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Contents
;i-
Acknowledgments
page xi
Introduction
Anthony Pagden
1
33
Anthony Pagden
2
55
J. G. A. Pocock
3
72
91
Hans W. Blom
5
116
Biancamaria Fontana
6
129
Wilfried Nippel
7
139
M ichael Herzfeld
8
171
Luisa Passerini
ix
191
Contents
10
209
Talal Asad
11
228
Philip Ruttley
12
260
Elie Cohen
13
287
317
331
Jam es Tully
Contributors
Index
359
363
Acknowledgments
The idea for this book originated with an invitation from James Morris, at
that time with the Woodrow Wilson Center, to present the first in a series
of public lectures on the idea of Europe. What have subsequently become
the chapters by J. G. A. Pocock, James Tully, and Biancamaria Fontana all
began as lectures in the same series. I would like to thank James Morris
not only for this initiative but also for organizing and hosting a conference
at the Center that brought together a number of the other contributors to
discuss the future shape and direction of the volume. This was sponsored
with the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the
United States Federal Conference Fund. I owe a special debt of gratitude
to Susan Nugent who has been a constant source of assistance in any
number of ways during the long and often torturqus period of the books
gestation, to Joe Brinley for all his patience and encouragement, and to
Patricia Katayama and Barbara de Boinville for their care in preparing the
text for publication. Two anonymous readers for Cambridge University
Press made a number of suggestions that have greatly helped to improve
the volume. Finally, I would like to thank Jose Maria Hernandez for his
friendship and for having reminded me of the presence of the smaller
nations in Europe, and Giulia Sissa, another good European, who has
influenced greatly what I think on this, and many other topics, and who
has saved me from innumerable errors.
Anthony Pagden
7
The European Self: Rethinking an Attitude
M IC H A E L H E R Z F E L D
139
140
M ic h a e l H e r z f e l d
141
142
M ic h a e l H e r z f e l d
TH E M EN TALITY TRAP
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M ic h a e l H e r z f e l d
17 See my article It Takes One to Know One: Collective Resentment and Mutual Recog
nition among Greeks in Local and Global Contexts, in Richard Fardon, ed., Coun
terworks: Managing the Diversity o f Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1995), 124-42;
and The Aesthetics of Individualism: Artisanship, Business, and the State in Greece
(paper presented at .the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association,
Washington, D.C., 1997). The research for these papers was,funded by the National
Science Foundation (award # 9307421).
T he European S elf
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146
M ic h a e l H e r z f e l d
147
148
M ic h a e l H e r z f e l d
149
in the 1960s to the more recent analyses of George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson, the equation of literalness with European industrial rationality
persists.35
Yet it has also been attacked at its very roots, in a remarkable reexam
ination of the ancient roots through which European rationalism usually
seeks legitimation. The Classicist G. E. R. Lloyd critically addresses the
concept of mentalite in European thought. He suggests that the distinc
tion between a rational European us and a prelogical, alien them
(which reached its apogee in the writings of Lucien Levy-Bruhl) has its
origins in the litigious practices of the ancient Athenian marketplace.
There, in a fashion not unfamiliar in an election year in modern industrial
democracies, contestants called their own arguments literal and dismissed
those of their opponents as mere metaphor.36
The genius of Lloyds insight is that it shows historically how ideas
can take on the force of logical abstraction even though or perhaps
because they are grounded in the social environments that their expo
nents seek to govern. We live in a world in which our own forebears have
shaped relations of power that invest the contingent with the force of
eternal verity. Those who resist are often silenced. I find it revealing that
in Bertrand Russells magisterial History o f Western Philosophy, a work
whose hero is surely Rene Descartes, Descartess gadfly Giambattista Vico
does not even rate an entry in the index.37
The Cartesian agenda was adopted as the touchstone of differentiation
between colonizing Europeans and colonized natives. Moreover, as a
motivating and shaping force in the construction of the colonial habi
tus, it reinforced the self-fulfilling properties of this stereotypical division.
Paul Rabinow has shown how the march of colonial building in French
Morocco adopted Cartesian principles of town planning in contrast to the
native mode of architecture. He has also pointed out the engagement
of social theorists of the Annee sociologique school in this programa
salutary warning of the ever-lurking risk of cooptation.38 Note that these
theorists were founders of the sociocentric tradition that Cohen attacks
in his formulation of personal nationalism.
