notions of free choice, individualism, and the apotheosis of intimacy, and thns willy-nilly reproduces the persistent evolutionism that conjoins us to a positivistic and colonialist intellectual past that many present-day anthropologists wonld prefer to forget. Just as social actors portray the "intimate" portrait of Greece as the Zorba-esque abandonment of formal responsibility and social convention, in the process oftcn reducing it to an all-toopredictable performance of spontaneity, so, ll10re generally, we must beware of two fallacies. The first is to see public repres~n tations of nlodernist intimacy as a new loosening of ideological shackles; they represent instead, in Keane's terms, an objectification of contingent social relations in termS that sit well with modernism. Perhaps it is only through irony that individnals can so release themselves from the constraints of encompassing power, but, when they do so, they also risk confirming the very stereotypes-of uncouth traditionalism above all-that lock them into their subaltern position. The second fallacy lies in misreading the public representation of the nation as a family as itself the expression of "cultural intimacy." It is, to the contrary, the opposite of cultural intimacy: an attempt to control domestic relations for the purposes of public representation. fts, such, it occludes the dirty secret that, for example, some women and men remain mutually distant, even hostile, within the home, cleaving to a patriarchal traditionalism that the state claims to have abolished; or that some parents still try to teach their children to learn enOflllOUS amounts of facts by rote even as their schools insist that this is bad for them.s It also occlndes the still more embarrassing fact that not all families are happy and harmonious.
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Shades and Shadow ofIntimacy A key feature of cultural intinlacy is that its content is necessarily inconstant. It represents the alternatives to currently official views, which, for all their pretensions of eternal truth, are themselves demonstrably labile. As reactions to state or other official forms of reification, cultural intimacy is no less a space of reification. Because it is also a space in which people feel safe from official interference-where its defining rejection of official norms affords that sense of internal security-it Illay also have the paradoxical effect of Illobilizing support for, or at least weakening resistance to, official importunings. It is likely that nation-states like Greece or the United States, emerging from a process of liberation that was also a process of collective selfdefinition, would not have been able to consolidate their power over sometimes reluctant populations without the unacknowledged refuge afforded by these culturally intimate zones. This is not to say that the framers of such national identities deliberately sought to achieve that effect; but many of them will have been aware of the possibility and perhaps for that reason tried to avoid confronting what otherwise would have seemed intolerably rebellious attitudes. 6 It is in this light that I respond to one of the most interesting critical responses to the original model to have appeared so far. Alexander Kiossev's (2002) discussion of "dark intimacy," in which the Bulgarian scholar suggests that there are many varieties of collective intimacy in the Balkan postsocialist countries, could easily, like Maddox's analysis, be misconstrued as an exercise in butterfly collecting. His descriptiou of "a kind of willing regression into a great, scandalous, Balkan 'neighborhood,' away from both Europe and the annoying official homelands" (Kiossev 2002: 185), sounds distinctly like the Greek variety. In an extended endnote, however, he suggests that cultural intinlacy is not only the result of a response to the presence of the state, but also raIllifies into a plethora of similarly conceived responses to power: "relics of pre-modern identities still question the power of national 'high' cultures, while the national high cultures passionately reject the apparent Balkan similarities (cultivating simultaneously nesting Balkanisms). These high cultures are still engaged-each for its own sake-in a vain struggle against the arrogance of Western Balkanism. In turn Balkanism, as a variant of a colonial discourse, has to cope with the new discourses in
50
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultuml Intimacy
power: cultural globalism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism" (Kiossev 2002: 190, n. 45). Kiossev is undoubtedly right to recognize a wider range of such contrasts than that iIllplied in IllY original heavy focus on the nation-state. All institutional structures are capable of generating their own peculiar intimacies; all encompassing cultural entities (such as diasporas, some of which are notoriously "defensive") may at times exhibit the same characteristic reluctance to admit prying outsiders. Academia is no exception; writing of the practices of social science in Taiwanese academic institutions, for example, Allen Chun (2000: 590) has documented a whole series of local practices-including the emergency of "a minor industry ... in which needy and frustrated academics buy receipts frOlll sympathetic vendors ... to purchase unapproved items such as PCs under the ru bric of miscellaneous goods." Proponents of the local audit culture that underwrites such practices would certainly deny their centrality to the scheme of things, as would the academics themselves; but the fact remains that this is a necessary collusion if any research is to get done, in a system that has largely taken over the trappings of a Western-derived model of accountability and yet at the same time rests securely in social practices of locally much more ancient lineage, ironically, than the intellectual genealogies that such practices have enabled scholars to build. The Balkans, as an area of otherness internal to geographical Europe, offer an entirely comparable spectacle. Both the nationstate and the other institutional discourses that Kiossev mentions are products of the same broadly Western-dominated global hierarchy. In this context, the Greek case provides illuminating points of contrast because of its special role as hallowed European ancestor now fallen on hard times, but it should not serve as a touchstone for deciding "how much" cultural intimacy another country or region possesses. Geographically a Balkan successor state to the Ottoman Empire like all the others, Greece nonetheless had a radically divergent political, cultural, and linguistic trajectory; consequently, the interior space it defends differs no less radically from that of Bulgaria or Albania. The point of the model is not to smooth away differences but, on the contrary, to serve as a heuristic device for identifying them and showing how they affect the negotiation and content of cultural intimacy. In that sense, Kiossev's concern that intimacy sounds perhaps too gentle and warm to accommodate the sometimes hostile implica51
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tions of transgressive actions is entirely reasonable, but I prefer to maintain a transgressive sense of the word itself. In this way, I hope that it will provoke discomfort sufficiently productive to prompt further explorations of what happens behind ti,e walls of official self-representation. I might add that intimate relationships are not always calm or reassuring! Thus, too, in the cOlllparison between Greece and Italy, the model can serve to flush out the diHerences in the ways in which a dynamics of strong national self-identification contrast with a situation in which it is local and regional identity with which people are concerned. (May we perhaps speculate that this is also connected with the difference between Athenian tendencies to build social relationships on patterns of riposte and challenge and Roman willingness to "let things go" [lassd std]? In Greece, fragmentation is social rather than cultural; in Italy there is a strong tendency, although it is far from absolute, in the opposite direction.)? In Greece, it is the nation that both officially denies its indebtedness to an Ottoman past but internally acknowledges it; at the same time, the capital in Athens is the uncontested center of cultural as well as political power. In Italy, "Africa begins in Rome" according to northerners; Romans both allege that "Mrica begins" farther south and at the same time emphasize the southern character of their own local culture, with its distinctive dialect and traditions-a judgment in which other Italians, most of them contel11ptuously, are pleased to concur. In Spain, a polity with yet another political framework, it is Andalusia-culturally and linguistically closer to the elite Castilianism of Madrid than most of the industrialized regions of the north-that represents "Mrica" within. In all three cases, expressions of rueful embarrassment emphasize the non-European content of the otherness within the body politic, distributing it differently in accordance with historically contingent differences in political organization and dynal11ics. So it is, too, with the Balkans north of Greece. The romanita that Mussolini wished on the Romans suffers from association with his discredited regime; but Romanians find in the name they share with the ancient empire some strikingly different implications, especially amid a sea of Slavic and other allegedly "less European" peoples further alienated from the West by their twentieth-century history under Russian control. 8 We therefore do not need to multiply the categories of cultural intimacy to appreciate that it is, as Kiossev shows, a product of the dominance of Western models as well as of models conceived 52
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy
in reaction to these. We should maintain in all its simplicity the basic idea of a zone of intimate culture, conceived in opposition to powerful images of an idealized West (or conceivably some other political pole), and affording a refuge from such imposing formalities. What IGossev's critique most usefully suggests, far from any encouragement of terminological proliferation, is the need to unphasize the open-endedness of the 1110dcl, in which indeed the nation-state figures as one important but by no means unique level of identification at which distinctions between the public and intimate faces of identity are negotiated. That increases, if anything, the sense of a heavily predominant global structure of cultural authority and power. Further ethnographic investigation, moreover, l11ight well reveal the ways in which specific models of cultural intimacy provide fodder for its reproduction in new contexts. The complexity of the Balkan region and the rapidity with which the geopolitical map has changed offer a unique opportunity to document such processes and to show how unstable, in practice, the realia of both official discourse and cultural intimacy are. Kiossev suggests that in the "dark intimacy" of the Balkans people do not so much appropriate official discourse for their own ends as they oppose all official discourse by means of an irreverent rejection of any kind of order. That, I suggest, is _no less true for Greece than it is for the countries he is considering; it is revealing that he follows the political convention of not treating Greece as a Balkan country when he emphasizes his personal access to the intimacy of Bulgaria. (There is an implicit contrast in what he says, between a Greece characterized by what he sees as IllY understanding of cultural intimacy and "the Balkans" at large.) On the other hand, if we follow the minimalist definition of cultural intimacy that I have just proposed, it matters not a whit whether one strategy of dealing with state discourse is to expropriate it; irreverence and subversion can certainly entail imitation and irony, but they can also take the form of outright rejection and mockery. In Greece, it is true, local actors sometimes do expropriate the discourse of officialdom for their own purposes; but Kiossev does not claim that in Bulgaria and Serbia they do not. When Cretan sheep-thieves lay claim to the mantle of the revolutionary guerrillas of the national War· of Independence, they are certainly contesting official historiography. But in any case such expropriations of official discourse should uot become the defining characteristic of cultural intimacy. Rather, 53
Cultural Intimacy
cultural intimacy is about alternative discourses-whether at the level of semantics (as in the case of expropriation) or of outward expression (as in the case of oppositional rhetoric). And in this regard both Greece and Bulgaria, not to speak of all the other countries of the Balkan peninsula, seem stupendously well equipped. (We might also recall here the geographically distant example) mentioned in the previous chapter, of the Wakuenai, whose incorporation of three nation-states into its local kinship system surpasses anything I have encountered in the European context.) In the intimate spaces, officials themselves oscillate betvleen caprice and collusion with those who, with equal disregard for formality, operate on the far margins of the law (see, e.g., Konstantinov 1996). Kiossev remarks, more specifically) that "the agency in power" is multiplied beyond that of a simple opposition between the state and its citizens because the intimacy of which he writes "scandalizes the official idioms ... rather than using and appropriating them" (2002: 190. n. 45). He suggests (loc. cit.) that this kind of activity "is just a form of anarchic protest against any kind of identity and any kind of symbolic order." I would in fact go further than Kiossev, and argue that the expropriation of official discourse is just one variety of the "scandal') he describes; it is a form of semantic play, ironic in effect and sometimes also in intention, that erodes the authority of bureaucrats' literal-mindedness. Consider, notably) the Cretan animal-thieves who first insist on inviting the local police to a sumptuous meal and then inform them that they have together just eaten the evidence (Herzfeld 1985a: 220-22); or their intellectual compatriots in Athens who, informed by the military dictators of the time that books may only be published under precise descriptive titles, publish a set of scathing satires under the label Eighteen Texts (Van Dyck 1997: 19). The work·to-rule, to wbich Scott (1998: 256,310-11) gives generous play in his account of how workers maintain dignity within the constraints of sOlnetimes suffocating regulation, is perhaps a more routine subversion, one that is all the harder for the state to control in that it openly transforms an ironic pose of conformism into real mischief. State officials may themselves subvert the official order in much the same way; civil servants, working to rule, can bring a nation to its knees remarkably quickly. For them, such action represents one of several choices of how to exercise their agency; the more familiar case, perhaps, is that of the individual 54
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy
official's self-serving interpretations of the law at the expense of some hapless citizen rather than at that of the state as a whole. Really skilled officials, however, can have it both ways. When bureaucrats contest local interpretations of legal language or history, for example, they often profess themselves to be "scandalized,l' but they equally often participate in these subversive readings-sometimes in ways that lead to their being labeled "corrupt." (ehun's desperately conniving Taiwanese academics follow a scenario that may be familiar, in variant forms, around the world.) Equally often, officials themselves participate in activities that they would never openly acknowledge. Cretan sheep-thieves insisted that it was precisely those politicians who claimed they would never accept a thief's vote and actively promoted antirustlillg legislation in the national parliament, for example, who in practice were the most thoroughly enmeshed of all politicians in patronage networks grounded in nothing other than the theft of animals, given the opportunities that this afforded for intervening in the legal process in exchange for votes. Here, if ever there was one, is an example of how scandal can actually unite the populace behind its leaders, all complicit in an activity that the leaders, at least, would condemn as "un-Europeall."9 I am not sure that this intiInacy is particularly sinister for those engaged in it; they often seem to find it uproariously funny. But it is certainly intimate. The state itself may practice some form of cultural intimacy within larger orbits of power. It is often not so much the use of official discourse-what Bourdieu (1977: 40) recognizes as "officializing stratcgics"-as the deliberate rejection of externally derived idioms of order that gives cultural intimacy an important national role in the wake of international domination such as colonial hegemony. As Robert J. Foster, writing of Papua New Guinea, observes, "professions of marginality-indeed, of lnoral~ material, and intellectual inferiority to white people-often perform ... 'cultural intimacy'; they disguise not only agency) but also optimism and even a certain lnoral confidence" (Foster 2002: 132-33). Or, as Hirokazu Miyazaki (2000: 42-43) points out, drawing on the same set of ideas, the denial of agency is still itself a form of agency-performative nonperformativity, in some contexts (for new examples, see Askew 2002: 5; Malaby 2003: 21). Thus, Kiossev's joyful anarchy begins to look like the search for an alternative kind of identity rather than as a rejection of identity as such.ludeed, it may be the state's ability to tolerate just 55
Cultum! Intimacy
New Refiectiol1S on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy
such appearances of dissidence as "typically Balkan" (or Melanesian, or Greek, or Papuan, or Thai) that both justifies its own more repressive moments and yet allows it to rely for its own survival on conditions Inade more tolerable precisely because they do not follow official prescription and give at least the appearance of a comforting disorder. The ilnage of the West invoked in conjunction with order is also an inversion of tradition. Because the Balkan countries nlade extensive use of folklore to build a sense of national identity, they have always been associated with a high degree of traditionalism; and tradition, from the perspective of the modernist project of state-building, can be the antithesis of order. In its "picturesque" rendition, it may look like a spirited rejection of intrusive moder-' nity; in grinl reality, it can, no less frequently, serve to limit the play of local or personal agency. Traditionalism can thus work both ways: it appears to elevate its bearers to a glorious role; yet , as we shall see, it can also be a reason for marginalizing them. Its ironies are thus fertile ground for the play of cultural intimacy behind fa~ades of national culture. This may not always be obvious, if only because it is an aspect of political reality that official ideologies work hard to occlude. While Susan Reed, in her discussion of Sri Lankan dancers, generously recognizes this dimension of cultural intimacy in my original formulation (2002: 253), for example, Kiossev's observations show that it does need to be spelled out more clearly, lest we assume that the riotous proliferation of forms of agency in postcolonial and crypto-colonial situations necessarily means the effective empowerment of weak members of the society. It can have precisely the opposite effect. This, in fact, is a classic problem, which has also bedeviled discussions of "resistance" and underlies the paradoxes of traditionalism that spring from the persistent presence of the global hierarchy of value.'o Kiossev's discussion also shows that what does change is not the basic dichotomy between insiders and outsiders or the idea that the secrets of the former must be shielded from the latter. It is, rather, the specific content-what Fredrik Barth (1969), in another but related discussion-long ago trenchantly dubbed the "cultural stuff of, in this case, the intimate zone. l1 Yesterday's embarrassments are today's proud boast-which is why an enormous range of once deprecating ethnonyms, from "Blacks" to "Turks," have become badges of honor. The cold war split inherited the East-West geographical symbolism of an II
56
earlier cultural hegemony, with which it then coexisted quite comfortably virtually until the end of the twentieth century; the clamorous rise of "Yugo-nostalgia" (Halpern and Kideckel 2000: 18) and Ostalgie (Berdah11999: 176) shows that, where once the desire for personal wealth represented the zone of cultural nostalgia in socialist countries, today the yearning for the security of state control may be well situated to replace it. Cultural intimacy thus offers the glimmerings of an explanation of political change. What apparently does not easily change is the structural nortalgio-the conviction of every era that things aren't what they used to he. The case of Germany, with its dnal history, is especially instructive here.l2 The structural paradox of a Greece that combined stereotypical attributes of East and West, or of Kiossev's account of a seIf-constitutedly anarchic identity in the Balkans, plays out in the form of a structured political dichotomy in the case of the two Germanies. These mutually hostile but culturally inseparable states traded negative views of each other, each supplying the ideologically appropriate insults from a stock of pejorative stereotypes about Germans in general, as Dominic Boyer (2000: 479) has demonstrated. Context is crucial here; self-deprecation provides the weapons for attacking an ideological other, with whom cultural kinship is nonetheless at least tacitly acknowledged. This is not the "narcissism of small differences" that Anton Blok finds in tensions among culturally similar ethnicities (2001: 115-35), although it is a related phenomenon. It is a sour "injoke," permitting a defiant recognition of common ground under the guise of a claim , classic among ethnic groups that share common borders, to the effect that "we know what they are like from our own close experience," but with the added twist that it could not be directly attributed to racism. 13
Historicizing Cultural Intimacy The content of cultural intimacy is thus highly labile. It shifts with the ideological winds of history, sometimes in wildly unpredictable ways. These changes belie the very idea of nndying social values. Thus, for example, older, patriarchal models that constituted the core of the imagined identities of several countriesnotably Greece, Spain, Portngal, Turkey, and some Middle Eastern states-are now a source of embarrassment. What had once been considered shamefnl, by contrast, notably more open roles for the 57
, I
Cultural Intimacy
female members of these societies, has now beco111c the mark of a successful cultural emancipation; it is the perduring residue of patriarchy that has to be swept under the carpet, but that provides a sense of lasting social identification for at least the male segment of these countries' populations. Thus, Esra Ozyiirek (2004: 105-108), iu the Shryock volume, deftly traces the reversals in the fortunes of Turkish patriarchy, showing how what had formerly been the dominant form of personal and social morality was now in embarrassed retreat. What has changed is not the fact of official desire to defend the spaces of cultural intimacy, but the kind of social intimacy -that now serves as an acceptable metaphor for the ideal domestic space-no longer a place of patriarchal hierarchy, but a determinedly lllodcrnist and "European" space of open and egalitarian affect. Neither model has in its thue been a perfectly accurate representation of contemporaneous social experience; that experience, in which affectionate family relations disrupted the ideal-typical patriarchy as persistently then as aggressively domineering masculinity disrupts the eqnally ideal-typical modernity projected by the ideologues of today's Turkish state nationalism. What persists is the circumstance that there is always something to defend: a space of surreptitious pleasure, essential to maintaining a sense of cultural commonality precisely because it defies the inadequate and utopian generalizations of the state. The intimacy invoked by Giddens (1992) as the hallmark of modernity is an example of the ideal type emulated by the ideologues; Giddens, no less than Mauss, is an evolutionist apres la lettre, both excellent ethnographic illustrations of a mode of thought that is pervasive among Western intellectuals and their imitators. It is this personalized, individualistic intimacy that the Turkish ideologues invoke; among self-consciously Europeanizing Turkish elites today, it is the rejection of such social intimacy that constitutes the inconvenient but locally familiar reality in which we should seek the characteristics of cultural intimacy.t4 The key term here, if often unenunciated, is "backwardness"; these models do rest on a bedrock of evolutionism. A dramatic example comes from the Miao minority of southwestern China, a group characterized by "internal colonial relations" with the dominant Han minority (Schein 1999: 364). It seems that the more the women of this ethnic minority attempt in their performances of ethnic traditions to lay claim at the same time to a 58
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy
modernity sanctioned by the state, the more they appear to conform to the assumptions of the encompassing majority about the female hasis of their traditionalism (Schein 1999: 385-86). Here, then, is a non-European example of the hegemonic trap that I have identified for Greece, altll0ugh one wunders how far the dominant model of modernity attempts to overcome a silnilarly unequal relationship with "the West." Be that as it may, the structural point remains valid: that even the most self-glorifying claims to a traditional identity limit the extent to which the agency associated with the intimate spaces of a national or regional identity can actually overcome the impression of backwardness or some other ineradicable deficiency. This may help us refine the thorny relationship berween agency and efficacy. To understand agency's practical effects, we must address the implications of their traditionalism-riotously anarchic or decorously folkloric alike-in the larger arena. To achieve transcendence, social actors must he, not so much lllodern, as modernist. They must dissociate their personae from a collective, generically folkloric past; the latter becomes their cultural possession-the mark of their collective similarity or, as I am, calling it here, "iconicity"-rather than the social reality of their current social relations. This is the strategic essentialism of ethnogenesis, often itself a response to repression and state violence .(see Jackson 1995). As Andrew Orta (2002), building in part on my discussion of iconicity, shows for the emergence of Aym.ara ethnic solidarity, such reductive strategies are important tools in the production of effective political action. Nostalgia alone is not enough; to gain a place in the modernist world, one must take control of it and at the same time distance oneself from it in temporal terms and with a delicate sense of the irony of traditionalism's fundamental modernity. Nostalgia must not only he constructed; it must be seen to be constructed. The claim to agency is itself a key part of the modernist project, and woe betide those who do not realize that important principle. Thus, in an important demonstration of this point, Jane Collier (1997) has clearly shown how the commodification of tradition in Andalusia leads to a very decisive rejection of antiquated modes of dress and custom by the modernizing elite, anxious to gain its place in the bright Spanish neoliberal sun. Those modernist Andalusians have no difficulty in claiming the folklore as part of their past; but, as part of the present, it must be self-consciously framed. As Fabian (1983) has so well
59
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demonstrated, to represent something as belonging to the past is to place it in a lower category-a clear expression of cultural and political hierarchy. In the case of the sicilianismo discussed by the Schneiders, for example, official Italian state discourse represents mafia values as retrograde; sicilianisma represents an attempt to reverse this hierarchy, much as some Turkish Islamists would like to restore patriarchal values as the official rather than as the el11barrassing ethic. Backwardness is also associated with tradition; alTIOng the Cretan artisans I studied, for example, the reproduction of "diamond in the rough" characteristics-to adopt Jon Mitchell's (2002: 140) apt rephrasing of this aspect-becomes a Ineans of at once glorifying their contributions to national and local tradition and decrying their bad manners (Herzfeld 2004a). The logic of hegemony is such that embracing traditionalism gives one's modernist opponents the upper hand much of the time. Mitchell's Maltese infoflnants, for example, extolled the cOlnmunitarian solidarity of one once notorious district, since destroyed, as grounded in the values of family and mutual help; but they also recalled its violence, roughness, and uncouth behavior (Mitchell 2002: 138-41). They also emphasized that the community constituted, at least notionally, a "single family." These, however, were precisely the features that led the l110dernists to press ahead with the area's delnolition. The state has little interest in maintaining familistic entities between the levels of the household and the state itself, since such entities pose challenges to the state's legitimacy. These Maltese working class people had failed to suppress the indexical nature of the relations that subsisted among theIn, and that would give them-as so often happens in politically marginalized communities-a strong sense of what divided them from the elite. They did not fit into the iconic self-production of tbe bonrgeois Maltese state, but threatened its harmony by acts-ironically, iconic acts-of social subversion. They too literally and materially disrupted the image of a harmonious nation. The affection with which they were remembered after eviction and demolition shows how the values they represented remained as an important part of the collective sentiments associated with national identity. Such values remain central to the cultural intimacy of the Maltese nation-state. But the essence of cultural intimacy is that it constitutes a discreetly maintained secretnot an aggressive source of obvious public disruption. 60
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy
Discretion is indeed the name of the game: those who can manage the disreputable aspects of cultural intilnacy with their local intimates while at the same time presenting a picture of smooth collective unity to outsiders are the most effective citizens, able to negotiate their everyday social relations and their engagements with the bureaucracy with equal ease. Whether they recognize it or not, bureaucrats and legislators depend on the persistence of that intimate sociability even as they condemn its forms. Behind the teleology of the state lies another kind of teleology, the sense that this disreputable intimacy serves a useful purpose; in the light of Boyer's argument, it is entirely conceivable that the East German regime collapsed in part because its officials were so literal-minded in their refusal to countenance the slightest stain on the socialist escutcheon. Even where the state rejects any compromise, however, there arc many cases of societies that have managed to muddle through state-induced catastrophes precisely because their members were able to rely on the inside knowledge that the state itself condemned as backward, inappropriate, or immoral. This point, an important aspect of Scott's argument in Seeing Like a State (Scott 1998: 331,352), does not only explain why the worst of state interventions have failed, in most cases, to destroy the sense of commnnity altogether. It also helps us understand an issue that he does not address directly in that work: why so many self-professed state-haters can nevertheless lay claim- to deep patriotism-not always benevolently, as the genesis of local militias in the United States demonstrates, but sometimes with the kind of insouciant bravado that elicits the admiration even of the bnreaucrats they are mocking. The eclipse of local community thus does not mean that the values it represented have disappeared, but that they now form a submerged segment of the larger entity's self-recognition. Exposed to the wrong audiences, they would too easily serve as a dramatic enactment of a failure of authority. Indeed, some societies appear to have emerged as discrete entities quite explicitly through the deft management of collective secrets (e.g., Rohatynskyj 1997). In Europe, such bodies as the Carbonari of the Italian Risorgimento and the "secret schools" that allegedly laid the groundwork for the Greek revolution of 1821 learned to discriminate between the oikas and the demos at a very early stage m their respective evolutions. Revolutionary bodies usually secure their members' allegiance by the swearing of a ferocious oath, in which the bond among "brothers" must itself be shrouded in
61
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secrecy; Freelnasonry is another example of this technique. Even in the European Union's seemingly bland corridors of power, the inability of British bureaucrats to adapt to the personalism of their colleagues is seen, not as an admirable defense of principle, but as a failure to engage in the social realities of political management (Shore 2000: 82). The contrast between official pronouncements and the recognition of how things actually work has not lessened with the shift from national to pan-European bureaucratic practice, but discretion remains crucial to maintaining the balance; obviously savvy ethnographers can elicit interviews with European Union bureaucrats that may be no less startling in this regard than what one might have heard in the old days, under equally private conditions, from local politicians and their clients (Shore 2000: 119). It thus becomes clear that, if collective identity is expressed through mutual resemblance, its intimate secrets are a matter of relationships-relational aspects of communal identity that often also disrupt its smooth surface from within. When these relational aspects become too obvious~and especially when local entities openly oppose their own alternatives to the state's familism-the tension may become intolerable. Local familism stands in the way of the modernist-evolutionist project, celebrated as the rise of a code of manners by Norbert Elias (1978), of fixing final authority (and especially the arbitration of morality and social interaction) at the level of the state. Thus, extensions of the family into patronage networks become forms of "corruption" and "nepotism"-highly charged sYlnbolic terms of an entity centrally concerned with order; we can read Scott's account of modernist obsessions with a fully legible state order as describing an especially revealing version of the symbolism of purity and pollution. Mafia godfathers symbolize the failure of the state; nepotism is the political equivalent of incest. is We should not be surprised to find it associated in the official imagination with violence, crime, and simple had behavior. And it does not easily go away. Indeed, it may also be one among many aspects of the collusion, at the pragmatic level, that enables the state to achieve greater control over the populace-a collusion that rests, as Tanya Li (1999: 295) explicitly states in her analysis of Indonesian resettlelnent schemes, on the practical advantages of compromise grounded in intimate Inutual knowledge. 62
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy
Culture against Society Such collusion, however, must not be visible from outside the institutional frame itself. Again, this is a matter of discretion. The Indonesian state as studied by Li, for example, could hardly admit to the level of "muddling through" that allowed both the state and its citizens to proclaim certain resettlement schemes a success. More generally, no state can afford to admit that family networks continue to provide the means of practical, day-to-day integration. In tbe Cretan highland communities where I have worked, it was precisely those politicians who declared themselves adamantly opposed to accepting the votes of sheep-thieves who, so many villagers insisted, had built the most effective, kinshipbased pattonage links with these very miscreants. The problem is that familial intimacy is also the image that the state elaims as the space of its own idealized social harmony. Familism may still constitute the dirty secret that politicians share with local people, but local communities that insist on the internal cohesion of kinship links give national and even municipal authorities charged with their management cause for deep concern~ I write these words in the aftermath of fieldwork in Thailand, where I spent much of my time in one community in Bangkok, a place called Porn Mahakan, which had the misfortune to occupy a space coveted by the municipal authorities for a public park that would form part of its plan to transform the older part of the city into the Paris of the East. The residents were proud of being "one family," thereby rejecting the authorities' constant denial that they really were a community at all (on the highly dubious grounds that they had multiple origins). They wanted to convince the authorities that they had modernized on their own terms, while retaining many of the traditions associated with the national culture. Their rhetorical familism and a determination to resist museummcation challenged the very basis of official power. The evolutionist rhetoric of the state is immensely alluring. The Porn Mahakan residents themselves use terms like kaanpathanaa, "development," of the process that they are trying to sustain as they struggle to remain on their site. Both sides are trying to have their cake and eat it too: both wish to claim control over "tradition" while advancing equally persistent claims on "modernity." In this sense, tradition itself is a peculiarly modernist idea. Its political implications, however, only become clear when we perceive 63
, Cultural Intimacy
how easily it becomes associated with an image of uncouthness, and here the link with cultural intimacy becomes palpable. The social relations among family members are luore obviously liable to the corrosion of time than the putatively essential similarities that we recognize as the cultural common ground of citizens; when the entire nation is conceived as a single, vast family, the sheer complexity of relationships embedded in social experience through time yields to a bland assumption of timeless homogeneity. Real kinship is inconvenient, and state officials seek to supplant it by empbasizing similarity rather than relationships; such processes accompany the construction of collective power, and may sometilues be imitated at the community level (Orta 2002). Tbe very fact of genealogy presupposes not only the fusion of those who recognize their common kinship, an aspect that the state has every interest in subsuming, but also the fission of those who reject its embrace. The path that leads from genealogy and social relations to presumed unity and eternal truth is a trajectory of self-occlusion. Familistic entities that survive in the midst of municipal, regional, or national projects are thus inconvenient reminders of what has been occluded, and a too-visible representation of what lies within the zone of cultural intimacy. One decade's embarrassment may also become another's pride and joy. This is often evident in historic reconstruction projects, where d,e selection of buildings for restoration can follow different principles at different times-a telling comment on tbe underlying intention of fixing history for all time. Ozyiirek's (2004) study of changing values in the secular Turkish state is especially useful in this regard; recall again the radical change in the status of patriarchal authority, from public norm to source of lurking embarrassment. One can easily multiply examples of such shifts. Richard Maddox (2004) shows how Spanish authoritarianism has similarly "flipped" into what he calls "cosmopolitan liberalism," a tolerance of diversity that now rejects formerly dominant public models of national purity as an anachronistic embarrassment. Time, clearly, is of the essence; the dustbin of history is precisely where we should look for the comforting debris that constitutes the material basis of cultural intimacy. Moreover, these are not irreversible processes. Islamists iu Turkey and franquistas in Spain hope to reverse the effects of major social change. We must be careful not to see such moves as simple retrogression; by doing so we, too, would be surrendering to the allure of nostalgia for an imagiued age that is slipping from our fingers. 64
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy
For any country, Greece included, the content of the intimate zone that may give rise to embarrassment in luore encompassing global contexts is liable to change. The only way to predict the direction of change is to examine the global distribution of power. But it would be foolhardy to assume that this distribution is itself immune to change. That is the illusion to which most of its symbolic labor is directed-an indication, if ever there was one, that there lurks behind the fa~ade a realization that history cannot be taken for granted after all. The examples of both Italy and Spain show how localism can be as strong a defender of intimate zones as nationalism, which it sometimes appears to subvert through the retention of practices deemed inappropriate to a nation-state: animal theft in Crete and Sardinia, the practices and organizations known as mafia in Sicily and 'drangheta in Calabria, aggressive masculinity in Andalusia and elsewhere in Spain. In some cases, these IDealist versions of cultural intimacy prove more compelling than the national renditions, particularly when the nation-state is weak (as in Italy); elsewhere, as in the Balkans, a collective sense of regional identity may similarly offer both intimate refuge and ferocious pride in its defense, transcending the nation-state's use of these functions. The nation-state is thus not the sale arena of tension betw~en official self-representation (for which there may not always be an institutional grounding such as that of the state apparatus) and the acknowledgment of cultural intimacy. This is a point that some of the more grounded critiques of cultural intimacy have actually helped to establish more clearly. Thus, for example, Broccolini (1999: 2) observes that in Italy, a coffiltry where the moral authority of the national entity is much weaker in relation to regional or civic identities than it is in Greece, it is not so much the nation as the city or region in which we find fierce defenses of cultural intimacy against criticism from outside.l 6 That difference, made all the more immediate by the status of Greece and Italy as co-heirs to the classical past of "European civilization," shows clearly that it is where institutional framing of identities converges most strongly with those that are locally perceived as important that we will find the clearest expression of sonle form of cultural intinlacy. The model of cultural intimacy would probably not have been read in structurally rigid terms by some commentators had I insisted more firmly on the mutual entailment of cultural inti-
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Cultural Intimacy
macy and social poetics. I offered the model of social poetics as a way of explaining how cultural change was forever en1ergent in performance; while particular social interactions are always" and necessarily, acts of self-reification, their content and form are both nevertheless perpetually in flux. In these terms, social interaction can be defined as the act of creating the illusion of fixity. Here we are back to objectification again. From bonds of eternal friendship to the eternal verities claill1ed by nationalistic and other ideologies, the quality of permanence emerges frOll1 the synergy of particular performances. In that regard, the state can be treated as an entity that controls particularly powerful resources for the management of the impression of permanence; but it is by no means the only onc, any more than the state has a monopoly over the imagination of community (see Anderson 1983). Its constant invocations of undying love, the unbreakable bonds of affect, and loyalty unto death show that even the sense of tbe state's entitlement to absolute allegiance is itself an illusion-necessary, perhaps, for the state's self-representation as a familial entity, but contingent and highly frangible nonetheless.
The Shadow of Europe
If I have focnsed rather heavily in this work on the looming presence of at least the generic notion of Europe, it is because today, in this supposedly postcolonial era, the "idea of the West" continues to occupy a surprisingly durable position at the apex of the cultural hierarchy of value. It is certainly a failure of both Europeanist ethnography and postcolonial criticism (including "subaltern studies") that these two areas of scholarship have dramatically failed to join forces. There are virtually no references to Europeanist ethnographies in the anthropological and other studies of postcolonialism outside Europe; it was left to novelists to show how the foot soldiers of Western expansion affected the cultures of tbose they helped to conquer and control. And there are very few works of scholarship on Europe that recognize postcoloniality as a sometimes European condition; among the few that do so, some (e.g., Aretxaga 1997; Mitchell 2002; Nadel-Klein 1991) deal only with those areas that-were clearly under the direct rule of stronger powers, while others are concerned with the reflux of immigration from the erstwhile colonies into Europe (e.g., Carter 1997; Raj 2003; Werbner 2002). Even those of us who have worked in Greece have largely 66
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy
failed to recognize the concern with cultural intimacy as a product of a fundamentally colonial relationship with powerful Western "protectors." And most work done on the postsocialist states of Eastern Europe has only recently engaged with the cultural economy in these terms. If we transcend the conceptual boundary that separates Europe from the rest of the world, we find that the entire range of countries that have been forced to adjust their notions of sovereignty to the presence of luassive colonial power in their regions-Thailand, Nepal, and to some extent Japan come to mind -offers important critical insights into what is meant by "the West." These countries, afflicted with what I have called "crypto-colonialism" (Herzfeld 2002),17 have suffered the invasion of their cultural worlds by a Cartesian understanding of the state's responsibilities scarcely less humiliating than that described, for example, by Rabinow (1989) for the French colonizers of North Africa and Southeast Asia. They have also, however, found themselves excluded to some extent from the postcolonial club. Placing countries like Greece and perhaps Spain and Portugal within the same category helps to make the point that notions of cultural intimacy cannot be understood in isolation from the power of European colonial domination; the myth of freedom from colonial control is an especially rich soil for developing a sens~ of cultural intimacy, since people know that their supposed freedom is to a large extent the freedom to elaborate on cultur,al themes already partially decided for them by overwhelmingly powerful outside forces. If we then compare with the discourse of cultural intimacy in crypto-colonial states the kind of postcolonial dilemmas faced, not only by national mainstreams, but also by those who have been doubly disenfranchised as former collaborators of colonial regimes, we can see that the complex role of the West cannot simply be reduced to binary oppositions between the colonized and the free (see especially Dube 2002: 741-43). The predicament of the Parsi community in India is an exemplary reminder of such complications: T. M. Luhrmann's study, which is intended to hold a mirror to some of the self-essentializing discourses about postcolonialism,18 suggests both the internal self-deprecation and the persistence of a variety of structural nostalgia that, in combination with an equally persistent optimism, bespeaks a powerful sense of cultural intimacy (Luhrmann 1996: 127-28). That optimism, within an increasingly marginal ethnic group, betrays the same dilemmas and anxi67
Cultural Intimacy
eties of agency that Foster has noted in the emergence of Papua New Guinea nation-building. Cultural intimacy does not always empower; on the contrary, it is often coupled with a kind of systemic hesitation that may allow more powerful others to take control, directly or otherwise. It is for this reason that it usually appears defensive, sometilues even to the point of replacing'the now-versus-then logic of structural nostalgia with a vision of endlessly cyclical ("peasant") time that utterly denies that presentday conflicts rooted in a brutal past correspond to any part of the collective local experience (see Fentress and Wickham 1992: 99-100). A postcolonial equivalent is the denial or suppression of "tribalism" in societies where its persistence might also be attributed, and with considerable justification, to the pernicious effects of colonial rule. Such family resemblances cut across simplistic geopolitical dichotomies. In this vein, my own comparative project of working more or less simultaneously in Italy and Thailand is an attempt to destabiize well-established dichotomies that have constricted our thinking while recognizing their force as itself an interesting and culturally salient objectification. These countries, taken together with Greece, offer some usefully eccentric angles of vision on the meaning of European influence in the world, transgressing the persistent division of labor that we might mischievously describe as subsisting between Europeanists and exoticists. My goal is in part simply to loosen the model of cultural intimacy: therc is absolutely no reason why it should be restricted either to European or to clearly postcolonial predicaments, or to those of state systems as such, and it may take on a wide range of expressions as its logic is refracted through widely divergent consequences of Western and other hegemonies around the world. On the one hand, the comparison of Greece and Italy offers some measure of liberation from the old-fashioned view that the burden of the classical past has predictable consequences; it reveals a sharp difference in the fate of the idea of the West in the two countries. On the other -hand, my other trajectory-to compare Greece and Thailand as two instances of crypto-colonialism, with effects that range from the virtually identical to the sharply contrasted-allows us to examine the consequences of the contested but authoritative valorization of Western culture in people's daily lives. That is surely the most important consideration, although it almost certainly gets the shortest shrift in most social science. It is this phenomenon that I intend by the terms
68
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Culturallntimacy
"practical occidentalisln" and "practical orientalism" to shift the heavily textual eluphasis of these terms into questions of everyday social practice. I first formulated this elaboration of orientalism in terms of practice and social agency, along with that of Greece as a crypto-colonial society, when working on the tortuous selfexamination entailed in Greek responses to historic conservation, with its highly conflicted debates about the relative values of classical, Western, and Ottoman elements in both the architectural remains and the self-presentation of the people inhabiting those spaces (Herzfeld 1991a: 16). While I applaud the goal of "provincializing Europe" (Chakrabarty 2000) in the sense of challenging the authority of Western cultural models, this will not come about as a result of ignoring the specificities of European ethnography. That was the mistake that anthropology made as a discipline until very recently; it is still shocking to see how few anthropologists of other areas actually read many Europeanist ethnographies, a move that would afford them a measure of distance from many of their own assumptions by making the everyday culture of Western colonial and postcolonial societies marc transparent. Given SOffi_e encouraging signs of just such a shift away from the old parochialism, which smacks of "salvage anthropology" and all its condescending implications, the urgent task now is to examine how "Europe" is configured both within and outside what have been regarded as geographically and historically "its" privileged spaces. Let us consider one of the luost tenacious of "absolutes" posited by the exponents of Western rationality: that of order. Its effects on European town-planning are famous; Baron Haussmann's Paris exeluplifies it, and Emile Durkheim's imagination transformed it into colonial practice-as Paul Rabinow's (1989) remarkable analysis, one of the few breaches in the walls of Eurocentric silence in anthropology, amply demonstrates. Order is the outward manifestation of authority, and has often been invoked by European and European-derived dictatorships as necessary to the preservation of "civilization!' The key concept is that of order, which serves as the basis of policies not unlike fascist experiments in Europe luany decades earlier. The luunicipal government's grandiose plans for the center of Bangkok call for the transformation of the central avenue of the old dynastic capital into "the Champs Elysees" of Asia. This effort has not gone unchallenged; the governor of Bangkok provoked immense ire by placing the homeless in the same category as stray dogs. ,.
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Cultural Intimacy
In terms of the imitation of Europe, the real parallel is not with Paris but with the Via dei Fori Imperiali in Rome,20 where a huge swath was cut through a district that was already many centuries old and full of architectural treasures to "restore" the grandeur of imperial Rome under its new cacsar, Benito Mussolini, and permit him a magnificent procession route (see Herzfeld 2003c). Note, too, the parallel that the Bangkok authorities have promoted is with a European capital, not with Tokyo or Beijing. Indeed, this plan succeeds earlier visions of Bangkok as the "Venice of Asia," a name that it gained from the complex of canals destroyed by an earlier orgy of pseudo-westernization. Deference to Western lllodcls is not erased by embracing "Asian values." The language of the cleanup is revealing. In particular, the then governor of Bangkok's comparison of the homeless with stray dogs, and his declared intention of removing both so that visiting dignitaries' eyes would not be offended, have attracted distinctly unfavorable comments (see, e.g., Thirasant 2003). His attempt to conceal the rougher side of Bangkok's life struck many observers as both artificial and ill·advised; but it elearly was an attempt to protect the nation's culturally intimate spaces. Unfortunately for the governor, it resonated in quite the wrong way with nlany Thais. On the one hand, animal epithets are locally considered to be extremely insulting (see, e.g., Tambiah 1969); to be called a dog is particularly offensive to Muslims, of whom significant numbers reside in Bangkok, but even in Buddhist culture the implicit allusion to reincarnation as a lower order being can cause deep hurt. On the other hand, a high proportion of nicknames used by Thais among their intimates consists of the ordinary words for animals: shrimp, crab, pig, and cat, are all common. Equating homeless Bangkokians with dogs is not so much an assumption of intimacy as a violation of intimacy-in this casc, an intentional one, designed to remove people who disrupt the official sense of order from the roster of fully Thai and fully human members of society. But within that society these people are understood, along with the stray dogs in fact, to deserve sympathy; they represent an aspect of the "real life" that the authorities wish to remove in their efforts to impress foreign leaders with their imitation of Paris (see also Herzfeld 2003d). Note that the authorities' offense lies in a breach of intimacy, that zone in which offensive epithets are transformed into signs of close affection. The authorities' attempt to remove sources of symbolic pollution by using this familiar insult seriously back· 70
New Reflections on the Geopolitics of Cultural Intimacy
fired. It was as though a Greek administrator had suggested that all these people were sexual deviants. Thais occasionally use the neuter pronoun man ("it"), an idiom of reference that is ordinarily considered extremely rude, as an affectionate form of reference, and Greek intimates may call each other "masturbators" with a comparable degree of license (and also may themselves very occasionally use animal epithets in a similarly privileged fashion). Such behavior is absolutely unacceptable when its sale purpose is to refuse the compassion due to one's fellow human beings. It is a violation of the very basis of cultural intimacy, a conversion of intimacy into hostile alienation, and all the more reprehensible in that it emanates from leaders who not only should act with the dignity appropriate to their office but also actively claim to be following a European model of civilized living (Thai Kwaamsiwilai; see Thongchai 2000) that harmonizes with the local Sense of moral order. This example shows how even (or perhaps especially) the polit· icalleaders of couutries that were not officially subjected to the colonial project may be the most energetic mimics of what they take to be the core of Western culture. Whether the site is post· colonial or crypto·colonial, the play of cultural intimacy that rcsults is very much an outcome of the geopolitics of cultural value; animal epithets, negatively viewed in religious tefln-s, convey affect by suggesting trust in the tolerance of intimates. Sexual epithets in Greece, where they are incompatible with the formal Eurocentric morality and with local values alike, convey the shared intimacy of those who cannot escape the fundamental baseness of human nature. Such usages have their origins in the social experience of conflict with official authority, secular or ecclesiastical. Yet we also know that the bearers of official discourse are themselves human and have access to the same kinds of intimacy; it is when they inject that intimacy into social spaces from which their role debars them that it misfires, as when a politician compares the homeless with dogs or-to cite another example-when a priest in a Christian country is found to have engaged in sexual misconduct. The language aud symbolism of such transgressions have a history. It is related to changing notions of social and cultural order; at any given time, in the flux of human affairs, it may acquire more positive connotations in intimate contexts than can ever be admitted in public. Some hanker for an older and now· discredited morality; others wistfully recall vanished freedoms and 71
Cultural Intimacy
other pleasures. If the state represses these objects of nostalgia altogether, it risks provoking the citizenry's ultimately uncontrollable fury. Such is the dilemma that cultural iutimacy poses for all official institutions. At this juncture, it thus becomes Inore than ever apposite to revisit the etymologies of the discourse of that exemplary institution of bureaucratic power, and to examine the ways in which nation-state authorities seek to stabilize their institutionallegitimacy by fixing it temporally as well as geographi· cally. In the next chapter, the turn to Vico's critical etymology of power provides a path to understanding the self·essentialization of the West. If we bear in mind that such objectification is both repro· duced and undone in virtually every performance of identity, we can begin to unravel the dynamics whereby unruly citizens are often also the n10st loyal ones-the paradox at the core of coercive institutional structures around the world.
Chapter Three
Of Definitions and Boundaries
In his autobiography, Giambattista Vico ([1728] 1977: 28) tells us
that the only occasion on which he was awarded any kind of academic prize was for the presentation of a treatise, "full of Greek and Latin erudition and critical treatment," on the etymology of the term stata, "state." We do not know what Vico actually wrote in his disquisition, as the text has been lost. His pursuit of etymology in the search for hidden historical truths, however, invites speculative emulation. Thus, for example, we could highlight the fact that in Italian, stato is used as the past perfect participle of the verb .for "be" (essere, significantly, a cognate of the English word essentialism, but directly derived from stare, stand, be in a certain state or condition). Such au etymology represents the state as the ultimate eternal verity, that which "has [always] beeu," and as such an outstanding example of what we would today call naturalization. In that case, the transformation of a verb particle into a noun10 stato, the state- bears witness to a process of reification. With their literalistic perception of reality, the academic representatives of formal culture who awarded Vico his prize would perhaps have taken such etymological imaginings at face value and assun1ed that they iudeed validated the state's claims to the staudiug (or status, both words being cognates of stare as well), of an eternal verity----"'---the political equivalent of a statement in language. VieD's imaginative games with etymology were the very antithesis of that kind of literalism, however, and, even without further speculation about what he actually said in his long·lost essay, we can take our lead from him. The social world is suffused 72
73
Cultural Intimacy
with "trailing clouds of etymology" (Austin [1956-57] 1971: 99-100) that give to social experience a rauge of meanings both allusive and elusive. Rendering these connections explicit and recovering their historical development entails what Deely (1982: 1) has appropriately called the "selniotic consciousness," that is, the awareness that all human knowledge is mediated by signs and that consequently description must always at some level be construction. Etynlology can be (and most commonly is) used to validate rather than to undermine power, and popular consciousness may be so snffused with official etymological principles that it actually reinforces the messages emanating from official sources: Greeks often dismiss nonnormative acts or artifacts by pointing out that their names are "Turkish." But to whom do they address such declarations of adherence to official historiography? A critical study of etymology must inspect these processes in their social and political contexts, which was also the task Vico set himself. The etymological hunt can thus be pursued against the grain of official interpretation by resurrecting a host of derivations from the "dead stretches of experience" (Ardener 1978: 111)-a recorded but now inert history. Far more than a mere punning galne, the search for an etymological history of reification serves to remind us of processes that are constantly at work through language and other semiotic systems and that principally serve the interests of those political and ideological formations that have successfully established their respective legitimacies. Thus, we will be doing in social theory what everyday actors do when they contest the "received wisdom"-a revealing phrasepurveyed by official sources of knowledge. This tactic disturbs the synchronic order of things by restoring to it a sense of historical contingency, renlinding us that the signs whereby we convey "self-evident truths" have histories of their own, and suggesting that the underlying self-evidence does also. In d,e linguistic sphere, for example, the status of the state and the static concept of meaning are supported by statements. The concept of the statement or constative utterance suggests, as Austin ([1962] 1975: 139-47) argued, a view of language that ignores the social conditions under which discourse is produced. Meaning is not a given, a datmn. (The process whereby the word data seems to be in the process of becoming a singular noun illustrates this creeping reification: as people forget that it is a plural entity grounded in the verb dare, to give, they can relax in blissful 74
Of Definitions and Boundaries
ignorance of its complexities.) Meaning is created by the interaction between an intending and an interpreting actor and by the alternation of roles between them, and the force of a performative utterance lies in the immediacy of the social situation. A statement, by contrast, would be given its force by the a priori validity of its premise. All attempts to naturalize a contingent claim (for example, to the legitimacy of a new government) therefore purport to be statements, or representations of fact. By treating them as performatives 1 and by focusing on the constructedness of their factuality, one can challenge their legitinlacy, opposing analytic tactics to the official strategy of essentialism. Nationalists appeal to tradition becanse its alleged antiquity validates their clainls by rooting them in a seemingly unassailable bedrock of historical fact;l its constructedness is suppressed, as is the performative force of its presentation1 through the solemn medium of acadelne. Nationalists naturalize their concerns by rendering them as self-evident truths. We should not forget, however, that it is the very performativity of discourse, its strategic capacity to express a fiat, that makes such a transformation possible. Nationhood, especially as conceived by the nationalists of early-nineteenth-century Europe, was explicitly cultural; yet its claims to eternal validity rested on the authority of a culturalized nature. Thus 1 the concept of nation encapsulated a paradox, and in this regard it reproduced, or at least prefigured, what Alain Goldschlager (1982) has called "authoritarian discourse." This rhetorical mode has much in common with Levi-Strauss's view of myth: mutually incompatible propositions are presented as mutually reinforcing statements, paradoxes as truisms (see I-Ierzfeld 1985b: 199). The very concept of nationhood that undergirds all of Goldschlager's illustrative examples fits the pattern. The nation is conceived in the Romantic ideology as a natural entity that can only reach full self-determination through the acquisition of political statehood, a quintessentially cultural imposition of order on chaos. This process entails the privileging of the arbitrary; it thus provides a classic example of selniotic illusion, or literalisln, in which the signifier is mistaken for the signified, the natural symbols of national statehood for nature itself. Here in the abstract is the logic of the passport office, itself part of a social institution that has the authority to "naturalize" human beings. It is a relationship that gives a political twist to Saussure's insistence on the arbitrariness of the sign (see Hawkes 1977: 25).
