Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage

The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures

by Michael Herzfeld

In Subversive Archaism , Michael Herzfeld explores how individuals and communities living at the margins of the modern nation-state use nationalist discourses of tradition to challenge state authority under both democratic and authoritarian governments. Through close attention to the claims and experiences of mountain shepherds in Greece and urban slum dwellers in Thailand, Herzfeld shows how these subversive archaists draw on national histories and past polities to claim legitimacy for their defiance of bureaucratic authority. Although vilified by government authorities as remote, primitive, or dangerous—often as preemptive justification for violent repression—these groups are not revolutionaries and do not reject national identity, but they do question the equation of state and nation. Herzfeld explores the political strengths and vulnerabilities of their deployment of heritage and the weaknesses they expose in the bureaucratic and ethnonational state in an era of accelerated globalization.

256 pages, Hardcover

Published January 25, 2022

About the author

Michael Herzfeld was educated at the Universities of Cambridge (B.A. in Archaeology and Anthropology, 1969), Athens (non-degree program in Greek Folklore, 1969-70), Birmingham (M.A., Modern Greek Studies, 1972; D.Litt., 1989); and Oxford (Social Anthropology, D.Phil., 1976). Before moving to Harvard, he taught at Vassar College (1978-80) and Indiana University (1980-91) (where he served as Associate Chair of the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies, 1980-85, and as Chair of the Department of Anthropology, 1987-90). Lord Simon Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester in 1994, he has also taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (1995), Paris, at the Università di Padova (1992), the Università di Roma “La Sapienza” (1999-2000), and the University of Melbourne (intermittently since 2004), and has held a visiting research appointments at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney (1985), at the University of Adelaide, and at the Université de Paris-X (Nanterre) (1991).

Major lectures include the inaugural Distinguished Lecture in European Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1996), the Munro Lecture at the University of Edinburgh (1997), the Journal of Anthropological Research Distinguished Lecture at the University of New Mexico (2001), the Einaudi Lecture at Cornell University (2004), the keynote address to the Association of Social Anthropologists of the British Commonwealth (2008), three lectures hosted by the Korea Research Foundation (2009), the Kimon Friar Lecture (Deree College, Athens, 2009), and the Eilert Sundt Lecture (University of Oslo, 2009).

His D.Litt. was awarded for a series of publications, including books and articles, that have set out his understanding of the processes at work in cultural identity construction in modern Greece.

A past president of both the Modern Greek Studies Association and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, he was editor of American Ethnologist during 1994-98 and is now Editor at Large with specific responsibility for the feature "Polyglot Perspectives" in Anthropological Quarterly; he serves on numerous other editorial boards and is currently co-editor of “New Anthropologies of Europe” (Indiana University Press).

Reviews

[Iqra Shagufta Cheema · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compelling book with an internationalist approach. It takes an ordinary phenomenon, people using tradition to protest and subvert oppressive entities, and theorizes it to provide a convincing perspective on archaism. I expected it to be prohibitively dense but it was an easy read.