35 Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1962); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
36 Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les societes inferieures (Paris: F. Al
can, 1910); G. E. R. Lloyd, Demystifying Mentalities (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990).
37 Bertrand Russell, History o f Western philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945).
38 Paul Rabinow, French M odem : Norms and Forms o f the Social Environment (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
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152
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44 As is, for example, official teleology. See Shaun Kingsley Malarney, The Limits of State
Functionalism and the Reconstruction of Funerary Ritual in Contemporary Northern
Vietnam, American Ethnologist 23 (1996): 540-60.
45 See Michael Herzfeld, Portrait o f a Greek Imagination: An Ethnographic Biography o f
Andreas Nenedakis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 84.
46 Handley Nationalism and the Politics o f Culture-, Macpherson, Political Theory o f
Possessive Individualism.
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they had deduced from the master narrative of Western philosophy, by the
Western powers themselves.55 While the Greek leaders saw this develop
ment as a claim on European identity, it provides the historical backdrop
agaihst which they learned to suppress internal self-assertion by local and
minority populations by insisting on the illegality of rebellion but also
of minoritarian politics.56 In other words, the European individualism
and love of freedom entailed in the genesis of the nation-state became
oriental or Turkish whenever it appeared as subsequent rebellion,
cultural or political, from within. To the extent that the Greek leader
ship could assume a European mantle, it could also deny the European
claims of those who dared disobey its dictates at home.
But there is another side to this proactive stance. Because it entails
starfding up to those who would dub the Greeks as fatalists, thereby dis
proving the charge, it entails actionsfrom the recasting of folklore to
uncooperative acts in international councilsthat serve to confirm the
negative aspects o f this Greek individualism for,those who wish to force
the country into compliance. At the height of the Macedonian crisis, an
article in the Athens daily Eleftherotipia demanded an end to such self
confirming hegemony: Since, dear friends and allies, the greatest news
papers of England, the U.S.A., but also of France and Germany have used
ad nauseam negative adjectives to dub our tactic on the Skopje issue as
unjustified (!), very often calling our policy by the Greek-derived words
paranoic, hysteric, myopic, we reply to you that when you discover and
incorporate into the vocabulary of your languages words that render the
sense of the Greek words paranoic, hysteric, and myopic, then you will
be able to understand even our curious sensitivity on the matter of the
name of Skopje.57 As a proactive response to international bullying, this
may have made fine copy at home. But it is because Greece is a country
55 Handler, Nationalism. The folklorists evidently saw their interventions in the content of
texts as a reassertion of agency in the face of Western overlordship. By adhering to the
classicizing conventions of the protectorate powers, however, they found themselves
caught in the usual traps of hegemony. If they failed to adhere to this line, they were
condemned as unpatriotic or un-European.
56 See Adamantia Pollis, Greek National Identity: Religious Minorities, Rights, and
European Norms, Journal o f M odem Greek Studies 10 (1992): 171-95; Stephanos
Stavros, The Legal Status of Minorities in Greece Today: The Adequacy of their Pro
tection in the Light of Current Human Rights Perceptions, Journal o f Modern Greek
Studies 13 (1995): 1-32.
57 Sakis Lefas, I Skopiani, i eteri mas, ki i istoria mas, Eleftherotipia, March 2 ,1 9 9 4 ,46.
This is an example of what A. J. B. Wace and M. S. Thompson called political philology.
See Wace and Thompson, The Nomads o f the Balkans (London: Methuen, 1914), 9.
See also Michael Herzfeld, Political Philology: Everyday Consequences of Grandiose
Grammars, Anthropological Linguistics 39 (1997): 351-75.
15 7
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M ic h a e l H e r z f e l d
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reputation, that one meets among shepherds and farmers. The ideology
that views the countryside as the repository of the national quintessence,
representative as it is of a larger pattern'of West European romanticism,62
does not happily face the key consequence of that pedigree: Greek moder
nity may in some respects be radically different from the very models in
Western Europe with which its advocates most eagerly claim kinship.