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1 Cultural Intimacy
Nature, however, is not always or necessarily benign in relation to culture. In many societies, outsiders arc "animals," or- at least appreciably less human than ourselves. For the Greeks of today, the epithet zoo, "animal," is a grave insult, suitable for Turks and antisocial individuals, but not to be used in addressing (or even speaking about) one's compatriots except perhaps in obvious jest. Nature, or at least an important part of it, is here opposed to an exalted culture. Clearly, tbe concept of nature is employed in two quite divergent senses. On the one hand, it conjures up the supposedly bestial world of ahen societies. On the other, culture is cosmologically a part of nature: it is natural, eternal, and therefore good. The underlying opposition is thus not solely between nature and culture, but between the nlore inclusive categories of nature-as-evil and nature-as-good, respectively. A moral distiuction thus underlies the rhetorical framing of nationhood, and it is on this distinction that the state's claim to be the arbiter of morality ultimately lies: it is the procrustean lnaral formation upon which all other moralities may be modeled. The absolute finitude with which such ideas are articulated can be seen iu the definite article iu i Fili, "the race," with which official Greek rhetoric refers to the Greek people. This is in contrast to the usage of the term in everyday discourse with either a specifier ("the fili of the Gypsies") or the indefinite article. The same is true of the term yenos-classical Greek genos, the "aristocratic conical clan" (Humphreys 1978: 194) of ancient times-which has come to mean "the [national] stock." Thus, the great prophets of national independence like Adamantios Koraes-the virtual creator of the the now-discredited neoclassical register of modern Greek-are often called "Teachers of the Yenos." The term appears in classical Greek as an agnatic group, usually of noble status; significantly, it combines the resulting implication of aristocracy with a strong agnatic bias in its transmutation into official modern Greek: yenos is the term used to designate the bride's and bride's mother's respective surname groups for the purpose of completing the official registration of a marriage. Nationalist rhetoric has turned the nation into a superordinate genos, thereby removing to the sphere of its own conceptual and legal control the potentially feud-prone agnatic idiom of kinship from the local level (although that idiom does still subsist on Crete and in the Mani, usually in situations, such as feuding, that quite explicitly pit local against state values). It has also absorbed 76
Of Definitions and Boundaries
the very similar (and historically related) popular perception of the term that we encounter in, for example, certain medieval and postmedieval poems that mention ksantha yeni (classical Greek xantha gene), "blond tribes"-in other words, the Russians who were expected to come to the rescue of their enslaved Orthodox brethren, the Greeks. "Racial" inheritance, nobility; and the male liue have all been co-opted and singularized by the discourse of the bureaucratic state. The resulting grammatical uniformity (singular noun, definite article) reproduces the conceptual reification of social and cultural experience. The tenn yenos has survived in the widespread dialect form yenia, usually meaning some kind of agnatic grouping. Thus, doubtless aided by a separate morphological formation, it has strayed from the homogenizing and singularizing statist discourse just discussed and has become associated with a plurality of social groups within the local community. Even where agnation is no longer significant, as on the island of Rhodes, one may still hear that a child's character is formed by the "seven patrilines" that contribute to the child's ancestry (Herzfeld 1983a: 162~63). On Crete, the yenia is virtually a symbol of the local community'S opposition to official norms, since it is the normative unit of blood vengeance; it is also a segmentary concept, which automatically places it in opposition to the reifled concepts of social grouping necessary to any bureaucratic organization. The idea of the genos/yenia is elosely associated with concepts of nature and birth (genesis), just as nation and nature are related through a COlnmon Latin root, natio, meaning birth. Many villagers consider the patriline to be the channel for the transmission of the fisiko, character, but etymologically and more specifically a person's nature (fisi[s]) in the sense of inherited traits. The idea of the Greek nation as a single, unified patriline thus encapsulates, at least by historical allusion, the embedding of nationhood in nature, which is close to what the Latin roots of the English terms also imply. In short, nation is a metaphorical construction; it brings together two superficially unlike entitiesgenetics as nature and national statehood as culture-and insists on their commonality. It is for this reason that statists must be literalists: their entire rationale rests on the premise that both the nation and the state are "real" entities, not metaphorical ones. It is also for this reason that Greek journalists and other commentators commonly do not recognize a distinction between genetic and cnltmal definitions of national or ethnic identity-and, 77
1i
Cultural Intimacy
indeed, see no reason to distinguish between the national and the ethnic, which are conflated in a single term. . Nationhood thus represents both a naturalization of political centralization (in the sense of representing it as a fonn of logical entity) and a "culturalization" of uature (in the sense that political centralization is grounded in ideas of genetic inheritance). Moreover, these are secured through a semantically stable terminology. Signifiers (words, terms, legal pronouncements) often have invariant forms. The state would thus be hard pressed to detect the nonconformist implications of a popular discourse in which these verbal symbols are deployed in significantly different ways. Perhaps the most striking example of this divergence between the two kinds of discourse, which should nevertheless not be thought of as entirely discontinuous with each other, is in blasphemy, an unreflexive mode of ideological expression in which the doctrinally unitary figures of religious iconography are fragmented through the divisions of the social order; in the most dramatic example, a person swears against "your Virgin Mary," thereby implying that an enemy's Mary cannot possibly be the same as one's own (Herzfeld 1984a). But there are many more obvious examples of such divergence between definition and usage, including the play of precision and ambiguity in ethnonyms.
Morality and Identity: The Status of Eternal Verities Nationalism treats national identity as a system of absolute values, in which the relativism of ethnic shifters has been transformed into a set of reified eternal verities: the state has always existed. This process of reification follows tbe fate of the more general class of moral-attribute shifters, but it does so within a specific and identifiable political context. Nationalism deprives the essentially moral terminology of identity of its relativity, imposing upon it a definitional fixity that sometimes creates genuine difficulties and embarrassments-as, for example, when the Greek state is forced to specify that Muslim citizens are eligible for police service because, althougb popularly known as Turks, they are in fact Greek citizens. Indeed, it has become rather dangerous for any Greek Muslims to call themselves Turks because of the official denial of ethnic minorities' existence. Here popular usage is so strong that the state's claim on the loyalty of all citizens is implicitly called into qnestion and has to be reinforced by a very explicit official statement. 78
Of Definitions and Boundaries
Thus, ethnic identity is a highly relative concept that the political morality of nationalisnl seeks to transform into an absolute one. Identity as a "style," something that «aSSUlnes choice and allows for change" (Royce 1982: 9), is transmuted into a presumed national character; ethnic shifters (Galaty 1982) become fixed designators. The terms for cultural identity assume a certainty hitherto denied them by the experiential exigencies of social life. Nationalistic reification of these tcrms reverses the contextual sensitivity appropriate and necessary to their use as terms of personal, moral evaluation; they become instead the technical vocabulary of a fixed political order. Ultimately, the language of national or ethnic identity is indeed a language of morality. It is an cncoded discourse about inclusion and exclusion. Like all such systems, it is subject to manipulation in everyday speech. For this reason, a semiotic critique of nationalism must examine the process whereby nationalism invests certain kinds of identity with a rigidity that they do not commonly possess in everyday discourse. Such an approach would resist the process of literalization-the process whereby bureaucratic organizations reify the language of social interaction as a set of eternal verities. Meeker (1979: 30) sums up the semiotic task appositely: "Values and ideals arc interpreted in terms of their function in a particular form of discourse rather than as timeless truths which stand beyond a speaker or writer." Statism, on the other hand, exploits the power of discourse to generate the semblance of timeless truths in tvvo ways: first, by coopting morality itself as a function of the state and, second, by inserting its own identity in the resulting canon of values. No more revealing or immediate example of this can be found than the use of the term patriotis in Greek. In everyday usage, this word simply means someone from the same local community as the speaker and is close to Italian paesano; in nationalistic discourse, by contrast, it exclusively possesses or is possessed by the meaning of citizen, with the added sense in which it has entered English as a cognate: patriot. If all ethnic and national terms are moral terms in that they imply a qualitative differentiation between insiders and outsiders, all moral value terms are to some extent negotiable markers for the lines of social or cultural inclusion and exclusion. The close identification between moral and ethnic categories leads with inexorable logic to the state's institutionalization of moral
79
Cultural Intimacy
authority-cultural rather than natural justice, as it were, but conscripted against the allegedly unnatural phenomena of immorality, miscegenation, and treason. (The now defunct apartheid laws of South Africa exemplified the resulting bureaucratic logic in an extrelne form.) Even in the most centralized nation-states, however, it seems that everyday usage continues to reflect the relativism of ordinary discourse rather than the presumed absolutism of the state-itself a rather misleading proposition that many bureaucrats perpetuate by blaming "the system" for the harshness of its laws, but one that their own sometimes remarkably flexible and inventive strategiesincluding that of blaming the system~thereforeeffectively belie. This suggests that for practical purposes people operate on the basis of a theory of meaning that conflicts with the lexicographical rigidity they attribute to the state. In societies where state control is weaker, it is easier to recognize this; in such societies, when interethnic contact occurs, for example, the parties concerned make different asseSSlnents of the situation and of the extent to which they share a common identity (see Shalinsky 1980: 279-80). But even in tightly controlled societies most people know how to adopt the rhetoric of normativity to achieve nonnonnative ends. Strategies depend on situations, and the choice of term does not depend on what group One belongs to but on what moral self-designator one invokes in the context of a particular level of interaction. To call a Greek town dweller a Vlakhos, for example, is scarcely complimentary. The literalist would expect that this meant simply that the addressee was a member of the Romanianspeaking pastoral Koutsovlach community and would assume that the distaste evinced for the term by many Greeks derives from nationalistic feelings of distrust toward a foreign group. According to this perspective, any other use of the term would be a metaphorical extension. TIllS, however, is putting the cart before the horse: the nationalistic definition of both Hlinas (Greek) and Vlakhos (Vlach) does not precede, semantically or chronologically, the establishment of nation-states in the Balkan region, but has merely been co-opted and subsumed by the latter process. To most Greeks, the context would be sufficiently well defined to ascertain whether the speaker meant Koutsovlach, Northern Greek shepherd, or simply conntry bumpkin. Such fluidity in the use of terms normally associated with clearly defined groups is often a response of marginalized populations-as, for example,
80
Of Definitions and Boundaries
Castilian as a term for Andalusian (as well as for the non-Spanish ethnographer) in relation to Gypsy (Brandes 1980: 13,57), Israeli Arabs' use of Sephardi to describe themselves in contrast to all Jews (Cohen 1971), or the famous distinction between Catholic Jews and Protestant Jews (depending on the part of Ireland from which they come). These usages are inconsistent only if one adheres to the absolntist logic of official ethnicity rather than to the entirely different theoretical underpinnings of ordinary talk. The meaning of an ethnic shifter depends on the relationships binding the social group in question (narrative event) to the salient social identity of the speaker (speech event). Terms of this kind conflate social identity with morality by implying that similar principles of morality apply to all of the discriminatious made, regardless of the level at which they are made: outsiders remain inferior to insiders in any sense. Thus, in Afghanistan, Uzbeks and Arabs both justify their respective practices in terms of Islamic law (Shalinsky 1980: 280). Each group uses the seemingly fixed conceptual abstraction of Islamic law to define boundaries and symbolic objects according to its own needs and perceptions. Moreover, such shifters are not always verbal. In Glendi, photographs of Eleftherios Venizelos, a staunchly antimonarchist early-twentieth-century liberal politician, appear in most coffeehouses, including those of diehard conservatives. S~ce Venizelos was Cretan, every local politician claims him as a spiritual ancestor. Thus, the virtues that his portrait representsthose of the stereotypical Cretan-are of negotiable content. The image of Venizelos, no less than the equally divisible Virgin Mary invoked in blasphemous curses, is a shifter. The use of moral-value terms represents social diagnoses of where the boundaries lie. Like all diagnoses, these are open to dispute. Moreover, the criteria themselves are negotiable. Two speakers may think they share a common understanding of what is meant by honesty, Islam, anare, or being a Vlakhos. The use of the phrase "un-American activities," for which there is an equally anticommunist equivalent in Greek,2 illustrates how even statist rhetoric may seem relativistic; in fact, it represents an attempt to fix both the term and the reality in an unchanging relationship so that the national boundaries become inflexibly coterminous with the exclusion of comlnunists. National and ethnic. terms allow for a surprising amount of semantic slippage; their appearance of semantic fixity allows actors to treat dIem as though they were existential absolutes rather than counters in a game.
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Cultural Intimacy
Within state societies, the shifters that have escaped with the least damage to their semantic lability are those that signify moral values not actively endorsed by the state's own peculiar version of national morality. Thus, for example, Gilsenan's (1976: 201) treatment of the term makhlu' in Lebanon deals with a concept of social identification so bound up with notions of revenge and the blood feud that it could not have served comfortably in any nationalistic canoo. A young revenge killer was regarded as makhlu' after his release from jail, but not at the time he conullitted the deed. Moreover, when he was subsequently attacked by an outsider, his family's only concern ... was whether one of the other families in the village had done it. Had it been so, there would have been little choice but to continue the cycle of revenge, since his being makhlu' defined him as socially anonymous within the defining group but not vis-a-vis outsiders, to whom he remained visible and a member of Beit Ahmad. (Gilsenan 1976: 201)
Gilsenan was sensitive to the fact that attributions of makhlu' (and other moral properties) might well be affected by the interlocutor's outsider status, whether the latter was an ethnographer or a "native insider" (1976: 202). Social boundaries between speaker and addressee as well as the relationship between actor and narrator mediate the attribution. The diagnostic signs of being makhlu' are rarely so self-evident as to permit absolute claims. The point to be emphasized is not just d,at moral standing can be, and is, negotiated but tbat the negotiability of the identity in question is made possible by both the seeming fixity and thc actual lability of the terminology. Returning to Greek Inaterial, the concept of barbarisn1 provides a good illnstration of this interplay of fixity and lability, in counterpoint to the equally ambiguous status of "civilization" (politismos) and of its geographical embodiment, "Europe" (Evropi). Tbese terms are all derived from the nationalistic view of Greece as the continuation of ancient Hellas and therefore as the source of all European culture. In classical times, barbarism characterized those whose foreign and therefore incomprehensible speech was thought to resemble the chattering (bar-bar) of swallows; modern Greeks similarly attribute oxlike dumbness to the Turks (Herzfeld 1980a: 297), whose language seems so different from their own. In the nationalistic discourse of modern
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Of Definitions and Boundaries
Greece, barbarism SUlns up the Turks' supposedly inhuman and rapacious cruelty and their so-called lack of religion, where religion is defined as Christianity (see also Asad 1994). Politismos, on the other hand, combines the meanings of "culture" (qua "high" culture) and "civilization"3 andis particularly associated with the ideal of Enropean identity. For the nationalist, Evropi (Europe) has a fixed semantic field, combining geography with the concept of a common heritage derived from classical Hellenism-with the ideals, in fact, that are ordinarily understood by the term politismos. 4 In everyday discourse, however, this fixity melts away. "Europe" includes the Greeks in situations where a collective display of cultural patriotism is called for (notably in conversations with foreigners), but often excludes them when the Greeks have occasion, among themselves, to dwell on what they perceive as national failings and weaknesses-in brief, as evidence of their erstwhile condition as the serfs of varvari, barbarians. All this argues a n1easurc of historical consciousness; and it is indeed the sense of history that invests all the relevant terms with their special powers of evocation (d. Elias 1978: 7). By the same token, the ambiguity of terms such as Evro!Ji derives from the dnality of that historical experience: tension has always subsisted between the idealized, Western-derived models of "high culture" and the often far less flattering self-recognition that Greeks associate wi-th cultural intimacy. Similarly, although barbarism is conventionally associated with the Turks and other snpposedly uneulightened peoples, Greeks often treat it as a specifically Greek problem when they are talking in confidence among themselves or with friendly outsiders. Residents of the island of Nisiros (in the Dodecanese chain in the southeastern Aegean) complained in my presence that the practice of letting off firecrackers immediately in front of people was a "barbarous custom"; yet one of them became incensed when, upset at having exploding firecrackers thrown at my feet, I foolisWy thought I could put a stop to this teasing by adopting their own rhetoric. I was curtly and explicitly put in my place by a very drunk and extremely angry Nisirian. Who was I to say such things, after eating and drinking widl the islanders and enjoying the generous time that they had devoted to helping a callow young man with his research? Indeed, the irate islander's use of irony-a clearly tactical inversion of what Chock (1987) has so appropriately captured
83
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Cultural Intimacy
as "the irony of stereotypes"-highlights the strategically useful semantic fluidity of what at first sight look like fixed, uegative self-stereotypes. My clumsy attribution of the "Turkish" quality of "barbarism" to Greeks-and local Greeks at that-threw cultural intimacy in the teeth of my hosts, thereby violating their hospitality; and hospitality itself is a major context for the negotiation of social relationships, affording plentiful opportunities for the sYl11bolic inversion of encompassing power relations and for drawing the lines around intinIacy both social and cultural (Herzfeld 1987b). Although a student at the time, I was also in SOll1e sense a representative of that West to which l11any Greeks felt obliged to calibrate their hierarchy of cultural values; I had thus failed to recognize my obligations of sensitivity as a member of the privileged world outside Greece. The structural property of barbarism that made this ironic effect work so devastatingly is that the term, as a shifter, contextually tied Greek collective self-doubt to my status as a "European"; there may also have been other inequalities at stake, such as those between educated urbanite and illiterate peasant, or even between Athenian-given the style of my spoken Greek at the times-and provincial. As a visitor I adopted the term from local speakers, only to discover the hard way that this act of appropriation had in itself been sufficient to change the term's meaning. The moral is clear: (Western) Europeans have a particular obligation to respect the semantically rigid mutual exclusion of Greeks and barbarians. Only those with privileged access to the intimacy of Greek culture may engage in the play of semantic fluidity that permits self-deprecation and damaging assessments of local culture. Tbis complex response exemplifies the difficulty of pinning down the meaning of terms of moral evaluation. (Gilsenan [1976: 206-210] provides a related analysis, when he explores the way in which a "liar" can reveal "truth" by exposing another's failure to read the signs of the liar's own" lying.") Such terms do not make sense in the abstract; indeed, to attempt a decontextualized definition of thelTI violates their semantics. Yet definition is precisely what the state (which benefits from the semiotic illusion that there exists an absolute or correct understanding) imposes on morality in general. In terms like varvarotita (barbarism), moreover, morality and national identity coincide, calibrated to an externally derived criterion of excellence. The foreign visitor treads this minefield at considerable risk. 84
Of Definitions and Boundaries
Further Ethnographic Illustrations from Greece A brief look at some related ethnographic materials can make these contextual properties stand out more clearly. In the example I have just given of the charge of barbarism, it is the foreigner whose presence provokes the semantic coalescence that marks effective exclusion. My Nisirian acquaintance shifted-in the technical sense of the semantic shifter-from a reflexive understanding of the concept to one more closely identified with the values of the nation-state, producing a stalwart defense against an invasion of cultural intimacy. But such shifting implies an already existing dissonance between intimate and formal uses of the terminology. In a nIoment of patriotic anger the Nisirian acted, not as he would probably have done with a close friend Jrom his own community, but as a representative of his entire nation-state. This was especially noteworthy in that in the Dodecanese, incorporated into the Greek state only in 1948, people still talk of "when Greece came [here]"-in other words, treating the state itself as the intrusive or foreign power. My presence and lack of tact contextualized the Nisirian as a Greek rather than as a Dodecanesian. Such shifts are common and can even be reversed. On one occasion in the Cretan village of Glendi, two men of local origin who had lived in Athens and become very metropolitan in their personal styles began to berate me for all the crimes of the AngloAmerican conspiracy against Greece. Almost immediately, one of the local villagers, a man who had especially delighted in haranguing me about the very same topic but who also had learned that I was sympathetic to Greek concerns, bristled at the visitors and offered to intervene. Fearful that violence might erupt on my behalf, I declined his help with appropriate expressions of gratitude; but the incident made it very clear that residence in the village and my still rather partial command of the local dialect had given me a situational edge over the deracinated visitors. My wife and I were, as someone commented, "our own outsiders"virtual Glendiots in the context of Athenian-style affectations. The self-reified state inevitahly masks numerous shifting meanings, but the goal of territorial fixity and absolute ethnic identity creates a model that does not easily tolerate open ambignity. This is particularly true of any moral concept closely associated with national identity. This authoritative definition of moral values often contrasts starkly with the variety of interpretations that we 85
Cultumllntimacy
meet in everyday speech. In statist morality, for example, eghoismos (broadly, self-regard and self-interest) is nsnally a negative value. Even here, however, matters are not quite as unambiguous as the exponents of state morality try to make them seem; for this same concept can be represented as individualism-viewed as a stereotypically European virtue-and used as the basis for claiming the Western character of Greek small business and artisanship. Often these commentators then criticize the same occupations for their endemic resistance to any fonn of cooperation; at this point, eghoismos acquires the implications of a Turkish rather than a European value. For the swashbuckling villagers of Glendi, where I conducted fieldwork for some sixteen months between 1974 and 1981, the term has a far marc accessible alnbiguity; indeed, the villagers are quite explicit about this. There are forms in which eghoismos is acceptable-some of them, notably systematic, reciprocal animaltheft, entirely contrary to the laws of the state. But villagers sometimes speak of "an eghoismos," intending through this use of the indefinite article to indicate that someone exhibits a specificand usually not very admirable-version of this social value. In other words, they recognize its variability: in some contexts, such as that of small-scale capitalism, they consider a highly competitive stance to be morally right; a man who is eghoistis in this sense is defending his family, and that is as it should be. The usage of "an eghoismos" delnonstrates a significant measure of fragmentation in the villagers' social experience and shows that they recognize the situational character of moral definition. It is not a usage that one would expect to encounter in official writings. For most Greek villagers, moral evaluations are not assessments of innate character-which they deny being able to read even as they try to do so- bnt rather of social inclusion. The boundaries of the state are fixed. Those of the moral community of covillagers, on the other hand, belong to a shifting and fragmentary social world and are therefore necessarily subject to continual readjustment and reevaluation. Rhodian villagers explicitly call the morally bad "those outside of here" (i okso apodho), and they explain that "here" conld mean equally the moral or the physical community: it is itself a shifter and can convey both the local community (village or district or region) and the larger community of Greek Orthodoxy (see Stewart 1991: 164). In the Rhodian agricnltural community where I worked in 1973-74, and to
86
Of Definitions and Boundaries
which I have given the pseudonym of Petko, villagers justify village endogamy by using a proverb that elaborates on another adage far better known as a dictum about the folly of marrying a non-Greek. 6 All moral terminology conflates moral disapprobation with group exclusion; when the definition of "the" group is itself alnbiguous or variable, the relevance of moral prescriptions hecomes negotiable in a way that directly contradicts the codified perspective of burea ucratic law. We can summarize the Greek terminology in a few words that might help clarify the main point. Pefkiot villagers symbolically equate the physical exclusion of devils (through exorcism) with the social exclusion of the wicked. Ghrousouzia, the evil condition of flawed covillagers, is furthermore equated with a "lack of good fortune," so that fate and not the hapless covillager takes the brunt of the blame-an effective way, at the same time, of denying the existence of truly malign wickedness within one's own community, especially when talking to outsiders. By contrast, evil outsiders are atimi, without social worth. But the latter term can, under some circumstances, be used descriptively of a covillager, particularly in the context of an interfamilial or interclan dispute. By the same token, it may not be used of any Greek at all in the context of a discussion comparing Greeks with Turks, the definitive enemy. Similarly, ghrousouzia is applicable to animal theft in any form in eastern Crete; in western Crete, where animal theft is still partly endemic, the term can only be used to condemn intravillagc animal theft, whereas intervillage theft is nsnally greeted with some approval. In short, the moral content of "outsiderhood)) is not geared to any particular level or realization of that condition, although its diagnostic traits may vary somewhat from level to level. When the traits do vary, however, they themselves become shifters. The wickedness of a covillager who is not a kinsperson is usually seen as very different from that of a Turk, although to both may be ascribed a subhuman lack of social worth. Women, too, are described as illiterate in comparison to Greek men, but they are never so described when the Greeks are collectively contrasted to the stereotypically illiterate Tnrks (Herzfeld 1980a: 296-97). Thus, ethnic shifters emerge as above all evaluative terms, which nationalisln remes in nluch the same way as it generally assnmes the control of ethical norms. The corollary is that those who regard themselves as good citizens may nevertheless talk of 87
Cultural Intimacy
the national entity as an intruder, while those who see themselves as outside the law will speak of the state as the intruder. Even the most law-abiding Rhodian, for example, mindful of the recent date of the incorporation of the Dodecancse into the Greek state, will speak of "when Greece carne here," thereby treating Elladha, Greece, as a term of ambiguous and to some extent outsiderlike standing. The more rebellious Cretans with whom I worked stated the matter more succinctly: "We're the free Greece here!" Such a statement truly challenged the authority of national (and ecclesiastical) law. On another occasion, confronted by an angry police official demanding respect for "the law" (to noma), an equally angry Glendiot responded that he "had 'two shoulders' (dhio n-omous) too!" His pun poetically reinforced its own message: such wordplays challenge the authority of d,e official lexicon, by introducing dialect forms? and by poking fun at the solemnity of official language. In fact, the contrast between the law-abiding Rhodian farmers of Pefko and the rebellious Cretan shepherds of Glendi illustrates more or less the extrenles of semantic variation that one encounters in Greek moral terminology, and that one finds in the use of national and edmic labels as well. The Glendiots have found a way of recasting themselves as the llloral center of the nation, even though they complain frequendy of being at its political periphery; the milder Pefkiots, on the other hand, committed as they are to at least an outward show of respect for the law, are unable or unwilling to make the saIne distinction between nation and state. It is noteworthy that the Glendiots found it far easier to explicate the segmentary properties of the insider/outsider distinction than did the Pefkiots, just as they had a much clearer sense of tbe ambiguity of eghoismos and other value-terms. To a Glendiot, there is nothing problematic about identifying Cretan pride with Greekness. For the Pefkiots, on the other hand, who claim Greek purity in contrast to the supposed bastardization of the mainland popnlation, the business of being Greek is itself identified with loyalty to the state. And Glendiots were fully explicit a bout the segmentary implications of their blasphemy, recognizing that it differentiated one's own Virgin Mary from that of the enemy, where Pefkiots simply dismissed such blasphemy as a "bad habit" and seemed uninterested in exploring further what its syntactical and semantic properties might portend. 88
Of Definitions and Boundaries
1 Ii
Meaning and the State: The Status of Definition
Ii,I
The foregoing examples suggest two quite distinct semiotic orientations on the part of informants. On the one hand, the relativism of informant usage argues a "use" or "action" theory of meaning as the organizing conceptual framework. The official representatives of the state, by contrast, maintain a much more lexicographical perspective on meaning. That this is so becomes abundantly clear when one considers legal terminology: Pefkiots, for example, use the terminology of inheritance in senses directly opposed to the meanings given in codified law, and their uses of the terminology are consistent only if one takes every definition in combination with the context of utterance (Herzfeld 1980b). This lability, moreover, matches their own concept of meaning, which corresponds most closely to an action theory. Lability constantly threatens the semantic stability of the state's moral universe. It is an ever-present threat: not only are state functionaries themselves engaged in negotiating the meanings of legal and ethical as well as administrative concepts, but also the timelessness of the state is itself an illusion, indirectly challenged in recent years by such events as the breakup of neighboring Yugoslavia. Moreover, the local communities on which the nation-state is so often modeled are themselves, as we have seen, hardly iQ.Ilocent of ambiguity. Ambiguity itself becomes a defining characteristic of the cultural intimacy denied by official ideology. In states where a savage nature, opposed to the ordered culture of the national entity, is identified with a specific human enemy, this can have remarkable effects on local uses of etymology to explore issues of ambiguity. Thus, it is noteworthy that many of the Greek terms for extreme disorder-alaloum, total mayhem; tourlou-tourlou, running all over the place; and koutourou, without counting precisely-not only are of Turkish derivation but also are known to be so. More generally, this association seems to rest on a sound symbolism that itself posits criteria of both phonetic and cultural purity (see Joseph 1992). The words in question are immediately recognizable as sounding sufficiently foreign to stand for admixture, plurality, and confusion. In this way, popular understandings of the cultural order are aligned with official values. That Turkish-derived words are also used to express strong personal emotions-kefi, unbridled and
i
89
'I I
Cultumllntimacy
relaxed pleasure (on this see further Cowan 1990: 106-12); meraki, enthusiastic absorption in an activity; and so on-does not undercut this argument. On the contrary, it indicates the extent to which cultural intimacy identifies personal with cultural privacy-spaces for the acceptable display of emotion and for release from formal social constraints. Even the terms for disorder that I have just cited are more often enunciated with affectionate amusement and perhaps even collective self-mockery than with a sense of real cultural alienation. These emotions are aspects of the "natural-person" interior of human beings, just as the "Turkish." forms of disorder belong to the "nature" interior of the Greek national character-the very substance of cultural intimacy. In both cases, supposedly natural feelings and impnlses have in effect been domesticated by formal culture, to be displayed only before intiInates. On the exterior, not only has nature become cnlturalized bnt also cnlture itself is more sharply defined and naturalized. Context gives way to eternal verity. Thus, what I have described here is not simply a process whereby an emergent state arrogates to itself the moral privileges that hitherto belonged to competing social groups, as Blok (1981) has suggested for "honor," although that is certainly an important part of it. It is also the process whereby public concepts of morality and identity are essentialized to harmonize with a uniform and unitary image of the nation. By recognizing the connection between morality and social or ethnic identity, moreover, we can perceive how difficnlt it would be for state officials to tolerate, in any open and self-conscious way, a use-theory view of morality or identity. Not only would it conflict with the image of invariant law but, by that very fact, it would also undermine their individual authority. Reference theory, by contrast, provides a prescriptive idiom of definition as conceptual cover for those whose ostensible job it is to promote territorial, political, and moral finitude all at once. Even in popular discourse, people increasingly identify nation with cnlture, and thereby surrender the right of cnltural definition to the agencies of state control: folklore gives way to folklorism. At the same tilne, however, the perceptions of actors engaged in such systelns are attuned to the negotiation of social values and they often call the bluff of official rhetoric. In so doing they raise the possibility of an alternative, critical perspective, one that peers into the senlantic intimacies that notions of pure re£erentiality 90
Of Definitions and Boundaries
conceal. Clearly, people do not think, act, or speak exactly as the schematized ideologies of statism would prefer. Nevertheless, they do continue to serve their national entities with great loyalty and to move within the legal and political frameworks that the latter provide. By questioning the naturalization of culture in statist ideologies as well as the concomitant reification of nature, we can perhaps begin to understand how sensitive actors can negotiate the tensions of social identity and daily life within the turbnlent context of the modern nation-state, and how they can be fiercely patriotic and just as fiercely rebellious at one and the same time. This perspective represents an epistemologicallnilitant middle ground; it entails recognizing agency rather than surrendering to either regress or reification. Brought to bear on the shifting shapes of the nation-state, it restores Vico's original vision of the human capacity for symbolic invention to an anthropology no longer restricted, one hopes, to the exotic and the marginal.
91
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Chapter Four
Persuasive Resemblances
lconicity and the Backgmunding of Rhetoric "Icon" is a misleading word-and all the more so in a book where a partial emphasis on Greece and the Orthodox Christian world may already have created false expectations. 10 religious usage, the term-eikon, Greek "likeness"-conveys the· imitation of the divine. But since we are concerned here with the secularist theology of the nation-state, perhaps the confusion is illuminating after all. For it is the rhetorical force of likeness that I explore io this chapter. In modern popular usage, again, the term icon carries a potentially misleading significance. It often means little more than emblem: a cultural form, or luore commonly a person who seems to emhody the ideal traits of a faddish cultural ideology. In the more technical semiotic sense in which I use the concept of iconicity here, I mean instead the way in which meaning is derived from resemblance: as a portrait "means" its subject. Of course, one could argue that the popular usage is not entirely off base: to be "ideal-typical" in a national context is to reproduce one version of the "imagined community" envisioned by Anderson (1983), although not necessarily the one desired by the official state. But it is helpful to he clear about the specific meaning of the term used before we launch into an extended discussion. Note that I write, not of icons, but of iconicity. This seemingly minor shift of terminology actually makes a large difference: it reminds us that we are speaking not of permanent things but of processes whereby permanence and thingness are achieved. A sign 93
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Cultural Intimacy
is only an icon because someone uses it that way, and because others agree to understand it as such. Of all signifying processes, moreover, iconicity may be the one that most effectively hides from analysis. It would not be helpful to aid and abet that elusiveness by rcifying as icons signs that from another angle do not resemble their alleged rdereuts at all. The decision to recognize iconicity always has potential political implications. Sometimes these have to do with the politics of taste and knowledge. Questions of plagiarism, creativity, and originality all hinge On iconicity. What in academic discourse is straightforwardly plagiarism, for example, might become originality in a culture much given to impromptu oral versifying, in which a different context of use creates a new text, as happens with the rhyming duels of Cretan mountain villagers. Was Canaletto a mechanistic precursor of photographic reproduction or a gifted observer? Sometimes the issues are more obviously political, and it is these that will concern us here. As an illustration, we may ask what happens to propositions of national linguistic unity when the speakers nf what has been classified as a dialect insist that their speech instead represents a language. Or we may consider how systems of egalitarian citizenship address the complaint that some groups smell different, pnllute food by sharing it, or practice unspeakable rites. These arc all questions about the uses of iconicity. They concern the issue of social and political context. !conicity does not exist independently of human agency; it is called into existence. Because state bureaucracies are immensely powerful and command enormous resources, they often possess meansthrough the media, for exaillple-to constitute iconicity out of a variegated cultural world. We must not lose sight of the fact that these agents are nevertheless still creating iconicity. While it is often their goal to create the impression that iconicity is beyond analysis-that it is totally "natural"-ours should be to challenge that stance and see official agency as constructing iconicity in a social field in which others have highly variable degrees of freedom to contest it. Whether perceived resemblances correspond to reality is less relevant than the fact that they are perceived: some ethnographic work (e.g., Forge 1968) suggests that basic assumptions about iconicity (that a photograph represents the object it shows, for example) do not work in all cultural contexts. But even when those concerned agree in principle on the criteria of resemblance, they may disagree about specific cases, and their 94
Persuasive Resemblances
disagreement will reveal something of the play of power among them. Much may be at stake in discussions about which parent a baby resembles (and to which it therefore in some invidious sense belongs) or whether a royal claimant has noble bearing or a candidate "looks presidential." If such matters, which are about the very basis of classification, were unambiguous, they would not prompt such heated discussion. In this chapter, I am largely concerned with the production of iconicity by official sources of ideological unity, especially officers of the bureaucratic nation-state. It is also important to remember, however, that the shift I have just signaled-frOlll icons to iconicity and more generally from signs to sign use (see also Eco 1976: 191-208)-allows for a considerable play of alternative iconicities. Those who contest iconicity can also create it in other spaces, using other materials. Those who do not concur with the official view of how the community is to be imagined will find other connections out of which to suggest other imaginings. Perhaps more than any other sign relationship, iconicitymeaning something by resembling it-"backgrounds" (Douglas 1975: 4) its own semiotic character for the human observer. From original to simulacrum is a short, often circular path. (That is why those who simulate intimate social relations, as I noted in the introductory chapter, can accuse rebellious consumers of bad manners and character.) According to Eco (1976: 6-7), the possibility of deception exists in all semiotic operations. In that sense, iconicity must be the most deviously employed of all semiotic principles, since, as every forger knows, it is often not seen as a sign at all. It is easy to routinize: we are all morally alike, equal, standardized, even within ideologies that recognize our personal idiosyncrasies.1 Most social and political ideologies rely on this capacity for homogenization (see Eco 1976: 155). Some cultural ideologies seek temporal depth for modern homogeneity. They articulate an idiom of structural nostalgia: they seek to reconstitute perfect archaic fonus out of modern cultural idioms and genetic phenotypes. Appealing to the idea of a corrupted world, they rebuild original texts (the folklorists' Ul'texte), racial ideals (as in ethnic cleansing and Nazi obsessions with racial purity), and national arts. They construct claims of silllilarity-imperfect but recoverable-between modern and ancient cultures. These claims, which are essentially appeals for legitimacy on the basis of historical priority, are grounded in literalistic ideas about cultural content-that is, abont the etymolog95
~I
Cultural Intimacy
ical, archaeological, genetic, and ethnological data out of which historical continuities can be constructed. The reliance of this type of ideological discourse upon the iconicity principle has so far largely eluded detailed analysis, a fact that in itself suggests how effective the backgrounding has been. Because resemblance looks natural, challenges to such projections of iconicity are profoundly disturbing to those who have learned to accept them. In this way, resemblance perpetuates itself. Three decades ago, Umberto Eco (1976: 190-217) unleashed a massive critique of the concept of iconicity. His argument was simple: iconicity was in a sense a victim of its own logic; too much is conflated under a single label and the phenomena it subsumes are not usefully rmderstood as all the same. If we take seriously EcD's own call for treating semiotic analysis as social criticism, the objection begs the important question: why is a presumption of sameness so important for ideological purposes? To argue that this is self-evident is to surrender to the iconizing logic of the idea of common sense: who says that such a sense must be common or (universally) sensible and what motivates these claims? It is the usual argument of nationalists to insist that the essential resemblance of the ethnically pure is beyond question; the usual defense of egalitarian communities-their concealment of the inequalities that a more intimate knowledge would reveal-is to deny the existence of difference, whether of viewpoint, moral quality, or economic status. We must thus ask whether the ideological creation and use of resemblance constitute a unitary phenomenon in any useful sense. H racial and linguistic features are treated as isomorphic in their geographical or historical distribution, for example, our own ideological objections to such a methodology as racist should not blind us to its intrinsic interest as a form of discourse. (This is exactly the argument that I use elsewhere in these pages to insist on the importance of taking stereotypes seriously, however much we may disagree with them.) We should, however, seek to ask critical questions about the uses of these procedures. "Why are such distributions treated as isomorphic by the adherents and apologists of a given ideology? How persuasive did that treatluent prove? Did critics of the prevailing order manage to unpack the iconic bundle, and what did they find? Those who argued in the early nineteenth century for or against a particular kind of national rmity (see Herzfeld 1982a: 77) conflated racial and ethnographic forms of evidence, 96
Persuasive Resemblances
no matter which side the protagonists were on in a particular debate. They all fell into the same conceptual trap. But to deny that they were all arguing about resemblance makes it impossible to understand why the shared assumptions about cultural homogeneity should have proved so persistent. One of the most common fallacies about iconicity is that it must be visual (see Sebeok 1979: 117). By the same token, classification is frequently assumed to be exclusively verbal. Animals, lacking language, nevertheless clearly have taxonomic capacities; it would therefore clearly be absurd to insist that humans should be entirely dependent upon language for their classificatory needs. Thus, just as Gombrich (1961: 101-04, 178) writes of "visual classification," so, conversely, we may also recognize the iconicity of visual and other nonverbal correspondences. Smell, for example, provides a common basis for ethnic and class stereotypes, not only in the elite cultures of Western Europe and North America (Classen 1993: 7-10, 102). Verbal iconicity is usually treated, in its synchronic and diachronic versions, respectively, as folk etymology and philological, or academic, etymology. Folk etymology is further differentiated from its scholarly counterpart by being largely dismissed as the manifestation of unconscious error, as in Bolinger's (1975: 406) characterization of it as "a kind of auditory malapropism." This division, privileging as it does the perspective of the scholar, has been roundly criticized (Ardener 1971b: 224). Like the artificial distinction between myth and history (see Drummond 1981; feely-Harnik 1978; Hill] 988; Levi-Strauss 1962), it smacks of scholarly privilege: "folk etymologies" may in fact be ways of wresting ideological control from a powerful oppressor, perhaps even by deploying the cultural logic of the oppressor for the purpose. The animal-thief who argued with the law by saying that his community bore the weight of social rmderstanding on its "two shoulders"-suggesting that as a community insider he had access to richer veins of knowledge than did the self-important representatives of the state-was hardly betraying ignorance. The parallel between the folk-academic discrimination in etymology and the distinction between myth and history is close, and has similar political implications. Both discriminations are predicated on elite claims to the monopoly of truth. In both, moreover, we may discern a scholarly proclivity to see a fundamental similarity among the observed (the natives all look alike, make the same complaints, behave typically), while simultane97
-, I Cultural Intimacy
ously forging discontinuity between tbem and the observer. This is an excellent example in scholarly practice of the ideological use of iconicity close to home.
Etymology and Recognition At the moment, however, I alTI concerned with more distant instances. The passage of time makes them seem more readily accessible to critical analysis. The element of reduction-of caricature even-that temporal distancing permits foregrounds certain aspects of the problem that depend for their effectiveriess on remaining in the background. I have just mentioned etynl010gy. This is the usual term for verbal iconicity; its usefulness for ideological purposes has long been recognized 'and exploited. Ironically, it was especially the work of Giambattista Vico-for whom the beauty of etymology was that it could be used to discommode established "truths"-that spawned a whole generation of ideological etymologists in Italy (Cocchiara 1952: 176-77,239,278-82), Greece (Herzfeld 1981, 1982a), and elsewhere, a generation whose insistence that the literal truth about cultural identity could be gleaned from etymological and other ethnographic evidence contrasted strangely with Vico's own celebrated axiom regarding the constructed nature of truth. With the advent of Saussurean linguistics in this century, the study of verbal etymology fell into some measure of disrepute, although there have been resurgences (see Lehm31lli 1975: 12-13, 18-19). Conversely, the academic production of etymologies of nonverbal cultural forms never weakened, especially in those countries in which the study of folklore was actively encouraged for political ends. It was not usually called etymology; its dissociation from academically demode kinds of historical linguistics saved it from their fate, while its association with ruling power groups rendered it comparatively immune to overt criticism. For the student of nationalism, officially sanctioned uses of iconicity are of compelling interest, as cultural continuity has repeatedly served as the primary justification for territorial clainls. Where direct political advantage does not necessarily explain the particular framework of interpretation, ideological considerations may still be at work. Past cultural changes, for example, may be explicitly acknowledged, but interpreted in terms of a prevailing cultural lTIorality. Thus, there is some evidence that earlier British archaeologists were prone to attribute 98
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all evidence of cultural change in the archaeological record in Britain to "invasions," apparently in accordance with a general reluctance to see the British Isles as a center for any kind of aesthetic innovation (Clark 1966). Apparently, this kind of thing did not sit well with self-professed Anglo-Saxons, whose academic nativism-a form of cultural intimacy operating at the level of scholarly discourse-preferred hardheaded common sense to the artistic genius of foreigners. Historical and ethnological facts are given significance by a present concern; as perspectives change, so too does the past (Collingwood 1965: 138-39; d. Buttitta 1971: 10). Historiography is a disturbing teacher, since it suggests that the concerns of the present lTIay not be as immutable or as nearly eternal as their protagonists might believe. The very fact that we talk about "the past" illustrates the groping for a reified certainty to which we are all heirs. And it is easy to see how what Collingwood (1965: 127) has described as Vico's use of "systematic disbelief" about the claims of scholars and nations alike could be converted in a brief span of time into systematized nationalist dogma. When such dogma is allied to political interests, lTIOreOVer, the incentives for renewed criticism may atrophy rapidly. The representation of cultural continuities, both geographical and temporal, cannot easily be subjected to analytic dissection in countries where territorial disputes with other nation-states impose a degree of internal solidarity. The sharing of cultural intimacy poses risks; why initiate what is in essence a critique of factuality itself, when thefacts support one's case? (Wallis's [1975: 18] gentle rebuke that "not all scholars are yet aware that likenesses ... are also signs" may be extended to the consumers of such signs, and has special force in those cases where the scholars themselves were both generating and consuming the resemblances.) Students of culture often disagree about the attribution of a particular cultural link with the past. They are also often unwilling to confront the contingent nature of the resemblances in which such links subsist. The list of scholarly concerns to which this applies is enormous and includes such diverse topics as etymology, evolutionary and developmentalist theories of culture, the study of so-called culture areas, archaeological distribution mapping, Urtext models of oral tradition, and various forms of anthropological diffusionism and comparativism. In all, "sameness" and "likeness" have virtually been given the status of primary data, not of problems worthy of investigation in them99
I I !
Cultural Jntimacy
selves. Today, it is true, there are signs that valuable correctives are being generated in all branches of anthropological and historical inquiry, but the older trend has certainly not been halted. There is at least a strong presumption that many of these socalled resemblances could more profitably be dismantled than perpetuated. In general, the value of any taxonomy is at its greatest at the mOlnent of dissolution, even more so than at its point of constitution. This moment offers us a glimpse of the historical context that gave currency to the act of scholarship itsel£.2 One might surmise, for example, that early-twentiethcentury diffusionism sprang in part from a desire to reproduce in the archaeological record something of the flavor of imperial nlercantilism, just as the most prestigious British university education long insisted on the primacy of classical learning in the formation of true imperial leaders (Symonds 1986: 31~34). Lacking any firsthand acquaintance with the events of ancient times (Collingwood 1965: 136; Goldstein 1976: 125-28), scholars instead constructed an icon of their own immediate experience in the archaeological record-iconic relations being fully reciprocal or reversible (Sebeok 1979: 118-20).3 It is when knowledge is invested with absolute authoritywhen a scholarly account, which is itself rooted in a particular social and historical context, claims definitive status-that we can most comfortably agree with Buttitta (1971: 10) in declaring that "to kuow is to deform." Just as the concept of social poetics may help us comprehend how norms become understood in a particular society through their creative deformation in social perfonnance, this appraisal shows that authoritative knowledge can perhaps most critically be seen as a performance in the Austinian sense: as the creation of factuality by the creative and culturally effective use of discourse. Peirce's (1.384) call for "destructive distillation" recognizes this aspect of knowledge, the intellectual aridity of a closed taxonomy (see also Handler 1985). Any re-cognition of historical events must entail some sort of taxonOlllic straightjacket, or we could not know at all. Equally, however, knowing about that knowing works against the tendency for taxonomy to become a hypostatized datum in its own right. Such insights are extremely dangerous to absolutist ideologies of ethnic or national identity. Tight boundaries on the conceptual map sit well with hermetically sealed and rigidly demarcated political borders. That is why maps are such an important icon of
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territorial integrity. The intense involvelnent of rnicl-nineteenthcentury European political leaders in the encouragement of official ethnology is ample evidence of this concern; consider, nlore recently, the cold-war title of tbe nationalist Greek folklorist Stilpon Kyriakideis's essay, The Northern Ethnological Boundaries of Hellenism (1955), in which territorial mapping was further enhanced by the iconizing of Slavophones as communists, and vice versa. Such devices conflate what we would analytically regard as separate domains of identity. By mapping out several mutually reinforcing iconicities, ideologically motivated scholars produced a multidimensional image of their cultural theories. That is one reason for which anthropologists' insistence on separating the genetic from the cultural has been so fiercely resisted by advocates of extreme nationalism and totalitarianism. But the more obvious manipulative examples of recent times should not lead us to assume that such conflations are always, or necessarily, made in bad faith. The burden of anthropological thinking in the nineteenth century did not suggest the importance of making clear distinctions at every turn between the racial and the cultural; the horrendous consequences of conflating the two became obvious only in our own century. Not surprisingly, nonspecialist discourse remains relatively slow to incorporate this change of perspective. In addition, the desire for clear definition is often so great that people are willing to accept anything that produces that effect. When evidence from the two domains seems to converge, finally; the taxonomic imperative is such that acceptance often appears the most reasonable attitude to take. The genetic-cultural distinction may be more easily made explicit in verbal than in other ways. The use of visual iconicity often works in the opposite direction. Here we are in the realm of a nonlinguistic taxonomy. The modern (1964) reprint of J. C. Lawson's (1910) survivalist study of Greek folk religion carries a frontispiece juxtaposing an archaic bas-relief of a shepherd with a photographic portrait of a modern shepherd from Arachova. Facial features, occupational stance, and an enigmatic smile are thus brought together as components of a visual statement about cultural continuity-one that probably needed no further explication unless we count the main text of the book itself. In fact, there is a caption, claiming that the juxtaposition "brings this archaic sculpture to life unknowingly showing one on [sic] the many similarities between ancient and modern life in Greece" (my emphasis).
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The caption carries a certain persuasive force of its own, but in practice the visual statement would have worked very well without it. The emphasis on an unconscious-"unknowing"-connection is revealing: iconicity is a matter of self-evidence. The verbal statement foregrounds, as it were, the semiotic character of the iconic rclation, but it also thereby poses a risk, a risk that someone lnay, as I have just done, question its assmnptions. Comlnitment to a particular taxonomy, however, is often strongly resistant to critical erosion of this sort. That archdiffusionist, Grafton Elliot Smith, claimed to have discovered a stone relief of an elephant among the Mayan ruins of Palenque: "Some cautious scholars, it was true, circumambulated the elephant by suggesting that the animal pictured might be a rendering of the tapir.... But Smith simply laughed at them" (Ceram 1957~58: 322-23). In this case, visual classification clearly made an appeal to Smith that was far more forceful than any verbal argument. We should not forget that this scornful dislnissal of views different from diffusionist orthodoxy carne at the height of British mercantile hegemony, of which diffusionism was itself, as I have suggested, a remarkably persuasive icon. In nationalism, too, claims of iconicity in cultural rclations confuse resemblance with identity. Archaeological and ethnographic evidence for a connection between ancient and modern cultures is understood to signify an essential sameness, which is why doubts about the antiquity of fragile new states like Greece-especially when they originated from the Western European countries on which Greece's survival depended-appeared to be so threatening to Greek national interests; and why any attempt to suggest that cultural continnity may be mixed with discontinuities generally meets unremitting fury. The presumed sameness of ancient and modern is then projected back onto the data, so that the resemblance itself is conventionalized, taken for granted; its contingent character is rendered invisible. Paradoxi~ cally, however, resemblance rests on the possibility of difference; a living continuity between past and present likewise rests on the concomitant possibility of change. The effect is analogous to that of a dead metaphor, which is the result of the collapse of the tension that makes any effective metaphor work (see Richards 1936).4 The possibility of recovering that tension-of investing a tired metaphor with a new sense of freshness-is usually present. Thus, the confusion between resemblance and identity 102
Persuasive Resemblances
reproduces that between the metaphorical and the literal. Iconicity, like metaphor, is necessarily predicated on a potential absence of equivalence. Were this not so, all iconic relations would be merely tautological; instead, there is always a risk that outsiders may unnlask the cultural intimacy of difference that iconicity conceals. Absolutist ideologies, by contrast, require scholarship to confirm the validity of the iconicities upon which cultural and territorial claims rest and to furnish supposedly irrefutable taxonomic clailns about the identity of the modern nation with its forebears. Continuity in this sense is really more a form of marking time-marking it, moreover, as one's own. The central paradox of iconicity thus conceived always contains within itself the seeds of its own potential dissolution. People know perfectly well that they are not ancient Teutons or Aztecs. This is why we cannot simply dismiss nationalistic ideologies as spurious without becoming literalists ourselves: engaging in that kind of debate is classic top-down theorizing in that it ignores what ordinary people say or imply. And to assume that all the members of a given nation-state agree completely on the essence of cultural continuity is to suppress the agency of numerous populations and individuals. Nonetheless, iconicity rcmains a powerful tool; its use worles on the principle of Poe's "purloined letter": it is there for all to see, so no marauding critic (or "thief of history," as so many nationalists say) suspects its presence. The uses of script illustrate how the paradox is sustained in a particularly clear way. Script types are used in an allusory fashion to suggest continuities with earlier, morc powerful political entities (Morison 1972; Wallis 1975: 61-63, 76). To take a case in point: the last Greek king, Constantine Xli, took his number from the Byzantine series, rather than frOln thc national Greek series (in which he also figured, as Constantine II). Tbe coins of his reign have Byzantine lettering, rather than the classical lettering used by both his father, Paul, and by the military junta that first restricted his powers and then, when he rebelled, supplanted him altogether. Both modes pointed back to historical glories witb which the modern polity could claim some degree of continuity. Whereas scholars of culture who wished to make the same point might take artifacts of both the earlier epoch and the present one, and set them sidc by side in order to signify the nature of the cultural connections in question, the designers of these coins 103
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achieved much the same effect by means of an allusion. And allusion, being indirect, discourages critical dissection. Both allusion aud direct juxtaposition illustrate the paradox that makes iconicity so useful a tool for ideologies of the sort considered here: juxtaposition, by positing at least two terms to be compared, logically denies identity. It states a contradiction that cannot be resolved in literal fashion: tension between difference and salneness underlies any claim to cultural homogeneity and thereby renders that claim potentially open to eventual disintegration. The ideologue controls the contradiction by encasing it in the rhetoric of a rigid taxonomy. In this, the exponents of natioualistic ethnology follow a familiar pattern: "The King is dead. Long live the King!" All these devices are strong performative utterances: they reconstitute what may be an impossible condition in one sense as fundamental truth in another. They belong to the larger class of devices that ostensibly background the figurative character of an attribution ("So-and-so is a real shark"). Just as it would be merely silly to object to the reality of the shark, so too we stand to gain nothing from simply dismissing the claims of cultural ideologies as untrue. Their validity is subject to what Hanson (1979) has called a "double contingency," one side of which lies in the evidential rules within which the ideology itself is formulated. Like all performatives, such devices are successful in varying degrees. The Nazi use of Germanic folktales looks absurd in hindsight because it involved the removal of the tales from their local settings (Kamenetsky 1977: 178): in effect, the strain between idealized past and experienced present built up to critical proportions under the combined stress of external pressure and military and political failure. For foreign observers, the demands on credulity had in smne cases become too great even before the outbreak of war, especially in the realm of archaeology, where they were challenged by German scholars as well (Clark 1939: 201-6). For the populace at large, however, they were embedded in a cynical reconstitution of "Indo-European" culture in terms of blood ideology and the pagan origins of Christmas customs (Gajek 1990). Prototypes are always retrospectively created, although sometimes wily critics catch the ideologues in the act. More generally, we can say that the rhetorical force of such iconic correspondences resides in their being perceived as somehow natural. That the concept of natural symbols is itself a para104
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doxical formulation has not prevented its growing importance in cultural analysis (see, for example, Douglas [1970] 1973: 11-12; Foucault 1966). Once a cultural order can be represented as part of the natural order, the moral rejection of dissonant cases proceeds as a matter of course, and this is reflected in the scholarly literature by an often negative treatment of such themes as miscegenation, cultural and textual corruption, and demographic minorities. Minorities in particular appear as symbolic pollutants (see Herzfeld 1992a: 31). Not all scholars have adopted the official position, of course, but scholars have certainly played an important role in the development of modern nationalism through their authoritative control over the conceptualization of culture. More than that, they have in a sense been the agents of the conversion of cultural data into natural truths. Not all uses of archaeology and folklore for nationalistic purposes have rested primarily on iconic relations. Geographical distribution is also a key factor, and it has sometimes proved sufficient to demonstrate continuous habitation in a given region to stake a convincing territorial claim. The associated material remnant has a certain hardness, which, for exalnple, etymological data seem to lack. s Yet the straightforward recovery of autique relics as a basis for irredentist claims differs from appeals to iconicity in one important respect: it is predicated on the complete absence of any recognition of cultural difference or change. TIllS is why the enormous popnlarity of archaeological metaphors in the nineteenth-century survivalist literature (see Hodgen 1936) creates such an impression of overwhelming literalism. Yet there are many situations in which distributional studies rest on resemblances rather than on the mere survival of material artifacts in situ. We have already noted the use of genetic data in conjunction with cultural evidence; while anthropologists and archaeologists have been generally critical of such confIations in recent years, their perpetuation in other dOlnains of discourse such as journalism and political rhetoric is striking. Distributions based on different sets of iconic criteria tend to reinforce each other as a means of expressing cultural differentiation: "What is begun in one thread (language) is completed in another (spatial relations) .... A boundary between two settlements may be a city wall or a piece of legislation, a disjunction in building materials, or in dialect" (Preziosi 1979: 59)-or, we might add, in discursively created cultural or "racial" difference.
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Some Illustrations At this point, I consider some specific examples of cultural etymology. I begin with an instance of what could be represented as folk etymology; my goal is to suggest that its historicity is essentially similar to many of the cultural claims made by literate ideologies. It is part of the cultural etiology of the Iteso of Kenya: "They state that they were originally members of the Karimojong tribe which migrated south. The Karimojong who remained behind told the younger men who were pushing on that they were going to their graves, atesin-hence, the Iteso. The people who stayed in Karimoja were called the 'tired old men'-Ilwrimojong" . (Karp 1978: 16). Because statelTIents of this kind are verbal, their validity seems especially vulnerable in the context of literate history. But the Iteso example shows that recourse to verbal iconicity is not the exclusive preserve of literate cultures. Etymologies of this kind provide compact instances of the differentiating character of origin myths (see Drummond 1981), and they legitimize the moral boundaries of culture in ways not altogether different from what we encounter in nineteenth-century European nationalisn1. Even in Europe, moreover, the nationalisms of the nineteenth century were not the .first ideologies to lTIake use of verbal iconicity. Thus, for example, we learn that the Romans utilized etymologies of the local names of the Anatolian deity, Men, in order to conflate the god's homeland and the territory in Italy that inclnded some homonyms of Anatolian place-names (Lane 1975: 239): "The colt of the god Men seems deliberately to have been fostered as a unifying force by the Roman rulers in Asia Minor, and a mythology deliberately created, which, through epithets laden with legendary lore and the clever use of word resemblances, underscored the cult of Men as an integral part of the supposed racial relationship between the subject Anatolians and their Italian masters." One sees here a remarkable anticipation of the twentieth-century Italian claims to the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum (our sea)-a claim at once geographical and chronological-and of the Italian re-cognition of Corsican and Maltese culture as essentially Italian (see Simeone 1978: 553). The one important difference is that the ancient claim was predicated on the association of epiphanies of a deity with particular place-names, whereas the ecumenicallTIonotheism of Christianity precluded that particular line of argument. On the other hand, the
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modern culturology of the Fascists drew on a much wider range of cultural traits. The connection between ideology and scholarship in Mussolini's Italy is abundantly evidenced by the official support given to the ethnological journal Lares (Simeone 1978: 549). The unity of Italian culture was still not firmly established at the time; in a very real and widely acknowledged sense, the creation of Italian national character was seen as a consequence rather than as a contributory cause of political unification in the years immediately following that event (Moss 1979: 483; Simeone 1978: 545). The Italians, in other words, wished to forge a cultural unity in the image of the political entity that they had already achieved. Somewhat similar processes were and have since taken place all over Europe (Grillo 1980) and elsewhere, although they are now being resisted by resurgent forms of nationalism, which established governments in turn contemptuously dismiss as "localism" (see also Nadel-Klein 1991). The unity of the Italian nation thus envisaged could be reproduced in countless exhibits of popular culture. "While it is perhaps true that no ethnographic exhibit is ever free of ideological implications of one sort or another (Buttitta 1971: 161-64), the Fascist regime saw special opportunities in the genre. Artistic creativity and individualism were said not to undermine thi$ essential un~ty but to characterize the greatness of the popular genius "whence, came forth all the beauty that makes Italy proud of her past. Thus it was ever so, whether it [i.e., Italy] was split between different states, with few communications and limited education, or today, in all the country's compactness and unity, possessing every kind of progress and civilization" (Bona 1940: 476). That unity emerges in lavish exhibits funded by the regime: "For the first time, exhibitions of handicraft are conjoined with those of Popular Arts, thereby creating a syuthesis of beauty and life which exquisitely interprets the spirit of this Fascist era" (ibid.). In the foregoing examples, we see two quite different uses of iconicity for the construction of ideological unity. One demonstrates homogeneity among classes of artifacts. The other, more abstract or structural, shows the resemblance created between the organization of an exhibit and the form of the idea it represents. Just as certain nineteenth-century museums are replicas of evolutionism in their layout, so the Fascist exhibits of Mussolini's Italy were designed as images of national unity. The earlier understanding of thinkers like D'Azeglio, who saw that the creation of
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the political entity called Italy preceded that of a true national consciousness and identity, was now inverted: "These lllotifs which invariably succeed one another through Inany centuries in every region of Italy do not represent ... the judgments of local taste, but ... should be considered as a sure sign of the ethnic unity which preceded political unity, as a demonstration of the nation's spiritual unity" (Bertarelli 1938: 31; my emphasis). The ethnic unity in question is cast in the image of its political counterpart, utilizing the evidence of folk iconography. Here, explicitly conjoined, are the two uses of iconicity I have just described.
Defending Cultural Intimacy: Iconicity, Rhetoric, and Cultural Identity The huge range of possible phenomena treated under the heading of "similarity" (Eco 1976: 192-200) includes, as we have briefly seen, a variety of major categories: language, material artifacts, genetic inheritance, and so on. Were there such a thing as pure iconicity in culture, we should have to refine our definitions and approach the issue in an altogether fresh way. But in practice, as Peirce appears to have recognized (see Sebeok 1979: 113), such purity is rarely a feature of human discourse. The illusion of iconic purity, on the other hand, is a rhetorical device of prime importance in the kinds of ideological formulations we have been considering: because virtually all nationalisms are centrally concerned with purity and pollution, they elevate domestic symbolisms to the level of national essence. My emphasis throughout this chapter has been on the ways in which the premise of iconicity has been used and on the efficacy of those uses. The ease with which identity and resemblance are confused with each other, moreover) masks the semiotic process itself, and lends itself to the snstenance of self-fulfilling arguments-those based on the symmetry of iconicity-necessary to nationalistic ideologies. The pre-Romantic shift to a view of meaning in which natural signs came to be less and less obviously semiotic phenomena (Foucault 1966: 75-76) prepared the way for investing pronouncements about the rights of nations with the force of natural law. The ideological debates that emerge are confrontations among divergent truths. Thus, a Greek folklorist may argue that the Bulgarians do not have a national epic of their own but merely copied that of the Greeks (Megas 1946); for some Bulgarians, on 108
Persuasive Resemblances
the other hand, Macedonia is "a province which in legendary times is said to have been Greek" (Slavenkoff 1904: 41; my emphasis). The dispute seems to be in full spate an entire century later. These are arguments about territory, couched in terms of origins, and reasoned on the grounds of likeness or dissimilarity. They provide an effective defense of cultural intimacy because they naturalize particular interests in order to render disagreement absurd. The appeal is always to cultural etymology-in other words, to sanctioned, framed iconicity, recast as incontrovertible fact. The iconic reproduction of artifactual forms is foregrounded; into the background, by contrast, the logical principles, special pleading, and presuppositions, by which that reproduction is invested with ideological significance, recede. It does not necessarily follow that because culture A resembles culture B, those who own territory B must also own territory A. But this presupposition of irredentist discourse is the very rationale of what we might call the appeal to etymology, and its force would be dissipated by critical dissection. The peculiar cogency of such arguments derives frolT! a structural resemblance, recalling the transformational sets of La pensee sauvage (Levi-Strauss 1962): as original forms arc to derivative ones, so culture B is to culture A. The battle oyer whether Balkan houses are to be considered Greek or not (e.g., Megas 1951) is thus a battle over whether the Greeks themselves are derivative or primary in the wider Balkan context. Cultural artifacts become "good to think" in searching for ways of discriminating between them and us. Once we accept that something actually and absolutely is Greek, Bulgarian, or whatever, we have allowed ourselves to become entrapped by the rhetoric we were trying to analyze. The metaphor, so to speak, has died on us. The rhetorical uses of iconicity go far beyond nationalism alone. But the paradigm offered by nationalistic folklore illustrates with a wealth of detail how effectively the iconic basis of classification can be employed for rhetorical ends, with or without verbal explication. This rhetorical force derives from a combination of factors: the reversibility of the iconic relationship, the backgrounding of its semiotic makeup, the consequent conflation of identity with similarity, the evidential appeal of sameness, the convergence of popular with scholarly discourse in according respect to the historical implications of etymology. The very heterogeneity of iconicity is what recommends it to the
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reductionist needs of ideology: it simplifies the awkward, complicated, messy truths about ethnic and other kinds of internal diversity that undergird its bland assertions of homogeneity. For this reason, far from rejecting it as too simplistic an umbrella, we should treat it as a crucial concept in the study of political rhetoric. It is the primary line of defense for the secrets of cultural intilnacy.
Chapter Five
The Dangers of Metaphor: From Troubled Waters to Boiling Blood
Of Nations and Metaphors Roger Just, in an extremely important paper entitled "The Triumph of the Ethnos" (1989), has suggested that the remarkable achievement of Greek nationalism was to develop a culturally monolithic society in a century and a half, suppressing the once rich ethnic mosaic (see also Andromedas 1976) that had formerly characterized the present-day Greek lands. He expresses surprise at the simplicity of the message as well as the totality of its success: the synthesizing criterion of Greek blood (elliniko ema) has been attributed to a motley assortment of social groups and has played its role almost to the exclusion of all other touchstones of identity. If the resounding success of the ethnos now looks like a self-evident truth, this was not always so. On the eve of the struggle for independence, it even looked like a rather dubious proposition. But blood is a compelling symbol: indeed, as we know from other societies (e.g., Saba 1993: 77), the idea of unity based on shared blood works even at those intimate levels where people know perfectly well that, in a literal sense, they are not related at all, but wish to act as though they were. In this very brief chapter, which introduces several more detailed analyses of issues in nationalism, I start out from the phenomenal success story that Just has so accurately pinpointed. I have argued elsewhere that, in Greece, the logic of nation-state formation harmonized extraordinarily well with the persistence of localist ideologies (Herzfeld 1987: 157). Nation-statism and localism are usually portrayed as mutually hostile, and with good 110
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reason; the Basque insurgency in Spain and the continuing agony in Northern Ireland provides instructive illustrations of what happens to state authority when localist sentiment-which may take the form of religious or cultural martyrdom-erupts in violence. For the moment, however, Greece appears extraordinarily homogeneous, no trivial matter in an area notoriously beset by ethnic strife. The successful consolidation of the Greek ethnos is indeed a remarkable triumph. I suspect, in part on the basis of comparisons with neighboring Balkan countries, that the triumph of the ethnos among the Greeks may in fact be illusory. In effect, the state has been pusbing its luck and has risked becoming the victim of its own rhetoric; instead of accepting that a certain degree of political relativity ("segmentation") is probably inevitable, and that the same metaphors of blood relationship that united the country also have powerful roots in the logic of feud, it long refused to see that too confrontational a view of localist sentiment presupposes (and thereby creates) a sense of equivalence and, in consequence, grounds for secessionist sentiment. European Union membership and accelerated immigration could conceivably-as in Italyintensify rather than mute the potential for conflict. It is no longer a question of the Greeks versus the minorities: minorities do not necessarily, at least in a moral sense, conceive of theillseives as such, whatever the statistical situation (Ardener 1978). The member of at least one significant population, the Arvanites, have shown a marked preference for claiming a role within Greek culture and history for themselves, rather than emphasizing difference and alienation (Gefou-Madiauou 1999). Rather, it is now a struggle between roughly equivalent ethnic entities, in which-because the old relativities no longer obtainthe state cannot tolerate the existence of cultural entities claiming to have ethnic identity separate from that of the dominant majority. It is worth thiuking about why that should be so. One of the enabling conditions for this hardening of positions is, paradoxically, the persistence in nation-statist discourse of the very features of localisln that the state most abhors: devotion to family as the primary locus of solidarity, patrilineal ideologies capable of achieving massive violence, solidarity of the blood. In a characteristic exercise in metaphorical expansionism, the state expropriates the language of kinship, treating familistic interests as inimical to the common family of the nation; but in a country where family values are still very strongly held (and indeed are 112
The Dangers of Metaphor
recognized as such by the state), this strategy can easily backfire when some of the family members, especially those whose membership is in dispute, behave like strangers. It creates the means of dissent against itself. As a striking example, one need search no further than the moment when Palestinian fedayin-in an obvious evocation of the Exodus story from World War lIsailed a boatload of Palestinian exiles into the waters off Haifa harbor: suddenly the Israeli authorities found themselves internationally cast in the role of their predecessors, the British Mandate authorities. But the object of these ruminations is not to go over already well-traveled territory. I want, rather, to sketch the probable consequences of the literalization of national identity that characterizes nationalism, with a particular focus on the Greek case. For the Greek success in naturalizing an ethnic identity as nationhood is but one example of the larger effectiveness of nationalism around the world. It is an extreme case for, in part, a linguistic reason. The language of ethnicity is based on a Greek root (ethnos), which in Greek also incorporates virtually the entire range of terminology for nationhood and nationalism. This leads to semantic conflations that do not reflect international usage; Greek commentators may in a sense have become the victims of their own linguistic ideology, according to which the historical primacy of Greek makes any discussion of the meaning of Greekderived terms in other languages a Inatter for authoritative Greek expertise. And West European and North American commentators are victims of their success in persuading the Greeks of that primacy, as they now find it virtually impossible to engage Greek diplomats or other commentators in the establishment of an internationally transparent terminology. Anthropology has not been entirely successful in reaching a consensus either (see Eriksen 1993; Li Causi 1995). The tendency to literalize, to seck the essence of a particular kind of identity, is as tempting as it is misguided. In this chapter, I address this literalizing tendency, and suggest that treating national identity as an elaborate metaphor is much more useful as a distancing device. Although those who have a vested interest in luaintaining the status quo of the nation-state may not find this approach to their taste, it has the virtue of grounding analysis in empirical research among those most directly affected in everyday life. Consider, for example, that the entire discourse of familism is, as a self-description of the nation-state, openly and aggres113
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Cultural Intimacy
sively metaphorical. Official discourse pretends to abhor any language that is not precise, including metaphor, because such language threatens the totalizing semantic control on which every state system must to SOlne extent rely. Literalism, however, sets up the grounds for a particular kind of rhetorical contest. Like generates like; consequently, the iinpetus toward ethnic self-determination may actually be a by-product of the uationstatism with which it is so often contrasted. By demanding demographic precision, statist ideologies create the basis for thcir own subsequent dissection. Greece offers a particularly good case study precisely because it is, prima facie, such an unlikely site of ethnic resurgcnce. A small country with a population of around ten million, it counts ethnic Greeks as the overwhelming majority of its inhabitqnts. Successive population exchanges (notably with Bulgaria in 1912 and with Turkey in 1924) have "purified" the landscape. The remaining minority communities are very small, although during the 1990s events regarding both the Mace<1onian and the Turkish communities (to use their terms of self-designation) suggest that demography is not the most significant touchstone. The danger of territorial elaiins by neighboring nations is often mentioned as a cause for alarm, and it is probably because of this factor that the Turkish and Macedonian minorities attract the most active assimilation programs of the Greek state as well as its deepest sllspicion. But other groups, both ethnic and religious, also suffer various forms of discrimination; for example, the Jehovah's Witnesses' refusal to bear arms makes them militarily innocuous but, because it violates indigenous ideas about Greek national pride, exposes them to sometimes severe legal sanctions (see Pollis 1987).
Images of Existence: Essentialism as Metaphor Tambiah (1989) alerts us to the ways in which nation-states, by building on their underlying metaphors of formation, may provoke relatively disenfranchised groups, notably "minorities," into coalescing into directly analogous entities. While he largely tackles the inadequacies of the nation-state concept to describe the most recent eruptions of violence and thereby moves beyond Anderson's (1983) "imagined communities," I want to go further still. I argue that etlmicity itself is not only a highly problematic phenomenon, one that is perhaps only capturable in a state of 114
The Dangers of Metaphor
"emergence" and as "style" (Royce 1982), but also a product, in its extraordinary tendency toward self-reification, of the nationstate's status as a rcified model of sociality. I want to suggest also, using the Greek case as a limiting one (because the minorities, by the Greeks' own argument, are so small), that the implicit patrilinearity of the kinship models thereby invoked is highly compatible with violence. If, therefore, we see today a mild upsurge in ethnic self-determination in Greece, tlus is largely a consequence, not only of external pressures, but also of the state's own production of ethnicity. Moreover, in Greece the problem is again further exacerbated by the fact that ethnicity and nation are conflated in a single ternl, ethnos. This makes the potential for disaster enormous, and indeed quite ant of proportion to the strictly demographic scale of the problem. It also makes the Greek case interesting for comparative purposes, as does the fact that Greek reactions to minority attitudes are overdetermined by the discourse of orientalism and Eurocentrism: communists are Slavs and as such not considered fully European; most other minorities arc non-Christian and represent the dangers of the East or, like the Gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses, defy definition and thus constitute symbolic "pollution" in Douglas's (1966) sense-"matter out of place," the very substance of cultural intimacy. It is hardly surprising that nationalist ideologies should resort frequently and inventively to metaphor, or, conversely, that they should be hostile to the idea that metaphor is central to their discourse. Pragmatically, at least, these are by no means mutually incompatible positions. To make this point clearer, and to delineate something of its significance, I would like to allude briefly to a recent stndy by G. E. R. Lloyd (1990) of the popular concept of social or cultural "mentality." Lloyd takes issue with a tradition-largely originated by Lucien Levy-Bruhl and elaborated by a host of anthropologists, Annales historians, sociologists, and psychologists-that characterizes whole cultures in terms of a collective mental disposition, or mentality (menta/ite). These mentalities are more broadly divided into "prelogical" and "modern" types. Lloyd rejects the whole thesis, largely on the grounds that to be useful mentalities would have to be objectively discrete, whereas the evidence offers no such convenient assurance. I do not have the space to rehearse Lloyd's sophisticated argument in detail here, but wish to retain two aspects of it. 115
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First, Lloyd suggests that the psychologistic reasoning that permits us to divide the world's cultures in so summary a fashion reflects our own prejudices more than it demonstrates observable regularities in non-Western societies in general. This is part of what Kuper (1988) has called the invention of primitive society; it has also bccOlne a common feature of educated nonprofessional talk about the world's cultures. Secoud, Lloyd suggests that the foundation of such arguments, the idea that primitives use metaphor where their sophisticated contemporaries would use only literal discourse, harkens back to the eristic Inanagement of ideas about truth in preclassical and classical Greek courts. Thus, the abstract questions of metaphor and literalness to which Aristotle brought such careful elaboration were grounded in contestin the agonistic relations that, as ethnographers have repeatedly insisted, are also characteristic of the modern societies of the region (see Peristiany 1965). Lloyd mischievously implies that nlodern academic debates about literalness exhibit much the same social quality, for reasons clearly accessible in the social history of ideas. The distinction between the literal and the metaphorical thus emerges as grounded, not in universal truth, but in the conditions under which it is given shape; it exists only insofar as it is socially created. The first of these points, the conceptual poverty of hard-andfast divisions between logical and prclogical Inentalities, is directly relevant to the study of present-day nationalist discourse in Greece and surrounding countries. Greek discussion of differences betweeo the Greek national character and that of the other peoples of the area often turns on the nebulous but evocative concept of nootropia, which is a close approximation to mentalite. It handily explains both the strange vagaries of visitors, especially tourists, and the £erce insistence on personal pride and independence on which so many Greeks vocally pride themselves. It is a description of certain stereotypical vices or virtues. As such, it has no analytic value, but it is to be regretted that obvious derivation from scholarly locution has deflected attention away from the enormous currency it enjoys as a term of popular speech. Anthropologists have ignored it, perhaps out of a sense of elnbarrassment: it purports to describe the very foundations of culture, yet clearly serves instead as a carrier of the kinds of generalizations that most anthropologists would prefer to avoid and that they regret in the early history of their own discipline. 116
The Dangers of Metaphor
I would urge instead that we approach it with all due seriousness-etlmographically. In other words, we shonld not treat it as an analytic construct for studying national differences, but as an artifact used in the construction of those differences and as an important link in the relationship between nationalism and scholarship. Lloyd's second point, about the historical and social origins of Aristotelian literalism, may seem at first blush to be far removed from the scene of modern ethnic and national rivalries. And yet, I suggest, this is not so: for, if the literal-lnetaphorical distinction indeed emerges as a function of discursive contest rather than of inherently logical properties, as Lloyd suggests, its prominence as both an explicit problematic and an underlying dimension of contests over territory and identity becomes immediately more understandable. Nation-states spend enormous amounts of effort on denying the reality of each other's existence. This is the crux of what Geertz (1973: 240-41), in an early anthropological discussion of nationalist ideology, called "essentialism." It is not merely the attribution of innate characteristics, including a specific national mentality, but the conflation of images with experienced reality. Benedict Anderson's argument is particularly pertinent here. His work docs not specifically address the metaphorical character of nationalist doctrines, but the creation of a suppositio~s commonality-so often realized in assertions like "I can always tell my compatriots from the way they walk, talk, move, and so on"-is both metonymical (each citizen is a micrOCOSln of the encompassing whole) and metaphorical (each citizen is a version of the national character or mentality). As we have seen in the previous chapter, this also explains the extraordinarily important role of similarity in forging national solidarities. An important part of Lloyd's discussion of metaphor hinges on the fact that ultimately it makes little sense to say that something is (or is not) a metaphor. What happens is that the metaphorical basis of the labels we give all entities is pushed into the background. Nationalism is a doctrine of reification. In its usual terms, a nation either exists or does not exist: reality, constituted in these uncompromising terms, generates other, Counterposed realities of a similar order (neighboring nations, the enemy, foreign interference), and the symbolic production of a unifying discourse, so often launched with benign goals of collective eman117
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cipation, all too rapidly becomes instead a call to arms. Reality has supervened, with disastrous results. The case of Cyprns is a tragically appropriate illustration of this process; that of Crete before it points up the character of the tragedy. On both islands, over long periods, Greek-speaking Christians and Muslims lived side by side, separated by their respective religions but conjoined in certain ritual practices of local significance and by ties of reciprocity that would be enacted in dramatic public displays on special occasions such as major feast-days. Yet virtually the entire Muslim population of Crete was shipped off to Asia Minor in 1924, while the current hardening of "ethnic" lines between "Greeks" and "Turks" on Cyprus further illustrates the transformation of identities into ethT!icity and thence into nationality-a progression that has brought little but disruption and death to the local comlTIlmities and transmuted local norms of feuding into national "causes" (see Loizos 1988). Metaphorical usages may also slip easily between very different levels of social inclusiveness. As I have observed elsewhere (Herzfeld 1985a), the Cretan shepherds who adopt aggressive poses of village manhood may also, under appropriate circumstances, work simultaneously on family and national sentiments of solidarity as well. An important aspect of the approach I am advocating here, and in all my work, concerns the parallelisms that subsist among multiple levels of identity. When we study a village community, without intending any claims of typicality we are not only studying that community; we are also engaged with several other social entities, overlapping or concentric, clearly or weakly defined, officially recognized or contrary to the social values of the bureaucratic state. In Greece, the state recognizes kinship bilaterally, for example, yet agnatic kinship comes to the fore when the crises of a feuding society supervene, constituting a real challenge to state authority since the official definition of the nation is framed in mutedly agnatic terms. The parallels among levels of social identification must be studied ethnographically. They do not ordinarily appear in the official pronouncements of the bureaucracy, the political parties, or the national media. They are nonetheless vitally important if we are to understand the perspective of those whose loyalty the state seeks to command. Let me offer an example (described in detail in Herzfeld 1985a: 9-10). An elderly Cretan ex-shepherd, a former mayor of the 118
The DangeTs of MetaphoT
village steeped in the heroic legends of resistance against Turks and Germans, recalled the defense of the Arkadi monastery in 1866, when after a ferocious battle some Greek villagers and monks were cornered by the Turks and blew themselves up rather than surrender. Several men from his village perished in the explosion. The old man characteristically approaches these events from the perspective of his agnatic group, singing of his paternal grandfather and namesake's exploits at Arkadi. The identification is so strong that he is moved to uncontrollable tears. Is he, at that moment, celebrating kin, local, Cretan, or Greek identity? Only a literalist would insist that we should choose only one level of identification, for his performance resonates at all of thelTI. Yet this adumbration of concentric loyalties runs counter to the exclusivism of nation-state ideology. While the old man might wish to identify with the national ideal, his message is always potentially subversive, because it raises the possibility that one of the less inclusive levels of solidarity might eventually prevail and command a more immediate attachment. In Crete, perhaps, the authorities have little to worry about. Even when such rebelliousness still occurs there, it is usually represented as heroic, typically Greek, and redolent of a love of independence; the freewheeling sheep-thieves of the hill country cultivate such reappropriations of nationalist discourse ~ith gleeful assiduity. What of the non-Greek-speaking people of other areas? Here the evidence is muddy at best. A major part of the problem is that the principal instrument of research into such matters is the census. Whether or not the occasional doubts about the accuracy and motivation of the census have any foundation in fact, as an instrument it encourages reification. People lTIUst either speak one language or two; the census is incapable of registering the evanescent subtleties of code-switching (see Tsitsipis 1983). They must register an official religion; the confusions of local cults, in which the participation of Muslims and Christians together was an occasional feature in the past, have no place here. In short, the census is not only insensitive to the indeterminacies of social and cultural dynamics at the locallevcl; it is ahnost certainly the catalyst for the very processes of reification that it alone can register accurately. "While the Greek census is exactly like any other in this respect, it should be said that inbuilt exclusions such as that of the Macedonian minority may have done more to create that category than any propagandizing from 119
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Skopje or Thessaloniki. It may well be that in the census we see more clearly than anywhere else the paradoxical dynamics that permit the state to generate the most serious challenge to its own hegemony. That challenge is a consequence of the mutual dependence of official and popular idioms of identity. It is worth asking ourselves at this juncture what lessons could be learned from recent events in the former East Bloc countries. There, the collapse of centralized Marxist regimes has brought in its train a disturbing intensification of ethnic factionalism. The recurrence of anti-Semitism and persecution of Gypsies arid the feuding between Hungary and Romania over Transylvania draft popular prejudices in the service of aggressive new nationalisms (Kligman 1990). What is the cause of such developments"and what light can they shed on the superficially different scene in Greece? Democracy (or, better, udemocratization l ' ) is not necessarily equivalent to greater tolerance. On the contrary, as Kapferer (1988) has shown for Australia (see also Bottomley and Lechte 1990), the logic of tolerance, whieh comes under such names as "multiculturalism" and "cultural diversity," may heighten the sense of otherness and arrogate the egalitarian perquisites of democracy to a majority group. In Australia, the white majority particularly resists the incursion of strangers to its symbolically elevated "mateship" (significantly, an androcentric image). In Greece, the ambiguity of hospitality (Herzfeld 1987b) is an expression of inequality, which only an intimate can level; a stranger must always remain ipokhreomenos, under obligation. Thus, we should not be surprised that the democratization of Bulgaria, Romania, and the former Yugoslav Federation should actually have increased ethnic tensions and discrimination against disenfranchised minorities. For one thing, minorities, notably the Jews, have often been accused of siding with the old regimes. Then again, the rhetoric of an exclusive kin group, which (with the exception of Romania) went into abeyance under the internationalist communist regiInes, returns now as the basis of a new exclusivism. The language of blood has returned, and with it a greatly increased risk of literal bloodshed: in Bosnia, the pattern of rape, infanticide, and murder recasts the logic of agnatic feuding in terms of a terrible violence, with which it then returns to haunt local conllTIunities in the most destructive way as an external force rupturing local affective bonds and leading to irreversible hostility (see Bringa 1995). In vain the Bosnian Muslims tried to emphasize 120
The Dangers of Metapho1"
confessional community rather than blood, as Bringa (1995: 32-33) notes; the rhetoric of blood was too widespread in the region, and too easily understood by the cynical Western interests that sustained post-Yugoslav ethnonationalism, to yield its longestablished primacy to more peaceful images. That "blood is thicker than water" is also, after all, a common view among West Europeans and North Americans. This agnatic logic is also present, in muted form, in Greek nationalist discourse: the "Greek blood" of which Just writes belongs to that idiom. It is worth recalling in this context that Greeks view blood as a thoroughly flexible symbol: the emotionally "boiling blood" of brothers, for example, leads them to embrace each other fervently after long years of absence, but, by the same token, ean also lead to hatred and killing when the relationship sours-usually, significantly enough for our purposes, over territorial disputes. In the national arena, the boundary fence separating fields inherited from a common set of parents becomes the international boundary over which nationstates go to war. The Greek nation appears in early nationalistic discourse under the thin disguise of an agnatic grouping, to genos (pronounced yenos). This term, an artifact of official discourse with its origins in a romantic reading of classical Athenian society, may be glossed locally by such terms as yenia that also carry agnatic implications in many parts of the country (HerzfeLd 1983a, 1985a). Such idioms are also extremely common beyond the national borders of Greece: in the former Yugoslavia, for example, where agnatic kinship is in some areas much more pronounced than even in the most extreme cases in Greece (Boehm 1984; Hammel 1968; d. Alexakis 1980; Couroucli 1985; Herzfeld 1985a), the language of blood and revenge informs the emergence of national leadership (see Boehm 1984). In Romania, long a contestant against Greek interests for the mantle of classical presence in the Balkans (see Campbell 1964: 3-6), the Ceau§cscu regime adopted a similar rhetoric of patrilinearity (Kligman 1990). It may be that some of these idioms are of Turkish origin (see Delaney 1995), but they also correspond to strongly held local usages. In any event, it is important to remember the common symbolic ground that these countries share-a property also present in lTIOre muted guise in Western European countries that consider themselves long shed of such embarrassing hiuts of prehistory. 121
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Cultural Intimacy
Thus, the ceutral concept of blood is not uniquely Greek or even Balkan-indeed, it has a long history in hldo-European and Semitic cultures as a marker of social inclusiveness-but it does appear to play an unusually prominent role in discussions of the perceived threat to Greek cultural and even territorial survival. It is apparent in government pronatalist policies (in the form of official support for families with many children) and in antiassimilationist drives by the Greek authorities in the diaspora. In the diaspora, moreover, it provides an appealing device that seems to transcend the barriers of prejudice against charges of Balkan atavism. A former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce, Andrew Manatos, is reported as saying, "The dilution of Greek blood in the United States is because nearly 90 percent of Greek-Americans are marrying non-Greek-Americans. This marriage pattern is due to the fact that Greek-Americans are becoming less ethnically Greek" (Greek-American Herald, 12 December 1995,24). This alarm appears in the context of concerns about a weakening of the Greek lobby's support in the face of threats thought to emanate from Ankara and Skopje. It is clear that the symbol of blood translates into familiar terms-as central to modern American kinship ideology as they arc in the ancient European world (Linke 1985; Schneider 1968)-the larger fears that Greeks entertain about their collective weakness in the world today. In the United States and most of Western Europe, the agnatic implications of this ideology are well concealed (but d. Delaney 1995). In most of the Balkan regions, these more focused meanings still subsist at the level of local-level feuds (the Hatfields and McCoys strike most Americans as belonging to an irrecoverable past). Given their still mlll1dane visibility, their escalation to the level of ethnic conflict can be managed by skilled political actors. This seems to have played a large part in the Bosnian conflagration, and-since feuding relations entail fusion as well as schism-the apparent shift in both Greece and Albania toward at least symbolic expressions of unity in the face of coIlective threat. I do not wish to suggest that Greece is about to face a massive increase in ethnic violence. The minorities there are all too small to constitute a real threat in that sense. The problem lies much more in the official perception that hostile foreign governments might use the presence of minorities on Greek soil to advance irredentist goals. The past has shown that such fears are not entirely unfounded and that Greece is probably right not to put much faith in Western support in the event of a major confronta122
The Dangers of Metaphor
tion. Nevertheless, the increasing prominence of minority spokespersons and parties and the continuing vein of nationalist exclusivism in official rhetoric cause politicians and the public alike considerable concern. At the very least, tbey suggest that the logic of the nation-state provides a model for its own destabilization from within. Spicer's (1992) modcl of the oppositional development of ethnogenesis has direct relevance to the Balkans. Once launched on the path of confrontation, this process is extremely resistant to restraint. What are the practical implications of focusing on the metaphorical character of blood in this context? Numerous anthropologists (e.g., Fernandez 1986; Sapir and Crocker 1977) have paid close attention to the uses of metaphor in negotiating identity. If Fernandez is right in seeing metaphor as the predication of a conlprehensible sign upon an inchoate subject and in suggesting that the subject of the person represents one of the most common targets of this device, the unstable lines that divide outsiders from insiders in the Greek context are a rich field for Inetaphorical exploration. Greeks recognize in their political discourse a high degree of personification. Political analysts have associated this with a wide range of phenomena, fro~ strong clientelism (Campbell 1964; Kharalambis 1989; Legg 1969) to a very unfamiliar conception of civil rights (Pollis 1987). A constant refrain in media discussions has it that Greeks always treat political events as personaIIy motivated. This does not mean that they necessarily believe that such is the case, but it does suggest that metaphors of solidarity based on affronts to the collective pride will effectively stir up emotional responses. This is clearly the case. But the idea of metaphor is itself not value free in the Greek setting. Peter Mackridge (1985: 348) draws attention to the way in which public and literary discourse in Greece appears inimical to metaphor. The frequent use of quotation marks around anything that might stray too far from the literal is a common stylistic feature, while newspapers tend to use hackneyed metaphors that are too close to death to do much harm. Such protection of the very idea of referentiality harmonizes accurately with the fears of a nation-state unsure of its cultural claims. The state is the very embodiment of the literal-perhaps nowhere more so than in Greece, where Enlightenment-derived discourse masks a rich array of ambiguities about law, entitlement, and morality (Tsoucalas 1991). In popular discourse, this is supported 123
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Cultural Intimacy
by ideas about genuine (ghnisios) identities and tremendous confusion about categories-such as that of the Jews-for whom identity does not necessarily conflate descent, religion, language, and territory. Thus, to suggest that the ethnos is metaphorically constructed sbakes tbe foundations of personal as well as collective ontology. Under these circumstances one may legitimately ask whether the very term ethnicity might beg nl0re questions than it can possibly answer. Given the Greek origins of the term, many commentators have found it especially slippery semantically in the context of modern Greek cultural politics. Greek public discourse dnes not admit of the possibility of ambiguity in tbe definition of tbe ethnos, for which the base model is the Greek nation itself, but it is precisely this semantic invariance that has furnished the most accessible model to other cultural and social entities struggling to find tlie means of expressing collective identities. In place of a pluralistic vision it offers only the option of generating increasing numbers of mutually hostile "nationalities." Among European and especially Balkan nation-states, Greece is unusual in the extent to which it is able to make convincing claims to ethnic and cultural homogeneity. It may well be that tbe dangers Greece faces internally are not as great as the scenario I have just described would suggest. Why do the Greek authorities continue to pound away at this theme, when, that is, by most countries' standards, they have every right to treat it as already successfully managed? Doubtless, as Pollis (1987) has argued, part of the answer lies in anxieties about the unclear definition of rights, a concept that has been absorbed as a piece of rbetorical weaponry without its philosophical underlay. Doubtless, too, the territorial disputes of Greece with neighboring countries lend urgency to the issue: they certainly seeln to explain, for example, the denial of Macedonian ethnic identity and the insistence that Thracian Muslims "are not Turks." (The Bulgarian "solution" to its "Turkish problem" has been much less palatable still: it was to force the Turkisb minority to leave, although this was subsequently reversed.) But I have suggested here that another factor must be taken into account. That is tbe well-concealed but ever-present lability of Greek political entities. Today's localism could become tomorrow's separatism, and the fact that-while denying that they use metaphor-politicians on every side use metaphors of the embattled person to address issues of cultural boundary creation cannot 124
The Dangers of Metaphor
offer much comfort for the future. Further cOluparisons with the Balkans and beyond may show a strong correlation between the use of person-based metaphors of the body politic and the tendency to turn a deaf ear on pleas for ethnic self-determination, leading in turn to ever more insistent reaching for referentiality by the disenfranchised populations. In other words, the real danger is internal to the dynamics of Greek politics. This, then, is the practical issue: a country wishing to avoid a potential ethnic explosion can hardly afford to maintain the confrontational politics that lead to an ever greater hardening of the categories on every side. Nationalistic discourses that seek to suppress internal differentiation, whether at the level of local sociocultural peculiarities or at that of minority calls for sel£determination, simply aggravate the problem they are trying to defuse. Hypersensitivity to outside curiosity-to invasions, as it were, of cultural intimacy-breeds ridicule among a country's more powerful international patrons and in the alliances of which the country is a member. This in turn creates a notable lack of sympathy for extravagant calls that may lnask very real anxieties, as the Greek experience over Macedonia has painfully demonstrated. The constant harping on Greece's claim to "real" European status, discussed later on in this book (cbapter 6), exemplifies another of the less successful defenses of cultural intimacy for political purposes. Intransigent "ethnonationalism," to use the term developed by Tambiah (1989) as a contrast with more pluralistic idioms of citizenship, provides the model for the battles to which, sooner or later, its own logic is liable to lead. 1 Vico warned of the importance of remembering tbe embodied and material basis of the lnetaphors from which even the most abstract terminology and even the most formal idiOlns of power are derived. Again and again, ethnonationalism has proved susceptible to the siren song of referentiality-the call of the literal. As its metapborical basis-whether as an "imagined community" or luore specifically as a brotherhood of agnatic blood-fades from sight, as it becomes essentialized as more and more of a present and unchangeable reality in the people's lives, it can only reproduce itself. The Bosnian experience is not a display of Balkan atavism, as it has become dangerously conventional to assert. It is a lesson in what may happen anywhere when this process, cynically encouraged from outside, is allowed to run its course. Nervousness about internal diversity will not make this problem go away. 125
1
Chapter Six
Cultural Intimacy and the Meaning of Europe
Essentialism and the Balkans In the recent brawling over the political mayhem in the Balkans, a dangerous prejudice masquerades as an analytic perspective. It is a prejudice far more deeply and more insidiously entrenched than the atavism that it claims to have identified in Balkan society at large, and that it cites as the pretext for condescension and hegemony. It is the view that pits the allegedly rational democracies of Western Europe against states whose European identity is itself at issue-states that are variously characterized a$ unstable, kinship based, and small scale. The irony of this perspective is of course that the language in which it is couched is itself that of kinship: that of the stern parent chastising a wayward and fractious brood of children. Unhappily, not only does this paternalistic mode of thought pervade the rhetoric of global and regional Realpolitik, but also it has become a dominant idiom of analysis. Well may we wonder about the resulting ideological entailment of analysis in its object of study.' It is not my purpose to claim a privileged immunity frOlll such charges for social anthropology; indeed, that discipline has been much criticized for its own embedded colonialism. 2 I do want to suggest, however, that the ethical imperatives behind the discipline's massive self-examination have certainly also raised the stakes in terms of the quality of scholarship, by divorcing it more securely than ever before from the kind of unthinking essentialism that led to talk of "Balkan atavism" and other crude culture-area stereotypes. Indeed, arguments about the mission of anthropology 127
r Cultural Intimacy
that pit "science" against "morality" partake of the same essentializing and binary discourse in which the panoply of ratioilalist language serves as the preeminent symbol of late-twentiethcentury authority, and thus they fail to achieve the detachment they claim as their defining virtue. Moreover, in this discourse "rationality" often serves as a proxy for the equally essentialized West-what the Greeks call "Europe."3 Thus, the vicissitudes of anthropology in Europe give us a particularly iIIuminatiug ethnographic perspective on the dynamics of cultural intimacy. Ironically, this tactic is made possible by turning to one of the most traditional features of anthropological investigation: the conduct of long-term field research in bighly localized, usually slnall communities in which research means above all access to relations of intimacy. The anthropological approach to political life has always been characterized by a focus on the local community. Even when national and international issues are at stake , analysis has usually centered ou the experiences of people the ethnographer has known under conditions of relative intimacy.4 The intensity and personal commitment of this focus have their costs. Anthropological work evokes resentment and, at times, downright hostility in some local intellectuals, who tend to dismiss its concerns as immaterial and (in a quite literal sense) inessential. But these reactions, especially as they are not shared by all local observers, indicate that the research has uncovered something significant-if not, why the fuss? Such reactions are diagnostic: they betray the underlying assunIptions and so create the best conditions for an ethnographic examination of elite cosmologies and of the nation-state itself. For while media discourse provides a national-level ethnographic mode analogous to village-level gossip (Herzfeld 1992b), it is the active engagement of anthropology by elite members, sometimes also through the media, that puts the "participant" into the "participant observation" of fieldwork "in" the nation-state. Local anthropologists, who have rightly criticized their foreign colleagues' reluctance to engage with the rate of social and cultural change, especially in the cities, have nevertheless acknowledged that the older studies offer a necessary baseline for evaluating change, which itself may in part be constituted by a cultural rhetoric, even a kind of structural nostalgia, about the confusions of a continually updated "nowadays" (Bakalaki 1993: 57). Such is the argument for a specifically ethuographic analysis of the nation-state-an analysis that also incorporates, but is not 128
Cultuml Intimacy and the Meaning of Europe
exhausted by, the many more localized studies of villages and towns, and of bureaucratic and other formal institutions. In the sense that a remote village, while not in any analytically useful sense typical of an entire country, lllay nonetheless serve to draw out some of the latter's more distinctive self-typifications,S a single European cOlmtry may similarly throw the construction of European identity into critical relief. I shall pursue this analytic strategy with regard to places exemplified by Greece, that have themselves been strikingly marginal to the international power structures. In this, I anI pushing that strategy as far as I think it will gO. 6 The strategy, in effect, makes both the anthropological intervention and the reactions that it elicits a means of gauging what is at stake for nationalistic discourses in the promotion of a particular self-image and its calibration to a particular reading of "Europe." If anthropological interest evokes such intense irritation and anger, there is. presumably a reason. What I wish to suggest is that the anthropological delnand for intimate access to the body politic violates state monopolies of representation in ways that reveal how those monopolies operate, what they control, and why they matter. This is a classic anthropological move: it examines the st~kes that leaders and "high culture" critics may have in what they nevertheless brusquely dismiss to inquisitive outsiders as periphera~ or trivial phenomena. As the editors of a recent exploration of beauty pageants poiut out, gendered and other bodily images of the ideal provide an accessible site for observing the dissonance masked by the smiling faces of national harmony (Cohen, Wilk, Stoeltje, 1996: 6-10), putatively a Western harmony at that. It would be hard to find a better metaphor for cultural intimacy. A focus on such matters may usefully discommode received ideas about "common sense" or "rationality," a longstanding anthropological concern (see Carrier 1995c; Douglas 1975; Geertz 1983; Herzfeld 1992a; Lloyd 1990; Tambiah 1990). Just as J. L. Austin based his "plea for excuses" (Austin [1956-57] 1971) on the apparent triviality of excuses as breaching unprotected cultural defenses to give major insights into a whole moral universe, so I would argue that it is the very mereness of what anthropologists mostly describe-the "stories" of everyday lifethat breaches the sense of a unitary history that nationalist ideologies promote. This, then, is a plea for anecdotes. The point is not to irritate for irritation's sake, but simply to respond to an irritation that already exists in order to discover what it portends.