In one sense the eghoismos of the rural population is a form of con
formity. As the driving force of social contest, it can be and often is
assimilated to a capitalist ethos of competition.63 Competition differen
tiates individuals only insofar as it lures them with the promise of distinc
tion; the fact that they are competing to acquire a commonly esteemed
advantage belies the distinctiveness of their respective motives. And the
modernist claim to despise such games, which we might expect to be
unique to the modern sphere as Anthony Giddens has described it, or
indeed as some ethnographers have found for its historical emergence
(for example, Jane Collier for Andalusia), has its roots in the contemptu
ous pride of rural actors.64 While the urban Greek intellectual may today
dispose of much greater ranges of choice and self-determination, there
is nevertheless an identifiable continuity with modes of action more dra
matically described in the ethnographies of rural society. Indeed, Renee
Hirschon has made the extremely important point that the social and sym
bolic organization of domestic space the physical habitus , as it were
shows this continuity clearly. In more recent work she has also shown how
the transmission of agonistic modes of action is much the same among
urbanites as among rural dwellers.65 That perception is consistent with
the persistence of ideas about causation and responsibility, in forms dis
tinctive to the Greek society, within that most modernist of projects, the
national bureaucracy.66
62 See, variously, Malcolm Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture (London:
Croom Helm, 1978); George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and
Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985); Nadel-Klein,
Reweaving the Fringe; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto
andWindus, 1973).
63 In a mountain village on Crete, I was told that eghoismos produced beneficial effects
when it led to competitive commercial success, as in the extraordinary proliferation of
coffeehouses.
64 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Jane Fishburne Colliet, From Duty to Desire:
Remaking Families in a Spanish Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
65 Renee Hirschon, Heirs o f the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life o f Asia Minor Refugees
in Piraeus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Greek Adults Play, or, How to Train for
Caution, Journal o f Modern Greek Studies 10 (1992): 35-56.
66 See my Social Production o f Indifference, esp. 122-3.
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61 See Juliet du Boulay, Portrait o f a Greek Mountain Village (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1974), in which we find the expression etsi to vrtkame (thats- how we found it) in
voked by villagers to account for customs they may have fearedalthough she does
not raise this issueit might strike the visiting anthropologist as primitive or otherwise
undesirable.
68 This paper was eventually published as When Exceptions Define the Rules: Greek Bap
tismal Names and the Negotiation of Identity, Journal o f Anthropological Research 38
(1982): 288-302.
69 On one occasion I was criticized for my Greek by a Greek-born copy editor in the United
States who failed to realize that the texts in question were in Cretan dialect.
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Thus far I have examined a structural relationship between self and society.
I hgve suggested that it exhibits a high degree of internal flexibility. But
that flexibility is not well described by simply reducing it to the level of
individualism permitted by an otherwise determining social conformity.
We do not thereby satisfactorily answer the questions of how such ideolo
gies are actually maintained, how they interact with the new circumstances
of class and globalization, or how they are inculcated at the level of daily
action. To answer these questions, I turn to a somewhat different line of
argument.
This approach is perhaps best exemplified by the idea of crafting
selves described by Dorinne Kondo in her study of Japanese artisans and
their self-fashioning.80 Kondo shows that the artisans see in the products
of their labor models of their idealized collective selves (although the point
is rather submerged in her account). Among Greek (especially Cretan)
artisans, I have found an immediate formal analog: differentiation among
artifacts reproduces individualism among artisans. The political leader
ship both hails this .as an expression of the European quintessence and
excoriates it as resistance to modernity. The artisans, for their part, both
boast of their disgust with homogenization and self-critically lament
the difficulty of achieving standardization, a term that acquires nega
tive reverberations only in the soundbox of intellectual debate, whence it
returns to everyday speech and further complicates the picture.
Sjuch questions are not usefully addressed in terms of resistance,
except in the sense that acts of resistance may confirm the marginalization
of those who engage in them and claim them as evidence of moral purity
(which, in the European context, is often equated with political weak
ness).81 As Debbora Battaglia has rightly insisted, self-makingwhich
75 See David E. Sutton, Local Names, Foreign Claims: Family Inheritance and National
Heritage on a Greek Island, American Ethnologist 24 (1997): 415-37.
80 Dorinne K. Kondo, Crafting Selves: tow er, Gender, and Discourses o f Identity in a
Japanese Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
81 This must be understood contextually: moral purity is claimed as a compensation for po
litical margiriality. This is the process that Edwin Ardener identified as englobing (that
is, of the politically stronger by the politically weaker); see his The Problem Revisited,
in Shirley Ardener, ed., Perceiving Women (London: J. M. Dent, 1975), 19-27.
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167
mentality? Is this another exoticizing device, relegating the preRevolutionary French working classes to something analogous to LevyBruhls prelogicaLmentality? Is the concern with honor a sign of some
collective inability to distinguish between symbolic and literal-forms of
truth, as we might infer by applying Lloyds reading ofthe mentalite concept ?
Once we recognize that almost everything that has been classed-as
honor has less to do with adherence to a structural code than with
meeting expectations, we can see that the whole game of reputation pol
itics is a matter of social calculation and strategy. The strategy that leads
social actors to capitalize on tradition is in that sense continuous with
what it mimics, for what we call honor is a calculating claim to lineage, to
a past, to history. If today the expectations one must meet are manufac
tured through media representation, that suggests that tradition plays
the role once accorded by anthropologists, in rural contexts in southern
Europe, to honor. Tradition is the collective representation of an expected
conformity. In the European context its lack of homogeneity can be read as
the sign of a European individualism and as the mark of backwardness.
But such self-stereotyping is not uniform throughout Europe.
Post-Soviet Muscovites, for example, classify themselves as collective
people.87 Unless one wishes to view such pronouncements as proof of
the older stereotypesthat Slavs are collectivist and therefore not really
European88they should alert us to the dangers of conflation, much as
do differences in local usages so often lumped together as honor. In
both instances circularity leads to preemptive arguments that ill serve the
goals of analysis.
One important difficulty with historical attempts to explain collective
values, as Farr attempts to do for the seventeenth-century artisans, is
that such reconstructions most commonly are made in the absence of
much knowledge of the ways in which the objects artisans created were
locally understood as models of the self. Even in social anthropology,
scholars have begun to pay serious attention only recently to the crafting
of subjectivities and the crafting of objects. If the artisans in Farrs account
were really so subject to the ideological dictates of the corporatist polity,
were the products of their labors similarly functional and uniform? Were
they perceived to be so? And what notions of artisanal (but also of literary)
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originality and license were in the ascendant at that time and in that
place?
To address those questions, I briefly mention Susan Terrios remark-*
able work on French chocolatiers. Terrio describes how she arrived for
a tasting filled with fear of revealing her lack of expertise. .She quitkly
realized that she would not, indeed could not, admit to liking the sweeter
chocolates. Informed that the tasting was an apprenticeship, she found
herself swept into, a new process of creating national culture by
educating the entire population into conformity with comprehensive mod
els of how things should taste. She suggests that the imperative for
this massive inculcationwhich is about social representations of taste
rather than about a psychological preferencecame from the threats
posed to French autonomy by incorporation in the European Union: At
tempts to forge Europeanness in the name of a universal culture were
especially problematic given the existence of a notion of French cul
ture also defined as universal and embodied in French cultiiral achieve
ments from literature to cuisine.89 The threat posed by Belgian choco
lates led the French manufacturers of hand-crafted chocolates to accent
their Aztec origins, using exoticism to describe their product in com
plementarity with the traditional (or domestically exotic) aspect of its
production.
Here is the logic of segmentation in full force, etched in the dark bitter
chocolate that the new French cultural logic demands. Universality itself
becomes a remarkable fissile propertyjust like the Divine Being of the
Nuer, refracted through all the divisions of the body politic: my universal
ity is better than yours, because my chocolate is better than yoursmuch
as Guizot had argued over a century earlier that the French were the most
European of all because they Were the most internally differentiated.90
Possessive individualism is sovereignty.
French chocolatiers have been able to insert.their cause in the larger
cultural hierarchies of taste that dominate world markets. The Cretan
artisans have been less lucky. Their alleged individualism allows them to
claim a European tradition, but their supposedly traditional products
have not achieved the popular appeal that perhaps may be possible only
in a country confident of its own modernitya place where, as Michael
Thompson has argued, garbage becomes valuable and feeds an entire
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