129
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The answer will prove, I think, nnexpectedly sympathetic to the predicament of the irritatcd, althongh they themselves may well not be terribly reassured. This is because nationalisln, especially in its more hegemonic forms that deny recognition to minority interests, often reproduces still larger power structures. As a result, local elites find themselves between a rock and a hard place: they cannot afford to admit to the international community the existence of internal disunities, yet their refusal to acknowledge such fissures saps their credibility before knowledgeable audiences at home and abroad. This is especially applicable to the nationalisms of those very countries whose political marginality makes the defense of a particular cultural reading especially crucial for the country's survival. Again, this can be said of no countl"y more dramatically than Greece. So overshadowed by an illustrious past-largely constructed for it by its self-appointed "protectors"-that it lnust humiliatingly always append the suffix "nl0dern" to its name, Greece nevertheless often finds that these self-same protectors change the rules of the game they have insisted on playing with the Greek leadership. It is hardly surprising, then, that classicists who wish to import anthropological approaches into their work sometimes now run afoul of a "challenged sense of ethnic and national identity," restive, to say the least, at the prospect of yet marc studies of marginal populations (Cartledge 1994: 4). But that marginality is-and perhaps the embarrassment lies right here-a small-scale model of the predicament of Greece as a country. I want to argue for maintaining (although not to the exclusion of all else) a critical ethnographic watch on the nation's cultural peripheries for the same reason that Greece itself is such an important test case for the significance of "Europe." At both levels, political marginality and the idea of historical centrality are bound tightly together: tradition is the nourishment of national idcntity, just as Hellas is of Europe. At the international level, this evokes roughly the same reactions as one finds in official state circles toward the strongly localist orientation of many Greek bureaucrats and politicians. In both cases, the defense of local interests derives in part from the support of powerful patrons, who have every interest in essentializing it as endemic. Internationally, at least, that link is often conveniently ignored: stereotypes provide convenient justifications. Thus, both American policymakers and Greece's European Union partners constantly express deep exasperation at the Greeks' Balkan policy 130
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and their insistent evocation of a millennia-deep history. One highly placed American commentator unhelpfully declared, "Greece is reminding the world that it too is a Balkan country, the inhabitant of a region where history often induces hysteria" (Talbott 1992). Such gratuitous generalizations must be read in the context of a global moral economy that overdetermined Greece's past at the price of its present independence. The essentializcrs-both academic and political (and these are not always discrete groupsi-see in such alleged proclivities the evidence they seek of a rift between Western and Balkan ways of doing things (notably Huntington 1993). This idiom, I suggest, is in fact both a diagnostic feature and an integral part of the problem itself. If history is the object of fierce contest, so is objectivity, that supposed product of Western rationality. Consequently, the continual Greek exhortations to foreign visitors to "study history,'l for exalnple, presuppose that this activity can only have one outcome. Disputed pasts illustrate perfectly my argument that essentialism is a strategy that denies its own existence: no party to such a conflict can ever admit the possibility of multiple answers or of ambiguity. But that is in no sense a peculiarly Balkan problem. . The particular issue of Macedonia is embedded in a long process whereby Greece has been required to plead its valt:!e in the modern world on the basis of its selectively reconstructed ancient past; yet what past is not selectively reconstrll,cted? The point here is not to approve Greek denials of minority rights, but to situate the problem in the larger context of an international politics of culture, a context in which sensitivity to the violation of cultural intimacy has economic, territorial, and long-term political significance. Thus, I prefer to read competing national histories as versions, on the scale of international relations, of what Bourdicu, writing of thc more modest domain of social life, has called "cultural capital" (Bourdieu 1984). And it is the possibility of applying this instrument of social and symbolic analysis to questions of global Realpolitik that particularly alerts us to the possiblc significance of ethnography-the point at which anthropological analysis connects with everyday experience-for understanding the dynamics of today's fractious Europe. While the Macedonian conflict preoccupied many regional specialists in the closing years of the twentieth century, as a dramatic contest over cultural as well as economic and territorial resources it typifies a situation in 131
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,'"
which Western essentializations of a "Balkan mentality" do little more than ensure the self-fulfillment of convenient prophecies. They add insult to injury, perpetuating the rhetoric through which Western interference helped lock the Balkan states into the pattern that the same external forces now mock. It is in this field of political forces that we nlust read the current predicaments of anthropological research. This is not only an analysis of Greece. It is a discussion -of why a Europe without the fair and full representation of Greek interests will nlerely lead to even luore repetitions of the political stance that maintains the Greeks' maverick status as a threat to European unity. It is, to illustrate the larger principle with a specific example, about why Greek resentment over the -FrancoGenuan attempt to reluove Greek from the roster of official European Union languages-the argument was that a reduction to five languages made for greater efficiency-exposes the self-reproducing proclivities of a hegeluony in which Greece has becOlne inextricably engaged. It is also an attempt to read from local reactions to anthropological research a more sensitive understanding of the politics of cultural scholarship, not as an incestuous field of backstabbing relevant only to the players and perhaps a few talented novelists, but as an integral part of the larger international dynamic. This chapter is about the politics of mereness. Should Greece be considered merely Balkan? Are the concerns of anthropology merely anecdotal and marginal to national realities? I intend to show that such questions reveal the contours of a vast field of political play. This chapter should thereby also help to sharpeu the definition of cultural intimacy, which, for immediate purposes, can be understood as the sharing of known and recognizable traits that not only define insiderhood but are also felt to be disapproved by powerful outsiders. The term's hints of domesticity are especially apposite in the context of nationalism, which is commonly characterized by a projection of kinship metaphors onto the larger scale of the nation-in other words, the metonymic extension of the face-to-face Gemeinschaft that constitutes the ethnographer's traditional arena of operation. 7 It is a familiar dilemma: to return for a moment to the self-presentation of flight attendants, trainees are trained to accept "home" as "an idea without an immediate referent" as they move from one base city to another (Hochschild 1983: 100). The stretching of domesticity is routinized in actual experIence. 132
Cultural Intimacy and the Meaning of Eumpe
This projection of kinship is what most of all gives the lie to attempts to represent the modern centralized polity as radically different from snch acephalous and snpposedly kinship-based societies as the Nuer. 8 More reluarkably still in the context of that Eurocentric perspective, patrilineality-althongh analytically a separate issue from segmentation-plays an important role in images common to most forms of European nationalism, usually in the rhetoric of blood, as discussed in the previous chapter. In Evans-Pritchard's (1940) description of the Nuer, it becomes apparent that while agnatic kinship substantially sets the organization of social relations at the lllorc intimate levels, it becomes more and more tenuous as the scale of social connections expands. Thus, the patrilines represented by the largest groups are, in a literal sense, largely fictitious. The same is no less true, I snggest, of the "fatherland" idiom that Delaney (1995) has skillfully identified as a pervasive feature of secularist Turkish nationalism, which shares with its Western European antecedents deep historical and ideological roots in the Abrahamic religions. In this regard the avowedly secular or Western nation-state is grou~ded in the metonymic stretching, to extend Anderson's useful portrayal, of the agnatic imagination. Hence cnltural intimacy. It is no accident that the pat Greek phrase for the defense of that intimacy, often heard as a reason for not discussing admitted weaknesses of the nationalist argument before a foreign andience, should be ta en iko mi en dhimo (matters of the honse [classical Greek oikos] [shonld] not [be exposed] in the public sphere). The classical oikos was apparently a prodnctive honsehold unit embedded in the patrilineally organized genos-the latter, a term often used in modern times and specifically in contexts of Romantic Greek nationalism to mean the whole Greek people conceptualized, Nuer-like, as a huge descent gronp. The dhimos (deme), the unit of social organization that underwent its own metonymic stretching to give us the term "democracy," is no place for washing the family's dirty linen-as we might express the same sentiment, using an idiom perhaps no less grounded in common European notions of the sanctity of the body and the male role in defending its privacy.9 It is in this context that I interpret Greek attempts to regulate the national image abroad. International spats· over national images are in no sense new (see Jervis 1970: 7), nor are they uniqnely Greek. They do seem to arise with striking predictability, however, over a very specific genre of disputes: those which 133
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Cultural Intimacy
concern a sexualized sense of national dignity. The Saudi response to British media portrayals of the execution of a royal princess and her commoner lover in 1977 illustrates this principle dramatically. The Saudi government insisted that the whole affair was an internal matter (Sassoon 1994: 36-37)-an appeal to the metaphor of domestic inviolability that reached its apogee in Greece under the military regimes of 1967-74. For the Saudi authorities the principle of privacy was thus violated twice over: first, by the sexual irruption by a commoner into the royal patriline and, second, by the ocular penetration of a national veil of decorum by the media of a categorically uncircmncised and therefore polluting West. 'o It is at this point that I would expect a Greek nationalist to object, not without sympathy for Saudi resentment: "We are not Muslims, and our sexual codes are the very reverse of such oriental barbarities." In so doing, however, the hypothetical nationalist-bearer of a powerful strain of post-Ottoman hostility to Islam that has already overdetermined Greek responses to the Bosnian conflict-would in fact be reproducing the Saudi stance of defending the national honor. The one key difference, to which we return briefly below, lies in the Greek's peculiar predicmnent of having to appeal to a Western orientalism (in Said's [19781 sense), but with the ironic twist that Greece itself has been represented in precisely this orientalist sense among the very powers before which it feels compelled to strike this attitude of European superiority. Clearly, orientalism is more relative and negotiable than appears to be the case in Said's textualist, and decontextualizing, perspective; and it is this property that has led me to generate a more agent-oriented view of it (Herzfeld 1991a: 16)-hence "practical orientalisln." Practical orientalisln is the translation of hegemonic ideology into everyday practice so that it infiltrates the habitual spaces of ordinary experience. It is here that we can no longer afford to do without anecdotalism. For unless we can appreciate how the discourse of cultural difference enters the enconlpassing realm of everyday sociality and sensual habit-how it colors the visual, flavors the olfactory, and tempers the emotional-we shall never know why people are moved to follow the extraordinarily uncompelling, abstract principles of national and transnational identity. From choices between bargaining and market formalism to decisions about dress, language, and food, the people of this land situated, as they are tirelessly reminded, 134
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Cultural Intimacy and the Meaning of Europe
on the crossroads betvveen East and West viscerally experience the pragmatic complementarities of cultural dualism. In Greece, at least, Kipling was formidably wrong: the twain-East and West-meet all the time. The Greeks struggle to keep them apart, but their difficulties in this regard are, as we shall see, overdetermined. The Greeks have certainly had their troubles with orientalizing media representations. Perhaps the two best-known films about Greek life in the West are Never on Sunday and Zorba the Greek. Both encountered storms of opposition dOlnesticaIly, in large measure because of the central position they gave to themes of sexuality and revenge; these were seen as demeaning to the Greek image abroad. In particular, the scene of the widow's death by stoning in Zorba the Greek-note how the film title "nationalizes" the personal narrative of Nikos Kazantzakis's Life and Social World of Alexis Zorbas-gave enormous offense. This must be read in the context of the fact that an older tolerance for so-called honor crimes has for a long time gradually been giving way to a reluctant perception that such tolerance ill suits a civilized society (see Safilios-Rothschild 1969). In the same way, although at the more restricted level of a locality defending its interests before a national (rather than an international) tribunal, the television serialization of Lilika Nakou's semi-autobiographical novella, Madame Do-Re-Mi, prompted a parliamentary demand for an official inquiry. This work ends with the humiliation of a cosmopolitan, out-of-town teacher who, struggling to understand the ferocious parochialism of a genteelly decaying provincial Cretan society, has inadvertently led her presumably virginal charges into the red-light quarter. While much of the indignation ostensibly focused on the apparent lack of hospitality displayed by the townspeople to the teacherheroine, it is clear that the deepest source of anger lay in the exposure of sexual irregularity (and, contrarily if understandably, in the suggestion that the townspeople held backward, rural ideas about II such things). Both sexuality and hospitality, in any case, are \i matters of a domestic pride projected onto larger social and ,\ cultural identities. In this context, it is important to recall that orientalist discourses feminize the populations they purport to describe. The anger emanated particularly from the morally as well as politically conservative town elite; leftists, more accustomed to challenging official images, were generally much happier with both the book and the film. 135
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Less spectacularly, and without the sexual element discussed here, another purported media offense deserves brief mention. This was the decision of the state television agency to award the British journalist David Holden a contract to make a film about Crete. The response was a parliamentary uproar. Opposition politicians particnlarly demanded to know by what logic or evil design the state had entrnsted the creation of a nationally significant document to "the present-day Fallmerayer"-an allusion to the nineteenth-eentnry Tyrolean pamphleteer and ardent PanGermanist whose denial of the ancient heritage of the modern Greeks, intended to strike a blow against Russia by strengthening Tnrkey, earned him the Greeks' still unabated hatred. Holden had written a decidedly tactless book abont Greece and its people under the colonels, Greece Without Columns (Holden 1972), in which he gratuitously derided the Greeks' seeming obsession with the ancient past and suggested that there were endeluic social and moral reasons for which the country had been saddled with its detestable dictatorship. He was thus representative of the supercilious Western European discourse about Greece, and it may have been the political implications of his book rather than his specific denial of the Greeks' ancient heritage that earned him the sobriquet of "Fallmerayer." The Greeks' unease does not only concern the vexed status of ethnic minorities, which officially do not exist. l1 It also concerns the enormous diversity of the country's regional culture. In the past, that diversity could be treated as the multiple refraction of a transcendent homogeneity: all Greek folklores were versions of an original ancient culture, to which the leaders of a national renaissance would lead them back in triumph. But the classical past, its hold weakened in the educational system as well as through an increasingly diverse intellectual reappraisal of the received historiographic wisdom, no longer exerts the unifying force on the present that it once-at least for public consumption-was able to command. In this context, an excessive focus on regional. cultures might seem to encourage political anxiety while it also undercuts the universalist claims of a modernizing elite. To exemplify the questions thus raised, I now turn to a recent study by a distinguished Greek scholar of the relevance of Greek legal history for understanding Greece's complex relations with the several encompassing administrative regimes that comprise institutional Enrope (Kozyris 1993). In several key respects, his study is the antithesis of this chapter. It can also be usefully 136
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contrasted, as I briefly show below, with the critical work of the political scientist, Adamantia Pollis. The fact that both are Greek scholars then working in the United States lends sharp focus to the contrast between their respective positions: both were necessarily familiar with the human rights discourse of the then current American and international political contexts; both have had to take positions with regard to Greck institutional practices within the larger framework of the European Union; and both were aware of the perduring admiration of classical culture that continues to flavor the rhetoric, but not much else, of the Western powers' ambivalent relations with the Greek state. Finally, both were, I believe, genuinely concerned to see Greece take a more secure and honored place within European and international contexts. That their assessments differ so radically reveals a great deal abont Greece as well as much about the significance of \ ;'. cultural intimacy in the redrawing of European identity. Kozyris's goal is to show that Greek legal history exhibits a long and by now irreversible accommodation to the European ideal. In one important respect, despite his concern to demonstrate the modernity of Greece, his position continues the romantic philhellenism of the nineteenth century, for he argues that Greek law demonstrates the European character of Greece, while conversely the global history of law demonstrates the Hellenic character of Europe. This argument reproduces the key motivation of nineteenth-century folklore; this is an important point to bear in mind when we see that his major complaint against anthropology is its seeming obsession with the local practices that formed the major preoccupation of nationalist folklore studies. Kozyris's views are representative (I assume he would not disagree) of a significant population, for which I am therefore using his argument as an ethnographic illustration: it is accessible in printed form and thus can more easily be discussed in a scholarly or intellectual forum than the daily conversations it typifies, and he can hardly dismiss it as marginal or irrelevant without fatally weakening his case. n Kozyris explicitly bases his argument on the claim that Greek law has a classical lineage. He conflates the latter with the "Roman-Byzantine" legal tradition that nineteenth-century Greek historiography had very explicitly rejected as foreign to the trne Greek spirit. J3 While there is no donbt some rather shadowy substance to his claims of conceptual continuity, its lllost striking feature for my present purpose is its direct refutation of the 137
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exclusion, so explicitly argued by Huntington (1993), of Orthodoxy from the Enropean tradition. Kozyris thns again follows the romantic-philhellenic path, this time in his attempt to reconcile an "oriental" Byzantium with a "European" Hellas. This in turn leads him to insist on an institutional, top-down reading of Greek legal history and specifically to dismiss village-level ethnography as irrelevant to the country's European destiny. Kozyris proceeds with the implicit bnt unmistakable tools of a rationalistic epistemology that reprodnces the most literal reading of Weber. This is a reading that sees Greek law as escaping the local constraints of culture and achieving transcendence~the claim that has been made for classical Greek philosophy (see Humphreys 1978) and that thus declares its Enlightenment and neoclassical ancestry as clearly as if it had spelled it onto This is a radically different view from that which sees Greek law as shaped by divergences among Enropean traditions (e.g., Pollis 1992) and by the more pluralistic and fractured view of Europe that calls for new attention to local and minority identities. Kozyris's approach essentializes both Greece and Europe. Like other writers of more obviously partisan intent (e.g., Zahariadis 1994; d. Karakasidou 1994), Kozyris overlooks the cultural basis of rationality itself and its entailment in the construction of identity. Thus, in circular fashion, he insists on the appropriateness of national-character generalizations to support these essentialisms, thereby ignoring the historically demonstrable linkage between national (and even minority or ethnic-group) lllobilization and mass numbers (see Urla 1993 on the Basque case, for example). Consistently with his position, he dismisses the evidence of ethnographic reporting as irrelevant to the main issues, and my own (1985c) attempt to bring it into productive dialogue with legal scholarship as "collage." Because Kozyris is a careful, conscientious scholar, his article offers something of a test case for my present argument. Unlike some recent journalistic attacks on the work of anthropologists (see below), his discussion is a Ineasured critique buttressed by a solid review of sources. I mention all this not only out of respect for his standards, but also in order not to trivialize what follows. A critique of his paper is at some level no less anecdotal than the most traditional ethnographic reportage, as I have already intimated. I can already imagine readers sympathetic to my arguments wondering why I bother to respond to Kozyris's very different mode of reasoning at all. Here, however, I wish to invoke 138
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the principle of parity. If we are to make a reasoned defense of ethnography, we must be willing to treat a learned analysis as no less diagnostic of its author's worldview (cosmology or ideology) than are villagers' gossip and daily practices of theirs. This perspective shows no disrespect for good scholarship; but it does entail deep respect for ordinary people, scholars included. For a project conceived in these terms, Kozyris's study offers rich pickings. Central to his argument is that Greek absorption into the European Union legislative structure does not represent so much the successful incorporation of Greece by Europe as it does the return of the European tradition to its rightful home: "It is generally agreed that the foundations of Western legal culture rest upon the humanistic spirit and the basic valnes articulated by the Ancient Greek philosophers and statesmen.... It should also be noted that the very idea of a federation of states was not merely conceived but played a major role in the structuring of relations among the Ancient Greek cities" (Kozyris 1993: 31-32). Thus, Kozyris suggests that the incorporation of Greece into the European Union fulfills the destiny of both. Without the least hint of irony, he goes on to claim~using as his source the EncyclofJedia Britannica-that the Delian League exemplifies the European federal tradition at source. Perhaps so; but in that case one might wonder why the example of heavy-handed and domineering Periclean Athens, so resented by its junior partners in the Delian League, does not offend the anti-imperialist sensibilities of the present-day Greek legal establishment as much as the linguistic and cultural imperialism of the Franco-German power clique. Adamantia Pollis provides another view, expressed in these pithy terms: "An integrated Europe cannot absorb an integral Greck state" (Pollis 1992: 191). In fairness to Kozyris, it must be admitted that Pollis's argument speaks to a rather different set of issues. Nevertheless, a brief inspection will show that onc issue is of concern to both: the relationship between Greek legal culture and the historical basis of Greek identity in general. Pollis wants to show that the official denial of minority identities and the unfair treatment of certain religious groups are incompatible with current European Union integrationist goals and that they spring from a confluence of legal positivism (see also Pollis 1987) with local Greek values, a combination that runs counter to the dominant legal culture of most other European states. Her perspective challenges the conceptual ethnic cleansing that produces the sort 139
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of historiography espoused by n10re conservative scholars from the great nineteenth-century nationalist historian Paparrhegopoulos to Kozyris. It is clear that what lies at the heart of this legal argumeut is a fundamental disagreement about culture. For Poll is, a pluralistic understanding of citizenship permits, indeed demands, the recognition of minority concerns and has nothing to do with questions of European identity or essence. In her argument, European membership is an administrative category rather than a congenital condition. For Kozyris, by contrast, what is European is also Greek, and this is a question of inalienable cultural heritage. Although Kozyris does uot argue his case in the earlier lan· guage of blood-an idiom for the perpetuation of which earlier schools of autbropology must certainly shoulder their share of blame-his position does reproduce what I have called the "ecumenical ethnocentrism" (Herzfeld 1982a: 49) of those same nineteenth-century writers whose occasionally embarrassing effusions he dismisses as irrelevant or marginal. Yet I think we should be understanding of such arguments. In a world where the clas· sical heritage seemed to many Greek leaders to be the sole source of internationallegitirnation, and which they in turn controlled as a "scarce resource" (Appadurai 1981; d. Sotiropoulos 1977), such arguments furnish a means of symbolically invertingArdener's (1975: 25) "englobing"-the authority of the domi· nant and the oppressive. Indeed, it would be hard to find a more literal illustration of englobing in this sense than the idea that Europe is but a variant of Greece-a neat inversion of the postEnlightenment expropriation of Hellas from the Greeks of modern times. Lest anyone doubt the salience of the englobing model for understanding the Greek political and cultural response to the power of the European Union, let us return to the dispute over the future of Greek as an official European Union language. Minister of Culture Thanos Mikroutsikos's response would not have seemed out of place in a politician of far more conservative bent: "The Greek language, along with Latin, constitutes the mother tongue of Europe, and presently, both the international scientific terminology and the 'dialect' used by technocrats in the European Union and its organs have their origin in the Greek language. In other words, Mr. Lamassoure [the French Minister for European Affairs] must consult the Great French dictionaries and encyclo· pedia Universalis before proceeding to the implementation of his 140
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views" (Greek Star, 5 January, 1995, 1). One might argue that Greece's interests would today, when foreign diplomats can no longer be counted on to know the ancient language, be better served by simply condemning the Franco-German initiative as mere international bullying, incompatible with the partnership ethos of European Union ideology, just as one might argue that territorial definitions of the entire Union are more appropriate to Greece's needs than are the endless arguments about ethnic history and nomenclature that the Macedonian dispute, in particular, raised to fever pitch. At a more brutal but perhaps a more insistent level, the use of Greek rhetorical style has worked in circular fashion to confirm the other European Union partners' dim view of Greek rationality (McDonald 1996: 58). Kozyris's argmnent demands a respectful reading for another reason, and this is the candor with which he recognizes the relationship between claims of heritage and the issue of (cultural) sovereignty. Near the end of his article, he observes: "Many [Greeks] feel that if the Greek state is to become modern it must not only reject the backwardness imposed for over four centuries by the Ottomans but must also rejoin the West by catching up with the progress made there. This is particularly true in the legal field. It becomes more palatable if we recognize that the Conti· nental legal systems derive from the Ancient Greek conception of justice and that they continue, in a sense, the ROlnan-Byzantine tradition" (Kozyris 1993: 34). I quote this remarkable passage at length-it goes on without a trace of irony to cite an earlier piece by Pollis in support of its position-to show how easily popular stereotypes may pervade scholarly discourse: the appeal to four centuries of Turkish misrule is a good example of the collective avoidance of responsibility (efthinofovia) that Kozyris so derides elsewhere in his article, and that I have traced to precisely the kinds of inheritance practice that he considers irrelevant to a serious understanding of Greek modernity (Herzfeld 1992a: 134-39). Still more to the point, I want to emphasize the specif· ically political implications of what he is saying. For it is clear, at least in this passage, that he is acknowledging the extent to which Greeks still look to more powerful countries for approbation; and this is the source of their deep preoccupation with issues of cultural intilnacy. But this "syndrome"-to borrow the term he applies to what he views as negative cultural traits (Kozyris 1993: 45, n. 27)while itself a recognition of political marginality at the interna· 141
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tionallevel, also leads him to deride the marginal concerns of anthropologists: "The Europeanization of Greek law has also been accelerated by the gradual modernization of the Greek economy.... This has reduced the importance of traditional law. For instance, even in property law ... regulations about the ownership of trees and about animal theft, fascinating:to anthropologists, grow pale in significance when contrasted to rules that set zoning or building standards, regulate condominization, or control the content and marketing of milk products." As these two anthropological "fascinations" happen to be among the topics with which my research has been particularly concerned, let lne respond from a basis of direct experience. If it is true that animal-theft is so unimportant-I have already dealt indirectly with the trees in my comments on the sources of efthinofovia-one would still like to know why so much parliamentary time and police effort have been deployed against it. I have already lnentioned the wider ramifications of animal-theft in the form of still persistent clientelism. Here I wonld simply point out that the recent history of conservative politics in Greece has been extensively marked by such issues, yet it is precisely the more conservative political forces that have expressed the greatest sense of cultural embarrassment over the continuing presence of animal-theft on Crete. (Let us also recall that these same forces expressed the most determined criticism of the televised Madame Do-Re-Mi in the national Parliament.) It becomes increasingly clear that helittling anthropological interest in these questions is closely linked to the defense of a very specific version of cultural intimacy, one derived from Western hegemony and its local representation in Greece. The issue is not about what does or does not happen in Greece but what it is seemly to discuss in an internationally public space: ta en iko mi en dhimo. It might thus be asked (and indeed often is asked with some perplexity) why anthropologists persist in discussing such matters. This is a book about cultural intimacy, and it is not the place for an extended analysis of Greece's party-political culture.'4 Bnt it might nevertheless be useful to inspect the correlation between such dismissals of local customs and minority concerns-in other words, the voices of the relatively disenfranchised in Greeceand a conservative ideology that wonld extend older hegemonies by subjecting Greece to the cultural hegemony of "Europe." Kozyris (1993: 43, n. 14) emphasizes the significance of "systematic economic, political, and legal analysis." I agree. But I would 142
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argue that such analyses must also be directed at those who wield power, not only at those who are subject to it. Were tact all that was at stake, the irritation that this question usually indicates would be an eminently reasonable position. But tact is not the whole story; hegemony is the larger part of it. Here, in fact, some readers may find my position surprisingly sympathetic to the dilemmas of those I have apparently been criticizing up to this juncture. For wh3t I propose to ask is why-by whose Jl,,!t-certain cultural traits must be seen as negative. Whose narrative of progress is called into being by the very mention of Europe? Kozyris sternly admonishes the Greeks to develop greater tespect for the law. There are certainly many others who would echo the same sentiments. They would regard all that agonistic jostling as "un-European," and, from this angle, it would indeed be tactless for those pesky anthropologists to point out that, by the evidence of these same critics' own complaints, it is hardly "un-Greek." But tact, I repeat, is not the issue. At stake is the politics of \ \ marginality,.a politics of which, in international relations, Greece itself is a clear victim. Surely it is offensive that-virtually alone among nations-Greece appears to require the prefix "modern" in order to remind others of its existence, or that its language is so unimportant today that larger powers within the European Union can uuilaterally propose to do without it. (Admittedly the move failed-but for how long?) By tbe same token, however, it would hardly be logical to endorse the argument that outsiders should stop fussing about the rights of the tiny number of people who could be considered ethnic minorities (which officially do not exist-the position Pollis criticizes). That is the very argument that we have seen advanced on the international stage in defense of the Greek position. Respect for minority rights aud the recognition of local idiosyncrasy, however, are integral to the official doctrine of the "new Europe." Perhaps, then, the insistence on the European identity of Greece is less of a persuasive argument on the international stage than it is the continuation of an ideological position idiosyncratic to Greece. In fact, I suggest, the concern with classical roots and European identity, the anxiety that Greeks sometilnes ruefully acknowledge as proghonopliksia (obsession with ancestors), is the symptom of a deeply wounding sense of social, cultural, economic, and political dependency. If one commentator on a recent dispute (Konstantinos Hadjidimitriou, Ethnikos Kyrix,
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quoted ou 1 March 1994) rather plaintively wondered why foreign COffilnentators seem disenchanted with romantic philhellenism, for example, I suspect that such hurt and puzzlement arise from the perception of precisely that dependency. Apparently the same Western intellectual establishment has duplicitously moved the goalposts and changed the rules of play. Romanticism has given way to deconstruction, and those whom romanticism had once "constructed" as true Hellenes now feel, in every sense, undone. This is apparent, for example, in some of the conservative attacks on Martin Bernal in both the scholarly literature and the popular media. In Bernal's (1987) controversial critique of the racist underpinnings of ROlnantic German philology, the critics apparently resent the fact that he discerns not only African but also Semitic elements in ancient Greek culture-as in fact did the ancient Greeks. Their modern snccessors are outraged, but their umbrage may also be a sign of the fear that their one claim on the respect of the world is about to be dismissed by the very people who originally awarded it to them. The issue is not whether Bernal is right, but why a supposedly scholarly issue should raise such public passions. is To understand the full implications of Bernal's insights into the significance of nineteenth-century Aryanism, we should remember that its pernicious development as Nazism in our own century is but one, if indeed the most terrible, of its consequences. Greek national autonomy is one of its less obvious victims. The nineteenth-century European disregard for the Greeks' own views of their origins (Bernal 1987) finds an ironic echo in both the marginalization of nlodern Greece to its glorious past and in Greek national leaders' steadfast disregard for the ideas of local populations about their origins and identities (see Karakasidou 1993; Schein 1975; Wace and Thompson 1913). At one level these arguments replay the debate between Fallmerayer and his philhellenic and Greek critics. Like Fallmerayer, present-day detractors of Greece find much scope for easy, cheap shots, such as making fun of so-called Greek hysteria over such lnatters as the name of Macedonia. Like Fallmerayer, too, they arc at best ingenuous in arguing that the Greeks have simply got their history wrong. Such statements are dangerous nonsense and are a significant part of the problem they are supposed to clarify. Like the equally insensitive refusals to countenance the return of the Elgin Marhles to Greece, they overlook the fact that 144
Cultural Tntimacy and the Meaning of Europe
the Western powers were responsible for defining these things as central to present-day Greek identity in the first place, just as German legal positivism and German Aryanist philology have served as conceptual fuel for new forms of intolerance and racism in a country that has long claimed to be free of such things. Like FaIImeraycr's critics, however, the defenders of Greece's present-day cultural reputation often fall into the trap of treating the hostile doctrine-then the denial of continuity with the ancient past, today the directly related denial of the Greeks' Europeanness and modernity-as though it posed an ontologically meaningful question. Their mistake was, and is, to take on the belittling talk on its own terms. But was this an innocent mistake? It is no coincidence that those who most passionately defend the Greekness of Macedonia are often the same people who sneer at local Greek-speakers as not "pure-blooded Greeks." It is not a far cry from such opportunist arguments to the coexistence of readings of animal-theft-or, to take another example, the Cretan and Cypriot dialects-as at once "Homeric" and "Turkish."16 Is it possible for Greece to escape this tangle of mutually complicit hegemonies? Defensive responses to the cultural ideologies of European hegemony-which in their less obvious, risible forms concern such matters as the name of Macedonia or the use of Greek as an official European Union language-can ind~ce affectations of comic despair among Greece's self-appointed friends. But contempt and condescension only perpetuate the problem. A great deal hinges on establishing a different kind of relationship between Greece and the other membercstates of the European Union. It affects all of them equally.17 Breaking out of such patterns of condescension and resentment, as I have suggested, is the real test of European identity. The question should not be posed, as it so often is today in Greece and throughout the European Union, as one of whether there is a transcendent European unity, and how far a Balkan state like Greece can partake of it. Arguments about whether Greeks are European conform to both the legal positivism of the state bureaucracy and the taxonomic habits of ordinary people; and the dangers they pose are rendered largely invisible, and therefore all the more insidious, by an entirely unrealistic assessment that most other Europeans think in much the saIne terms. The sort of essentialism that these conceptual habits represent locks all the European polities, tile Greek included (but not to a greater degree than the others), into an inflexible grid that paradoxically 145
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subverts the goal of achieving meaningfully inclusive European identity. And it resuscitates the error of Fallmerayer, which his opponents in Greece and elsewhere merely perpetutated, of both essentializing cultural identities and, more narrowlYl of assuming that only a Greece yoked absolutely and indivisibly to its ancient past conld possess the dignity of an independent nation-state. The Greek elite's reproduction of this ideology of disdain for its Own culture fits the sternest Gramscian model of hegemony. At sta~e is a redefinition of the cultural intimacy that currently preoccupieS many Greeks. What does the sense of urgency about beIng European convey? If the answer is to suppress both minority and local idiosyncrasies in the name of a positivized and E~rocentric representation of national character, the new Europe wIll turn out to have a very old face. It is not a comforting thought. The test of European identity will thus truly be played out on the margins to which powerful European players continue to confine Greece. Will the collusion of international with local elite domination give way to international respect for what Greece is today, rather than for what Greece was in the past? The answer seems directly tied to the extcnt to which the Greek authorities will be able and willing to develop a corresponding respect for disenfranchised voices at home. These are not issues for Greece alone. Unless both processes occur, the new Europe will have failed on its very borders to achieve that sense of definition that has already eluded it for so long. What happens in Greece does indeed have consequences for the meaning of Europe. It may not be the meaning that Greece has been tanght to seek. It is, I suggest, of much greater importancc still.
Chapter Seven
Structural Nostalgia: Time and the Oath in the Mountain Villages of Crete
Introduction: Reciprocity as Nostalgia and Practice The static image of an unspoiled and irrecoverable past often plays an important part in present actions. It legitim~zes deeds of the moment by investing them with the moral authonty of eternal truth and by representing the vagaries of circumstance as realizations of a larger universe of system and balance. I use the phrase "structural nostalgia" to mean this c?lIecti~e repr.esentation of an edenic order-a time before tlme-In whICh the balanced perfection of social relations has not yet suffered the decay that affects everything human. Structural nostalgIa characterizes the discourse of both the official state and its most lawless citizens. In fact, the idea of a time when state intervention was unnecessary for the conduct of a decent social life provides these two parties with the common ground of their continuing mutual engagement. For the state the model legitimizes its intervention as an act of restoring a formerly perfect social order. For the lawless, the model offers evidence of a condition of moral corruption that makes engagement with the state an acceptabl:, pragmatic accommodation; for people who define themselves III opposition to formal authority it is obedience, not lawlessness, that requires justification. In the modern United States this argument plays out around the idea of the "Founding Fathers' intentions;" enshrined, according to conservatives, in the notion of states' rights and minimal external regulation. But it is also conjured into a different sort of presence by violent factions such as the so-called militias,
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which seek to restore a pristine condition of unfettered self-regulation, often buttressed by ideas of racial or ethnic purification. While attention has largely centered on the major division between liberals and conservatives, it will be especially interesting to see how these tensions work themselves out among thpse who agree on the conservative theory of strict constitutionalism but not on the appropriate way to put it into practice. The United States, a country where the "right to bear arms" is still an article of faith for many, witnesses arguments about whether this right encourages alienation and criminality or might reverse the drift away from self-sufficiency, arguments that wonld sonnd extremely strange in any liberal European democracy. The militias' antistatist ideology rests on images of rugged individualism, frontier justice, and the fend of the very patrilineal Hatfields and McCoys. The United States is a society where-feminism and dietary concerns notwithstanding-a significant part of the population continues to applaud notions of masculine fellowship: the ideology of the "regnlar guy" discussed in chapter 8, buttressed by a symbolism of meat eating, hard drinking, and the reciprocity of morally acceptable violence. Australian "lnateship" offers a similar case (Kapfercr 1988). In both countries nationalism, racisln, and masculinist lawlessness are mutually entailed in ways that suggest close parallels with the emergent liberations of the various Muslin1 fedayin movements and the relatively recent history of national emergence in the Balkans. This is truly an instructive irony: as self-styled Westerners discursively seek to distance themselves from the "atavistic" Balkan and Muslim worlds, nsnally by decrying a snpposed lack of rationality in those populations, they find themselves imitating precisely the same paradoxical strategy of simultaneously exoticizing their own past and pointing to it as the source of their national character. In the account of Cretan animal-theft that follows, therefore, we must be careful, even if only for analytic reasons, not to fall into the same trap. Indeed, the advantage of focnsing thus on a supposedly marginal population is precisely that it throws into question the ideological assumptions of those who, as we saw in the last chapter, insist on such groups' marginality in tbe first place. The mutual engagement of lawless shepherds and legalistic state officialdom is the consequence of a logic that is not opposed to what we now call modernity, but socially and historically lies at its very base. We can best hope to tease
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out that mutual entailment by focusing on the symbolism that the state and its outlaws share. Two features are crucial to the definition of structural nostalgia. One is its replicability in every succeeding generation. Each youth cohort groans at its parents' evocation of a time when everything was better: people were more generous and uncomplicated, kindness was more disinterested, women were chaster and more aware of their familial obligations (Herzfeld 1983b), and men were more directly implicated in the reciprocities of has pitality. Each cohort in turn reproduces the saIne yearning a few years or decades later. A rhetoric of change and decay may thus actually be quite static. It seems likely, for example, that in Greece the dowry has "always" been viewed as an urban or foreign importation of recent date, and that people have found it convenient to blame their sense of moral discomfort with the idea of "paying the groom" (not to speak of the financial hardship involved) on vaguely defined, external forces. Similar laments about moral decay seem to march unchanged across the generations in inany countries. Their static quality provides moral cover for some very adroit and not at all static maneuvering over access to the resources that the bureaucratic state makes available to even its most disaffected and marginal citizens. The second feature concerns the object of this rhetorical longing. That object takes the form of a damaged reciprocity: the virtue that has allegedly decayed always entails some measure of mutuality, a mutuality that has been, perhaps irreversibly, ruptured by the self-interest of modern times. Whether that virtue is generosity, love, respect, or simply transactional honesty, it has lost its pristine perfection and may be in danger of disappearing altogether. That the mutuality in question may not have been one of equal terms is obscured by the rhetoric of nostalgia: the relationship between nobles and commoners or parents and children at a time when "people knew their place" is represented as ideally one in which those at tbe lower end of a hierarchical relationship were compensated by the total security it offered. Alternatively, democratic or egalitarian ideals, as Kapferer (1988) has argued for Australia, may actually exclude groups on the basis of their ancestry. Such fictions obscure the inequalities on which they rest by recreating the idealized fellowship-the "mateship" of Australian white males, for example-of a mythological past in which both blood and motives were pure. 149
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The idea of a once-perfect reciprocity has permeated social thought, where it is mapped onto various moral perceptions of the world. Not surprisingly, Marcel Mauss, theorist extraordinaire of reciprocity, bears especially close inspection in this regard; Carrier (1995b, 1995c) has noted how Mauss's evolutionist lament for the precommercial order of exchange fits an exoticizing strain. But there are many other examples of the salue phenomenon; after all, early sociological theory emerged at a time when many of the European nationalisms we know today had reached their apogee. Thus, Engels's primitive communism and Maine's precontractual primitive society both reproduce this feature. Among later models, Gluckman's (1955) "peace in the feud" idealizes reciprocal violence. This model also reappears as a form of "indigenous functionalism" in at least some of the feuding societies studied by anthropologists; among these are the villages in Crete I discuss at length in this chapter. Nor did these ideas disappear at mid-century. Constantine Doxiadis (1968: 5), the Greek urbanologist, wrote of the loss of "social cohesion" as well as aesthetic pleasure that came with the expansion of scale and complexity in modern times. I-lis views projected the antithesis of structural nostalgia into the future; he proposed a return to the human scale of planning that would in turn disinfect social life of the pollution of twentieth-century chaos. It was in every respect a nostalgic solution, and it was predicated on an iluage of earlier social life grounded in reciprocities of respect and affect. In a strikingly similar vein-and as further evidence of the sometimes disturbing convergence of nationalism and social thought-the ideologies of nationalism posit a prestatist era before the corruption of foreign dominion brought social discord and cultural confusion in its wake. Like Doxiades's ekistics, too, these ideologies promise a bright future in which harmony will accompany the ultiluate national resurrection; in Greece, the religious overtones are explicitly recognized. And indeed the religious traditions of Cbristianity on which important aspects of European and other nationalisms were modeled included images of a lost communicative perfection-Babel, the wreck of mutual understanding-as well as of an Eden into which human sin imported the imperfection that we know as temporality. Nostalgia for originary perfection is common to much nationalist historiography, as it is to religious narrative. Both explain the compromising of purity-the very core of cultural intimacy-in
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terms of the corrosion of time. One might also argue that modern structuralism is guilty of the same idealization of pure and timeless fonu, corrupted by processes of transformation and overlays of conscious thought. But in rightly rejecting the timeless perfections of structuralislu, some anthropologists (e.g., Bourdieu 1977; see Ortner 1984) have been too inclined to overlook how ordinary social actors in many societies, including their own, use similar models. 1 People generally ignore human agency when it suits them to do so. Thus, the failure of orthodox structuralism is not merely that it posits the existence of timeless structures in a social vacuum (Bourdieu 1977: 82), but also that it overlooks the ways in which social actors invent, refashion, and exploit such structures as luaral alibis for their contingent actions. Giddens (1984) has made this process central to his theory of "structuration," but he, unlike Bourdieu, has been unwilling to argue the case through detailed ethnography. In this chapter, following the "militant middle ground" position argued in the introduction, I propose to recover some of these strategic uses of perfect and timeless form in an ethnographic context. Let me offer a small preview by way of illustration. A Cretan shepherd, suspecting that a rival has stolen his animals, hales the suspect before a miraculous icon at the dead of night and makes him attest his innocence on oath. Only the intervention of the saint can guarantee the good faith that once bound all shepherds together. When it interrupts the pattern of raid and counterraid, ideally a contest between moral equals, the oath momentarily appears to reconstitute the fractured perfection of reciprocity. In today's fallen condition, the denial that one is playing a game is part of the game itself. Structural nostalgia thus gives a spiritual basis to a literally temporal advantage. It also disguises the strategic manipulation of present time, and here it bccOlues particularly relevant to the study of nationalism. Bourdieu (1977: 4-7) argues that such manipulation is central to the accumulation of symbolic capital. An animal-thief's victinl, for example, does not retaliate at once, because the tension that delay can create increases the force of the eventual riposte. When a boy began raiding an older and quite powerful shepherd because the latter had not tbought to offer him a cigarette, be did so in such gradual increments that, when the truth finally came out, the combination of self-restraint and cunning gave him a status made all the greater by his youth (Herzfeld 1985a: 171-73). Time, whether in the form of age differences or as the
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imbalance created by an unavenged slight, brings inequality. The struggle for personal dignity is an attempt to redress the balance, to achieve temporal equivalence, and thus also to recreate from one's own perspective some slnall part of the just and perfect order beyond time. This structural parity, however, can only be achieved from a particular agent's point of view. The evocation of structural nostalgia is a moral ploy. It is as much a strategy as the trickery that it is usual to condelnn in one's foes. Similarly, nation-states fight against those they accuse of having corrupted their moral, cultural, and demographic purity. Like villagers bemoaning a former state in which all lived in perfect amity-aghapimeni, as the Creeks say, evoking the New Testament notion of divinely inspired love (agape)-national governments accuse each other of disrupting a natural order of mutual respect. But there is another way in which the state is sometimes obliged to address structural nostalgia, as we shall see in this chapter, and that is the yearning for a time of perfect social balance when the encompassing state's own legal and disciplinary intervention was not necessary. Because almost any state ideology requires a narrative of progressive decay from which the bureaucratic state will now rescue the nation, the authorities sometimes find themselves entrapped in the logical conseqnence of their intervention: they arc an intrusive presence at the local level, representatives of a virtually foreign and therefore evil force, themselves a symptom rather than a cure of the national ailment. Whereas Cretan shepherds complain that the authorities have interfered with the very quality that most clearly proves their transcendent Greekness-their love of freedom from official restraint of any sort-the structural nostalgia of the state classifies as criminals these men who see thelnselves as the embodiment of national heroism.
Figure 1: Map of Crete.
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Structural Nostalgia in and against Church and State Such disputes make it clear that structural nostalgia is indeed a strategic resource, shared by these irreverent shepherds with the state and with the religious community of which they, and it, are part. There are in fact rather obvious historical reasons for this. In very schematic summary, these include both the active involvement of the lower clergy in the local-level spread of nationalism and its ultimate triumph, and the extent to which the heroic image of the Creek who fought for independence against Turkish oppression abounds with images of pastoral masculinism taken from social contexts appreciably like those still to be found in the Cretan mountains today. One of the priests I found in Clendi when I first did fieldwork there had been a shepherd, and therefore inevitably an animal-thief, before entering the church; Cretan monasteries used to contain many ex-thieves. In the state context, a disproportionate number of police officers have long been recruited in the Cretan pastoralist villages. This shared history reproduces a theme of the struggle for national independence that, as I have already noted in the introductory chapter, confronts the bureaucratic state with-a specific dilemma: how to discipline the very forces that were necessary to its own emergence, but that now threaten its newfound authority? That dilemma is probably typical of most postliberation nationalisms. In the discourse of structural nostalgia, we shall see one area in which the parties to this tcnsion could find apparent common ground, each interpreting the signs of that commonality in ways that suited its respective needs, and neither really appreciating the extent to which they diffcred-a striking illustratiou of the semiotic illusion of iconicity. In the cycle of Cretan animal-theft, there is onc particular device that can arrest the seemingly endless temporal flow of feud, 2 and thereby restore a sense of balance. This is the oath of innocence, sworn between rivals in a usually remote and deserted chapel. By recalling actors to a sense of moral duty and mutual respect, it brings structural nostalgia to the service of mutual trust in a society where otherwise irreversible suspicion would prevail. For the suspension of that endemic distrust means suppressing the slights that have accumulated through time, and doing it in a way that allows the actors to retain their pride iutact. In effect, actors use religious Ineans to restore a nominally ideal state of peace. To the extent that this works, it represents a vindication of
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I
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Cultural Intimacy
the moral order. Conversely, when it fails, it confirms the flawed condition of all humanity (Campbell 1964: 354; Herzfeld 1987a: 28-32, 46). These are the cosmological aspects. In practical terms, its success gives the actors a breathing space, while its failure can be used by each side to claiIll moral advantage over the other. Cosmology is not incompatible with even those aspects of social practice that appear to violate it. In the absence of centralized institutions, or when the ability of the latter to intervene is circumscribed, actors look for a more abstract source of moral authority to justify halting hostilities. Indeed, the encroachment of centralized institutions on local selfmanagement, a process that has certainly happened in Crete, may weaken the values that sustained peacemaking as much as violence. This weakening occurs in part because courts and their officers deliberately remove the ultimate responsibility from the immediate actors, and because the actors have little faith in the bureaucrats' ability to conjure up divine wrath in their support. 3 Structural nostalgia here takes the form of longing for a time when trust did not require the intervention unattainable in the bureaucracy-ridden present; it becomes the enabling condition for tricks, lapses, and excuses, but also for attempts to restore harmony even provisionally. Indeed, all such attempts must in the natilre of things be provisional. While total trust is socially impossible, its temporary evocation may be strategically useful and socially desirable. Its breakdown can be blmned on the bureaucratic state, or on the even vaguer force of modern chaos: in this secular theodicy the sheep-thieves, ekisticians, and generations of social theorists find themselves in strange agreement with the most authoritarian of government agents. Actors maintain their local social standing not only by defying each other, but also, perhaps especially, by standing up to these looming larger entities. Their moral entitlement to structural nostalgia lies in their defiance of an official order with which they share that fundamental premise. Modern higWand western and central Crete has a long-standing tradition of reciprocal animal-theft embedded in a morality of vengeance and reciprocal hospitality. The Cretan highlanders take great pride in their resistance to bureaucratic officers and express contempt for the equally bureaucratic functionaries of the church. Their ethical rhetoric despoils the official discourse of clerks and priests by a variety of discursive bricolage; it turns that discourse against its originators, using moral arguments (including the acknowledgment of Christ as a victim of bureaucracy and as 154
patron of cunning shepherds) to support the illegal and ecclesiastically disapproved practice of reciprocal animal-theft. By exploring the continually renegotiated reconciliation between the structures of religious orthodoxy and the practices entailed in reciprocal theft, I wish to suggest ways of moving beyond the conventional dualities of theology and folk religion, as Charles Stewart (1989, 1991) has recommended, or religiosity and instrumentality, or indeed structure and practice. I suggest that some versions of structure are best seen as practice, or more specifically as rhetorical devices that social actors use to good effect. In this framework, the use of religious paraphernalia in the resolution of theft-related disputes belongs to actors' strategic explorations of the tension between ideal order and daily experience. I will demonstrate this tension with a discussion of what the shepherds told me about specific confrontations. Their accounts illustrate the ways in which Cretan shepherds themselves interpret and negotiate the paradoxes of a contested moral universe. Swearing Innocence: Supernatural Sanctions
By "stealing to befriend," Cretan shepberds actively seek the admiration of potential allies through a series of reciprocal livestock raids that ideally culminate in ties of spiritual kinship between the principals. 4 Severely repressed by the dictator Metaxas (1936-40) and the military junta of 1967-74, animal-theft, which traditionally flourished during tunes of war and foreign occupation, also tends to burgeon in more democratic times, as politicians offer patronage (and especially protection from the law) to tough, powerful shepherds who control large agnatic voting blocs. The least effective thieves have generally found themselves excluded very rapidly from the game and have usually switched to agriculture-a despised occupation that bars them from further attelnpts at raiding, since they no long own livestock for their victims to steal in reprisal. A more recent pattern of commercial, nonreciprocal raidiug today allows tbe older shepherds, as they complain about the decline of thieves' 1110rality (sometinles even at police-sponsored meetings), to forget that their own raiding was not always reciprocal and that they, too, did not readily spare the weak. The view of the past that they now counter-pose to the selfish, brutal present bears the classic marks of structural nostalgia: social balance, reciprocity, moral parity, observance of self-enforcing rules. 155
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The ideal Cretan animal-thief, when challenged, admits to his deeds. Being heroic (andras, a man) means taking full responsibility for one's own actions, and thns to be reckoned with (ipoloyisimos). Reciprocal hostility between nonkin looks forward to the possibility of conversion into the positive reciprocities of alliance, whether through spiritual kinship or through other ties. Conversely, raids on kin, spiritual kin, or covillagers evoke charges of "pollution" (oghoursouza 5 ) that recall the parallel of incest. A suspect may refuse to admit to a particular deed, especially on those comparatively rare occasions when he finds himself confronted by the victim himself rather than by the latter's emissary.6 The victim may at that point demand that the suspect "take an oath," usually in a remote church in the dead of night and On pain of supernatural sanctions for perjury. These sanctions are often violent and are credited with impressively selective accuracy. The villagers of Keramia tell of two sheepthieves, one of whom refused to swear a false oath and lived to he ninety, while the other, who "was afraid" of his accuser (rather than of God), took a false oath, and died immediately thereafter. The usual form of the oath intinlates the terrors of divine punishment: "As my hand moves away from [the icon of] the saint, thus may my soul separate from my body if I am at fault to you" (or "if I know anything"). This suggests a theological metaphor: the hand, signifying the reliance of the human upon the divine, simultaneously affirms the dependence of the corporal upon the spiritual. A man whose word proves worthless is a mere husk, a body without socially recognized spirituality. It is tbrough the hand that a man realizes that spirituality. A handshake reestablishes nonnal relations after either an oath or a full cOluessian of guilt. Thus formally initiated, contact thereafter grows visibly more protracted and ela borate-one often sees shepherds fondling each other's arms or backs-as men become more at ease with each other. The hand is both symbol and instrument of male incorporation in the most literal sense. Sometimes, if these staunchly anticlerical shepherds do not want to enter a church at all, they make the sign of the cross on a stone and use that instead of an icon; then the oath begins, "As this cross stand stands out [from the stone] ... " (Herzfeld 1985a: 204). Both oaths may also reinforce the terror of perjury by adding "and [may my soul] not go to God but to the devils, if I know anything about what you ask me." Sometimes, the oath
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specifies the sanctions the perjurer may expect to incur (e.g., "may I not live out the year if ... "; the secular equivalent, heard in response to police interrogation, may be: "Even if I should be shot, I am not to blame for the animals"). The form "I am at fault to you" (sou fteo), moreover, recasts the social dimension as a relationship of accountability between two particular individuals; this form of reciprocity, damaged but now undergoing repair, reproduces the general premise of ultimate social interdependence in an immediate context of competitive male behavior and values. Shepherds may also add the formal court promise to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Some saints seem more commonly invoked, although none has an exclusive status. At one village (Miriokefala), shepherds used to promise the Panayia (Virgin Mary) a quarter of a stolen animal if they were successful on a raid. The equestrian St. Georgeprototype of the idealized youth (pallikari) among the shepherds (Campbell 1964: 272; Machin 1983)-is the patron saint of three of the major churches where oaths are taken by suspected thieves (Diskouri, Dramia, and Selinaris). In one mainly agricultural village near the south coast, I was told that the locals prefer the remoter church of St. John the Divine to the church of St. George, which is located right inside the village: distance and secrecy, as we shall see, are practical virtues. Other churches where the ritu~l is often conducted are dedicated to the Holy Cross, to St. Fanourios, and to St. Nicholas. But the key distinctions appear to lie less between specific saints than between the local refractions-in Evans-Pritchard's (1956: 196) sense-of a particular saint's grace (khari).? To a skeptic from Glendi who insisted that there was only one St. George, an ex-shepherd replied, "One [St. George] is a miracle-worker, the next a sinner!" "While such segmentary refraction of holy figures may be doctrinally unacceptable, it appears prominently in daily acts of veneration as well as in blasphemous utterances (Herzfeld 1987a: 166) and gives concrete expression to both conflict and alliance. It also foregrounds one of the bases of cultural intimacy: if even "a" St. George can be a sinner-a member of that social (rather than hagiological) fellowship of Christians-members of the community have a fine exemplar for actions that they would nevertheless prefer never to reveal to outsiders, especially the intrusive agents of state and church. Indeed, the local priests' refusal to hear confession from the shepherds underscores their
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insider status; as covillagers deeply emueshed in the nexus of raiding-related activities, they already know what sinners these men are and do not wish to become involved in ecclesiastical or bureaucratic sanctions against thelu. These local priests are, again, directly analogous to the local clergy who took up arn1S with the kleftouria (the world of guerrilla thieves) against Turkish oppression, against the wishes of the higher church authorities. A shepherd who seeks to repair or create an alliance luuSt invoke saintly grace at a level where it will be socially inclusive enough to incorporate both his own and his adversary's loyalties. Geographical distance and the icon's reputation for luiracles together decide the choice of church. This is the pattern wherehy, throughout Greece, a local shrine luay eventually become the focus of even national sentiment (Dubisch 1988: 122; 1995: 173).
Distance Lends Enchantment Geograpbical distance reflects both the need for secrecy and the view that luore reluote locations may be more effective sources of supernatural reinforcement against perjury. Oath taking occurs by preference at night, and only rarely in central village churches. Even though the suspect almost always protests his innocence, the very fact that he has heen called to accnunt in this way may affect his reputation. Some villagers say that using a church that one might enter every day undermines the solemnity, and therefore the efficacy, of the ritual; one man jested that the saint of one's own church would know too much already. (Perhaps he was thinking of the village priest, who avoids hearing shepherds' confessions for precisely that reason [Herzfeld 1985a: 242].) Moreover, the sight of two shepherds-in general a cynically anticlerical group of men-heading determinedly for a church door admits of only one likely explanation: "What else would they go to a church for?" At the mountain monastery of St. George at Diskouri, near Glendi, so deep was the perceived need for discretion, and so familiar was the late abbot with all the local shepherds (whose deliberations he could often hear clearly from his cell), that the principals would often send a third party til get the church key from the abbot in order to avoid recognition-or, at least, the admission of recognition, given that genuine concealment is virtually impossible (and that even secrecy is performed in a rather dramatic way, thereby justifying people's assumption tbat 158
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in fact nothing can be kept secret). Secrecy operates in favor of the chapels of comparatively reluote monasteries, as against more accessible village churches. The monks' presence also intensifies the sense of sanctity; the monks themselves, many of whom come from shepherding families and are not as prone as village priests to betray the secrets of the confessional, understand the need for discretion. At least in theory, however, any church may serve. There may also be good practical reasons for seizing the first available opportunity. The use of a simple stone for oath taking, which removes the action from priestly prying altogether, also gives the suspect little time to recant or to summon kin who might discourage him from taking the oath at all. The distance shepherds are prepared to go for the ritual is an index of the gravity of the particular theft and the intensity of feeling it has provoked. Thus, the evocation of religious sentiment simultaneously appeals to practicality: faced with an arduous journey, and with the outcome all the more certainly against him, a guilty party is more likely to confess right away. On the other hand, there is clearly not much point in taking a suspect far from home unless continuing suspicion threatens a wider network of social relationships, especially within the village co=unity. When the principals are from different villages, the oath is often the last available recourse. There is one general exception to the preference for distance and reluoteness. Some monastery shepherds, although enjoying the status of monks theluselves, seem not to have been above the occasional minor raid in the past and might often be called upon to take an oath of innocence. They were particularly careful not to commit perjury, proba bly because they were more constrained than ordinary shepherds to show respect for saintly retribution; moreover, they could be forced to swear on the icon of their own luonastery, where specific perjuries would compound the sacrilege against the offender's original monastic vows. These shepherdmonks (kouradhokonomi) could not indulge in large-scale countertheft without becoming an embarrassment to the church. They did have recourse to other means of creating social ties, particularly as dispensers of monastic hospitality, as kin to many ordinary shepherds, and through the creation of spiritual kinship ties with others. They also had no need of perjury, as their occasional tbefts could only have been intended as warnings rather than as a n1eans of initiating large-scale cycles of reciprocal raiding.
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SU!Jernatural Sanctions and Social Relations The most commonly attributed supernatural consequences of perjury include injury to a limb, sudden paralysis making it impossible to leave (or enter) the church, loss of sigbt or of an eye, and the destruction of one's family. Commenting on a case involving this last sanction, a skeptic insisted that it was not the action of "the saint" (actually the Holy Cross): "It jnst so happened that he got wounded! And the whole district became terrified that whoever 'ate' monastery animals would suffer injury-and especially if he took a false oath and didn't own up." That was supposedly the end of raids against the monastery: thus, even if one accepts the skeptic's interpretation, social effects flow from the attribution of supernatural sanctions. The consequences of perjury, observed one villager, are inexorable, "even if you have God as your father"-a phrase that once again domesticates the divine, bringing it down to the level of social intiIDacy. The icons with the greatest reputation for miracle working, punitive or not, mostly belong to independent monasteries rather than to local chapels. Monastery churches, being on their own territory, are neutral in relation to intervillage disputes; they also provide a neutral context for resolving strife between covillagers or kin (d. Brown 1971: 83-94). The Glendiots' preferred locations for oath taking rituals are the Diskouri chapel, which is close to their own village, and the roadside chapel of St. George at Selinaris near Agios Nikolaos. The first of these is relatively accessible, but stands in its own land and controls the water supply to Glendi and two other villages. The sanctions that this St. George produces can appear more embarrassing than punitive. A perjurer is said to find the saint's icon leaning away from his hand as he swears. This may be a play on the oath itself ("as my hand moves away ... ") and specifically omits evocation of death (the separation of soul from body). The rejection of the hand embodies and enacts the saint's rejection of the perjurer's soul, much as an affronted shepherd may decline his opponent's handshake, which is proffered precisely to test the relationship. But the saint does not subsequently appear in person to exact his revenge. In the 1930s, local thieves would go to Diskouri at the command of the police to swear never to steal again. They soon discovered that the saint did not punish them when they broke this solemn oath, apparently because bureaucratic duress invalidated it. The state has rarely resorted to this method of preven-
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tion since that time. The geographically luuch more distant St. George of 5eIinaris, by contrast, is credited with ferocious reprisals against perjurers: one "goes in and trembles." Also, if one passes by without stopping to pray in the church, a fatal accident is likely to follow swiftly. For this reason, it is an appropriate locale for the resolution of particularly serious conflicts; when, for example, a former mayor of Glendi was accused of writing libelous letters about some of the women in the village in order to discredit his political foes, he affirmed his innocence on oath at Selinaris, and the accusations rapidly died away. By emphasizing physical distance from their home villages, the principals avoid the fragmentation of daily social life and revert instead to a total spiritual fact with its social analogue in their encompassing Christianity. S Religious faith (pisti) brooks no questioning: "believe and do not investigate (pisteve ke min erevna)." The shepherds realize this same principle socially, through the trustworthiness (embistosini) that makes any further doubting of motives socially unacceptable and morally indefensible. Hmbistosini encompasses the duality of religious and social values. "When an accuser says of a local church, "I don't have embistosini in the Panayia, let's go to Diskouri," he does not spurn the Virgin Mary as a hagiographical entity, but rather expresses his faith in oaths sworn at a place already credited with miraculous po~ers. A case of what was characterized as betrayal illustrates the conceptual articulation of oath taking with social relations. A thief was arrested; the victim was locally suspected of having reported him to the authorities, an act that could have led to a full-scale cycle of vengeance killings. At the first trial, in the prefecture capital of Rethemnos, the thief was convicted and sentenced. He appealed, and the case was heard in more distant Khania. Note that, as with the oath-taking ritual, geographical span increases with the seriousness of the situation. Mutual friends of the thief and his victim meanwhile increased pressure on the victim to withdraw his testimony. Fear of this pressure allegedly became fiercer than fear of perjury, and, at the appeals trial, the accuser retracted the charges, saying that the thief's repeated protestations of innocence led him to propose a trial by oath at SeIinaris, and that the accused's ready acquiescence must be taken as proof of his innocence. "For I believe that he did not 'eat' them from me. 9 And I made a mistake. And I ask the court's forgiveness." Distance lent authority to holy shrine and appeals court alike, and the case for the prosecution was dismissed.
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Although the accused had in fact committed the theft, no judge would challenge even the reported voice of that higher and more distant judge, the miracle-working icon. Selinaris is the "Supreme Court" (Arios Paghos).l0 Physical distance and the terrors it evokes, human and divine, do not necessarily mean that shepherds believe each other in such situations. Their actions appear to be dictated mainly by social concerns. The question of belief, both in the validity of the oath taken and in the supernatural sanctions that supposedly befall perjurers, is in any case beyond analysis, although its representation as part of the strategic play is not. ll Others' motives are ultimately both impenetrable, as villagers themselves insist (see also du Boulay 1974: 84), and automatically suspect. The practice of resolution by oath permits a face-saving avoidance of further conflict in the name of higher truths, but this implies precisely the opposite of ingenuous trust: it furnishes a ritualized means of letting a rival escape further retribution without necessarily changing one's mind about his guilt. The invitation to take the oath comes invested with a guarantee that the matter will end there. The very sanctity of the process is what protects the lie that it may-and, in the general estimation, often does-conceal.
Reluctant Accusers: Risks of the Oath The oath-taking ritual is called ksekatharisi (clearing up), a term directly reminiscent of the so-called clean oath (katharos orkos) of the innocent man, of being clean in the sense of being innocent and therefore willing to take the oath, and of having been cleansed/cleared (ksekatharismenos) of suspicion (by taking the oath) or of the ongoing burden of guilt (by owning up). This set of terms, clearly opposed to pollution, and especially to being soiled (magharismenos) by perjury, conflatcs the establishment of truth with the restoration of social relations. For today, in contrast to the idealized past, perjury is far frOlTI rare: "now," it is said "we have become polluted." If a man agrees to take the oath, however, he has ritually constituted his own iImocence and can no longer be challenged without offense to his person and to the social body. Since lying is commonly expected of animal-thieves, their victims, thieves themselves, place little confidence in their oaths. Reciprocally, the suspect may put his accuser off with an excuse, procrastinate, or even refuse point-blank. Once he has agreed to
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take tlle oath, however, he bas accepted full responsibility before the saint and before God. Despite the terrifying stories of supernatural punislullent, perjury is precisely what many people expect of the guilty. Contrary to Austin's ([1962] 1975: 42-43, 154) account of judicial decisions, in which the verdict socially constitutes innocence or guilt and may be challenged if it is unconvincing, oath taking establishes a conventional truce in which further investigation is henceforward proscribed: "I [the victim] am obliged, I must never Inention it again." At the end of the ritual, an accuser may say to the suspect, "Khalali sou" ("I don't begrudge you it"), an expression that surrenders all rights to the stolen animal or object. This is hardly a reassurance that he really accepts the suspect's innocence. A former monk remarked that once a shepherd has sworn his innocence, "he is considered 'cleansed'not completely, of course, but, well ... " Such temporizing speaks for itself. In the wicked present world, the very expression "to take an oath" (na paris arko) can and commonly does mean "to perjure yourself." Wickedness is the rule, not the exception. Except as a last resort, the oath is thus a bad risk for the shepherd whose animals have disappeared. For the perjurer, moreover, there are numerous ways of squaring deceit with conscience. To say that one has not "eaten" another's sheep, for example, is ambiguous (sec n. 9). One Milopotamos shepberd asserted on oath that he had not ingested the stolen animals; and he had not done so in a literal sense. His accuser, however, understood him to be wholly uninvolved in the theft, which was also nor true. Such niceties avoid any necessity for actual perjury. Even if the truth comes out, the victim may not exact revenge. Mere evidence call1lot gainsay an oath's holy authority, and it is both blasphemous and a heinous solecism to suggest that it might. The shepherd's reluctance to place suspects on oath also stems from the theological implication of the challenger in the perjurer's sin. This is explicit: "you take on responsibility" (pernis efthini, a phrase that captures rhe reciprocity entailed by the perjurer's "taking" an oath); the accuser is to blame for having forced the suspect to such a pass. Harming any being, however evil, imposes a burden of sin. Even those who exorcise demons or banish the evil eye must shoulder that burden. If the suspect is in fact innocent, the accuser carries a Inore direct sin (amartia) ·and is significanrly more guilty (enokhos) himself, both socially and theologically, for he has dared to think ill of his innocent fellow shepherd.
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The responsibility that attaches to unfounded charges is dramatically symbolized in a tale about a man mistakenly accused of arson. Forced against his will to take an oath at the reputedly miraculous church of St. Nicholas at Keramia, he called on the saint to exercise poetic justice: "If I'm not at fault to you, he [the saint] will show the miracle on your head." This literally came to pass: within three months, his accuser died of a cerebral helnorrhage. Once again, theological exegesis parallels social exigency. A guilty person, when pressed to take the oath, usually prefers to return the animals because, as a former policenlan explained in unwitting evocation of Mauss's (1968: 160) concept of the spiritual bond (lien d'ames), "these people have close ties among themselves. " Suspicion, like animal-theft itself, is reciprocal, and a challenger may not refuse to take an oath in its turn. This is the social corollary of the theological reciprocity jnst noted, according to which those who accuse wrongly-even if through error rather than malice-may be punished by the saints or their own consciences. (It is worth noting that intention, in this society where people claim not to be able to read each otber's minds even while they try to do so, bas little to do with blame; a man who accidentally causes the death of another easily becomes the socially agreed target of revenge by the deceased's agnates.) In the ritual of the oath of innocence, the accuser has committed himself to a reciprocal agreement, the intention of which is to restore goodwill. He therefore cannot escape the ilnplications of reciprocity in the administration of the oath. The accused may, for example, demand that his accuser swear in return that the missing animals arc actually missing. Then again, if the accuser has himself started a cycle of theft against the accused, it wonld be logical for him to assume that tIus latest theft was in revenge. In that case, the roles are reversed and the current suspect demands that his challenger swear innocence in turn. Reciprocity is thematic: if the suspect is charged with some other offense, such as having reported the accuser to the police, the countercharge should be analogous. Above all, a challenger may not openly doubt tbe oath once it has been taken. To do so is not only a denial of common humanity (being an anthropos), the nexus that explains the need for trust in the first place; it is also "unmanly." This makes sense in terms of the commonly held view that manliness is a matter of courage and self-control. It takes strong nerves not to keep checking on a potential enemy. Among the tonghest shepherds, 164
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forbearance can be a sign of strengtb. Eternal faith (pisti) in the divine order provides the prototype for the necessarily more transient condition (d. Hart 1988: 187) of being persuaded (pistemenos) 12 that restores social harmony. The practical risks of nsing the oath are considerable. It is clear that the rhetoric of trust does not preclude trickery. On the contrary, it nurtures deception. At the same time, shepherds recognize that they are participants in a common social environment, and this imposes limits on their willingness to condemn one another to permanent social exclusion. It may be more useful to prevent a rival from cOllllnitting perjury because the latter is a strong and powerful shepherd with good connections, or because the victim is more interested in keeping the raiding cycle alive. An example will illustrate these limits. A pair of shepherds, having agreed with a thief to give up all claims on a stolen animal in exchange for the return of the bell,D and having consummated the agreement by establishing a relationship of spiritual kinship, then sneaked off to the thief's partner and tricked him-unbeknownst to the first thief-into agreeing to take an oath of innocence. At the last moment, however, the older accuser and a kinsman who had hidden himself in the priest's sanctum came forward with the bell. The thief had no choice but to confess. In this way, they stopped him from committing perjury-although this was expressed as a practical and social concern that the suspect should not implicate himself by becoming branded a perjurer-and at the same time scared him into giving them an animal to replace the stolen one after all. Behind this crafty trick lies uot only practical advantage bnt also a concern to avoid both spiritual pollution and political stupidity by implicating in perjury a rival who might someday become a useful ally. Its special brilliance lies in exacting compensation without actually committing the solecism of asking for it. Shepherds are tbus careful to avoid knowingly letting their rivals commit perjury and are very reluctant to use the oath. One Soutl} Cretan shepherd adamantly refuses ever to do so. He argues that it would be wrong to risk luring another shepherd into the sin of perjury over anything so trivial as a stolen goat. The only time he did use the device was when he was serving as a member of one of the state-supported local shepherds' committees set up in the post-junta 1970s to combat animal-theft. In this case, he was not acting solely on his own behalf. Admittedly, any form of cooperation with the authorities carried overtones of "betrayal" 165
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(prodhosia). By helping to narrow the field of suspects, however, he could plausibly claim to be protecting the intcrests of the community as a whole, while his use of a dramatically traditionalist device protected him from charges of betraying the culprit. Like the casting of lots in inheritance, it removed responsibility frOlll the agent to an impersonal, cosmological authority, and the accused thief made an independent decision to confess rather than risk divine wrath or eventual exposure as an antisocial perjurer. A shepherd must always remember that if his use of the oath causes a rival to lie, he himself may lose social worth. He may not challenge a declaration of innocence made under oath. Thus, he has cut himself off from any right to retaliate. If it should later emerge that the suspect was in fact the thief, the challenger-who has allowed himself to be cheated out of his just vengeance-may be as humiliated as deeply as the perjurer. At that point, his only reasonably sure means of regaining some degree of respect is through dramatic vengeance such as the destruction of the perjurer's entire flock, an action that would probably be privately applauded by the latter's home community, as well, less privately, as by the avenger's. The oath brings accuser and suspect face-to-face and carries an attendant risk of violence, rather than permitting the indirect negotiation through third parties that is the normative and preferred mode of operation. Even when shepherds are able to claim more or less plausibly that they have stolen by mistakethat is, from their own allies or kin-and decide to make amends, they prefer to leave the animals in a neutral place where their owners will find them, rather than taking them back in person and risking a violent confrontation. One's closest friend can be suspect until proved innocent, and shepherds openly doubt that allies would avoid raiding them if they could get away with it. It is the rhetoric of error that usually allows allies to gloss over a botched attempt by one side on the other's flocks. The only alternative is extreme moral outrage and its attendant mayhem. A successful administration of the oath should, by contrast, defuse violence. Guilty parties generally prefer to approach the brink of taking the oath instead of either confessing or refnsing outright. The gradual yielding that this permits improves the chances of a peaceful resolution. H a suspect refuses to submit to the test of the oath, he provokes doubts, not only about his irmocence but also, what may be more important in the long run, 166
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about his manhood. In so doing, he forfeits the respect on which worthwhile alliances are based. Only if the challenger has acted inappropriately may the suspect legitinlately decline. Then, the demonstrated immorality (dropi) of the challenger may work to the suspect's advantage. The latter may then want the former to go on suspecting him erroneously, without being able to arrive at a satisfactory resolution of his uncertainty. Conversely, when a challenger looks like a potentially worthy ally, owning up, even falsely, may seem to offer more advantages than taking an oath of innocence. False confessions, however, constitute as spurious a claim to manhood as perjury. It is best to tell the truth, for then the moral burden of response falls on the challenger. The practical principles of the oath of innocence are internally consistent. A shepherd will only administer the oath to a rival whose personal courage he has some expectation of respecting. A cowardly rival is of no interest. First of all, he will be of no use as a future ally. Then again, if he is afraid of telling the truth, his perjury works to the discredit of both parties, as it may raise embarrassing questions about the accuser's judgment as much as it does about the culprit's social worth. Finally, perjury has no obvious effects as long as it relnains undiscovered. A shepherd who suspects that his rival has taken a false oath can do nothing about it without, once again, raising awkward questions about his own initial judgment. Since he has accepted the rival as a virtual equal, the latter's perjury would imply that he has exercised poor judgment aud that, in so doing, he has participated in a truly appalling sin.
From the Word of God to the Word of Honor Nonetheless, narratives about actual cases of perj ury are far from infrequent. To understand the apparent paradox, we must first abandon the assulnption that the values entailed in reciprocal animal-theft are necessarily at odds with Christian morality. For the shepherds, the theological and the social belong to different but closely interwoven orders of truth. The social order represents a refraction of the divine through the divisive complexities of everyday experience. Social life is riddled with. secrecy and deception, so that apparent revelations may be disproved by subsequent evidence. Social life lacks the revealed quality of eternal truth; knowledge is contingent upon the flow of time. 167
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People understaud the workings of the divine order through its particular appearances in daily experience. Thus divine retribution for perjury parallels the logic of vengeance against those who violate the canmis of reciprocal theft. Similarly, the idea that a man who exacts a false oath from another carries an equal share of the burden of sin parallels the social humiliation he suffers when his gnllibility becomes a matter of public derision. Shepherds also see perjury as analogous to the betrayal of covillagers to the authorities, and, what is especially significant for their manhood and for nlY larger argmnent about the sources and images of cultural intimacy, to the rape of women from one's own village. All these acts are violations of boundaries (oria), and as such are also, as we have already seen, forms of symbolic pollution (oghoursouza). Sin, whether theological or social, violates the boundary between those one can treat categorically as one's own and others: ('Whatever the 'job' is, whether it's called 'theft' or 'atimia,'14 when it's in your own neighborhood it isn't right and you shouldn't do it." Rape in the home community, for example, like animal-theft and violence, is socially concentric widl incest but at a more inclusive level and allows the rapist no defenders. 's Thus, a "clean oath" springs from faith in the Word of God. Concomitantly, "cleaning up" the social relationship requires faith in one's opponent's word. The social both reflects and refracts the theological, so that to accuse a man of lying under oath is at one and the same time to say that he has been a poor specimen of manhood and to denounce him as a sinner and as lacking theofovia, fear of God. This implies not only that he has perpetuated the injury to the victim (who might have little claim on other shepherds' sympathy in any case), but also that he is beyond the human pale itself: these anticlerical shepherds unconsciously echo Durkheim as precisely as they do Mauss. Lack of the fear of God characterizes animals in contrast to hunlans, Turks in contrast to Greeks. By initiating the procedure of the oath, the victim challenges the suspect's probity but still does so in a manner that admits of recovery through the "manly" act of proud admission. By then accusing the suspect of perjury, however, a victim would turn a single act of the socially accepted practice of animal-theft into a collective, irremediable, and categorical condition of, simultaneously, sin and solecism. This intolerable insult can only be countered with homicide-precisely the extreme of violence that the oath is ideally meant to preclude.
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Perjury, because it is known to happen, can be a convincing charge. It identifies an individual's depravity with the modern condition that makes such depravity possible to begin with, the condition that occasions structural nostalgia. But the charge mars a culprit's reputation for personal strength. It fits a social framework in which men compete over the very possession of manhood and in which few can expect to maintain their reputations intact for a whole lifetime. The oath provides a sanctioned means of defusing tension. In my introductory remarks to this chapter, I showed how the gradual increments of raiding by the offended boy achieved a more effective result than a single massive raid would have done. Another young Glendiot avenged himself for long-past raids on his father's flock by stealing the culprit's lead ram-and thus the symbol of his own masculinity-as well as several ewes. When challenged, he agreed to swear on the icon of St. George in the village church. He confessed to one theft, then another, then yet another, all the time working his way up to the most serious confession of all: the theft of the ram. Through his strategic timing of the discussion, the Glendiot gradually lured the other into a state of admiration for his candor-a situation, moreover, in which he could then accuse him directly and with impunity of having ruined his father. His adversary had long assumed that his own theft had gone undetected and had hoped to neutralize the Glendiot by making him either swear or confess. He now had to accept reinterpretation of the Glcndiot's theft of the ram-which would have been considered a disgusting act under ordinary circumstances 16-as a just reciprocation. The immediate circumstances favored resolution. Because the entire exchange took place late at night and in secrecy, there was no external pressure to continue the feud, and the game ended in a tie. Only the priest, having been asked for the key to the church by the thoroughly profane Glendiot, must have suspected something (and was in fact free to ask what was happeuing because he was a member of the same patrigroup as the young man). In the contest over manhood, such delicate arrangelnents reduce the risk of actual bloodshed: "We made a compromise then. He didn't even ask for money; that is, [he had a right to do so because] the animals that I had 'eaten' were more, I'd 'eaten' more of his animals than he had [of mine]." This forbearance meant that resolution was possible: "And we shook hands there and then, and we never, that is, 'bothered' each other agaiu." Villagers say that the absence
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of pressure from third parties, or from the principals' agnates, contributes significantly to the lessening of tension. Audiences can be dangerous in a society where public performance luakes and breaks manly reputations. Secrecy allows much more play to constructive negotiation. It is the guarantee of true intimacy, which is the space in which mutual hostility may give way to affectionate complicity. As such, it is the perfect model for the cultural intimacy of the nation-state, in which sheep-thieves and politicians make cozy deals that the former affect to despise and that the latter deny before the critical eyes of the outside world. In this instance, in the privacy of a night-time encounter, the principals could quietly work out an interpretation of events that allowed them to evade the dangerous logic of insult. The accused both showed his manhood through confession and justified his actions on moral grounds. By thus claiming a moral balance with his accuser, he established the right conditions for a truce. Asymmetrical relations, by contrast, are a denial of the lesser partner's masculinity. Indeed, this logic also governs the occasional use of the oath between people of different genders. At the church of St. Nicholas in Keramia, men sometimes COlne from other areas to put their wives' fidelity to the test of the oath. A woman will not delay confession to the last minute as a thief might, and she may not put her husband on oath. Male infidelity does not usually carry the same sanctions as female (e.g., du Boulay 1974: 124). Initiating the procedure of the oath is a mark of superiority. Between shepherds, contestants in an unstable struggle, such inequality may sometunes be reversed; between spouses, whose inequality is divinely ordained, never,17
Oaths as Social Refractions of the Word The oath invests social relations with theological force. Like ties of spiritual kinship, whose instrumentality in the social and political world reflects rather than contradicts human relations with the saints, it is cosmological in a literal sense. The kosmos, literally the world, but also people (as in the French tout Ie monde), is what comments, gossips, backbites, and quarrels, but it is also the stage on which the thieves' actions acquire meaning and force. Relations of mutual trust convert all the negative aspects into positive ones. When an innocent suspect agrees to take an oath, "the hatred goes away" as a result: "If I anI determined not to believe him, we won't go to the church at all!" 170
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The oath detemporalizes a touchy situation: by treating the suspect's word as a ritually validated truth, it recasts it in the terms of eternity; it neutralizes past disputes in favor of present and future harmony. It begins in confrontation, and the danger of violent breakdown UlCreases right up to the last minute. Usually, however, a thief only just stops short of the oath itself, when he may legitimately subordinate his fear of another shepherd to the fear of God. Bourdieu (1977: 7) writes of two different ways of managing time: nlanipulating the tempo of the action to increase tension, and "strategies ultcnded simply to neutralize the action of time and ensure the continuity of interpersonal relations." These are not, however, mutually exclusive idioms. Here, the manipulation of tempo aims at achieving the sense of detemporalized continuity, of what we might well call eternal friendship. Strategies that express hostility through temporally marked and creatively deformed acts 18 achieve, in the logic of Cretan reciprocity, a timeless love (aghapi)-the social harmony that is both the correct relationship with God and the former condition of society (d. Stewart 1991: 91; du Boulay 1974: 249).19 The ideal end product of oath taking is usually described in this kind of language, which is also the language of structural nostalgia. In short, the oath returns the participants to that Edenic state of pure reciprocity when trust made a shepherd's word sufficient. Perjury is an affront to that love and to its accOlnpanying sense of value (timi, often translated as honor).2o It is a denial of the possibility of trust. Conversely, the informal word of honor (loghos timis) is the earthly refraction of the divinely ordained Logos. Indeed, shepherds regard the word of honor as the purest contractual form; it requires the least external regulation and is thus conceptually closest to God's Word. It is embedded directly in the social relationship, without saintly or legal mediation, and this is symbolized by the handclasp, which, in the oath, is replaced by the laying of the hand on the icon. In the postlapsarian world the oath breaks down: "I don't believe in you, in your words." Note the plural, "words": plurality is associated with evil in popular Greek cosmology (Stewart 1985b: 60) and-as in the blasphemous refraction of divine images-expresses social discord. ("Words" are also that most disruptive of social phenomena, gossip [see du Boulay 1974: 206].) It has therefore become necessary to appeal to a saintly guarantor, not just a generic St. George or Panayia but a localized refraction credited
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with perhaps terrible and certainly miracnlons powers. The shift from a bandshake to the placing of the hand on the icon, signifying saintly mediation, literally embodies the decline of direct and universal trust. It marks a shift frOln ecumenical harmony to a segmentary perception of mutual dependence, and to a world in which mediators-priests, monks, and bureaucrats-have become a regrettable necessity. A shepherd boasted that no rival had ever managed to get him inside a church, that bis word had always sufficed: antiecclesiastical sentilnent here ironically converges with closeness to God, just as lawlessness invokes the saIne principles of structural nostalgia as those whereby the state jnstifies its enforcement of law. The placing of a hand on the Bible in court represents a further and final decline in the embodiment of trust: the physical images of saints, themselves a more exigent and localized replacement for the handy stone or for the word of honor, now yield to the ultimate specificity of abstract print and the paraphernalia of the extrinsic bureaucratic state apparatus. Among shepherds who despise all kinds of "penpushers," even the Holy Writ seems a poor substitute for the direct and pervasive Word of God.
Cynicism and the State The common claim that shepherds formerly took oaths much more seriously is an extension of these same ideas. Perjurers resemble those who steal flock animals for purely financial gain: both undercut established idioms of reciprocity. Indeed, one of the commonest forms of perjury today-the rccanting of sworn testimony in court-most often serves commercial thieves. Villagers may criticize perjury of this type, but they attribute it to the fallibility of the legal system and to their own reluctance to betray the perjuries of specific individuals. One illiterate old man, asked by a judge whether he knew what perjury was, is said to have replied, "You get your deserts [that way] (to dava sou cerdhizis)!" To the thieves, oaths sworn in court are less sacrosanct than those sworn on the basis of mutual trust (pisti). In the words of a notorious Glendiot animal-thief: "In a law court, to get someone else off fa charge], they say, it [i.e., perjury] is not important.... In a church, you shouldn't do it. In church, you're afraid to." The court represents the hostile bureaucratic state, and saving a fellow shepherd from jail is morally good: villagers identify religious 172
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priorities with social rather than legal morality. Even in lowland villages, supposedly more inclined to legality, men prefer to take an oath in church rather than go to court. It is clear that the ideal world of reciprocal theft is closer to God's order than are the legal institutions of the state. Nostalgia for the past equates morality with respect for the Word: "in the old days, the word of honor was enough." Even the use of icons to reinforce a simple word of honor implies relative distrust. In Glendi, a small boy once swore on a stone that he would not betray the older girl who had put him up to stealing a pig, but, when put on his word of honor, could no longer pretend ignorance; such was the hierarchy of obligations internalized by a boy of seven or eight: "I preferred to break the oath [rather than the word of honor]; and I still cannot break my word." The smaller tbe degree of formality, the closer men come to God's intentions. To Cretan animal-thieves, the bureaucratic nationstatc, like the official church, represents the intrusion of moral corruption into society. Personal pasts reproduce the general nostalgia. One former shepherd maintained that in his youth be had never put anyone on oath, as the culprits were always proud and ready to confess. The ferocity of his reprisals insured him against the insult of others' lies, while his value as a potential ally made others actually want him to learn of their daring. But practical advantage, as we have seen, has theological and moral parallels that both explain and reinforce it. The purest word of honor was that which did not even need to be specified aloud. It was closer than any modern formula to the ineffable Word. In court, at the other extreme, legalism-the bureaucrat's insistence on establishing facts by writing them down-absolved him of any moral requirement to tell the truth at all. Defense counsel who try to make shepherds swear falsely in court can hardly increase these supposedly lawless highlanders' respect for judicial process, any more than do the politicians who solicit their patronage by intervening in that process on behalf of convicted thieves. The oath, although less pure than the word of honor, may nevertheless serve to restore the link with God. In official contexts, however, people falsely "take the oath" in court on the Gospel without fear of supernatural consequences.- In court, the Book, which for the state represents the unity of Deity and the Greek Orthodox people, does not have the punitive force of local refractions of particular saints. These saints are entailed in an 173
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unending contest between local solidarities, whose unity lies in their COffilnon recognition that the social world is in fact an irrevocably divided one. (Note again tbat this paradox is the fundamental condition of cultural intimacy.) To surrender to the blandly homogeneous bureaucracy is thus to deny the contestatory fellowship of being hUlnan. It is necessary to lie in order to protect socially recognized truths (see also Gilsenan 1976: 208-10). In the modern bureaucratic world, blasphemous falsehood becomes the only defense left to the divine ordering of human life.
The Ends of States and the State of Words Asad's (1987) argument that Catholic monastic discipline redirected rather than repressed human emotion also holds generally true for Orthodox monasticism. The monks are of, if not fully in, the same world as the shepherds, whose calling provides a powerful metaphor for the role of Christ and of the church;2l that much is clear from their entailment in pastoral practice in both senses (as in the role of the kouradhokonorni). fn monastic life, however, discipline triumphs over strategy, an encompassing institutional unity over individual will. The shepherds' use of ecclesiastical paraphernalia reverses all these things. The shepherds define their moral purity in opposition to institutionalized values, and engage in reciprocal relations with each other rather than with centralized authority. Their pragmatic authority thus refracts the Divine Word, Logos, through the divisions of social life. This atomized perspective results in a nlultiplicity of more or less reliable words (layi)22 of honor. "fn the Beginning was the Word." Today there are merely words, serving endless ends. But Eden is always only just out of sight. Such structural nostalgia, however, has considerable social importance. What Giddens (1984: 25-29) calls the "duality of structure"-the reciprocal interplay of structure and agency, here represented by the idealized Word and pragmatic "words," respectively-means that the formal ideology we recognize as structure is that very stuff that "socialized agents" (Bourdieu and Lamaison 1985: 94) mine for strategic resources. Questions of trust, which is a distinctly orderly notion, arise in situations of continuing uncertainty (Gambetta 1988a: 218)-a condition that did not disappear with modernity but may actually have increased with its pressures and its attempts to regiment social life (see Malaby 2003: 77-79). Trust turns on a 174
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questionable but necessary capacity for predicting and anticipating the actions of others and thus represents attempts to control present time. The continual suspicion that marks everyday experience is corrosive, and there are InOlnents when it is easier for all concerned to reach a truce based on mutual respect. In such situations the actors join forces to reclaim the eternal verities. They strive for a temporary suspension of temporality. Thus, in rejecting a simplistic opposition between Orthodox ecclesiastical values and those of the Cretan aniinal-thieves (and with it the view that the thieves treat the church without any regard for theological considerations), we are instead able to translate the "dialectic" between doctrinal and local concepts of Orthodoxy (Stewart 1985b: 40)23 into the more general dialectic between structure and strategy. Silnplistic oppositions between local and official religion, instrumentality and spirituality, or commodity and gift arc themselves enclosed within the logic of structural nostalgia: the embarrassing but comforting intimacies of the present would not have been necessary had humankind adhered to the daunting path of true virtue, and social life as we know it would never have happened. fndeed, nothing at all would have "happened," because time itself, that corrosive dimension of our mortality, would have been inconceivable. I am tempted here to draw a direct parallel between the structural a.p.d unconscious perfection of Bourdieu's notion of doxa on the one hand and the ideal-typical doctrinal virtue of, so to speak, the orthodoxy of Orthodoxy. Siruplistic oppositions of the kind I have just listed, if only because they are encased within the ideal type of strncture itself and thus represent the triumph of a hegemonic vision over social experience, miss this vital dimension of a shared and contested ideological universe. Indeed, just as politicians announce that they are not politicians, this kind of structurespeak marks the concealment of human motive in games of power. It is the logic of divine right. fn analyzing the practice and ideology of oath taking among animal-thieves, I have tried to show that the thieves' perspective challenges and reverses the ecclesiastical monopoly of ritual, but that it does so in a way that relocates ritual practice in real time. (This is an example of the local redeployment of official discourse, which, as Alexander Kiossev [2002: 190] correctly notes, is characteristic of some fonns of cultural intiinacy; it is clearly also accompanied, sometimes quite discordantly, by the kind of riotous rejection of official power and even of dissident intellectuals'
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pronouncements, that he sees as more typical of "Balkan" forms of collective intimacy.) Such "intimacy work," i defensive barrier against an intrusive state apparatus, provides conditions under which the kind of trust that a fallen world has made untenable can be created-"restored," in the logic of structural nostalgia, but only temporarily and on a case-by-case basis, the unity of the social world having been forever fractured beyond repair. Against the excuse for wrongdoing that we are mere human beings (anthropi), cultural intimacy offers the connter-vision of a "cornman humanity" (anthropia) tbat incorporates the idea of accepting moral responsibility for what one does to others. Strategy thus converts structural nostalgia into practice, and recovers just enough of the idealized past to avert the total collapse of society. It does not restore society to its presumed original unity, but instead translates the original Word into a Babel of pragmatic ((words of honor" that never completely abolish conflicting interests but simply defer the damage that these interests can do. In this scheme of things, trust only works wben people have a mutual interest in making it work. This is the practical theodicy of rather happily self-acknowledged sinners. The interplay of values between the pastoral church and tbese frankly anticlerical pastoralists is central to tbe cosmology-and to the imperfect kosmos-that tbey share, and so defines the boundaries of their social and cultural intimacy. They also share those boundaries with the secular state. In this they show close structural parallels with Spanish Anarcbists, who adhered to an ideology of strict chastity exactly like that of the repressive Francoist regime that tried to destroy them (Mintz 1982: 91-99). Indeed, if the authorities began to achieve some measure of success in the 1990s at controlling the Cretan shepherds' activities, it is because the highly Mallssian view that modern, commercial animal-theft represents a corrosion of original reciprocities rings true with the villagers and the authorities alike. We might even speculate ~hat the curious durability of Mauss's evolutionism springs from a more global resonance; that kind of nostalgia offers a truce between state power and social life around the world, a consensus that society has lost its umocence that is paradoxically grounded in the inability to agree on how to recover that innocence. When money enters in, according to this scenario, all notions of tradition and custom-key elements in the nationalistic folklore on which nation-states have often based their claims to legiti-
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macy-are compromised. The Cretan highland villagers and tbe police remain locked in a negotiation that is both possible and yet also necessarily inconclusive because of this shared pessimisnl. Their narratives thus repress the fact that older forms of raiding also had highly unfair effects, and it is clear that at first I fell into the trap of taking such rosy accounts of both past and present practice too literally (see, e.g., Darner 1986). Moreover, the practice of disguising such inequalities with a rhetoric of pristine tradition has become steadily less convincing as the commercial and political dimensions became lnore obvious-although this process, again paradoxically, perhaps explains why shepherds could at least insist on a morally purer past. Ethnographic parallels also suggest that such rhetoric may always have been more fragile than we might expect (see Hill 1992: 274). If so, this too represents an example of structural nostalgia, inasmuch as every generation would then have insisted that it could trace its fallen condition-the basis of its cultural intimacy-to events that had occurred in a vaguely defined past, dreamlike in its frustrating inaccessibility, but nevertheless highly convenient as a generic moral alibi for the present. Revelations of direct interest undermine the quality of the gift, in the shepherds' worldview as much as in Mauss's, so that the shepherds can only claim the mantle of the historical revolutionary past of the state by merging it with such vague assertions about the corrupting presence of modernity. Bnt here the shepherds and the state part company. The state claims that the shepherds have violated their moral standing as citizens and betrayed the glorious moral heritage of their swashbuckling revolutionary predecessors, thereby snbverting the predestined march to a blameless modernity; the sbepherds, by contrast, claim that it is the state that has violated an eternal pact, through the corruption and venality that they have come to associate with that same modernity, which they represent as a betrayal of the communal values of yesteryear. The state blames the shepberds for tbeir greed, conceding only the possibility that outside forces are partly responsible for the corruptions of these erstwhile exemplars of Greek heroism. The shepherds, for their part, associate the state with the evils that accompany international capitalism. Each treats the other as the victim of a noxious foreign influence. And it is foreign influence that, in this account, disrupted the harmonious reciprocities and structural balance of eternity and so jump-started time, the corrupter of flesh and morals alike. 177
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I
II I i !
This evidence of a moral space shared by the state and its outlaws helps us to understand the persistence of intimacy as a key theme in official discourse and bureaucratic strategies. The state does not exist except throngh those who staff its offices. These people know whereof they speak. None know it better than tho.se parliamentarians who denounce the very practices through which they have apparently risen to power. Small wonder, then, that anthropological interest in these matters should discommode the elite's modernist claims to a place in "Europe." Bnt small wonder, too, that anthropologists themselves shonld prove so~ewhat resi~tant to the idea that there has been a persistent stram of evolutIOnism throughout the history of the discipline. Johannes Fabian (1983) was perhaps the first to point this out In a systematIc way, particularly through his critique of structnralism; Levi-Stranss's (1962) famons distinction between "hot" and "cold" societies particnlarly smacks of this position. Anthropologists will protest that this was not the intention and that Levi-Strauss was particularly active in advocating ~ role for anthropology in the fight against racism and intolerance. Io like mode, they may wish to exonerate Evans-Pritchard from charges of an ahistorical, colonialist perspective (see, e.g., Rosaldo 1986) on the grounds that he was in fact instrumental in rehistoricizing anthropology in reaction to the functionalists' obsessive search for system ~nd disregar~ for contingent detail; or, again, they ITIay want to pomt out that It was the functionalists' commitITIent to fieldwork,. especially that of Bronislaw Malinowski, that fatallya.nd In spIte of senous flaws and biases-punctured the Victonan self-con~dence of the evolutionists. There is no reason why anthropologists shonld be any less assiduons than other human beings in protecting the spaces of their own peculiar forms of cultural intimacy. In those spaces, where they often indulge in the sins of romanticis~, ethnic and racial humor, stereotyping, not to speak of straIghtforward irritation with those whom they study, the com~on theme is .an unsaid assumption that they are uniquely quahfied to theOrize about their "subjects," who, lacking the comparatIve perspectIve and experience of the professional intellectuals, cannot or do not theorize about their own condition. To pr~test that .these are not deliberate expressions of contempt is to mIss the pomt. If the people we study only possess "semi-theoretical dispositions" (Bourdieu 1977: 18)240r do uot exhibit the 178
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full traits of an individualistic "modernity" (Giddens 1992)note that "practice theorists" are no less prone to offer these fundamentally evolutionist formulations than are any of the predecessors they also and at the same time consign to a "premodern" mode of anthropological thought-anthropologists are surely no less liable to forms of what Bourdieu (1977: 5-6) calls "misrecognition." Misrecognition is not necessarily an incapacity to recognize; those who misrecognize are not necessarily the unwilling dupes of false consciousness. Rather, those we study and we ourselves are, to more or less the same degree and for similar reasons, sometimes reluctant to tackle the implicit conditions of social life directly.IS The romanticism of the noble savage is well documented in early anthropological history. We are embarrassed by its constant resurgence, but we should not be surprised that this happens. We, no less than the people we study, and in the Judeo-Christian world perhaps more than elsewhere, are apt to view the complexities of life as evidence of a corrupting influence-of a fall from grace, in the terms of the same religious metaphor. Here, too, Greek official discourse has offered a middle position between anthropologists and the people they study: the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 constitutes an exact analogue of the original sin that led to the expulsion from Eden, and explains the intimate stains in Greek culture much as the larger Fall explains the petty sins of the human condition (Herzfeld 1992a: 41-42). The noble savage who constantly reappears on the stage of anthropological thought is that representative of edenic otherness, the gift-giver who "survives" only in rural hamlets and "backward" slums amidst the glitzy consumerism of those who have "succeeded." There are other versions, such as the stalwart pastoralist whose word is hi~ bond and the generous host, nostalgically evoked today in the theme-park oxymoron that labels tourism a "hospitality industry." We are easily disappointed when we do not find these people actually living in our field sites, and we become annoyed with ourselves when we realize how badly we wanted to find them. It is wheo we fight those romantic impulses that the urge to deconstruct appears. Sometimes, in the form of challenging the idea of an aboriginal past represented in the present by an uncomplicated ethnic identity, it poses political risks for those we study, requiring at the very least a considered ethical pause (see espe179
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cially Jackson 1995). Sometimes we, or our colleagues, react with disgust or ennui at our insistent probing of romantic images that we may feel were best left alone. But there is in fact little cause for concern on the latter count; it seems that the stories of alienation we share with our informants-expressions of the pessimistic evolutionism that we find in Cretan animal-thieves and in Marcel Mauss alike-will not easily die. Anthropological theory does continually reproduce the conviction, sustained by a happy unconscious as much in our thinking as in that of the people we study, that our own interventions have corrupted an erstwhile paradise of balanced reciprocity, moral harmony, and structural perfection. From survivals to structures and on to. doxa, that residual romanticism has never entirely disappeared. But is this nostalgia structural? It satisfies both criteria: the base model of perfect reciprocity (a form of Durkheimian mechanical solidarity, perhaps?) and the temporal dimension of its reproduction in successive generations. Since the original publication of this book, however, I have seen the concept of structural nostalgia invoked without any evidence that it satisfied this second requirement. I am reluctant to engage in terminological gatekeeping, but I aln concerned that what I intend by structural nostalgia in this book be distinguished from uostalgia tout court. The image of the noble savage represents nostalgia. It becomes an instance of specifically structural nostalgia when, as here, we can identify, not only assumptions about reciprocal social engagements, but also intergenerational reproduction of the basic idca. To the extent that anthropologists have failed to escape their concerns with aboriginal social forms, their theorizing reproduces over time a pattern not dissimilar to the structural nostalgia exhibited by the Cretan sheep-thieves. It is precisely such potentially embarrassing similarities-whether with the bureaucratic state or with uproarious outlaws-that suggest why we must sternly resist the increasing reluctance of the reading public and even of our own colleagues to engage with the sometimes obscure details of ethnography. In the spirit of the militant middle ground that I advocate for anthropology in this book, I suggest that the removal of ethnography from the center of some anthropologists' sense of the discipline has the odd effect of lessening the pressure on them to be truly reflexive. Whether the state's nostalgia for a pristine innocence is as structural as that of so many anthropologists or of people they study 180
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should be a matter for case-by-case archival research; it is an empirical question. But if dIe state's discourse reproduces, in each generation, a deep hankering for an ideal past always-already (to invoke Althusser again) just out of sight, the state's hmctionaries are acting in ways that are no less human than those of ordinary citizens. They too, to cite an American idiom to which I am about to turn by way of an accessible illustration, are-at least sometimes!-regular guys. Even their most buttoned-up lcgalisnls are performances, attempts to bend the conventional roles they play to personal ends, and the pristine past they evoke is a malleable instrument for thcir daily efforts to sustain their personallegitimacy as the embodiments of an absolute but unattainable morality. Their image of the past provides them with the basis for wagging their fingers at the perpetrators of every petty infraction of the rules. But it also, and by the sallIe token, provides the bureaucrats themselves with a handy ethical justification, no less than it protects the sheep-thieves or tax evaders with whom they both collide and collude, for living in the culturally intimate spaces of the present. For what else, they demand as they spread their hands in dramatic effusions of sympathetic despair and beg for their victims' understanding, can they do? Theirs is a social poetics of articulation-of articulation of citizen and state. They must accomn10date their superiors under the law, but they must also live with daily visits from their clients; and this double entailment exposes them to all the messy adjustments, all the challenges to essentialized pasts and presents, that characterize cultural intimacy: "We, too, arc human, after all." The concepts of structural nostalgia, social poetics, and cultural intimacy can usefully illuminate each other's operations and contexts, showing how the formal discourse of authority can coexist with the undisciplined realities of social life. Perhaps we could say that the state's nostalgia is not structural because it has no temporal depth. But the bureaucrats, like other citizens, are helplessly immured in time, and have recourse to more or less the same devices in every succeeding generation. What the European Union bureaucrats told Cris Shore about the need to play creatively with the rules reproduced certain national kinds of cultural intimacy at the emergentlevel of the European superstate-a very different Europe from that iInagined by the Greek academic who wanted to Inarginalize stories 181
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about animal-theft and political patronage as inconsistent with his country's new-but-ancient European identity. If the European Union spells the weakening and perhaps the death of the nation-state, it is by no means clear that the rhetoric of structuralnostalgia will disappear with it. It may well live on at a far grander level than any Cretan sheep-thief could have envisaged a scant two decades ago.
Chapter Eight
Social Poetics in Theory and Practice: Regular Guys and Irregular Practices
Rhetoric and the Constitution of Social Relations The core of social poetics is to treat essentialism as a social strategy. This deliberately reverses the goal of most essentializing, which is to turn happenstance into the permanent and the inevitable. In this chapter, I shall be concerned with the application of ideas that have emerged from the study of rhetoric. I do not limit that domain to the verbal, but follow a conveution already widely accepted in art history and related fields whereby any symbolic system used as an instrument of persuasion-or, as we might now say, used for performative effect-can be examined under this heading. Moreover, the ~~null hypothesis" of social poetics describes a situation in which a person's actions are so ordinary, so commonplace, that they escape attention altogether. TIllS comment has an altogether poetic purpose: to underscore the ease with which we assume that anything labeled poetic mnst be highly dramatic, aesthetically unusual, and probably immodest. In fact, I suggest, the real test of any model of social analysis is whether it can be used to understand the mundane in social life, for the noticeably ordinary features of social interaction register only when their very ordinariness seems extraordinary. Otherwise, we do not even think of people as particularly ordinary. We simply do not register their actions. Much of the language associated with this approach carries unfortunate associations. Some clarification is therefore in order. The term rhetoric, in particular, conjures up a host of misunderstandings-precisely those that, as we have seen, have 182
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given metaphor a bad na111e. Its use implies that there is a clear demarcation between the rhetorical and the real: figurative devices arc in some ontological sense less real than literal language. Yet we can see immediately that this is n1isleading, especially from the perspective of social context. The notion of literaFty is a truth claim; it is n1ade in order to persuade. It is itself rhetorical. As such, it has much in common with the notion of iconicity. Just as iconicity seeks to background the fact that it is a signifying relationship, so too literality is a claim to representindeed, to be-the unmediated truth. We have already seen how iconicity serves the interests of nationalism by rendering its contingent claims as eternal realities by removing them from the dOlllain of social practice to that of cultural essence. Literality is an equally central feature of religious dogmas, the various socalled fundamentalisms. Indeed, we can say that iconicity is a special case of literality: to reverse a popular phrase, things are what they seem to be. The success of literalizing strategies is all around us, resulting in a devaluation of the very phenomenon that makes it possible: rhetoric. I have already noted Lloyd's (1990) argument that the devaluation of metaphor waS itself a rhetorical device with its origins in the social practices of the Athenian law courts, and that its further reification as a particular type of 111entality serves the ideological goal of separating the irrationality of exotic peoples and times from the rationality of the West. While anthropologists have also done much to unpack this ideological baggage, 1 Lloyd's contribution is especially valuable in that it situates the genesis of this hahit of thought in the context of a historically and culturally specific social practice-that is, in an important sense, ethnographically. Calling another's performance rhetoric is a denial of its truthfulness. As such, it carries a strongly pejorative moral tonefurther evidence of its strategic character (and its capacity to essentialize an implicit reality) if we still need to be convinced. In ordinary usage, the term implies pretension, bombast, even deliberate dishonesty. As a result, the social sciences have generally treated rhetoric as epiphenomenal to a real world to which it blocks access. 2 Yet the consequent refusal to take rhetoric seriously is symptomatic of precisely what rhetoric does best: it backgrounds its own rhetoricity. Thus, all claims that social science should be free of rhetoric, that it should make modesty its watch-
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word, 111ay be as rhetorical and immodest as anything they oppose. They suffer from the ultimate epistemological self-deception, the illusion of pure, direct, unmediated knowledge. But the social sciences simply offer a special illustration of a larger principle, the role of rhetoric in everyday social action. A social poetics treats all social interaction, not only as employing rhetoric, but also as rhetorical in its own right. That verbal rhetoric plays an important part in channeling and shaping social relations has long been recognized and discussed (see especially Bauman 1977, 1986, 1987; Bauman and Briggs 1990). But I want to argue something more radical: that the entirety of social interaction-not just the linguistic and quasi-linguistic aspects-is rhetorical. This move allows us to use the insights already generated by speech-act theory to trace the actual operation of social agency in the crcation of social relations. In this chapter, I propose to sketch the necessary presuppositions for a rhetorical account of social relations in general, and to follow that account with a brief discussion of how this approach can be used to examine even those kinds of social relationships that-in the conventional sense of rhetoric-might appear to lack it altogether. The point of this latter move is twofold: first, to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of rhetoric as opposed to some arrangement separating it from social reality; and second, to argue against a similar division internal to social relations themselves, between rhetorical and nonrhetorical actions. For unless we can apply the approach to the whole range of social practices, including the academic and the institutional, it will not be very useful. Such an account, which belongs to what Bourdieu (1977) has called a "theory of rsocial] practice,"3 explores the relationships among cultural form, performance, and the creative deformation of structures and normative patterns. It should illuminate in specific, descriptive ways how emergent social structure can be creatively modeled and explored through the daily interactions of sentient human beings. In so doing, we jettison the epiphenomenal view that rhetoric is necessarily secondary to social organization. Instead, we treat social organization as rhetoric (although it is certainly much else as well). This helps us to get from the agnatic kinship of villages and sublineages to nationstates and large seg111entary political systems and to break down the equally false distinction between the "reality" of local-level kinship and the "simulated" character of its larger realizations,
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treating these differences of scale as differences of degree rather than of kind. These issues are not usefully approached through some new subfield of "the anthropology of rhetoric." First, that label still carries heavily verhocentric assmnptions. Second, rhetoric is not an inert, cultural phenomenon, but the source of social continuity and change in all areas of social life. Third, and consequently, it is important not to separate rhetoric from the material world to which, as a causative agent, it belongs. A rhetorical perspective on social life can plausibly be claimed as more attentive to the traditional concerns of Inaterialists with causation than are approaches that insist on (literalistically) separating physical objects and economic relations from expressive forms. Thus, I prefer the term "social poetics." The very name poetics conjures up an automatic series of misunderstandings. These, I suggest, can somewhat mischievously be turned to analytic advantage. A reviewer for the New York Times Review ofBooks, noting a sudden vogue for the term poetics in the titles of works in the social sciences (including my own The Poetics of Manhood), was moved to observe that, while this development was no doubt well and good in its own way, social life was full of nastiness as well, so that we should not insist on its "poetry" to thc exclusion of all else: The passion for poetics sounds like a welcoming of feelings, especially irrational ones-something therapists have taught us to desire.... We want analytic books about our lives to be romantic, sensitive, soulful. We would like to live with poet's license. While there's no harm in this, we do have to be careful. As Roland Barthes said, it is not enough to misname things in order to poet-
icize them. (Broyard 1986: 15) Indeed not. But Broyard did just that, by confusing the technical category of poetics with a romantic version of poetry-the bestknown realization of poetic principles, perhaps, but by no means the only one. Such condescending reactions, moreover, cultivate and exploit the popular version of positivism. Poetics, a term derived from the Greek verb for action (poieo), is an analytic approach to the uses of rhetorical form. It is not a compellingly romantic term at all, nor is its usefulness restricted to language (and even there it is not confined to verse). But the ease with which a distinguished literary 186
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critic fell (or jumped) into the semantic trap of confusing poetics with poetry serves an extremely useful purpose: it works iconically, to suggest the evasiveness of the phenomenon itself. For what I am describing has an extraordinary capacity to recede into the background of consciousness. Skilled social performers are not necessarily draillatic or even particularly impressive; on the contrary, SOlne of the most effective performances are alnong the least palpable. The evocation of a grand model-Turner's (1974) Becket and Hidalgo-works best when it is uot considered too obvious, except, of course, in cultures where dramatic self-presentation is normatively inflected with an unambiguously high moral tone. Let me first, however, address the relationship between social poetics and language. Some writers whose position is close to my own have argued that the term poetics creates too much confusion (Brenneis 1987: 248, n. 3; d. Bauman 1986: 1, n. 1; 1987: 9) and call for greater clarity. They specifically worry that terms like poetics are possibly wrongheaded because they imply the primacy of language (the language analogy). But this caution, however justifiable (the problem is with the terminology rather than the concept), springs its own traps. For example, even wIllie exemplarily calling for the reintegration of poetic with social theory, Bauman (1986: 2, 7) reserves the former term for the purely linguistic manifestations of rhetoric. This has the real advantage of highlighting parallelisms-in ]akobson's sense (see Waugh 1980)-within verbal texts, but, hy the same token, it risks obscuring the external parallelisms between narrative and social structuration. This undercuts the integrative power of such models. Furthermore, the available terminological alternatives to poetics are hardly less problematic than poetics itself. Among these, the most promising are aesthetics and semiotics. An aesthetics of social life is certainly not far relnoved from the poetic model I have proposed here (see Brenneis 1987); historically, Russian formalist and Prague School coucepts of aesthetic defamiIiarization directly anticipate Jakobson's poetic function. The difficulty is that the term aesthetics hardly escapes the romantic misrepresentation that has plagued poetics, while its etymological focus on sensual experience (aisthesis) .rather than on the relationship between form and action (poiein) pushes the social context of action into the background. And semiotics, which is often treated independently of social context altogether, 187
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similarly lacks the orientation to action that is etymologically conveyed by poetics. The rejection of language-derived models and the excessive privileging of language as an autonomous domain of social action and experience are but two sides of the Same glittering but counterfeit coin. These exhibit, if on a less grand scale, exactly the ironic equivalence that subsists between scientism and the more extreme appeals to an infinite regression of argument. Here, then, is another argument for the "militant middle ground," a stance enjoining vigilance lest language either be made the measure of all symbolic things or banished on charges of verbocentrism; such charges disregard the centrality of language in social life much as the blanket condemnation of essentialislll ignores the strategic necessity of essentialism to any concept of agency. (Indeed, the presence of agency only becomes apparent through the essentializing practices that give it form.) The ironic convergence of hostility to language and the tendency to place it on a remote pedestal has historically been a peculiarly Eurocentric phenomenon and can be traced to the power of the printed word (see also, with varying degrees of historical usefulness, Aarsleff 1975; Anderson 1983; Goody 1977; Harris 1980; Ong 1982). It has progressively and repeatedly frozen poetics into a stiflingly linguistic formality and has represented its implicit orientation to action as a synchronic study of literary structure. The separation of action from language is one refraction of the lllore general repression of the social character of language. Scholars have been highly successful at seeing the biases that "scriptism" introduces into the study of oral art (e.g., Bauman 1977). We must not now, however, fall into the other half of our ironic conjuncture of positivisln and relativism, by losing sight of the common grounds of meaning in language and in other forms of action-a point more fully recognized in infonnal, indigenous conceptualizations of llleaning (e.g., Herzfeld 1981, 1985a; Rosaldo 1982) than in academic discourse, which tends to reject these formulations as though they could not be considered fully theoretical at all. Thus, the fear of language analogies exposes us to the same logical and ironic difficulty as the secondary role accorded to language in most social science: a separation of language from action that speech act theory proposes to reverse. Dropping poetics as the organizing metaphor for a social approach to cultural form would only reinforce that separation. Indeed, Austin's perception
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of the role of etymology iu social life ([1956-57] 1971: 99-100)a rare acknowledgment of the importance of linguistic form in social interaction-should now be applied to anthropological practice. Poetics means action, and restoring that etymological awareness would also more effectively integrate the study of language into an understanding of the role of rhetoric in shaping and even creating social relations. 4
Language-Based Models or Language-Derived Models? ~'or reasons that have emerged in the foregoing discussion, it is 1Illportant to clarify the distinction between language-based and language-derived models of nonlinguistic modes of expression. Language-based models treat linguistic form as fundamental and their cOlnponents (e.g., "grammars" of architecture or mustc) as literally identical to the corresponding aspects of language; language-denved models examine the uses of language and of other semiotic systems in terms of possible commonalities of ideological context and practical action. Language-derived models are more acceptable because they do not predetermine the structural characteristics that different semiotic modes employ. Models of this kind were often regionally used to study language use. They do not necessarily determine our understanding of the other semiotic phenomena to which we apply them. They do not provide a "language analogy," but an "analogy WIth language use"-in other words, a model that focuses on the interplay of structure, action, and form rather than on form alone. It would be useful, therefore, to outline some of the possibilities of extending language-in-use models to other semiotic domains. This approach does not produce language-based models; it generates semiotic lnodels from a heuristic use of linguistic illustrations, a very different kind of proposition. Art historians would have no trouble at all with such an extension of rhetoric into nonverbal and even quite static areas of cultural production. Thus, for example, Gombrich (1979) has documented etymologies in the rhetoric of Renaissance and later architectural ornament. Other language-derived models can be introduced with the same logic. Drummond (1980a), for example, has emphasized tha.t a flexible version of sociolinguistic creolization models can _e'9'lainmore general cultural processes (see also Hannerz 1987). Rather than hypostatizing cultures as having the fixed boundaries
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of nation-states-a habit that demonstrably derives from the entaibnent of cultural scholarship in nation-state ideologies (see also Handler 1985)-we can instead treat them as pr~()L formal flux embedded in patterns of political· contest and inequality. In a conceptually related move, hut in the sphere of political action, Pels (1996) has productively suggested the language-derived model of "pidginization" to describe the extraordinary sYlnbiosis-in part through mutual incomprehensionthat underlay the British colonial administrative method known as "indirect rule," pointing out that the British were so confined by a narrowly scriptist understanding of the meaning of language that they never realized how creativcly the local leaders were able to "deform" the formal properties of colonial chieftainship. Finally, as we have already seen, the model of diglossia can be expanded semiotically to include vast areas of cultural tension hetween, in essence, collective self-display and self-knowledge. Conceived within an action-oriented rather than a referential theory of meaning, a distinction that corresponds to the one I have proposed here between language-derived and languagebased models, it acquires the flexibility to describe irony and other potential subversions of normative culture and so breaks down the barriers to cultural intimacy. What these models describe is a negotiation of identity through the deploylnent, deformation, and transformation of form. It is what Boon (1982) has dubbed the "exaggeration of culture." Such studies as Bogatyrev's ([1937] 1971) work au Moraviau folk costume identified the role of cultural form in signaling social identity but did not focus either on people's active capacity to constitute social relations or on the capacity of conventional form for mutation with effects in the observable, material world. Similarly, Stacy (1977), following Shklovsky, recognizes the potential of the concept of defamiliarization for discussing collective social styles but does not by extension analyze the constitutive power of individual agents' defamiliarizing tactics. These diffienlties also revert to a possible weakness of Austin's ([1962] 1975) view of language-as-action, in which the constitutive properties of language still presuppose a prefabricated cultural reality: the judge who declares a person guilty produces a wholly felicitous performative utterance because this is the predictable privilege of every member of the acknowledged class of judges. A poetic account of social relations must not merely explain individual prowess (which is a Ineaningless, ronlantic 190
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notion on its own, closely related to the conflation of poetry with poetics as a view of individualized genius), but should also, and simultaneously, contribute, to an account of cultural change at the level of collective representations. Let me now sketch by example some of the advantages to be gained by an extension of the Jakohsonian view of poeticity beyond the purely linguistic. Jakobson's poetic function is "the set (Einstellung) toward the message as such" (1960: 356). In verse, to take the most obvious example, it is the extraordinariness and diagrammatic properties of the verbal form that constitute the basis of "feel." As a result, the content, through its conversion to a nlore explicitly connotative mode, becomes enriched as well. In social life, such devices have led to a considerable emphasis on the more ritualized aspects of interaction, most notably in the works of Erving GoffInan. But the emphasis on "frames" and the heavy use of dramaturgical metaphors entail a risk of reification, leadiug eventually to the separation of the present flnidity of interactional poetics into analytically separable performative and everyday aspects. By reuniting these dimensions in the framework of a single poetics of social interaction, we may hope to capture in this area what Jakobson realized for language: that thc ordinary and the set-apart are features of a continuum, and that they are what they are in large measure because they focus attention on their being what they arc-in other words, because a social actor has so engineered their "set toward the lllessage."
On the Ordinary, the Ornery, and the Merely Regular This is perhaps clearest in a mental operation that we in fact perform all the time and that represents an unrcflexive theoretical perception embedded in everyday speech and action. Take, for example, terms like "regular guy" and "ornery bastard" in modern American slang, and reflect on what the respective etymologies of these designations imply. A "regular guy" is remarkable because he is so unremarkable as to deserve comment. Language is revealing here: in theory he might be a very ordinary sailor or professor, for example, but unless his actions highlight the eccentricities associated with these professions his ordinariness involves no creative deformation. As a "regular guy," on the other hand, he shows mastery of the rules of good fellowship; he is reliable and friendly to the point where he actually stands out191
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but uot to the poiut of appearing to show off. He negotiates a balance between the dull and the silly so carefully crafted that it is neither: he masters the rules, not they him. The "oruery bastard," similarly, is not literally a bastard; and if he were truly "ordinary," people would find nothing noteworthy in his daily actions. The metaphor places him at the margins of social acceptability. Such metaphors are a rich source of insight into the processes of symbolic boundary creation, since they play on the outer edges of what appear to be a society's constitutive rules (d. Douglas 1975: 90-114, 249-318). This applies with particular aptness to the "ornery bastard," since the latter, like the "regular guy," is acknowledged as an cillblematic stereotype, a genuinely American product, as can be seen from the frequency with which he figures in Westerns and spy thrillers. His orneriness is indeed a fonn of ordinariness. It is, in fact, so ordinary that it excites comment. Here, historical processes have embedded into the language a clear use of distortion (slang) in order to underscore the extraordinariness, as it were, of this type of ordinariness. Such usages all fit a larger group of tropes, in which the mctaphoricity of an utterance is foregrounded by making an obviously specious or exaggerated clam1 for its literalness: "this car is a real lemon," "we were literally boiling with fury," and so on. A British slang version of this practice-the use of the word right, as in "He's a right fool"-turns literalness into social normativity in a very direct, blunt fashion. Note that much of this discourse concerns male sociality. This does not mean that there can be no equivalent poetics of female action; on the contrary, separating the two, as I have done (Herzfeld 1986, 1991b), can analytically expose the ideology of differentiation that such usages reveal. It may be easier to identify a "poetics of manhood" in cultures where men enjoy greater freedom of verbal expression in public spaces; but neither speech nor silence is a prerogative of either gender, and gendered concepts of articulateness may provide enormous play for the uses of irony and other mocking devices. Whether such devices empower the weak is another question-being reduced to using them may itself foreground weakness-but we should at least recognize these attempts at dismantling the structures of power from within. An appreciation of the political resource that I have been calling cultural intimacy in this book is not an insignificant gain.
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Ethnographic Comparisons When we turn from English-speaking societies to modern Greece, not all the structuring principles of social interaction are entirely different; but they are often differently used. The aggressive Greek male stance is characterized by a mode of conventionalized dillerence. It is precisely because the interactions of Greek male villagers are so highly routinized that a man who demonstrates a greater degree of flair may gain a correspondingly greater degree of acceptance or admiration. But the risks are high. He can easily become ridiculous; in practice much depends on his preexisting relationships with his covillagers. If these are cordial, his performance has a better chance of succeeding. But a good performance may also increase that cordiality. In the Rhodian village where I did fieldwork in the early 1970s, a cOll1lllunity largely marked by what for Greece is an unusual degree of outward reserve and sobriety, one man was known for the flamboyance of his gestures. This is not the place to offer a detailed analysis of his physical movements, although, arguably, the ethnographic account would be incomplete without such a representation (see Farnell 1994, 1995a, 1995b).s On one occasion, he entered his favorite coffeehouse, executing little dance steps and playing to the hilt the full range of conventions that required him to look straight at all the customers already seated there. His greeting was boisterous, his self-presentation strangely contrasted with the quiet mien of the others. Yet they accepted him, and did so despite the possibility that his humble origins might have led them to expect a still stiffer code of self-restraint than they imposed upon themselves. The man was a successful entrepreneur. As he had explained to me in painstaking detail, he was probably the ouly farmer in tbe village who had taken full advantage of government policies regarding afforestation and the redistribution of land; and, when the government offered loans for the improvelnent of agricultural properties, he was the ouly inhabitant to make an effort to get some of the money, which he used to develop his irrigation system. In his eccentric dance routine, he was, I suggest, daring fate: he was performing his right to be inclnded in the company of his peers. This, moreover, was a performance both in the theatrical sense of a demonstration of skill and in Austin's ([1962] 1975) sense of an
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action that becomes constitutive of its social environment. His dance steps and boisterous greeting were based on the confident knowledge that, when it came to comparing degrees of industriousness (a paramount virtue in this particular COlllillunity), he could hold his owu with the best. Indeed, other villagers were uncharacteristically flattering about his hard work. His manner thus did not so much challenge the village order as hint that he was morally in a position to bend the rules. He was demonstrating a social competence that went beyond the reproduction of mere conventions to the expression of his individual distinctiveness within the larger setting. His hard work would not alone have sufficed to gain him such warm acceptance in the community. Another man, the owner of the coffeehouse, was cordially disliked by most other villagers precisely because he had succeeded (or so it was said) in amassing large amouuts of money by siphoning busloads off the tourist route for lunch in the higWy scenic village. But this man was well placed by kinship and land ownership at the very core of the community. He clearly felt no need to seek recognition-indeed, he was something of a recluse-and so he never achieved the popularity of the man with the dancing feet. I do not wish to suggest that the difference between them can be explained solely in terms of their respective public performances. It is clear that other dynamics were at work, including a strong perception that the coffee shop proprietor was earning the cash that men like tbe dancer-who had started out with far greater economic disadvantages-were spending in his establishment. In a village where any hint of nonreciprocity invited censure, this contrast was surely constitutive of the relative social esteem in which these two men were held. But what the dancer tested with his delicate eccentricity was the willingness of the others to include him in their exclusive company. Each time he succeeded, he made it harder for them to reverse their attitude. And he succeeded, I suggest, because his routine reminded them that he was unafraid. His action· is the converse of the "regular guy" phenomenon: instead of foregrounding an abnormal normalcy, it emphasizes an individuation that conforms, in its internal articulation, to social conventions. It is also, in another sense, the converse of Georg Simmel's ([1908] 1971) image of the stranger, the outsider who clailns a measure of insiderhood and thereby becOlnes a potential threat. The villager overcame his slightly dubious social
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origins to the point where he could (and did) pontificate about social morality, the llllportance of hard work, and the rights and privileges of the truc Pefkiot. His self-presentation modeled that achievelnent. By almost ironically prolonging his stare around the room as he entered, for example, he foregrounded the message of social normativeness at the expense of another interpretation: that he was perhaps just a little odd. Just as he was not quite an insider, but (since he had lived in the village most of his adult life and was in fact of village extraction) was not clearly an outsider either, so too his behavior was not quite normative but yet was sufficiently close to the norm to cOilllnand acceptance. A poetic analysis of social interaction allows for the recognition of precisely this sense of approximation and ambiguity in a way that more positivistic analytic modes suppress. Such a view of social interaction is, moreover, entirely consistent with an action-oriented approach to human scmiosis. Jonathan Cohen (1975) has succinctly urged the extension of an essentially Austinian perspective on language use to nonlinguistic codes as well. In the case of the Pefkiot entering the coffeehouse, for example, we can sec enacted an appropriately p~etic (or diagrammatic) shaping of the actor's social relationships. To understand this more fully, let us turn briefly to the social values that are in play in the scene in question. The ethnographic literature on Greece contains extensive discussions of the concept of filotimo (see especially Campbell 1964; du Boulay 1974; Friedl 1962; Herzfeld 1980b). The common semantic base of the widely varied realizations of this concept of social worth seems to be a sense that the possessor of filotimo behaves in accordance with the expectations of his community. Thus, a pauper's filotimo does not entail the same lavish outlay of generosity that a wealthier individual's would. There are also differences linked to sex, age, and degree of closeness of the relationships involved, and the pattern also seems to vary considerably among regions and even between mote or less neighboring villages. The Pefkiot whose behavior we have been examining was arguably an intrusive member of an almost totally endogamous community; he was an adopted child, and as such a member of a category that Pefkiots associate in cautionary tales with betrayal of parents (one was about the foster son who volunteered to hang his stepfather when no other volunteer could be found); and he was initially poor. His strenuous (and often ingenious) efforts to overCOlne his poverty, however, presaged a 195
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certain flair in his managelnent of self. His ability to appear lnildly eccentric, yet to do it in a way that simultaneously recalled socially acceptable behavior by deforming it to an inoffensive but still noticeable degree, reproduced that same flair. In other words, his actions iconically modeled his social standing, by presenting a virtual diagram of his relationship with others: a man strongly attached to the center of village society in spite of circumstances that would have marginalized a less effective player. Through their blending of the creative with the conventional, his actions played on the icouicity that defined community membership and so-again utilizing the principle of iconicity-also graphically reproduced the tension between a position of social strength and a history of personal marginality.
In Search of Embedded Regularities Presumahly the comparative perspective suggested by the two sets of examples that I have briefly outlined here could be developed on an empirical basis. The two ethnographic settings invert each other: the Greek example demonstrates the conventionality of the highly individual (indicating how hackneyed the image of the individualistic "Mediterranean peasant" has become), while the American exalnple shows how the overtly conventional (or "regular") actually works well only when it becomes eccentrically different. In both cases social actors test the possibilities and limitations of an encOlnpassing iconicity-"national character"but in instructively different ways. The contrast hetween the two systems lies at the level of social values; the structural principle involved is the same in both cases. In Greek society, although not to a uniform degree, self-regard is viewed as an appropriate attitude in males; in the Englishspeaking countries, by contrast, a measure of reticence is usually preferred. The structural principle, however, seems not to change. In both cases, an intensification of everyday attitudes sets the individual performer apart. A particularly striking example of this is the custom, found in many cultures, whereby noted performers deny their own ability to sing or tell tales (see Bauman 1977: 21-22); pretensions of false modesty are far from uncommon in the performing arts world of today. What such devices do-just as Greeks do when they say, "Not that I want to praise myself, but .,. "-is to "reduce" an artistic performance to the level of the commonplace, since the artist, like Simmel's ([1908] 1971: 146)
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stranger, is both an insider and an outsider. Those who are good at self-presentation are artists precisely because they are able to deploy the necessary ambiguity of social interactions for the enhancement of their own goals. For the stereotypes of the "regular guy" and the "ornery bastard" not only to exist, but to furnish negotiable models for the conduct of social relations, presupposes an embedded concept of normativity. Paradoxically, however, such normativity is not realized-given immediacy-except through some kind of defor·· mation. At such moments, not only is the identity of the particular actor heightened, but the very priuciples whereby the actor can deform the normative model become the arena of inquiry into what the embedded theory of meaning is. Moreover, these male models only subsist in the implied presence of a contrast to female equivalents. In a culture where the ideal-typical images of the two genders are contrasted, as in Greece (and as in the United States and Britain to a greater extent than is sometimes admitted), that contrast is itself a resource for the contingent contrasts that same-sex individuals dramatize among themselves. A man's mockery of female speech, a woman's ironic imitation of a man's narrative of derring-do-these devices, which presuppose a shared vocabulary of norms, must be presented as perforlnances to perform their task. Thus, a woman who unthinkingly hursts into a Greek coffeehouse and berates the men assembled there in a manner unbefitting her ideal-typical role is mocked as a "female-male WOlnan" and her pretensions made ridiculous by being ironically described as a declaration of "war" (Herzfeld 1985a: 71). But another woman who laughingly tells the story of a pig-theft-in which a woman, speaking in a high-pitched and rapid vocal style, recounts the theft of a non-flock animal in broad daylight-inverts every rule of male contest in deed and word and contributes to the growing erosion of male pride because she makes it clear that she does not really care very much about the outcome; she has not laid her defenses bare (Herzfeld 1991b: 86-88). Another reaSon for the apparent predominance of male models in both American and Greek social poetics lies in what, using another Jakobsonian term, we might call the "unmarked" character of male dominance in both societies (on this term see Waugh 1980: 74); that men define what it means to be human (anthropi in the Greek context), and even to be decently human (again, anthropi in Greek), has until recently heen such an everyday
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inequality as to be virtually invisible. The notion of the commonplace rests on self-evidence, which is in turn culturally and socially defined. But skilled actors, female and male alike, can deform that self-evidence for their own purposes, whether they succeed in incrementally altering the larger structure of values or not. In other words, self-evidence is made, not given. It does not rest on the existence of "self-evident truths," but on the presentation of contingent circumstances as self-evident truths. In this sense, literality is itself a trope, an ironic trope for the conditionality of all social experience. The rhetoric of self-evidence thus contains the means of its own decomposition; through ironic plays on the vocabulary-gestural as well as verbal-of ordinariness, it allows actors to explore the cultural rules through which they can reconstitute regularity in each situation as it arises. The "regular guy" is rarely so very regular: more often, his regularity consists in actively disobeying the laws of the larger society, such as the nation-state, within which his peer group is emhedded. But what is irregular for the encompassing, regulative entity becomes instead a positively valued eccentricity-a regular irregularityfor the members of the encompassed group, thereby uniting it in a new, maverick iconicity. The poetics of the commonplace is thus ultimately an exploration of how members of the social group fashion and refashion their imagined iconicity. Regularities, which seem to be embedded, are subject to negotiation. But this is not free play: the deformation of norms requires a skilled appreciation of what others consider the norms to be. And there are limits to invention as well as traps for those who cannot back up their eccentricities. Had the Rhodian "dancer" been a poor man, his actions would have seemed merely pathetic: a social poetics, while recognizing rhetoric (in the broadest sense) as constitutive of some aspects of power, must also account for those more grossly material dimensions in which it is both an embedded and a constitutive factor. While a performance of calm confidence can bring a shaky financier back to solvency, stretching the performance over too long a period or showing a poor grasp of its limits can be disastrous, as every financial scandal seems to show. I have focused on relatively obvious examples. But there are many instances where the operation of poetic principles is much less accessible. As a male ethnographer in Greece, for example, I experienced relatively snbstantial difficulty in detecting what I later decided were ironic usages in the self-presentation of 198
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women. Yet such unobtrusive performances are surely no less constitutive of what an observer construes as the prevailing social order than are the flamboyant acts of the strong and confident. This is the challenge for social poetics, not only in the obvious domain of gender but also as we turn to the political changes nOW taking place in the world. How do these local-level performances incrementally affect changes in political orientation? Why do voters sometimes applaud the nationalistic drumbeats cnlanating frOln the capital but sometimes deride them? And when and why do they decide to follow them? Clearly, some of their motives are grounded in immediate econOlnic self-interest. But we have also seen that the symbolic capital of claims on the distinctions of "European" identity exercises a material attraction all its own at the national level, even while individual actors negotiate the content of that identity. This is why a social poetics, properly construed, must address the actions of the whole range of society. Because of my training and early inclinations, I developed some of these ideas in the context of rather orthodox ethnographic settings. Now that ethnography has extended its reach across the symbolic boundary between elites and others to incorporate the politics of the academy and the arts, a comprehensive model of social poetics offers a more flexible approach to the mutual engagement of all kinds of actors-to heed Bakalaki's (1993) timely call-and a recognition of the involvement of all these actors in exploring the possihilities of models formerly thought to be confined to one or another sector of the population. The least literate of Greeks, for example, may have recourse to notions of "European" sophistication far in excess of what the residual exoticism of anthropology has been able to register (see especially Bakalaki 1994).' This in turn engenders smne creative new uses of notions of tradition. In the next chapter, I briefly sketch one example of the latter-mindful, however, that rapid education will make the tactics of the main character no less transparent to his erstwhile audience than it will be to the present reader of this book.
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Chapter Nine
The Practice of Stereotypes
Stereotypes in Action Anthropologists, as we have seen, sometimes stand accused of rendering caricatures of cultural and social reality. Certainly, such accounts as Banfield's (1958) notorious "amoral familism" or Foster's "image of limited good" (1965) generalize far beyond any acceptable level, while Fabian (1983) has pointed out tbat the American national character studies of the Cold War period are redolent with ideological special pleading. The criticisms hurt precisely because anthropologists generally see their discipline as committed to working against any form of cultural and racial prejudice. Tbis makes it hard for them to see the prejudices that their own work inadvertently conveys-prejudices, llloreover, that it often shares with nationalistic ideologies. Indeed, one courageously irreverent study of Gypsies' misadventures in the British social bureaucracy (Okely 1994) reveals embarrassing affinities between official and anthropological thinking. On the whole, however, anthropologists have been reluctant to play this dangerous game with the reputation of their own profession. Yet they can hardly avoid it, given the accusations-some of which I have documented in this book-that spring from the ironic convergence between nationalist self-stereotypes and the kinds of cultural representation that have especially interested the discipline. It is not necessary to endorse stereotypes in order to study them with a measure of pained self-recognition; and doing so may be a better assurance of good faith than all the antiracist declarations in the world. Indeed, this tactic offers the possibility
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of understanding the social life of stereotypes frmll within-a cultural intimacy of anthropology, as it were. This is not, perhaps, a major departure. At some level, much anthropology consists in the analysis of prejudice, other people's as well as our own. To a very large extent, this is what studies of ethnicity and nationalism are all about, and parallels can be identified at the interstices of class, gender, and professional forms of conflict. The act of stereotyping is by definition reductive, and, as such, it always lllarks the absence of sonle presumably desirable property in its object. It is therefore a discursive weapon of power. It does something, and something very insidious at that: it actively deprives the "other" of a certain property, and the perpetrator pleads moral innocence on the grounds that the property in question is symbolic rather than material, that the act of stereotyping is "lllerely" a lllanner of speech, and that "words can never hurt you." But this is the self-justification of the gossip, and it is interesting to note that Greek peasants and urban laborers seem to have a more practical, and more performative, view of the matter: "The [wicked] tongue has no bones, [yet] it breaks bones" (see also Hirschon 1989: 176-79). The categorical systems of local comillunities absorb (or are forced to swallow) increasingly regimented typifications of "others," emanating from above and authorized as the weapons of a locally reproduced form of power. When we reach the point where those "others" excuse their actions to visitors in these terms-"we're warm-blooded Mediterranean types, what else can we do!"-hegemony appears to have done its work too well. The resistance that irony makes possible docs not really elupower the weak. It may help them to "englobe" (Ardener 1975) their oppressors, but, as many feminists (e.g., Ferguson 1984; Fletcher 1980; Sbowalter 1986) have pointed out, it offers more moral satisfaction than change in the material conditions to which the powerful have accorded value. Indeed, subversion carries its own risks. As Handelman (1990) has shown, the very possibility of making up contrary rules can result in the production of "fun"-and its instant marginalization. For it is the powerful who detennine the "rules of the game" (see Appadurai 1981). The use of stereotypes does not do much of an immediate nature for those who are stereotyped, except in this ironic senseas Chock (1987) and Norman (1994) have noted. Because stereotypes do serve the interests of power, however, they carry the possibility of subversion and sometimes are used to achieve it; 202
The Practice of Stereotypes
lllore often totalitarian regillles, as in Nazi Germany, use them to incite the majority population into becoming an instrument of the state repression of lllinority groups. In this sense stereotypes do represent a cruel way of "doing things with words" (Austin [1962] 1975), and they have material consequences. I would only add that it is not just words that are at stake. White middle-class individuals who take studious care not to seem to be avoiding physical contact with black (or poor, or disabled) people may be responding to exaggerated performances of "otherness" by the latter, or to exaggerated stereotyping in their own minds. Poetics and Practice
This position is the basis of a politically committed, critical social poetics-a poetics that can provide the link between the wordy texts of propaganda and the subtly nonverbal creative acts that constitute the interactive signals of a Goffillanesque world (sec especially Goffman 1959). In the analysis of modern conditions, it makes little sense to ignore the "practical consciousness" (Giddens 1984) that social actors bring to what were once, perhaps, much less reflexivcly apprehended realizations of social and cultural difference. In Greece we see a country that has internalized the stereotypes of both Europe and the Orient; the Greeks certainly use both. And usc is the issue. In their practical orientalism we find the best evidence of the reproductive menace of hegeillony. It may also, as I shall suggest, provide the weak with a protective wall of practical discourse, in which the deformation and exaggeration of accepted convention becomes a testing-ground-an event-asmodel, in Handelman's (1990) terms-for possibly revolutionary, OI at least comforting, ideas. Whether, in this rcsocialized Jakobsonian poetics, a poetics of "otherness" that is neither primarily linguistic nor carefully apolitica! should be treated as a strategy of oppression or a tactic (de Certeau 1984) of resistance, it clearly can "do something." It is this intersection between everyday experience and the structures of power that impinge upon it that constitutes the ground of social poetics. Hegemonic texts without a visible subject and social actors in tribal or peasant isolates are equally meaningless in today's world. The space in which they meet constitutes the nexus of political action, and the visible matter upon which the work of empowerment/disenfranchisement is performed typically consists of stereotypes. 203
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A Bureaucrat Reminisces An elderly, retired tax official in the town of Rethemnos, a man whose origins lay in the legendary mountain fastnesses of Sfakia in the southwest part of Crete, took enormous pride in these origins and never lost any opportunity to boast of the Inanliness of Sfakian men, relate the historical origins-as he saw them-of Sfakian customs and people, and express contempt for the local members of other political alignments (he himself was an active supporter of the then-ruling socialist party, PASOK) as lacking in these traits of manliness. Sean Damer (1988) has documented the creation of the Sfakian "legend," although again I would prefer to use the term stereotype. He argues that an increasingly marginalized economic backwater came to rely ever more desperately on a rhetoric of male pride that became, for all practical purposes, ever emptier. There is much merit in his argument. It suggests that the sort of male posturing that characterizes the mountain areas of Crete has become a commodity, perhaps useful to Greek nationalists and to the tourist industry on Crete, and certainly expressive of a situation in which these people do not control the framework of their economic destinies and indeed are themselves comlnoditized. There is another side to the picture, however, and that is the role of male self-presentation in the constitution of local power. A man's standing depends in large nleasure on the kinds of patronage of which he is able to boast, and this has long been one of the major channels through which outside interests have come to dominate the local economy and political life. This process has been framed in an increasingly self-conscious traditionalism. Indeed, it is quite clear that the specificity of "tradition" grows in relation to the alienation of the local actor from the local social framework. It is thus not merely epiphenomenal. To view it as such is to become complicit with the state's devaluation of marginal communities-obvious parallels include dismissive treatments of African-Americans as "musical" or state discourses that elevate the "peasant" or the "good wife" to an honored but isolating pedestal (see Herzfeld 1986,2004; Rogers 1987). These are devices of marginalization: they mark their subjects as ancestral or prototypical, closer to nature, and constrained fronl speaking with their own voices. To the extent that Erik Hobsbawm's (1983b) view of tradition as an elite fake has merit, it lies not in the denial of grassroots ideological alternatives (anticipated
204
The PTactice of Stereotypes
in Hobsbawm 1959: 23), but in the suggestion that elites encourage the construction of stereotypes. The corollary, however, largely overlooked by Hobsbawm and others, is that official stereotyping-whether of the national self or of some despised "other"-offers a basis for both contesting and reproducing power relations at the local level. The retired tax official, a professed socialist, espoused a view of the Sfakians according to which they were the descendants of the ancient Dorians. This not only gave his own ancestry a local pedigree of insuperable antiquity but also legitimized the Sfakians' lawlessness as part of the internally contradictory foundation myth of the Greek state. The people of Mount Ida (including the people I had studied) were, he claimed, of Minoan descent. They were, so to speak, the older inhabitants. Note here that the premise of greater age does not necessarily confer greater authority. By the time of our discussions, Sfakians had faded from the political scene and were no longer heavily implicated in animal-theft, whereas the regionally more dominant people of Mount Ida were both politically powerful and active in raiding. The representation of the Mount Ida population as Minoans acknowledges their historical primacy but curiously undercuts their manhood: the Minoans are thought to have been relatively effeminate in relation to the warlike Dorians, whose mark is still allegedly identifiable in the Cretan (especially Sfakian) dialect. Thus, this Sfakian representative of the state used a gender-based idiom to criticize, implicitly, the current locus of local power. Of Iraklio, the most powerful economic center, he said, "They're all hybrids (mighadhes)"-a clear devaluation of the city, consistent with the rhetoric of the shepherds but also a significant claim on both the nationalists' purism and a larger Eurocentric anti-urban ideology of long standing (see, e.g., Mosse 1985: 46). Now one might argue that this was all quite irrelevant to real politics. In fact, however, this man was actively engaged in trying to discredit one of the conservative (New Democracy) candidates in the upcoming ffitlllicipal elections, and we should see his elaborations of history and his evocation of stereotypes as part of a larger game, one in which several other male actors played in similar ways. He was setting himself up as a member of a culture that, while marginalized, was also viewed as the: repository of modern Cretan, especially male Cretan, values. It was thus important to remind people that he was himself a Sfakian, and that he also understood and knew those supposedly older Ur-Cretans 205
r Cultural Intimacy
I
who still did lawless things like stealing sheep but didn't do them as well as his own "Dorians." His attacks on the New Democracy candidate were all phrased in terms of masculinity: "He has no patriline." "He's a member of
the kakosiri [those of bad rank or sira, a self-consciously 'picturesque' disparagement of small, weak patrigroupsJ," "He has no manliness." Greek political rhetoric works by claiming for the future what one hopes will in fact happen, so he kept insisting that the candidate would surely fail. What was more, he argued, the candidate's own natural constituency, the true co"nservatives, would support other candidates because this one was actually a deserter from the Left and would therefore never be one of them. This, too, was phrased in the rhetoric of patrilineal identity. In short, my informant was dearly trying to co-opt his enemy and the electorate in a rhetoric that wonld allow him to devalue the conservative candidate's legitimacy and make it morally offensive for anyone to vote for him. The tactic appears to have succeeded. The candidate did receive Some votes-largely, my informant had sourly predicted, because,
as a small but centrally located tradesman, he could cow his considerable band of creditors into supporting him as the price of continued forbearance on his part. In this way, the candidate's trump card also played into the rhetoric, willy-nilly: shopkeepers, so the argument ran, are not real men. But it also won out over the more obviously material imperative of debt obligations. The tax officialnsed thc stereotypes to discourage people from voting for the opposing party: the men, in particular, became progressively afraid of being ridiculed for their failure to uphold the historic masculinism of Crete, itself eleverly allied here to a localist reading of nationalistic historiography. We should also note that this entire tactic was based on a rhetoric ostensibly opposed to the actor's political party's policies. The socialists had condemned patronage and influence peddling, and indeed had made considerable progress toward securing the support of the small patrigroups in the animal-raiding villages by attacking the system of protectionism by which the larger patrigronps allegedly exchanged bloc votes for protection from police surveillance; yet here was a passionately self-proclaimed socialist invoking the most characteristic language of the opposition's preferred mode of patronage. His tactic was nevertheless effective. It identified his place of origin with a tradition marginalized on the larger, national scene 206
The Pmctice of Stereotypes
but locally given high moral value, and at the same time it identified this tradition with a political party that had ideologically rejected everything it stood for. He was then able to use this symbolic formation to attack the candidate of the other party in terms that his neighbors, and fellow voters, could clearly follow and appreciate. His tactics displayed a sort of "practical romanticism," very much like the ~'practical orientalism" whereby Rethemnos shopkeepers encourage foreign tourists to bargain and so lure them into paying outrageous prices. It is an approach to social relations whereby the actor adopts the stereotypes of a dominant discourse and deploys them in the pursuit of personal interests. It is hard to know whether this Machiavellian meddling was intentionally ironic. I was not directly privy to the political bargaining that went on and relied on the account of the main actor for my information. It is thus possible that I was presented with an even more aggressive use of the stereotype than would have occurred among fellow townspeople: I was told what a splendid Cretan my infonnant was. Manipulative uses of selfstereotypes are far from uncommon in Crete, where the overwhelming offer of hospitality can be inescapable. Every attempt to counter hospitality is met with a normative refusal: you are on Crete, Cretans don't allow visitors to treat them, tl;Iat's just agaip.st the custom.
Stereotypes and Resistance Such uses of stereotypes can play on multiple ironies (see also Chock 1987). Commentators have often noted that people in subordinate positions will exaggerate the expectations of their actions that stereotypes engender. Tugging the forelock or salaaming in apparently bashful obeisance is an unanswerable tactic, the performative dimension of Hegel's insight into the master's dependence on the slave (Hegel 1977: 522; see Scott 1985: 288-89). Much less elear is the question of how those involved in such socially ambiguous encounters determine how far exaggeration and understatement can go. lt is not only the obviously subordinate who find themselves using such devices. Bureaucrats, for example, often invoke some nameless system in order to justify their more capricious actions; de Certeau's (1984) discussion of the perruque in France exemplifies the other side of this process. Bureaucrats are never
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autonomous actors but reproduce the power relations to which they are themselves subject, sometimes humiliatingly so, in their dealings with clients. It is not necessary here to appeal to some psychological notion of catharsis or compensation; bureaucrats engage in contest over very small stakes of status and advantage with their colleagues and deploy the symbolic capital provided by obligingly dependent clients to that end. At the same time, clients must be made complicit, and it is here that the presumed "system" allows bureaucrats to hide behind a stereotype of the faceless self that otherwise embodies all that clients find most odious about the administrative class. Resistance, like power, is diffuse and hard to define. Those who appeal to stereotypes of the powerfnl, however, do have access to one important locus of stereotype production: the media. To take a relatively straightforward example, newspaper accounts of bureaucratic inflation and irresponsibility-a theme much favored by Greek journalists precisely, I suggest, because it is so recognizable-offer endless stories. In these , through multiple but predictable permutations, tile same elements appear over and over: the refusal of the bureaucrat to be accountable in any degree, the condescension of bureaucratic language and the almost institutionalized inequality in the use of "pronouns of power and solidarity" (Brown and Gilman 1960) between bureaucrat and client, the arbitrariness of the bureaucrats' actions. This arbitrariness is the crux of the matter. In it are conflated the arbitrary-that is, capricious-use of power with the dissociation of the utterance from material reality. A client protests that the bureaucrat is being ridiculously petty; the bureaucrat laughs. The bureaucrat's pettiness is its own goal: it is an objectified effigy, as it were, of that arbitrary power-l'arbitraire du signe l]olitique-Iaid bare. It is caricature that admits its own absurdity and uses it as a weapon, a performative utterance that-like the mediums, economists, meteorologists , and other prognosticating wizards of contemporary society-flaunts its failure to produce clear answers as the unanswerable evidence of its political clout: it is, after all, still in power. Against this use of the bureaucratic stereotype, there is no effective resistance. The stereotype is itself the locus of resistance by the bureaucrat) against both the hordes of importunate clients and the cliques of exigent superiors.
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Stereotypes and the Modern Condition . nif
Why study stereotypes? They constitute,I have suggested, :~lro: . 'f leant proportIon 0 the categories tradItIOnally studIed by . t ologists. As the discipline sbifts its focus from c,ategunes 0 P k es,f . cent ra I to the task. Ethmc)o ractices stereotypes remaH1 'd P ' tactile avoidance 0 f" athers "( 0 r the avOl £ance ad racial slurs . t ' aid them) assumptions about where to go or goo seemmg 0 a:r . tions to protect one's money f ad or musIC extraor d'.mary pIecau . wh' h o .' 11 th Ie or one's chastity-a ese are ster~o typc-based . actiOns . f to d and their subjects will respond in a vanety of tactlcally In Grme ethnographically interesting ways. . f Itural I the resent age with its educated consciousness 0 Cll an; oth:r sensibilities, the resilience seenlS to call for more of an explanation than WOll ave een the case in the self-confidently evolutionist academy and frankly racist elite society of the previous century. T~e surpnse IS not that stereotypes have come under critical scrutmy, but that t~ey ·11 1· d well In an intermediate stage of anthropologICal are stl a lve a n . . . d re 'udice and . 1 thinking stereotypes were either dlsmlsse as ~ere P J. therefor~ as antithetical to the disciplinary ethIC) or as exc~sslV~ y
collectiv~
ofl~t~reot~pes
ordinary because they were part of our. own w~ri~~;~~t~c~;~::: "others" of the capacity for stereotypmg~ to Ie , 11 h . such on-thc-ground cssentializing strateg~es In which ~ uma~ groups engage, I'S a condescending reversIOn to the ot erness 0 the noble savage.
209
Afterword: Toward a Militant Middle Ground?
In presenting these reflections on a common set of themcs~ I have tried to get some critical purchase on the nation-state by showing
that its apparent fixities are the products of the very things they deny: action,agency, and use. In recognizing that essentialism and agency are two sides of the same coin, as are state and people, I have aimed at a "militant middle ground" between these obstinate
polarities for anthropology. That middle ground similarly collapses the supposed opposites of epistemology: empiricism and speculation, inEnite regression and the most crass forms of scientism, and rejection of language as peripheral and its excessive
adulation as the defining code for all human ways of making mearung. Polarities arc a convenience. They are useful for sorting out issues. But, like all classificatory devices, they can also become a substitute for thinking: they get essentialized, turned into fact. They become part of a moral universe that disregards its own moral character: the science-morality debate is a good illustration of this, especially as it leads in turn to an equally pernicious binarism, that of ethical prescription about the appropriate degree of political involvement by anthropologists in moral issues that concern the societies they study. The tone of such debates is deeply embedded in the history of cultnral relativism and the ambiguities that it has engendered. By the middle of the twentieth century, the nascent concern with anthropological field ethics led to a strongly hands-off attitnde that eonflated respect for local culture with avoidance of any direct political engagement. This stance also entailed prescriptive 211
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rel11cdies-often in the form of strong recommendations to avoid substantive engagement with "internal" politics-for the kinds of moral problems that ethnographers repeatedly encountered in the field. To the extent that anthropology did have an active moral mission, as opposed to a passivc code of ethics, it was one of applying at home the lessons learned abroad. By the process that literary analysts know as "defamiliarization," the same process by w~ich in social poetics we recognize cultural forms through creatively distorted renditions and unexpected analogies, for example, scholars like Margaret Mead sought to shock their home societies into recognizing themselves in the mirror of Samoa or New Guinea. But the corollary of this early form of reflexivity, as also of European functionalism with its insistence on tightly sealed and homeostatic social entities, was the pose of lofty detachment that I have just mentioned: a standing injunction never to interfere in the cultures of one's hosts or in any way to criticize their normative activities. While the motive behind this position was benign, it had two unintended consequences that were markedly less so. First, its il11plications today generally strike us in retrospect as condescending: it expresses the tutelary power to safeguard the culture of exotic peoples because "they" are presumed to be incapable of doing so. It also suggests a powerful impulse toward structural nostalgia in the Eonll of preserving-as in fact ethnological museums attempted to do-the perfection of societies supposedly still untouched by the corrosive forces of modernity: money, the debasement of pure and disinterested reciprocity, all the evils through which the Gesellschaft has destroyed the Gemeinschaft. If the citizens of countries where anthropologists have cast a long shadow feel diminished as "natives," might this well-intended hands-off stance not be a significant part of the problem? But there is a corollary to that complaint. Once we agree to dissolve the demeaning category of "natives," and with it the argument for an intellectual protectorate not unlike the political varieties created by colonialism, we have in effect made space for anthropologists to become cultural critics. They may well then raise such issues as gender equality or minority rights. On minority questions they must negotiate between competing essentialisms because, as we have seen, the essentialism of the nationstate may provoke massive outbreaks of essentializing in response. Alternatively, some groups may reject both the idea of the unitary nation-state and the minority status it gives them by default. In 212
Afterword
either case the defense of rebuffing foreign criticism as "intervention in our internal affairs"-or, more fashionably, "cultural imperialism"-identifies the majority (or otherwise stronger) population's perspective as that of "the nation." True, anthropologists may hesitate before publishing findings that might bring minority survival tactics to the authorities' attention, for publication can sometimes bring disastrous consequences ranging £r0111 petty harassment to genocide. In this sense, exposing the privileged cultural and social intimacies of small or disenfranchised groups may not be a kindly act. But the worst consequences can be avoided if such reporting is coupled with an equally penetrating critique of the nation-state. For the second negative consequence of avoiding political engagement with the nation-states we study is that it allows our desire not to embarrass a geopolitically weaker country to overwhelm our concern for the disadvantaged within. What is more, if we take seriously our hosts' wishes to be treated as moral equals, as indeed we should, such avoidance of criticism is not only condescending but inconsistent as well. We should be equally free to argue with the abuse of power at whatever level we encounter it. In the places where we do our work, l11oreover, there are often intellectually vivacious individuals who are able and willing to make the official, majority case to us. With such people it is surely insulting to refuse engagement. We expect them to speak openly to us about their views; why should we hide our own? Obviously considerations of tact are not trivial; and, 110 less obviously, our ability to discomfit our local friends is often greatly exaggerated-indeed, the shoe more commonly fits the other foot! It is not that we know better, as the cynical use of human rights discourses for geopolitical purposes sometimes implies. But when it is apparent that we are already privy to the cultural intimacy of our hosts, it is hypocritical to pretend otherwise or to ignore the consequences of that knowledge. Besides, disagreement is not with a country but with specific people; all Greeks do not think alike, for example, and, for all their talk about "mentality" (nootropia), they would be deeply and justifiably affronted by any claim that they did. Such matters cannot be legislated, for they vary enormously from case to case. This is the besetting weakness of audit-culture approaches to ethics, which cannot accommodate the sometimes agonizing choices that anthropologists must make among conflicting interests within the community under study, or between entities with competing and perhaps 213
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equally cogent claims. In other situations, however, the imperatives seem nluch clearer. An anthropologist is more likely to advocate the interests of an oppressed minority than of the government accused of oppressing it, although, as I have indicated in Iny discussion of Greece's relationship to "Europe," an awareness of one's own country's implication in the relevant power imbalance will modulate the partiality of such judgments. Listening in on the culturally iutimate talk of the society in question is not simply a matter of inquisitiveness; it is also a useful means of evaluating the situation. The official interpreter's systematic omissions then not only constitute an ethnographically fascinating topic; they also become a source of serious but often productive ethical anxiety as to whose dirty laundry, if anybody's, and which parts of it, the anthropologist should expose. Ultimately, judgments of this sort are necessarily lonely ones. They can also be a source of great joy and deep engagement. In my research with the Porn Mahakan community in Bangkok, I was reluctant to enter the lists on the community's side until I could establish to my own satisfaction that the residents had substantial claims on the site and that they were being subjected to a local reproduction of crypto-colonial dynaillics. Once convinced, however, I was happy to lend whatever symbolic capital I could muster to their cause (see Herzfeld 2003c, 2003d). To official mutterings that the residents were in effect manufacturiug their cultural ideutity, I would answer that they have followed the official example itself. All culture is in this sense "invented:' Once I had resolved that point in my own mind, the residue of the issues at hand concerned questions of human rights and dignity; and here the residents' enthusiasm for my intervention provided a fine response to bureaucratic ethics back home. There is no plausible bureaucratic response to deep affect. Our ethical cbarge, then, is to take responsibility for the pragmatic judgments we feel able to make, and to follow through when they have unintended consequences. Whether and where we publish our insights, for example, is sometimes a difficult matter. It is here above all that anthropologists must be willing to accept direct, personal responsibility-ofren afrer carefully consulting other interested parties-for their actions. That is the price they pay for the privilege of access, and they should not complain if their hosts criticize them in turn. They are engaged willy-nilly in cultural and political criticism and the choices are theirs to make. If rhey are willing to accept these responsibilities, 214
Afterword
they have a ready-made answer to the all-too-common charge of "lneddling in our internal affairs." For there no longer are any purely internal affairs-if indeed there ever were. In this counection it may be helpful to remember that the Greek junta of 1967-74 was especially adept at using this rhetoric. It coupled vociferous complaints about foreign interference in the nation's internal politics with an equally strident denunciation of all citizens who dared to appeal for foreign help in their struggle against dictatorship as "non-Greeks." Indeed, the colonels unceremoniously stripped these activists of their Greek citizenship, whereupon some-notably the late actress (and subsequently Minister of Culture) Melina Mercouri-trapped them in the essentializing logic of this acrion by demanding how a handful of colonels could deny them their birrhright (Mercouri 1971). But note that the terms of this conflict set a dangerous path for the future. Even now, many relatively liberal citizens are reluctant to replace the argument of blood with that of a more pluralistic, cultural definition of citizenship. In fairness, it must certainly be added that other European nations, notably Germany (Soysal 1994) and the successOr states to the Yugoslav Federation (Hayden 1996), have been reluctant to shed their own models of natural nationhood. And thar only compounds the problem, since it undercuts the incentives for change. The usefulness of the blood mctaphor lies largely in the deferise of cultural intimacy. If one is not born to the nation, so the argument goes, one cannot possibly understand the national culture, and one may be in danger of attributing to it various traits that are in reality foreign in every sense. The Greek colonels, for example, backed their resentment of outside meddling "in the internal affairs of the country" with cultural warfare against a remarkable range of forme of collective self-exposure: supposedly Turkish-sounding music with politically subversive lyrics, minority languages, men's beards and women's miniskirts (expressive bodily metonyms of disorder and moral embarrassment, respectively), and even the obscene passages in the plays of the fifth-century B.C. Attic comic writer Aristophanes. As the guardians of the national birthright who had arrogated to themselves the righr to decide who was Greek, they tried to protect the dignity of Greece's status as the very source of Europe. The attempt ultimately failed because the colonels' cultural incompetence drew derision instead of respect, both at hOllle and abroad. Nevertheless, it is important to remen1ber that their talents had a 215
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popular base; the idiom still occasionally appears even in more democratic times, as when, at the height of the Macedonian crisis, the journalist Takis Michas faced trial for describing the Macedonianhero-king, Alexander the Great, as "the sla ughterer of the peoples.'" And yet "the things of the house" cannot always be kept out of the public or international space-out of the plaza, to turn to a Latin American version of this idiOln. It can also be counterproductive: secretiveness breeds suspicion far in excess of what is actuaBy concealed and may make an entire country the laughingstock of the international community. (One can argue that this is proof of the power imbalance, as indeed it is, but that does not aBay the practical effects of so much secrecy.) Moreover, "the things of the house" are an integral part of the national identity for the insiders themselves. Not ouly do they kuow how unrealistic official representations of national culture often are hut, as I have argued in these pages, it is paradoxically the insubordinate values and practices that make patriotism attractive from day to day. The house guards intimate secrets that are themselves the basis for family solidarity and that, from within, do not necessarily appear in a negative light at all. Large numbers of Greeks claim Slavic, Koutsovlach, or Albanian ancestry, acknowledge the Turkish derivatiou of much of the culture they know and love, chuckle over tales of splendid dishonesty among their nearest and dearest, and-even while shaking their heads over the wild stories of certain animal-thieves-evoke precisely the same national stereotype of defiant independence as they fiddle their tax returns. Tax evasion as a basis for national solidarity? Oddly enough, I suspect that "regular guys" the world over would admit, under conditions of intimacy, that this was so. And the defense of the realm typicaBy falls to those same regular guys. Even official rhetoric appeals to a nostalgic model of corrupted structural perfection, the sanIe IllOde! by which the animal-thieves justify both their recourse to oaths and their continuing defiance of the corrupt state itself, in order to justify its intervention in everyday life. When Kozyris says that Greeks must develop greater respect for the law, he participates in the same logic, in this case framed as a return to archetypical European virtues. Speaking as an insider who recognizes a national proclivity for disobedience, he thereby concedes that ideal-typical character of supposedly Inarginal activities, of which animal-theft is an extreme (but for that very reason effective) i11ustration.
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In short, proclivities for lawlessness and other forms of misc~n duct are part of the friable basis of patriotism-a virtue in whIC~ the animal-thieves, not coincidentally, are second to none. PatrIotism, despite the usual caricatures of nationalism, often gives cultural criticism ample play. But that play takes place among insiders, and anthropologists' privileged status is especially ambiguous at that point. And while it should not surprise us that "the things of the house should not be discussed in the pubhc sphere," national culhlral secrecy is surely a lost cause from the start. Even before Zorba, tourism had already "opened" Greece to the world-and "opening," whether of the body personal or of the body politic (see Hirschon 1978), is what transnational communication is all about. As part of their defense of cultural intimacy some Greeks would argue that they are not unique in respect of any of its supposedly negative features: other people have the same troubles, commit the same sins. The ironic flip side of that argument is exceptionalism, the claim that nO one can possibly understand the culture because it is unique. But, indeed, these defenders of the inner spaces are right when they say that other countries display the same responses, including a similar mixture of exceptionalism and resentment at being singled out for critique. If at times the Greeks' defense of cultural intimacy seems extreme, this is again helpfu~ as a clear iIJustration. It serves to highlight what may elsewhere be more diffuse eveu though it is no less present, and it finely illustrates the geopolitical forces and the global cultural hierarchy that provoke that kind of defense. It thus helps us to situate the poetics of cultural ideutity in relation to the pressures of global politics. It also constitutes an important response to those who would argue that social poetics belongs to some hermeticaIJy bounded zoue of ~~symbolic anthropology"-to an intellectual Ruritania that no more reflects the inteuded epistemology of the approach than the idea of a perfect cultural and demographic isolate corresponds to the actual experience of life in a nation-state society. Hence the importance of a militant middle ground: militant because it is forever threatened by our desire for closure and hermetic. de~ni tion; middle because it struggles to escape the overdeterITll~atIon of binarism; and ground because it is indeed grounded In the direct, empirical evideuce of ethnography. '. and', 'f I situate that ground, too, III the dIfficulty of chOlces .~J':,.., their consequences. These include choices for anthropologl make about what stand to take on political issues that,
I I I
Cultural Intimacy
them in tense arguments with their infonnants. They also include the binary choices-official versus intimate, normative versus performative, "real" versus "rhetoricaI"-that shape informants' daily lives and that an ethnographic account must recognize. This is a position that recognizes the reality and the importance of binarism and other forms of essentialism in social life, particularly (hut not exclusively) in nation-state societies; but it is also one that rejects the classificatory necessity of essentialism to the bl1siness of analysis and description-a difficult balance that is perhaps best described as refusing to essentialize essentialism. This approach records the dissonance between official and social perspectives, but it treats that dissonance as a product of both discourses-two discourses that are in practice a single rhetoric of community, family, even hody, and both of which are therefore intensely entailed in each other. We treat them separately for analytic purposes, but at the risk of forgetting that radical commonality. Yet it is a commonality that encapsulates plural possibilities-pluralism, in a word. There is no single "national view"; to act as though such a thing existed beyond the strategic defense of cultnral intimacy is uothinkingly to accept the essentialism of the nation-state and simultaneously to reject the lived experiences of its citizens. Tn my earlier work, some of which is represented in this book, I focused heavily on what I saw as a contrast between the discourse of the state and that of ordinary people. This gave a binary emphasis to much of what I wrote: hence disemia. Bnt the binarism that I have described is a cultnrally and historically specific phenomenon, and one that social agents have often manipulated for a lmge variety of self-interested pnrposes. To those who persist in seeing binary emphasis in the theoretical content of these arguments, I offer two suggestions. The first is to consider, as I do at length in Anthropology through the Looking-Glass (1987a), the common grounds on which the binary emphases of anthropology and nationalism developed. Most nationalisms, especially those located right on the fanlt line of the orientalist/oceidentalist division of cultural labor, do indeed exhibit strong binary divisions between insiders and outsiders; hut that rhetoric, despite its own claims to rest on universal principles, does not commit the analyst to a universal theory of cognitive structures. Conversely, however, even the conviction that such struetnres are a figment of dIe scholarly imagination is no reason to throw out the baby of observing an
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,f-
Afte1word
ethnographically documented dnalism in the symbolism of official structures along with the bathwater of discarded structuralist theories that beg all the important questions and derive, as I have suggested, from the same source. While in the original edition of this book I relied rather heavily on the example of Greece, and do still feel that the Greek case illuminates the historical genesis of Eurocentric dualism because of the Greeks' peculiar, dual symbolic entailment in the construction of the West, the new materials that I have been able to bring from the contrasted cases of Italy and Thailand reinforce the evidence that certain symbolic oppositions-Manichaean in their current incarnations in all the rhetoric about empires of evil, terrorism, and fanaticismcontinue to enjoy a disturbingly privileged reach. By examining the West from odd angles of vision rather than from an angle of either a hermetically postcolonial discourse or the unrepentant elitism of European high-culture scholarship, we can locate and analyze binarism ethnographically and historically and detail its role in the cultural geopolitics of modernity. The second suggestion, which I made in the original edition of Cultural Intimacy, strikes me as more urgent than ever. It is to ask why, in the face of clear evidence that binarism is a cultural trait of certain self-consciously Western or Westernizing political regimes, critics still-after all this additional time~insist C?n treating it as though it were only a theoretical tool, a structuralist conceit. The inference was, and remains, distressing: the inability to come to terms with this distinction suggests that at least some of these critics may themselves be more prone to structuralist ways of thinking about the world than they are prepared to admit. (It might be opportune here to remind ourselves of the similar persistence-discussed earlier in this book-of evolutionist ideas in everyday di;;course and anthropological theory alike, and to recall that structuralism has retained a strong evolutionist flavor.) The careless rejection of binarism as an observable aspect of cultural geopolitics springs from an entrenched, Cartesian separation of theory and theorists from ethnography and its "subjects." From this angle it is a short path to insisting on a radical division between the material and the symbolic, the commodity and the gift, and the scientific and the moral. We use these binarisms in our everyday speech and writing hecause they are convenient ways of describing aspects, not essences, of the world as we experi,epce it. That is a facet of our Own culture. To confuse tbat observation with an abstractly theoretical binarism
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\
is to be thoroughly unreflexive about our own modes of thought. For some practitioners, especially those who rail against what they see as the elnbarrassments of the sometimes lacerating selfcriticism in which anthropology has engaged for over tw"o decades now, recognition of the entailment of binary modes of thought in our own political experience and ideology could only be a hetrayal of the discipline's own brand of cultural intimacy. With this in mind, it is precisely athwart the aspectual use of binarism that I would like to situate the militaut middle ground I advocate here-necessarily militant because, like so many middle grounds, it is harder to defend, and perhaps also harder to sustain in one's own thinking, than extreme positions. There are moments when it is helpful to emphasize the materiality of speeches and symbols, or when the sYlnbolic aspects of economic activity must be recuperated from Inodernist contexts in which the main social actors themselves ['misrecognize" the importance of these aspects because their syn1bolic capital consists of a package called "rationality." Even the most supple theorists occasionally fall into this pattern, as when Bourdieu (1977), railiug against what he calls "economism" in social theory, nevertheless consistently falls back on his favored metaphors of capital, symbolic and cultural. I also situate this militant middle ground in the conceptual space betw"een the extremes of fonnalisln and nihilisn1. In their own work, few of those who take these extreme positions actually practice what they preach. Like nationalists, however, they cannot afford to recognize the strategic nature of their essentializing, and so also are often reluctant to recognize the political character of the binarism that persists in local and national responses to the global hierarchy of value. They have, for example, too easily accepted a separation of the world into the exotic or postcolonial (depending on their particular ideological predilections) and the familiar or colonial. To reprise a theme that I adumbrated in the new second chapter: how many theorists of postcolonialisln are willing either to read exhaustively in the ethnography of European societies or to cite the ideas of locals who lack the status of public intellectuals and perhaps even a formal education but who, like all of us everywhere, have always worked away at building a conceptual framework for understanding the world as they experience it? ,, In this book, I have largely addressed the uses to which variously situated actors have put these various binary oppositions in 220
Afterword
,!
their relationships with the nation-state, but I have also now tried to expand the range of the argument beyond the nation-state to other collective entities. The key point remains simple, paradoxical, and resistant to our gaze. It is that the idea of the politynahon=-sta-te~-io-calcommunity, or international body-succeeds tc;-the extent that its formal ideology encapsulates (or incorporates) all the inward flaws and imperfections to which it is officially and ostensibly opposed. The nation-state may be the most obviously accessible of such entities; it is certainly not the only one. Its frequent recourse to familial metaphors shows that it is not unique; although, as a relatively new invention in most of the world, it may depend on the suggestive familiarity of such intimate metaphors to ground its appeal. But this in itself means that the state is not unique in having a collective intimacy to defend, and we find that many other eutities-from the local community where "we are all one family" to the oft-touted "family of nations"-exhibit parallel characteristics. I suspect that the nation-state owes its primacy here to something I mentioned at the begilming of the book: if the very idea of cultnral intimacy, s~~JD~jnherently paradoxical, the dynamics irnpli-ed -nCthe-te~:~ are ilnmediately recognizable in this curiously bloodless structure that nevertheless invokes the symbolism of blood-au abstraction that represents itself as a family. If now we shifJ: the argume:Q-t to other entities, the nation-state nonetheless remains "good to think" for anthropologists. The success of the state thus rests clearly on its ability to manage that paradox. If the nation can be credibly represented as a family, people will be loyal to it because they know that families are flawed. As anthropologists have shifted from ideal-typical accounts of the family-compare, for example, J. K. Campbell's 1964 description of family values in a secretive pastoral cOlrununity in Greece with Neni Panourgii's (1995) expose of the shenanigans that go on inside her own, conflicted, bourgeois Athenian family-we gain a better understanding of the power of imperfection to inspire loyalty and love. Campbell observed a number of infractions, to be sure, but the magnitude of the challenge that his acute observations posed was not immediately understood. Others, it is also true, breached the walls of cultural intimacy by showing how avidly villagers would gossip about each other's wickedness, while energetically exonerating themselves and their families from blame (see, notably, du Boulay 1974). If Campbell's analysis of the rural Greek idea that all 221
Cultural Intimacy
humans are sinners (and can thus excuse their .smaller sins on theological grounds) launched the significance o{imperfection as a theme in anthropological analysis, it may well be that it was not until Panourgia's daring move-an exposme of both familial and cultural intimacy-that the importance of his original insight, so central to what I have tried to articulate with my discussion of cultural intimacy, came into clear focus. We are, after all (to repeat that Greek phrase yet again), but human. These Greek observations apply to all of us, not least to our capacities as theorists of the human condition. The sign of our imperfection is that everything we create is subject to corrosion: corrosion by time, corrosion by personal weakness, corrosion by the misunderstanding of others. Academic discourse is no exception; once we launch a new term, it is carried by unpredictable aud sometimes fickle winds to new and sometilues transfonnative contexts. Terms like cultural intimacy and structural nostalgia seem already to have entered the professional vocabulary. That they have not always done so with the precise inflections of meaning I intended for them might prove quite advantageous in some cases, especially given the extent to which other writers have helped to historicize and pluralize these concepts. There is, to be sure, a problem of precision, which is why I have always tried, as here, to keep the use of the term "icon" in anthropology to its Peircean sense rather than its everyday use of "emblem" (especially as it is all the more interesting when the two phenomena converge, as they so often do in nationalistic symbolism). Moreover, a quick perusal of the Internet reveals that "cultural intimacy" often serves simply to mean "deep knowledge of another's culture" such as one might gain from a study-abroad program or even one of those handbooks on quick-fix cultural acquaintance that have proliferated in recent years, while "structural nostalgia" indicates anything from a well-built souvenir to the nostalgia associated with architectural reconstruction. It has ever been the fate of anthropologists to use terminology that sounds neither scientific enough to escape this entailment in the real world nor quite ordinary enough to escape the animadversions of egghead-haters. But that, too, is benign, in that it suggests that a militant (and militantly defensible) middle ground has always been the appropriate space for the discipline. We are neither fish nor fowl, and we arc proud of it. Such is our intimate secret.
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1--
We are also engaged in work of complex ethical implications, in which we sometinles allow the strong sense of our nlarginality in a positivistic and neoliberal world to obscure the realitie~ of our power; we are also sometimes inclined, in moments of ethlc~l panic, to commit the vanity of assuming that our power wl11 really be enough to make a possihly harmful differencc. We should be on our guard against inadvertent harm, to be sure; that should go without saying. But we are already implicated in the constant negotiation of our own status as observers who almost always come, in SOll1e sense or another, from ~'outside." Intimacy imposes its own obligations, which cannot be easily addressed~ and indeed may be subverted-through the use of bureaucratic control over ethics. However benign the intentions behind such developments, they can work only in a context in which there is a spirited critique of all such official measures. Anthropology is well equipped to provide this critique, at the same time as-and in part because-its practitioners lUllSt constantly ponder the dictates of their own consciences. Reco~ nizing that we have a cultural intimacy of our own to defend IS an important aspect of the maintenance of the middle. ground; comparison is meaningless if we do not subject our own assum~ tions to the same analytic questioning that we address to the SOCIeties we study. Anthropologists' defense of their disciplinary intimacy is entirely human, and a mark of what we share with the people we know in those societies. There is then no excus~ f~r exceptionalism-itself sometimes a defense of cultural I.numacy-in the service of either academic disciplines or natlOnstates or indeed of any social entity at all. We should not, for exam~le, contemptuously refuse the challenge of the new ethical prescriptious, but should instead respond in equally crItIcal fashion by asking what interests are served in practice by their application. . This is consistent with the anthropology that I have descrIbed in these pages. It is above all an anthropology of engagement. It is about social and cultural life, but it is also situated In that life. What those outsiders to the discipline sometimes see as anthropologists' obsession with the minutiae of ethnography is a dedication to the idea that nothing is necessarily unimportant, and that in any case it is our job to ask why it is sOTegarded and who so regards it. These are questions that discoIDIuode a.nd elubarrass the wielders of power, which is one reason for whICh
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anthropologists have not, with rare exceptions outside the world of research itself, found effective ways of breaching the cultural intimacies of elites. But the role of the social critic is never easy, and an anthropologist who refuses that role has walked away from the world and entered the safe antisepsis of theory, structure, and pure reason. I offer this book, itself newly refreshed, as an antidote against such an insidious temptation.
Notes
Notes to Chapter One Acknowledgments: I am deeply grateful to those good friends whose critical comments on this introductory chapter have helped me define my position and clarify many aspects of the argument. They are mentioned by name in the preface. I trust that they will recognize their input, however imperfectly realized. 1. See especially Handler (1985, 1988); Kapfcrcr (1988); Watson (1994). 2. I first coined this term in Herzfeld (1995). I would especially like to thank Richard Fardon, who, by including me in the project of that volume, gave me the first serious incentive to develop it beyond the formal model of disemia-the codified tensions between collective self-knowledge and collective sclf-presentation-with which I had hitherto been working (see especially Herzfeld 1987a: 95-122). Peter Pels (personal communication, 1995) has suggested that "national intimacy" might be a more apposite term. While I agree with him that this formulation heightens the conceptual tensionnations are not usually thought to be intimate entities-I am anxious to avoid the implication already associated with Anderson's (1983) "imagined community" (see below) that these are exclusively national-level phenomena. 3. This useful formulation comes from Blok (1981), and can be preserved independently of his central argument (sec Herzfeld 1987a: 11-12,95). 4. Indeed, the Nuer, taken by Evans-Pritchard (1940) as the very antithesis of a state society, knew perfectly well that.patrilineal ~in ship was a convenient way of expressing political alliances rather than the literal reason for the solidarity of an entire tribe. See below, chapter 6. 224
225
Cultural Intimacy 5. Baudrillard's commentary addresses the more general phenomenon of "simulation" in modern culture; but whose "teal" does he mean? Is the ardent nationalist merely a dupe? Do people have no ironic capacity to recognize how stretched the metaphors of immediate experience have become? And is that experience literally immediate ~that is, not mediated by signs at all)? Or. to take another example. IS the Nuer use of agnatic kinship to express political relationships more real than the paternalism of the modern state? Such formulations beg a crucial question of ontology by reducing gradated differences of scale to a binary opposition: real versus metaphorical. 6. See especially, and variously: Abeles (1989); Hellier (1993); Faubion (1993); Horn (1994); Rabinow (1989); Traweek (1988); Vcrdery (1991); Zabusky (1995). 7. See Beidelman (1995). But my approach in fact recognizes that bureaucrats may interpret their work as a civic duty rather than as a personal goldmine and that. in so doing. they make ethical choices; they are social agents. The extent to which they may deviate from the prevailing civic morality varies culturally and sitllationally, but eve~ .t~e most socially conscientious bureaucracies must engage in actIVIties that exclude people defined as outsiders. When bureaucrats and other citizens agree in blaming "the system," the idiom of self-exoneration in which they share channels both the failures and the successes of the official ethic in its day-to-day application to real issues and dilemmas, and the fact that many bureaucrats do exactly what they are supposed to do in no way reduces the likelihood that their more disappointed clients, in particular. will seek culturally appropriate explanations for these actions. In arguing thus I reject the view of symbolism as an interesting but distracting epiphenomenon of political reality and address it as the malleable material of social engagement. For a similar but more grounded critique, see Heyman (1994) and my response. 8. hl countries like Greece, the relevant social history has been dominated by economic issues, to which a newly arrived but energetic anthropological presence offers greater depth and richer contexts as Papataxiarchis (1993: 60) remarks. His comment is especially ~ig nificant in that it appears in a volume of essays that emerged from the 1986 conference he co-organized in Mytilene to mark the launching of Greece's first university program in social anthropology (at the University of the Aegean). 9. The constant refrain in Greek appraisals of the U.S. attitude to Greco-Turkish disputes is one of American ingratitude and proTurkish favoritism. 1 am prepared to argue that there is much substance to these charges. By representing U.S. one-sidedness as the stance of a bad parent. however, and specifically as that of unfair property distribution, those who level this charge must accept some ~egree of responsibility for the persistence of U.S. paternalism, as it IS so aptly named, in the geopolitics of the region. Indeed, this would appear to be a classic example of the way in which a discourse of resistance may actually serve to confirm and perpetuate the hege-
226
Notes
10.
1 J.
12.
13.
14.
many against which it is directed-a point that has been suggested with regard to my own (Herzfeld 1991b) attempt to sketch a "poetics of womanhood" (see, e.g., Loizas and Papataxiarchis 1991b: 13). On the rhetoric of self-exoneration in international relations, see Herzfeld (1992a); on the conceptual limits and possibilities of "resistance" see Comaroff and Comaroff (1989); Gutmann (1993); Mbembe (1991, 1992); Rccd-Danahay (1993). Diamandouros (1994) poses an interesting contrast in Greek political culture between "underdog" and "reformist" positions, in which the latter represents precisely the desire to relocate responsibility for Greek political actions within Greek society itself rather than relying on the status of perennial underdog in international affairs. See especially Herzfeld (1982b); Kenna (1976); Vernier (1991). The affective relationship between naming and property is also briefly and anecdotally explored in Herzfeld (1991a: 133,136). For an excellent early account of the politics of cartography in the Balkans, see Wilkinson (1951). Some of this discussion is foreshadowed in Bakhtin (1981) and Lotman and Uspenskii (1985), but these theorists do not satisfactorily engage with the role of agency in the selective deployment of official and subversive codes, and they tend to reify the distinction between official and nonofficial codes (see also Mbembe 1992: 4). On musical disemia, see Dorn (1991), Turino (1993); on disemia in conflicting economic ideologies (the formal market versus bargaining and other socially embedded idioms), see Herzfeld (1991a: 160-63). For a more extended general discussion of disemia. see Herzfeld (1987a: 95-122). Lee Drummond (personal communication) has suggested the perceptive pun "dys-semia" here. The pun has a somewhat pejorative sense ("dys" is derived from the Greek root dus. badly), however; whereas the original formulation was not intended to carry such negative implications (Greek di-, double, twice. is ostensibly valueneutral). Ferguson's (1959) original formulation of diglossia as pairing an "H" (high) and an "L" (low) register encountered similar difficulties. Greeks today usually call themselves Ellines, Hellenes. This was the official term adopted by the Greek state from the start, despite that it had long been an unfamiliar designation for most of the population until shortly before independence; the more usual term was Romii, which alluded to the Byzantine (i.e., East Roman) heritage and its Ottoman successors. Greeks often call themselves Romii when they want to emphasize their disrespect for the formal culture and its values; the term also has left-Wing connotations (see Herzfeld 1982a:141). Those who complain that this binary opposition omits the other terms that Greeks have sometimes used of themselves, or that people rarely still call themselves Romii, are missing the point that the Ellines-Romii distinction provides a basic model of disemia on which infinite variations are possible in social and linguistic practice.
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r
Notes
Cultural Intimacy 15. On Turkish self-designation, see Delaney (1995). 16. Cf. Fabian (1983), on the relationship between cxoticiziog "denials of cocvalncss" and hegemony. 17. On the relationship between nostalgia and interiority or intimacy, see S. Stewart (1984). 18. Elsewhere (Herzfeld 1992a: 5-10, 1996), I have called this cosmology a "secular theadiey." 19. On Tinos the pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin Mary has taken on powerful nationalist overtones. lowe dus example to Jill Dubisch (personal communication, 1995), whose book on the Tinos pilgrimage, In a Different Place (Dubisch 1995), should be consulted. 20. On the complex links between narrative and architecture in the construction of conflicting histories, see Gable, Handler, and Lawson (1992); Herzfeld (1991a). 21.. See the discussion in Herzfeld (1987a: 189-91). and passim. 22. See Handler (1985, 1988); Herzfeld (1987a, 1991c). On racial stereotypes, see Wade (1995)j Wallman (1978); and several of the essays in Bond and Gilliam (1994). 23. There is some irony in this, inasmuch as Charles Sanders Peirce, whose tripartite division of signs into icons, indexes, and symbols animates this discussion, has been the focus of a certain amount of American scholastic nationalism. Among the most useful discussions of the Peircean schema arc Deely (1990) and, for a specifically anthropological application, Parmentier (1994). 24. Freedberg offers this comment specifically in the context of discussing the Iconoclast movement in Byzantine Christianity, but its logic also fits the populist appeal of nationalism. The Iconoclasts feared precisely this power of images, which can occlude their divine referent (see also Baudrillard 1988: 169). In nationalism, however, this occlusion may be desirable in that it can mask the social heterogeneity underlying the premise of cultural unity; representations of social harmony-in bromides about a "classless society" and "our brothers and sisters" (and in those airline courtesies again!)hide the social alienation against which people build the escape I have called "structural nostalgia." 25. Again, r am incorporating terms and ideas to which I have already given some play; see Herzfeld (1991a: 16, 1995: 128). 26. The picture is beginning to change with the passing of the generation that was active in politics both before and after the 1967-74 period of military dictatorship. It is not entirely clear how far the shepherds' tics with politicians actually influenced the course of national politics, but it is at least certain that the pastoral tail did wag the parliamentary dog to a surprising degree. 27. On the constitution of society, see especially Giddens (1984); Lincoln (1989). 28. See Herzfeld (1987a: 77n78). Norman (1994) argues that Swedish working-class women may ironically challenge the conditions of 228
their own subordination through obscene joking about their own bodies. 29. See, for example, the intense discussion that occurred in the pages of the Greek glossy biweekly Ikol1omikos Takhidhromos on precisely this topic in 1993. In this debate I was both a target and a contributor. For defending a colleague's right to explore the minoritarian identity claims of Slavic speakers in Greek Macedonia, I was vilified as creating a school of thought whose sole focus was to deny the Greeks' ancient heritage while concealing the political implications of such a move. For the main discussion, see Herzfeld (1993) and Kargakos (1993); for a detailed expose of the methodological devices employed to support the nationalist position, see especially Karakasidou (1994b). For a revealing defense of national interests, partly in terms of what I am calling cultural intimacy, see Gcorgakas (1996). At the time the first edition of this book was going to press, responses to the Georgakas piece appeared in the May/June 1996 issue of Odyssey (pp. 7-9); see also Gudeman and Herzfeld (1996). The positivistic defense of supposedly traditional methods lends a scientific gloss to the nationalistic defense_ of perceived ethnonational interests. The rhetoric provides a fine illustration of Lloyd's (1990) point about the socially embedded character of the literal-metaphorical and rational-irrational polarities, discussed later in this book.
Notes to Chapter Two Acknowledgments: I express my special gratitude to Alexander IGossev, Smita Lahiri, Andrew Shryock, and Stanley J. Tambiah, who looked at this chapter in part or as a whole during the final stage of its absorption into the book. The entire chapter is a new addition to the work, and is intended to frame and clarify the development of the cultural intimacy concept since publication of the first edition in 1997. 1. I particularly allude here to the work of Shore and Wright (2000) and more generally of Strathern (2000). Issues concerning the relationship between cultural intimacy and what these scholars have aptly called "audit culturc"-thc reduction of social life and ethics to a simplistic economic accounting model-surface, implicitly and explicitly, at various points in Shryock (2004). 2. Thus, for example, Katherine Bowie at the University of Wisconsin has used the book in her teaching on tlle state, and Rosalind Morris (2004) has written an important study partially grounded in the concept of cultural intimacy. Maria Minicuci (Universita "La Sapienza," Rome), to whom I am deeply grateful for this and for many relevant discussions, has been an especially enthusiastic promoter of the Italian edition (Herzfeld 2003a). 3. This is the split between Romii and Hellenes, discllssed in the first chapter. Nowadays the term Romii is viewed more as a literary conceit and rarely figures prominently in ordinary speech except in a few proverbs. Its submersion may be the sign of a more confident 229
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4.
5. 6.
7.
8. 9.
10.
'II.
230
collective role for Greece within the European Union, particularly since a more technocratic and modernizing political leadership has worked hard to elinrinate many of the earlier marks of deep resentment toward the West. I mention the parallel with his work in Anakalang, which he mentions in much the same framework, to emphasize the common obligation to examine our own projection of idealized selves in the same terms, and with the same recognition that reification is what constitutes social interaction and that, as such; it is both inevitable and yet in need of unceasing dissection. I address this question more fully below and in the Shryock (2004) volume. This is the remorseless issue of teleology. I have argued that where statist ideologues adopted a more or less Durkheimian sociocentrism, we can locate teleology in their actions (Herzfeld 1992a; see also Malarney 1996). But we certainly cannot take it as a general rule that the "function" of cultural intimacy is to provide the "glue" of political cohesion. My insistence on citing the Romanesco (Roman dialect) form of standard Italian lasciar perdeTe (or, more strictly, of lasciare stare) might be viewed in some circles as itself a transgressive act; it might seem out of place in an account of the capital's culture, or in an academic treatise on what outside Italy is viewed as a major cultural center. But there is no reason anthropologists should treat the citizens of important European cities differently from (for example) Cretan highlanders or African tribespeople, and in Italy it is arguably, if paradoxically, the capital city that enjoys a peculiarly marginal status within the larger framework of national cultural aspirations. So my use of the externally despised dialect form makes the point, central to tlus analysis, that there is a direct analogy between the positions of Roman working-class culture and Cretan village values within their respective national contexts. See especially Bot (2003); Herzfeld (2003b). As we shall see in a later chapter, that particular debate ramifies into academic discourse as wel1. It is perhaps worth noting that several local politicians achieved high office, indirectly but clearly, through this engagement with illegal activity-in ways that are significantly absent from all political-science analyses of electoral history in Greece. Academics, too, may be complicit in shielding culturally intimate spaces, and we as observers are no less engaged in these processes-a key aspect of the question of grammatical person and the objectification of the anthropological self. For incisive critiques of excessive romanticism in the attribution of resistance to subaltern actors, see especially Abu-Lughod (1990); Recd-Danahay (1993). The important difference here is that in Bartll's formulation "cultural stuff" served to differentiate groups of people occupying the opposed spaces on either side of a boundary, however labile or
Notes porous the latter might be, whereas in the case of cultural intimacy we are addressing the selective deployment of cultural traits by-in most cases-a single group of people facing different sides of a perceived boundary. This is not as obvious a point as it might appear. My first, crude attempts to describe the conceptual distinction between Greeks-as-Hcllenes and Greeks-as-Romi (that is, in an image that emphasized their postclassical culture) led some readers to assume that these images belonged to distinct segments of Greek society, whereas they are self-stereotypes largely performed for the consumption of, respectively, external and local audiences. 12. Borneman's (1992) rich exploration of the two Germanies as a moiety system works well with my treatment of nepotism as political incest; here, miscegenation rather than incest was the fear, as e.ach side feared "pollution" by the other's alleged ideological subverSIOn. See also Glaeser (2004) for an account of the state paranoia that this generated and its engagement in the suppression of culturally intimate alternatives from within. 13. I say "directly" for good reason. West Germans are often inclined to attribute the perceived laziness and inefficiency of the easterners who have now become their compatriots to "Slavic" dcscent-a rhetoric that disturbingly reproduces the self-purificatory rhetoric of the Nazis. The idea that Marxism is a "Slavic dogma" also has a long and entrenched history in Greece, a country (unlike the majority of those in the Eastern Bloc) with a non-Slavic majority and the only Balkan nation-state to remain on the "Western" side during and after the cold war. 14. In the Shryock volume, I e~pand on this point at greater len?th. Despite the different ways Ozyiirck a~ld I ha~dle these ~aten.als, she is to be credited with documentlllg an Important hIstorIcal change-the kind of problem that my initial formulation of cultural intimacy may have been too undifferentiated to handle. 15. See also my more extended discussion of these matters in Her>deld (1992a: 12) and passim. The model of purity and pollution invoked here is that of Douglas (1966). 16. 1 made a very similar observation in my introduction to the Italian edition of Cultural Intimacy (2003a: 9-10). 17. I developed this notion in the specific context of comparing Greece and Thailand, having originally viewed its effects in the context of an empirical study of historic conservation in the former cOUI~try (Herzfeld 1991: 16; 2002). For an interesting and original apphc~ tion of the concept by a Thai scllOlar to issues of the uses of arcluteeture in a restoration project in Bangkok, see Woranuch (2002). 18. See especially Luhrmann (1996: 236). Luhrmann generously relates her project to mine in the sense that both are attempts to re~ect back on anthropological theory and practice from the perspectlves of societies that do not neatly fit the grids of received wisdom. 19. See especially Thirasant (2003).
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Cultural Intimacy 20. It is perhaps germane that central Rome, in an area bordering tIus majestic road, is my chosen field site in Italy, just as the Rattanakosin Island area (bisected by the avenue in question, Rachadamnoen), is the area where I have been conducting research in Thailand.
Notes to Chapter Three 1. For a llseful analysis of this issue from a semiotic perspective, see Handler and Linnekin (1984). 2. Anthellinas, anti-Greek, is a term much favored by extreme nationalists for those who criticize the Greek claim to a classical heritage or who in other ways attack the nationalist position. It was extensively used by the military regime of 1967-74 to describe its enemies-a clear case of a government's identification of itself with polity and nation. But in times of extreme international tension it is sometimes trotted out against any foreigner who is thought not to be totally committed to the current Greek politicalli..ne. 3. Politismos is derived from polis, city-state; cf. the derivation of "civilization" from civis, "inhabitant of a civitas." 4. Koultoura is a term sometimes used by left-wing social commentators. A sarcastic derivative of this term is the newly coined koultouriaTis, "one who makes a profession out of knowing about culture, a member of the intellechial establishment." 5. At the time I spoke fluent Athenian Greek, but was not warmly encouraged to learn the local dialect by the villagers. This reaction stood in sharp contrast to what I experienced in tIle Cretan mountains. 6. "A shoe from your own place, even if it is patched, / but where you know the craftsman who made it!" The panheUenic variant uses only the first line; the second would not necessarily make much sense in the wider context, although "knowledge" is a formal definition of the insider (dhikos mas) at all levels of social differentiation, including the mass national and religious, and provides a major key to the metonymical relationship between local and national identities. 7. The pun depends on a common transference of the terminal postvocalic It of the masculine accusative definite article to the succeeding noun. Omos is the usual term for shoulder, nomos for law. Such transferences have generated well-known forms, especially 111 toponymy (for example, Nidhra from Idhra [HydraJ).
Notes to Chapter Four Acknowledgments: In preparing the essay on which this chapter was based, I was greatly helped by the critical commentary of John N. Deely, Ivan Karp, and Greg N. Mahnke. 1. Indeed, the literalism that can be attacked so effectively in verbal or cultural translation (Beidelman 1980,1981; Crick 1976; Goldstein 1976; Willis 1980) creeps up on us much more easily when the ques232
Notes .. . II y, bU t by nO means exclusively, in tion of similarIty anses, espeCla the visual arena. . d te, (1967'" 87) discussion of nddles emonstrates, ca 2. As Hamnctts .J d f d'scourse To or reification obstructs insight into any lll? e. o. ~ .. ngd y G 0 Idstems " (1976) terminology a opt . .' acadelllIC dISCIplines are co tituted by the practlCc of scholarshIp. . h' S g h I h ave found the term "reversibility" convelllent here, t IS 3. Althofu h ld not be confused with the more usual anthrouse 0 '1 - It s ou . ' ' ' ) foun, d for example , pOIoglCa sens'e (akin to "symbolic mverSlOll in Babcock (1978), . I Sh ' 1980) 4. This is what Shapiro and Shapiro {1976j see a so aplfO mean by "hierarchy." .. . f' ( Indeed, the point was unfairly made in early cntIclsm o. ~Ic:d ~~~ S. B " , 1975' 103) Vico does not appear to have enter tam attlstlnJ .. . ." . f hi h h' ork later came kind of irredentist polItics III supP?rt? ~ IS. W . sed to be cited. But such artificial ternton~l~ty, ill whICh schola~s u. id " of the word" to mark polmcoculturaI boundanes, d e~~~l~ill~n;~ove durable; see Nisbet (1969: 100); Herzfeld (1982a: 10-11).
:r
Note to Chapter Five f h ationalism nevertheless 1. Note that Tambiah's account 0 e~ non. h C r (1993' 383) avoids the charge of ll'ratio~alitYo;;slt;e;~~~tha~n;t~nonati~nalist charges the ph:,nomenon. onneals to reason but through appeals rhetoric works not through ~pp . d b t to the bloodr' is analytito emotions (appeals not to t e n;tlll ~I . . . b usin the ally unhelpful bnt ethnograpillcally tllnnllnatmg. y f:r d .. b . d and body through the Imagery 0 00 c OPPOSltIO~ etw~~n m~y he demonstrates both the symbolic basis
~~ ~~~~~~listtOr~~t~r~~
schol~ldrl~:~~~~~i~~
and the degree to w hich I come permeate d -even am these p~enodr:nena ~ay 1~y the very imagery that they seek to objecperceptIve ISCUSSlOntify and dissect.
Notes to Chapter Six As an example of this discourse played out in foreign policy terms,
espw~lly Huntin~to~n~i::~'~sad
1, see (1973); Cliffnrd (1983); Clif2. These crItiques nota y 6)' and Fabian (1983); and see also Sal~ ford and Marcus (198 , d b ' tual caricatures of SC1(1989). On anthropology as conteste y vu nce and morality see D'Andrade (1995). . , m , respect a f'economics' , is also the position artIculated by Car3. eTIllS, rier (199Sb and 1995c: 202). , '. (1975) For an outstanding early demonstratIOn, see LOlZOS I . 4. . iii . f th classic focus on smal , remote cornS. I discnss tbis JUst canon or e ') d H feld (1987a: 63)' for a erz , munities in Herzfeld {1985a: XVi , an 233
r
Cultural Intimacy
6.
7. 8.
9.
10.
234
measured critical response see Bakalaki (1993). The urgent search for "relevance" may partially explain why it is becoming inCl"CaSingly unfashionable to conduct such field research, but this in turn risks reproducing precisely the occidentalist-nationalist discourse I discuss in this chapter; and, as far as Greece is concerned, it overlooks the excellent point, offered in what at the time was plausibly the most urban of all published Greck ethnographies, that in fact the invention of a separate sphere of urban anthropology violates cultural categories and social experience (Hirschon 1989: 233). This is the logical development of the theoretical position laid out in Herzfeld (1987a). Bakalaki (1993: 53) notes that anthropologists working in Greece have had to contend with a double-sided attack-for focusing on small communities on the One hand, and for overgeneralizing on the other-and concludes (1993: 56) that these are two aspects of a common problem, that of assuming that the local and national of social identity are mutually congruent. The criticism seems entirely fair-and is equally applicable to ideologues who imagine the national community in the idiom of the local. Note that the equation of anthropologists with a category of foreigners fortunately no longer applies. Indeed, a Greek nonanthropologist who found himself criticized in Alaska for
Notes
11.
12.
13.
14. 15.
16. 17.
lims (many but not all of whom are Turkish speaking) primarily reflects territorial anxieties, has embroiled the Greek authorities in several international confrontations. "Whatever one thought about the executions, British reaction was comparable to that evinced by the Iranian edict against Salman Rushdie, on which Asad's (1994) controversial account demonstrates the Eurocentrism of British liberal ideology. Blok's (1981) observation that emergent nation-states may appropriate the discourse of honor and remove it from the sphere of interpersonal or local-level relations is pertinent to my argument about the sources of cultural intimacy; but his view of a homogeneous Mediterranean moral code not only conflates numerous different concepts (Herzfeld 1984b), but also reproduces an evolutionist perspective similar to that which Asad (1994) finds directed at the Muslim world in British political discourse; it is thus important to disaggregate the two strands of his argument, detaching the historicity of particular nation-states' appropriation of local values from the unilineal schema in terms of which Blok has-unfortunately, in my viewcouched his otherwise very useful insight. See also Faubion (1993). The outrage that Faubion's book appears to have provoked in some Greek circles appears, in part, to derive from the converse of tile elite reaction to anthropology that I am discussing here, the sense that intellectuals should be immune to the ethnographer's analytic interest. This was the position of the two towering figures of grand nineteenth-century historiography in Greece, Spyridon Zambelios (1828-81) (1852) and Konstantinos Paparrhegopoulos (1815-91) (1932). Especially rdevaut are Clogg (1987, 1993); Diamandouros (1994); Kharalambis (1989); Sponrdalakis (1988). Similar arguments have been extensively aired in the United States and Western Europe, showing clearly that the storm of protest in Greece belongs to a far wider ideological debate, of which it is nonetheless both diagnostic and, doubtless because of the Greeks' more immediate geopolitical worries, something of a caricature. See Herzfeld (1987a: 45, 51, 115). There is no point in claiming that Greek fears about the territorial ambitions of their nearest neighbors are necessarily either unrealistic or paranoid. Indeed, I would argue that such crass psychological stereotypes are part of the problem, not a serious contribution to solving it. But it is true that the tendency to blame others for Greece's predicament, while grounded in painful historical experience (Couloumbis, Petro pulos, and Psomiades 1976), is oftcn couched in a culturally distinctive style (Herzfeld 1992a: 127-57) that can simply invite ridicule. 235
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Notes to Chapter Seven Acknowledgm.ents: Tn addition to support acknowledged in Herzfeld (1985a) for research done io the Upper Milopotamos village of Glendi, I express my gratitude to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for a grant-in-aid that enabled me to conduct the subsequent fieldwork in the Summer of 1987 on which this chapter is principally based. The foundation is not responsible for the opinions expressed here. I similarly absolve those who reviewed a version of this chapter for Man, as well as several other colleagues whose gencrouscriticism has helped me greatly in revising it: Joelle Bahlonl, Richard Bauman, Lording M. Danforth, Michael Jackson, Martha B. Kendall, Jerome R. Mintz, C. Nadia Seremetakis, Charles Stewart, Lawrence j. laylor, and Richard R. Wilk. John M. Hollingsworth rendered my crude cartography intelligible (Figure 7.1). To the many, often necessarily anonymous Cretan friends whose voices inform this analysis, lowe a special gratitude that is both personal and intellectual. 1. The structural nostalgia that orthodox structuralism shares with so many of the world's cultures suggests that the attempt to distinguish the "unconscious models" of the latter from the anthropologists' own analytic models (Levi-Strauss 1963; d. HerzfcI'd 1987a: 60) may have been too ambitious, not to say etlulocentric. 2. See Black-Michaud (1975) for a useful review of the definitional problems associated with the concept of feud and of the attendant issues of duration and conclusion. 3. See Gellner (1988: 149) for an interesting analogue from an Islamic society and especially for Ibn Khaldun's anticipation of this type of argument. 4. On the conventions of animal-theft, see Herzfeld (1985a: 163-231, especially 183-189 on alliances). Spiritual kin, notably when the link is created through baptism rather than marriage, should not raid one another. 5. Standard Greek ghrousouzia. Its Turkish root form means "being unlucky, banishing fortune"; see Herzfeld (1987a: 178). 6. Shepherds prefer total indirection where possible. The victim's kinsman seeks his spiritual kinsmen in villages where he suspects that the theft originated; dle latter leave him in their homes while they check with likely prospects among their own kin. 7. Campbell (1964: 344) adopts the same metaphor to describe the significance of family icons. 8. Being Khrist(h)ianos (Christian) signifies social acceptability in a community of silmers, rather than devotion. Calling someone Kh1·istianos may thus imply roguery rather than religiosity. 9. "Eating," a common metaphor for theft, also unplies the (dishonest) acquisition of wealth. 10. The classical name of dle court (Areopagos, hill of Ares) dates from the earliest years of the Greek state. 236
Notes 11. Needham (1972) argues against describing psychological inner states for entire peoples; Loizos (1975: 301, o. 2) extends this to secular, political conviction. 12. Pistemenos (literally, believed) implies a mutuality of trust that the English "persuaded" does not really capture. It may be taken as a tiny shred of evidence for the desire for a restoration of perfect balance implicit in the concept of structural nostalgia. 13. Cutting off these bells (sklaveria), which are distinctive to each animal and flock, graphically affronts the victim's masculinity. See Herzfeld (1985a: 191-92); Stewart (1991: 71-72). 14. Usually translated as dishonor, this term implies especially acts of sexual dishonesty or violence. 15. Bailey (1971: 17) similarly identifies "concentric circle.s of trust" with Greek data from Campbell (1964). On segmentation as the key organizing principle, see Herzfeld (1987a: 173-79). 16. Theft of the ram, practically a threat to flock reproduction, is another symbolic emasculation of the shepherd (d. n. 13, above). 17. On the theological foundations of gender ideology in Greece, see particularly du Boulay (1974: 100-120; 1986). 18. Deformation of conventional forms is basic to the "poetics-of social interaction" (Herzfeld 1985a: 16; and see chapter 8). 19. In English and related languages, there is a complex etymological relationship between "love" and "belief." At least two anthropologists have made usc of this connection: Needham (1972: 41-44) suggests that these terms represent inaccessible psychological inner states, while Hart (1988: 186-87) connects the notion of truscto the "evidence of the senses." "Whatever the consequences of either position, most recent writers (e.g., Gambetta 1988b) would accept that trust and its ncar synonyms can be analyzed with confidence only as representations. This, however, is no small or trivial undertaking. 20. Timi also means price. Despite problems about the supposed equivalence of timi and honor, the loghos timis docs seem to have- precisely the force of the word of honor in English. 21. For the corollary of the shepherd's role as divine, see Campbell (1964: 26). 22. The Classical and Koine Greek is usually transliterated as logos. According to the conventions for transliterating modern Greek that I have adopted here, this word, spelled the same way in Greek, emerges as loghos; the respective plural forms arc logoi and loyi. Cretan shepherds frequently emphasize a surprising piece of information with the exclamation logho timis ([on my] word of honor), much as we might in English (d. "scout's honor"). 23. See also Stewart (1985a: 1991) for further, detailed explorations-of this relationship. 24. See Reed-Danahay (1995) for a critique of Bourdieu that shows clearly how he ignored the historical entailments of his own
237
Notes
Cultural Intimac)' research, "unconsciously" positing a colonial subject in implicit opposition to the mentally active and reflexive academic. 25. I explore tlus question in ethnographic detail in my study of artisans' attitudes to teaching apprentices (Herzfeld 2004). There are several aspects of this process that the artisans refuse to recognize unless they are pressed to do so; the fact that they can then articulate them suggests that there was never any actual inability to understand the processes involved, but that it was inconvenient to acknowledge these in any direct fashion.
Notes to Chapter Eight Acknowledgments: A version of one part of this chapter was presented on October 24, 1987, at the Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America at Pensacola, Florida. I am indebted to Eric Schwimmer for his helpful reading of that version. A further version was circulated by the Center for Psycho-Social Studies, Chicago, as #22 in its series of Working Papers and Proceedings under the title, "Rhetoric and the Constitution of Social Relations" (1988), and I have benefited from many subsequent discussions of the argument. 1. See the varied contributions of Carrier (1995a, 1995c); Fabian (1983); Kuper (1988); SaWins (1976); aud Iambiah (1990); as well as my own discussion of Western claims to rationality in bureaucratic practice (Herzfeld 1992a). 2. :Historiography has proved more sensitive to this issue than have many other social epistemologies, and there are several accounts of the rhetoric of history (e.g., Goldstein 1976). Richard Harvey Brown (1977, 1991) has done a great deal to advance this cause in sociology, and in the social sciences generally; see also the essays collected in Clifford and Marcus (1986). 3. There is an irony in citing Bourdieu in such a context, in that Bourdieu (1977: 18) himself sees indigenous exegesis as only "semi"-theoretical, and as generated only by outsiders' questions. This restricts the concept of social theory to a level that denies the intellectual creativity of the indigenous actor and so undermines the attribution of agency precisely at the moment of otherwise acknowledging it. For a more detailed elaboration of this point, see Herzfeld (1987a: 82-87); see also Karp (1986: 133-34). On indigenous notions of meaning in Greece, see the discussions in Herzfeld (1981 and 1985a), and Caraveli's (1982) treatment of related concepts. On "emergeuce," see Bauman (1977); Giddens (1984); Karp (1980). While anthropologists have recognized tlle illogic in automatically subordinating symbolism to social structure (e.g., Needham 1963), they have been less generous to the encompassing category of rhetoric. In the past two decades, anthropologists in the Kenneth Burke tradition (e.g., Sapir and Crocker 1977; Fernandez 1986) have focused on the performative aspects of language in socialli.fe by treating the play of tropes as constitutive of cultural life.
238
4. This should provide reassurances in the light of George's (1996: 136) concerns about the potential of Jakobson's model for generating an excessively static and formal analysis. 5. Cowan (1990), building on several papers on the rhetoric of embodiment offers an outstanding contribution to the analysis of the embodiment of ideology that develops the work of Bourdieu and Gramsci. For another perspective that also uses Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and bodily hexis, sec]ackson (1983). On the relationship among embodiment, clothing, continence, and disemia, see Herzfeld (1987a: 96-101). 6. Bakalaki's criticism of earlier formulations, including some of my own is as well taken as it is balanced. She makes the critical point that'while dualisms such as "West-East" certainly do playa prominen; role in Greek social discourse, their schematic association wi:h contrasted, fixed ideologies is reductionist in that they .ignore ~ertam forms of social agency-such as that of women who mternahze the "European" model to which public discourse supposedly debars their access. She also sees the mechanistic quality of the earlier formulations as partly grounded in the extremely restric~ive orientatio~ of most ethnographic work to community-level studIes (although It should be said that, beginning with Campbell [1964], many ethnographers have examined the sometimes successful atte~~ts of the village tail to wag the governmental dog). In that hc~ cntique .calls for a more flexible understanding of the uses to which such Ideological formalisms are put-in my terms, the es~entializ~gs~rategies that activate them-I would argue that a poetICS of SOCIal hfe, considerably expanded beyond the limits of my first attempt to appl}~ it in The Poetics of Manhood, is fully compatible, and mutually re-1l~ forcing, with the nuanced and histori~ally ~r.ounded a:nalytlc approach she proposes. See also, for a seflous cr.luque of qu~te general import, Handelman (1994: 370-72); the ShIft o~ a~alytlC.focus from disemia to the less formal concept of culturalmtllllacy m the present work should address some key concerns.
Note to Afterword 1. Elites are now as much a topic of anthropological interest as other groups' See now de Pina-Cabral and Pedroso de Lima (2000); Marcus (1992);' Sbor~ and Nugeut (2002).
239
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Index
Aarsleff, Hans 188 Abeles, Marc 9, 226n abstraction 43 Abu-Lughod, Lila 230n academic practices 51,55 accountability 51,141,163,164, 214 acephalous societies 133 activism 41 adoption 195 aesthetics 187 Afghanistan 81 Africa 24, 25; as model and stereotype 18, 42, 52; -n elements in ancient Greek culture 144 African Americans 16,204 agency 30,47,49,55,69,151,188, 211, 227n, 239n; of state 9, 54, 211; limited by traditionalism 56, 59 agnatic relations See patrilinearity airline crews 21, 132 Albania 51; -n culture 216 Alexakis, Eleftherios P. 121 Alexander the Great 216 Alexiou, Margaret B. 24 Almeida, .Miguel Vale de 21 Althusser, Louis 30, 181 ambiguity 22,23,25,37,85,88,89, 131,195; epistemological 211; of codes 20; of ethnonyms 78; of social relations 7; strategic deployment of 197 Anakalang 230n Anarchism 176
268
Anatolia 106 Andalusia 52,59,65,81 Anderson, Benedict 5,6,28,43,93, 114,117, 133,188,225n,234n Andes 15 Andromedas, John N. 1 J 1 animal epithets 70,76 animal-theft 8,31,32,53,55,63,65, 87,97,119,142,145,148,151, 153,155,156,160-70,172,173, 176,180,182,205-6,216-7, 234n,236n apartheid 80 Appadurai, Arjun 28, 140, 202 apprenticeship 238n Arabs 81 Arafat, Yasser 32 arbitrariness 208; semiological 75, 208 archaeology 12,96,98-9,100,102, 104 archaism (linguistic) 14 architecture 15,20,24,222; and narrative 228n; "grammars" of Ardener, Edwin 12,74,97,112,140, 202 Aretxaga, Begofia 66 Aristophanes 215 Arkadi monastery, defense of (1866) 119 articulacy, denial of 11. articulation (between the state and social life) 181 artisans 238n Arvanites 112
269
T
Cultural Intimacy
Index
I
Aryanism 144,145 Asad, Talal 83,174, 233n, 235n Asia:Minor 19, -118 Askew, Marc 49 Askew, Kelly 55 Athens 52,54,221; ancient, 121, 139,184 audit culture 41,51,213, 229n Austin,].L. 74,100, "129, 163, 188-9,190,193-4,203 Australia 44,120,148,149 authoritarianism 64; discourse of 75 authority 5,61, 100; disregard for ix; of the state 2, 5, 12, 36, 62,118; cultural 53; dielmmas of 153; expressed through order 69; moral 79-80 Aymara 59
Babcock, Barbara 233n backgrounding 95 Badone, Ellen 16 Bailey, EG. 9, 237n Bakalaki, Alexandra 20, 128, 199, 234n, 2390 Bakhatin, Mikhail 227n Balkans 35,50,51,52,53-4,56,57, 65,80,109,121,123,124-5, 127,130-2,148,176 Baloglou, George 234n Banda, Hastings 4 Banfield, E.C. 201 banditry 31-2; social 10 Bangkok 63, 69-70, 214, 231n, 2320 barbarism 82, 83, 84 Barth, Fredrik 56, 230n Basque Country and culture 14, 112, 138 Battaglia, Debbora 45 Battistini, Andrea 233n Baudrillard, Jean 6, 226n, 228n Bauer, Arnold J. 17 Bauman, Richard 185,187,188, 196, 238n Beidelman, Thomas O. 2260, 232n Bellier, Irene 226n Berdahl, Daphne .57 Berlusconi, Silvio 9 Bernal, Martin 144 Bertarelli, Achille 108 binarism 15,19,20,23,26,27, 45-6,67,211,218-21 Black-Michaud, Jacob 236n
270
blasphemy 78,81,88,157,163,171 Blok, Anton 57,90, 225n, 235n blood 104,111,112,120-2,123, 140,145,149,215,221 body 2,4,5,12,15,20,21,26,133, 239n; joking about, 2290 Boehm, Christopher 121 Bogatyrcv, Petr G. 190 Bolinger, Dwight Bona, Emma 107 Boon, James -190 Borneman, John 231 n Bosnia 120-1,122,125,134 Bot, Ioana 23011 Bourdieu, Pierre 55, 131, 151, 171, 174,178,179, 185, 220, 237-8n, 2390 Bowie, Katherine 229n Boyer, Dominic 57, 61 Brandes, Stanley E. 81 Brazil 13 "breakage" ix Brenneis, Don 187 Briggs, Charles L. 185 Bringa 120-1 Brittany {and Bretons) 16 Broccolini, Alessandra Maria Paola 65 Brown, Richard fL"lrvey 238n Brown, Roger 208 Broyard, Anatole 186 Bruner, Edward M. 12 Buddhism 70 Bulgaria 50,5:1,53-4,108,114, 120,124 bullfighting 18 bureaucracy, bureaucrats 4,7,8,10, 25,31,32,36,54,55,61,72,80, 94,129,130,145,152,1.54,160, 172, -173,207-8, 226n, 238n; British and European 62, 181; Greek 130,204 Burke, Kenneth 238n Buttitta, Antonino 99,100,107 Byzantium and Byzantine heritage 19,137, 138, 14:1, 227n, 228n; monarchy and 103 Calabria 65 CampbelI,].K. 24,121,123,154, 19.5, 221-2, 236n, 237n,239n Cameroon 25 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal) 94
I
capital, cultural 131,220; and commensality 6 symbolic 151, 208, 214, 220 commodification 59,204 capitalism 177; small-scale 86 commOn sense 47-8, 129 Caravc1i, Anna 238n communism state's rejection of in Carbonari 61 Greece ~nd USA 81, 101 Carrier, James G. 8,30,129,150, community, imagined 5,28,93,114, 233n,238n 125, 133, 225n Carter, Donald IvIartin 66 community involvement 214 Cartledge, Paul 130 concentric loyalties 118-9 Cartesian thought 67,219 confession (religious) 158 cartography 14, 100-1, 227n Connor, Walker 2330 Cea u~cscu, Nicolae 19, 121 constitutionalism 32 censorship 54 contingency 32,42,48,49,74 census 1-19-20, 138 continuity, cultural 101,103 corruption 8,9,17,25,55,62,173 Ceram, C.W. 102 Corsica 106 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 69 cosmology 4, 154, 166, 170, 22811 China 15,58 costume See dress Chock, Pbyllis Pease 21,33,83-4, Couloumbis, T.A. 2350 202,207 Couroucli, Maria 121 Christ as victim of bureaucracy 154; Cowan, Jane K. 90,2390 shepherd as metaphor of 174 creolization 189 Christianity and Christians 13, 83, Crete 8,23,25,31,36,53,54,60, 106, 118, 150, 161,167,236n; as 63,76,77,81,85,86,87,88,94, sinners 157, 236n; Catholic 19, 118-9,135,136,142,145,150, 174; Orthodox 19,25,77,86,93, 152,153-77,180,204-6 138,175 Crick, Malcolm 232n Chon, Allen 51,55 Crocker, J. Christopher 123,238n civilizational models 69,71,82-3 crypto-colonialism 56,67,68,71, civil rights 123, 124; of minorities 214 131,139,143,212 cultural cringe 44 Cla;k,J.G.D. 99,104 cultural form 2,16,21,31,189,190 class 18,47,60,202,203; smell as a culture 3, 83, 105; creation of basis of recognizing 97; working national, 10; exaggeration of 190; 60, 228-9n opposed to nature 76 Classen, Constance 97 curing 16 classification 100,101,211,218 Cyprus 118, 145 cleansing, ethnic 2,95,139 c1ientilism See patronage Damer, Scan 23,177,204 Clifford, james 233n,238n dance ix, 56; steps 193-4 Clagg, Richard 235n D'Andrade, Roy 23,233n Cocchiara, Giuseppe 98 D'Azcglio, Vittorio Emanuele Tapparcode-switching (linguistic) 119 eUi, Marchese 107 Cohen, Colleen Ballerino 129 de Certeau,Michel 203, 207 Cohen, Jonathan 195 deconstructionism 26 Collard, Anna 12 Deely, John 74,2280 collective representations 6 defamiliarization 212 Collingwood, R.C. 99,100 deformation (of conventions) as social Colombia 13 technique 22, 24, 37, 100, 171, colonialism 3,13,18,21,39,42,46, 185, 190,197, 198, 203, 237n; as 49,55,67,68,127,178,190, basis of knowledge 100 220; internal 58; varieties of 50 Delaney, Carol 121,122,133, 228n Sec also crypto-colonialism; postDelian League 139 colonial states democracy 4, 120, 133, 149, 155 Comaroff, Jean 227n de Pina-Cabral, Joao 239n Comaroff, John 227n
271
Cultural Intimacy development 63 Diamandouros, P. Nikiforos 227n diasporas 51, 122 dictatorship 25; Greek military ix,
54,103,134,136,155,215 See also Greece diffusionism 99,100,102 diglossia 14,190, 227n disclaimers 196-7 disemia 14-5,16,17,18,21,37,45, 190, 225n, 227n, 2390; religious
19 disorder 56 distinction 15 Dodecanese 83,85,88 domesticity 4,20,21,49,58,132,
134 Dorians 205-6 Darn, Pamela 18, 227n Douglas,Mary 95,105, US, 129,
192, 231n Douglass, Carrie B. 18 dowry 149 Doxiadis, Constantine 150 dress 47, 134, 190,215, 234n, 239n Drummond, Lee 97,106,189,2270 Dube, Saurabh 67 Dubisch, Jill 228n du Eoulay,Juliet 162,171,195,221, 2370 Durkheim, Emile 69,168,180, 230n eating (metaphor) 25, 162, 169, 236n Eco, Umberto 19,95,96,108 economism 220 edenicimages 150,171,174,179 eghoismos 86, 88 Eighteen Texts (book) 54 ekistics 150, 154 Elgin Marbles 144 Elias, Norbert 62, 83 elite, -s 3,6,7,11,15,17,59,60, 128,130,136,178,199,204-5, 224, 239n; claims made for 97; values of 36; -ism, intellectual
Index Errington, Frederick K 29 essentialism 1,2,8,22,25,27,28, 32,49,73,114,125,127,131, 138,145,183,212,218; as practice 188; practical 26, 30, 130; reverse 9; self-, 67, 72; strategic
32,75,183,220 ethics 11-2,35,41; anthropological
37-8,48,127,179-80,211-2, 223; bureaucratization of 41, 213, 214, 223, 229n ethnicity 57,77-8,79,81,114-5, 118,120,124,136,202,209 ethnogenesis 15,59,123 ethnography x, 9,11,23-4,38,39, 41,42,128,131,138,151,178, 217-9,220; dismissed 138; and defense of 139; intimacy of 47; of nation-states 34, 41; styles of writing in 47-8 ethnonyms 16,17,56,78 etymology 73,89,95-6,98,99,106, 109,189; folk 97; of power 72; trailing clouds of (Austin) 74 Europe 18,24,50,51,54,66,75, 136,138,142; alleged essence of 140,216; anthropology and ethnography of 39, 40, 66, 69, 128,220; as model 17-8, 20, 37, 42,43,55,58,82-3,84,125, 127-46,178,199, 239n; models of 7,19,20,69,86; provincializing 69; -an models 6, 10, 13; -an Union 18,62,112,130,132,
137,139,140-1,143,145,181, 230n Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 24,157,178, 225n,234n evidence, cultural conditions governing 104 evolutionism 62; persistence of 40-1,46,49,58,150,176.178,
179,180,209,219 exceptionalism 217 excuses 129
219 embarrassment 6,7,21,29,34,36, 47,49,58,60,64,65,142 endogamy, forms of 87 Engels, Friedrich 150 England 17 englobing 12, 140, 202 equilibrium model 8 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland 113
272
Fabian, Johannes 46,59-60, 178, 201, 228n, 233n, 238n factionalism 27 faith 161,165 Fallmerayer,Jakob Philipp 136,144,
146 familism 12, 60, 62, 63, 64, 112, 113-4; amoral 201
family 2,5,6, -118, 221-2; as source of metaphors 13,34,49,58,64, 66, 221; as value 60 Fardon, Richard 30, 225n Farnell, Brcnda 21,23,193 Faubion, James 226n,235n Feely-Harnik, Gillian 97 Feld, Steven 23 feminism 32, "148 Fentress, James 68 Ferguson, Charles A. 14, 227n Ferguson, Kathy E. 202 Fernandez, James W. 5,18,123, 238n fcud, -ing 76,82,118,120,122,148, 161, 236n; peace in, 150 fieldwork See ethnography filotimo 195 Finland 18 Fletcher, Sheila 202 folklore 24,56,59,90,95,108,136,
137,176-7 food 134,209 Forge, Anthony 94 formalism 16 Fortes, Meyer 234n Foster, George M. 201 Foster, Robert]. 55,68 Foucault, Michel 105,108 France 9,14,16,207 Franco, Francisco, and the franquistas
64,176 Freedberg, David 28 Friedl, Ernestine 17, 195 friendship, 6, 66; eternal 171 functionalism 178; European 212; indigenous ISO furberia 9 Furth, Charlotte 15,27 Gable, Eric 12, 228n Gajek, Esther 104 Galaty,John G. 79 Galicia (Spain) 12 Gambetta, Diego 174, 237n Geertz, Clifford 117,129 Gcfou-Madianou, Dimitra 112, 234n Gelles, Paul 15 gender 15,20,21,30,37,58-9,170,
192,197,199,202,212 genos See yenos genuineness 124 Gellner, Ernest 6,10,11,16,29, 236n genealogy 64
genocide 213 Georgakas, Dan 229n George, Kelllleth M. 239n Germany 57,104,203,215, 23tn; East (former GDR) 57, 61; intellectual traditions of, 145 geshlre 23,24 Gewertz, Deborah E. 29 ghrouZQllzia 87,156, 23Gn Giannuli, Dimitra 19-20 Giddens,Anthony 58,151,174,179, 203, 2280, 23 8n Gilman, Albert 208 Gilsenan, Michael 23,82,84,174 Glaeser, Andreas 231n globalism and globalization 4,51,65 Gluckman, Max 150 Goffman, Erving 191,203 Goldschlager, Alain 75 Goldstein, Leon J. 100,2320,2330, 238n Gombrich, Ernst H. 97,189 Goody, Jack 188 Gorfain, Phyllis 12 gossip 37,128,139,171,221 Gramsci, Antonio 146, 239n_ Greece and Greeks ix, xi, 12, 13,14, 16,17,18,19-20,22,24,33,34, 37,41,42,46,49,50,52,53-4, 57,61,65,66-7;69,74,76, 78-9,80,81,82,98,111,112-3,
116,120,122-4,129-30,132, 133-6,193,196,197,203,215, 2350; ancient, 102, 136, 139, 140, 141, 144, 145, 146, 226n, 227n, 232n; and as source of Europe 19,33,51,65,215 See also Athens; Crete; Dodecanese; Nisiros; Rhodes Greenwood, Davydd J. 18 Grillo, Ralph 107 Gudeman, Stephen 2290 Gupta, Akhil 8 Gutmann, Matthew C. 227n Gypsies See Roma Hadjidimitriou, Konstantinos 143-4 Halpern, Joel M. 57 Hamilakis, Yannis 22 Hanunel, Eugene A. 121 Hamnett, Ian 233n . hand {as symbolic instrument} 156,
160,171,172 Handelman, Don 12,202,203, 239n
273
Cultural Intimacy Handler, Richard U, 27, 49, 100, 190, 225n, 228n, 232n Hannerz, Ul£ 189 Hanson, E Allan 104 Harris, Roy 188 Hart, Janet 12 Hart, Keith 237n Hatfields and McCoys 122, 148 lL'lusmann, Baron 69 Hawkes, Terence 75 Hayden, Robert M. 215 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 207 hegemony 146,202,203,226-7n Hellas, Hellenes, and Hellenism 16, 83,130,137,139,140,144, 227n, 229n, 231n heritage 49, 141 Heyman, Josiah McC. 226n Hill, Jane H. 177 Hill, Jonathan D. 13, 97 I-lirschon, Renee 217, 234n historic conservation 12, 64, 69, 222, 231n history 83; contested 12, 16, 53, 64, 131,144; essentialized 131; national 22, 53, 129 Hobsbawm, Eric 10,11,204-5 Hochschild, Arlie 7, 132 Hodgen, Margaret T. 105 Holden, David 136 holism 23 homclcssness 70 homogeneity 2,11,22,29,32;64, 95,104,110,136 honor 8,90,171; crimes of 135; nationalS; word of 173, 176 Horn, David G. 226n hospitality 31,36,45,84,120,135, 149,159,179 humanity (as moral attribute) 164, 176,197 human rights 214; discourses 213 Hlmgary 120 Huntington, Samuel P. 131,138, 233n Hussein, King, of Jordan 12 iconicity 28,29,30,32,33,59,60, 93-110, 153, 184, 196,222; of critique 187 Iconoclasts 228n iconography 29,78; folk 108 Ida, Mount (Crete) 205 ideology 2,5,6,7,8,10,11,15,16, 20,29,30,31,57,91,95,101, 103,104,107,108,114,139,
274
Index L42, 150, 190,220,221, 231n; class 18; hegemonic 134, 142-3; linguistic -113; Romantic 75 See also nationalism images, uses of in international politics 133-4 irrunigration 66 imperialism 100; ancient 139; cultural 213 incest 156, 168 indexicality 7,29,30,60 India 67 indirect rule 190 individual, -ism ix, 9, 29, 49, 86, 107,148,179,196 Indonesia 48,62,63 inequality 15,170,190,197-8 infanticide UO inheritance 141-2, 166 insults 70-1,76, 168 Internet 4 interpellation 30 interpreters 11, 12,214 intimacy 13,29,31; cultural x, 3, 4, 6,8,9,11,14,20,25,26,33,36, 40,41,44,47,50,51,52,55,56, 58,60,65,68,83,84,85,90, 115,128,132,150,157,173, 221,222, 224,239n; and colonialism 67; and consequences of breaching 131, 137, 212-3; and contingency 42; and critiques of the model of 44-5; and defense of 65, 109; and discourse of 53-4; and ethics 11-2; and insults 70-1; and interpreters 214; and traditionalism 64; and varieties of 45; and in relation to social poetics 65-6; "dark" 50, 53; epistemological 43; national 225n; professional 178, 220, 223; social 3, 16, 17, 44, 58, 84, 128, 160,216 Iran 235n Ireland 81; Northern 112 irony 5,14,15,16,21,31,53,54, 83, 197, 198, 207, 228n Islam and Muslims 18,20,60,64, 70,78, 81, 118, 134, 148, 235n Israel 12,113; Arabs in, 81 haly xi, 9, 17,41,42,44,52,60,61, 65,68,98,106,107,108,112, 219, 229n, 230n, 231n See also Rome Iteso 106
Jackson, Jean E. 27,59,180 Jackson, Michael 239n Jakobson, Roman 22,187,191,197, 203, 239n Japan 43,67 Jehovah's Witnesses 114 Jervis, Robert 133 Jews and Judaism 3, 13, 81, 120, 123 Joseph, Brian D. 89 journalism 208 Just, Roger 111,121 Kamcnctsky, Christa 104 Kapferer, Bruce 120,148,149, 225n Karakasidou, Anastasia 138, 144, 229n Kargakos, Sarandos 229n Karp, Ivan 106, 238n Kazantzakis, Nikos 135 Keane,~ebb 47,48 ken 89-90 Kemalism 18 Kendon, Adam 21 Kenna, Margaret E. 24, 227n Kenya 106 Kharalambis, Dimitrios 123, 235n Kideckel, David A. 57 kinship 2,5,7,12,13,32,54,63, 64,112,115,118,120,122, 132-3,2250, 226n; appropriated by the state 76; spiritual 155, 156, 159, 236n Kiossev, Alexander 50-1,52-4,55, 56,57,175 kleftes, kleftomia 31,158 Kleirunan, Arthur M. 21 Kligman, Gail 19,120,121 Konstantinov, Yulian 54 Koraes, Adamantios 76 Koutsovlachs 80; culture of 216 Kozyris, P. John, 136-43, 216 Kuper, Adam 116, 238n Kyriakides, Stilpon P. 101 lagging emulation 17 Lamaison, P. 174 language 22,88,132,134,140, 187-8,190; attitudes to 82; dialects of 145,205, 230n; learning of 11; materiality of 48, 220; models based on and derived from 189-90; registers of 14,76; used to distinguish animals from their meat, 17; Vico on 26 Lares (journal) 107
law 1,2,4,8,9,32,87,88,97,123, 142, 143, 198; and definition 89; courts 14, 161, 172, 173, 184, 2360; defiance of 148, 216-7; history of 1.37, 139; interpretations of 55; protection from 155; respect for 216; violations of 36, 54; -s 47 Lawson, Anna 12, 228n Lawson, John Cuthbert 101 Leach, Edmuud R. 45 Lebanon 12, 82 Legg, Keith R. 123 Lehmann, W.P. 98 Levi-Strauss, Claude 75,97,109, 178, 236n Levy-BmW, Lucien 117 Li, Tanya 62, 63 Li Causi, Luciano 113 limited good 20-1 Lincoln, Brucc 228n Linke, Uli 122 Linnekin, Jocelyn 232n literalism 73,75,77; 95, 105, 114, 117, 125, 232n literality 184 Lloyd, G.E.R. 115-7,129,184, 229n localism 65,107,111,124; of bureaucrats and politicians, 130 Loizos, Peter 118, 227n, 233n, 237n Lotman, Iurii M. 227n Luhrmann, T.M. 67, 231n Macedonia 13,109,141; -ns 35, 114,119,124,125,131,144, 145, 216, 229n machismo 31 Mackridgc, Petcr 123 Maddox, Richard 45,50,64 Madrid 52 mafia 17,60; movement against 9 Maine, Henry 150 Malaby, Thomas M. 55, 174 Malarney, Sha un Kingsley 2300 Malawi 4 Malinowski, Bronislaw 178 Malta 60, 106 Mani 76 Maori 13,27,29 Marcus, George E. 233n, 238n, 239n marginality, -ization 36.55,60, 67, 80,130,141,144,148,149,204 markedfurunarked 197 Marxism 11,231n Masada 12
275
T
I I
Cultural Intimacy masculinity 23,58,65,118,120, 148,153,156,164,168-70,193, 205,206, 237n mass media, -tion 44 mateship 120,148,149 Mauss, Marcel 8,58,150,164,168, 176,177,180 Mbemhe, Achille 3,25, 227n McDonald, Maryon 141 Mead, Margaret 212 meaning 80,188; contrasted theories of 89 mediation, necessity of 172 Meeker, Michael E. 79 Megas, Geocgios A. 108 Men (deity) 106 mentality 115, 132, 184, 213 meraki 90 Mercouri, Melina 215 mereness See significance, politics of metaphor 4,5,12,13,20,22,25,34, 58,102,103, IDS, 109, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 123, 124, 125,132,156,174,184,192, 215,221, 226n, 229n; denied 77; dramaturgical 191 Metaxas, loannis -155 metonymy 5,7,29,117,133 Miao 58 Michas, Takis 216 Mikrolltsikos, Thanos 140 militant middle ground 26,37,38, 40,47,91,151,180,188, 211-24 militias (in USA) 22,61,147 Miuicuci, Maria 229n Minoans 205 minorities 3,12,28,35,58,78, IDS, 114, lIS, 119, 120, 122-3,124, 125,130,131,136,139,140, 142,143,203,212-3,214; languages of 215; religious, 234n Mintz, Jerome R. 12, 176 misrecognition 179,220 Mitchell, Jon 60, 66 Miyazaki, Hirokazu 55 modernism and modernity 23,49, 59,62,136,137,141,145,148, 174, 179,220; as corrupting 177, 212; contested 63; stereotype of 7,56,58 monasticism and monks 153,158-9, 172,174 money 8,29,176,212 Moore, Sally Falk 21
276
moralism and morality 8,9,12,17, 20,21,22,23,71,76,78,79,81, 82,84,85,86,128,149,153-4, 155,167,181,202; Enlightenment models of 123; essentialized 90; in scholarship, 211,219, 233n; political 206-7; religious compared to social 172-3; terminology of 87-8 Moravia 190 Morison, Stanley 103 Morris, Rosalind 229n mortality See contingency Moss, David 107 mourning 24 multiculturalism 51, 120 museum, -s 212; -ification 63 music 18,23,209,215, 227n; "grammars of" 189; iconicity in 28 Mussolini, Benito 70, 107 mutuality 149,153 myth 75,106; falsely distinguished from history 97 Nadel-Klein, Jane 18,66,107 Nakoll, Lilika 135 names 7,13,21, 227n; national 46, 52,80 national dlaracter (concept) ix, 7, 29, 79,107,116,138,146,196 nationalism ix, 1,3,5,6,10,11,15, 16,22,28,29,30,35,58,65,66, 75,78,79,80,87,99,101,102, 105,107,108,111,113,117, 123,130,132,134,148, ISO, 151, 199,202,220, 222,229n, 234n; and anthropology 7, 201, 218; and binarism 19,45; and historiography 24, 31; culhlfal 14; ethno-121, 125, 229n, 233n; scholarly 228n nation-state, -s ix, 1-2, 6, 10, 13, 16, 21,32,47,53,54,85,95,128, 176-7,190,211,212-3,218, 221; establishment of in the Balkans, SO; ethnography of 34 Native Americans 16 naturalization (of cultural and political phenomena) 28,73,75,78 Nazism 95,104,144,203,2310 'ndrangheta 65 Needham, Rodney 237n, 237n, 23Sn neoclassicism 19 Nepal 67 nepotism 62,231n
Index Never on Sunday (film) 135 New Zealand 13,27,29 Nisbet, Robert A. 233n Nisiros 83 Norman, Karin 21,202, 228-9n nostalgia 7,8,18,59,64,72, 228n; folkloric 45, 47; imperialist 45; practical 45; structural 22, 36, 40,41,57,67,68,95,128, 147-82, 222, 228n, 236n, 237n; and definition of 149, 180; and in anthropological practice 212; Yugo-,57 Nuer 133, 225n, 2260 Nugent, Stephen 239n oaths 61,151,153,156-61,166, 170,171,172,175 See also perjury objectification 48,49, 66, 68, 72, 230n occidentalism 30,218, 234n; practical 69 officialdom 4,8,10,12,148,218; collusion of 54, 62-3 See also bureaucracy Okely, Judith 201 Ong, Walter J. 188 opening (symbolic act) 217 order 62,69,75; cultural and natural 105; in conflict with experience 155; moral 71 ordinariness, as coocpetual problem 191 orientalism 8, IS, 30, 115, 134, 135, 218; practical 69, 134, 203, 207 Orlove, Benjamin S. 17 Orta, Andrew 59,64 Ortner, Sherry 151 Ostalgie 57 Ozyurek, Esra 58,64, 231n Palenque 102 Palestinians 113 Panourgia, E. Neni K. 221-2 Paparrhegopoulos, Konstantinos 140,235n Papataxiarchis, Evthymios 226n, 227n Papua New Guinea 29,55,68,211 parallelism 187 Paris 69; emulation of by Bangkok authorities 63,70 Parmentier, Richard 2280 Parsi conmmnity 67
paternalism 127,2260 patriarchy 57-8,64 patrilinearity 76,77,112,115,118, 121,133,134, ISS, 185,206, 225n,2260 patriotism 61,79,83,85,91,216, 217 patronage 32,55,63.130,142, ISS, 173,204,206; divine. 154-5 peasantry as image 204 Pedroso de Lima, Antonia 2390 Peirce, Charles Sanders 100,108, 222,2280 Pels, Peter 3,190,22511 performance 21,24,31,48,49,72. 100, 170, 184, 193-4, 198,203, 218; pecformative nOll- 32 performativity 55,75,183,190,208 Peristiany. J.G. 116 pequry 156,159,161,163,165, 167,169, 172; of wrongly claiming responsibility 167; implication of dIe victim in the sin of 165; supernatural sanctions against 160, 162 personhood 13 See also self Petropulos, John A. 235n pidginization 190 pilgrimage 25, 228n plaza as model of public sphere 216 poetic function 187.191 poetry 22; contrasted to poetics 23, 186-7,191 police 10,31,36,54,78,142,153, 155,160,164,177,206 politeness 7 politics, international 212-3; local 204-6; national 227n politicians 9,12,25,32,36,55,63, 71,81,124,130,142, "155, 170, 173 Pollis,Adamantia 114,123,124, 137,139-40,141,143 Porn Mahakan 63,214 populism 22 Portugal 18,57, 67 positivism 23,26,39,48,49, 188, 195, 229u; legal 139, 145 postcolonial states 3,25,40,51,56, 66,71; and theory ~9, 67. 68, 219,220 postmodernism 39 power 3, IS. 25, 27, 50, 74, 130, 202,203,208; of state 20, 54;
277
1 Index
Cultural Intimacy absolute, in relation to abstraction 43; etymology of 72 practice 29,30,31,69,155,179, 185,189,201-9 Prague School 187 Preziosi, Donald 105 primordialism 22 privacy x, 14, 21, 90, 133 pronatalism 122 pronouns of power and solidarity 208 Psomiades, H.]. 235n public spheres 44 purity 8,22,35,36,62,64,88,150, 152; and pollution 62, 70, IDS, 108, 134, 156, 162, 231n; «racial" 95, 115, 145, 148,205 Rabin, Yitzhak 13 Rabinow, Paul 43,67,69, 226n racism 57,96,145,148,178,201, 209 Raj, Dhoolcka S. 66 rape (wartime) 120 rationalism, rationality 7,43,128, 129,131,138,141,148,184, 233n,238n Rattanakosin Island 232n Reagan, Ronald 9 reciprocity 8,149,150,151,155, 156,171,177,180,212; absence of 194; negative 159, 169; of suspicion 164 Reed. Susan A. 56 Reed-Danahay, Deborah E. 227n, 230n,237-8n reflexivity 39,41,48,180,203,212 refraction 157,171-2,173 reification 1,5,10,25,26,27,47, 49,50,73,74,79,91,99,184, 191; induced by census 119; self48,66, 85, 115, 117,230n;theoretical227n reproduction 28 resistance 13,31,56,203,208, 226n, 230n responsibility See accOlmtability Rethemnos (Rethimno) 161,204, 207 rhetoric 2,4,5,12,15,16,22,25, 34,35,76,81,90,141,183-5, 186,189,198,206,215,216, 218, 238n, 239n Rhodes 77,86-7,88,89,193,198 Richards, LA. 102
278
Rockwell, Norman 18 Rogers, Susan Carol 204 Rohatynskyj, Marta 61 Roma 81, 120,201 Romanesco 230n Romania, -ns 17,18-9,43,52,80, 120,121 romanita 52 romanticism, practical 207 Rome 52, 70, 230n, 232n; ancient 106; dialect of, 230n Romii 16, 227n, 229n, 231n Rosaldo, Michelle Z. 188 Rosaldo, Renato 45,178 Roseman, Sharon 12 Royce, Anya Peterson 79, 115 rules 8 Russia 18,43,52,77, 136;-n Formalism 187 Safilios-Rothschild,Ioanna 135 Sahlins, Marshall 238n Said, Edward 30, 134 saints' powers 157,160-1,164,172 Salvador, EI 30 Samoa 212 Sapir,]. David 123,2380 Saudi Arabia 134 Saussure, Ferdinand de 75,98 scale 26 Schein, Louisa 58 Schein, Muriel Dimen 144 Schneider, David M. 122 Schneider, Jane 9, 17, 60 Schneider, Peter 9,17,60 Schwimmer, Eric 13,29 scientism 16,23,128,188,211 Scotland 18 Scott, James C. 25,41, 54, 61, 62, 207 script 103; -ism 188, 190 Sebeok, Thomas A. 100, "108 secrecy 61,62,158-9,170,216,217 secret schools 61 segmentation 77,88,112,133,157, 172, 185, 237n self 20; -hood x, 6, 230n; determination 13-4, 114, 115; -display 20, 196; -evidence 28, 32, 74, 96, 102,198; -interest 9, 86; -knowledge 16, 20; -recognition 6; -reification 48, 115, 230n; reliance 22; -sacrifice 6 See also personhood semiotic bricolage 25
semiotic consciousness 74 semiotic illusion 20,21,22,32,75, 84,108,153; social basis of 66 semiotics 187-8 separatism 124 Serbia 53 sex and sexuality 70-1,135 Sfakia 204-5 Shakers 18 Shalinksy, Audrey C. 80 Shapiro, Marianne 233n Shapiro, Michael 233n shifters 84,85,86,87; ethnic 78,79, 81,87 Shklovsky, Viktor 190 Shore, Cds 62,181, 229n, 239n Showalter, Elaine 202 Shryock, Andrew 44, 229N siblings as metaphor 13 sicilianislllo 17,60 Sicily 17,65 significance, politics of x, 11, 35, 128,129,223 silence 21 Simeone, William E. 106, 107 Simme1, Georg 194,196-7 simulacra 6,12 sin 163, 168, 176, 222; as basis of allegiance 36 Singapore 43 slang 191-2 Slavenkoff, Feneho 109 Slavic culture 216, 231n Smith, Gavin 28 Smith, Grafton Elliot 102 Soba, E.]. III sociablity, fabricated 7 social drama 24 social poetics x, 16, 21, 23, 26, 27, 46-7,181,187,217; critiques of 23; defined, 32, 37; exemplified 36; in relation to cultural intimacy 65-6; misconstrued 186; problems of identifying 192; uses of 40 social theory as symbolism 36 social worth 87,166 somatization 21 Sontag, Susan 48 South Africa 80 sovereignty "141 Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu 215 Spain 12,14,15,17,52,57,59,64, 65,67,81,112,176
speech act theory 188 See also Austin, j.L. Spicer, Edward H. 15,16,123 Spivak, Gayatri 32 spontaneity, performance of 49 Spourdalakis, Miehalis 235n Sri Lanka 56 Stacy R.H. 190 state 1,5,7,8,9,12,20,25,28,30, 50,58,62,63,79, 160, 225n; church and 36; reification of 9-10,25, 85; teleology of 61; Vico's treatise on 73 See also nation-state Stavros, Stephanos 234n Stephen, Lynn 30-1 Stewart, Charles 86,155,171,175, 237n Stewart, Susan 228n stereotypes 3,8,16,21,26,29,31, 33,35,47,49,97,141,178, 201-9; gender, 31, 37; irony of 84; performance of 48; ideological 57; racial 26 Stoeltje, Beverly 129 stranger 194,186-7 strategies,-y 9,59,171~175,203; essentialism as 27, 32, 75, 220; officializing 55 Strathern, Andrew 29 Strathern, Marilyn 229n structuralism 45-6, LSI, 178,219 structuration 151,187 structure 155,174,175; pure 8 Sutton, David E. 13 Sweden 228-9n symbolism 6,7,8,12,15,19,20,23, 25,27,35,36,65,70,84,149, 156, 217,221, 222,226n, 238n; materiality of 27-8, 220; natural 104; and order 54; of sound 89; official 219; shared 121; and by outlaws with state, 149 Symonds, Richard 100 tactics 32,199,203,207 Taiwan 51,55 Talbott, Strobe 131 Tambiah, Stanley]. 43,70, 114, 125, 129, 2330, 238n taxonomy See classification teleology 61, 230n territoriality 13, 117, 124
279
Cultural Tntimacy Thailand xi, 41, 42, 43, 44, 63, 67, 68,219, 231n, 232n See also Bangkok 'I'hatcher, Margaret 9,29 theodicy, practical 176; and secular 4, 154,228n Thirasant'Mann 231n Thompson, Maurice 144 Thongchai Winichakul 71 time 22, 151-2, 175; corrosion by 222; cyclical 68; strategic mastery of 169, 171 timi 171,237n Tinos 25, 228n tourism 5,7,18,116,207,217 town-planning 69 tradition 49,199; contested 63; invention of 10,12,204-5,214; management of 44; -alism 49, 56,
58-9,60,204 Transylvania 120 Traweek, Sharon 226n tribalism -68 trust 36,153,161,165,170,174-5, 237n; brcakdown of 171-2 'Isitsipis, Loukas 119 Tsoucalas, Constantine 123 Torino, Thomas 227n Turkey and Turks 13, 16, 18, 19,43, 57,58, 60, 64, 76, 82, 83, 87, 114, 122, 133, 136, 153, 168, 2260, 228n; as cultural source 15, 74,121,145,216; ethnic as opposed to national 78, 124 Tmks 35,114 Turner, Victor 24,187 Tziovas, Dimitris 49 United Kingdom 98-9,2350; universities in, 100, 197 United States of America 7,12,17, 21,22,43,50,61,81,122,130,
137,147-8,181,191-2,196, 197,201, 226n, 235n Urla, Jacqueline 14, 138 use 211 Uspenskii, Boris A. 227n Uzbeks 81 Van Dyck,Karen 54 van Mcijl, Toon 27
280
value: global hierarchy of 46, 51, 56, 217,220; -s, Asian 43,70 See also moralism and morality Venezuela 13 Venize1os, Eleftherios 81 verbality 21 Verdcry, Katherine 19,226n Vernier, Bernard 227n Vico, Giambattista 26,43, 72, 73, 91,98,99, 125, 233n Vidal, Denis 23 Vietnam 4 vohmtarism 9 Wace, A,JB. 144 Wade, Petcr 228n Wakueoai 13,32,54 Wallis, Mieczyslaw 99,103 Wallman, Sandra 228n war 5; cold 56-7, 101, 201; of Independence, Greek 31,53,61,111,
153 Watson, Rubie S, 225n Waugh, Linda 187,197 Werbner, Pnina 66 West 8,19-20,42,46,47,52,53, 56,57,66,68,72,128,131,184, 219, 239n; complexity of 67; opposition to 19, 230n Wickham, Chris 68 Wilk,BUchard 129 Wilkinson, Henry Robert 2270 Williamsburg, Colonial 12 Willis, Roy 232n Wilson, William A, 18 woman, women 20,31, 198-9; ~ hood, poetics of 227n; on oath
170 Woranuch Charungrattanapong 231n work-to-rule 54 Wright, Susan 229n Yalomi, Eleana 22 yenos, ycnia 76, 77, 121, 133 Yugoslavia, former Federation of
120,121,215 Zabusky, Stacia E. 226n Zahariadis, Nikolaos 138 Zambe1ios, Spiridon 235n Zorba the Greek (film) 135
