The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (Classical Presences)

375 Pages·2007·4.75 MB·English

by  Yannis Hamilakis

CLASSICAL PRESENCES
General Editors
Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter
CLASSICAL PRESENCES
Thetexts,ideas, images,andmaterialcultureofancientGreeceandRome
have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to
authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the
assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical
Presencesbringsthelatestscholarshiptobearonthecontexts,theory,and
practiceofsuchuse,andabuse,oftheclassicalpast.
The Nation and its
Ruins: Antiquity,
Archaeology, and
National Imagination
in Greece
YANNIS HAMILAKIS
1
3
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Thenationanditsruins:antiquity,archaeology,andnationalimaginationinGreece/YannisHamilakis.
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ISBN–13: 978–0–19–923038–9
1. Nationalcharacteristics,Greek.2. Greece–Antiquities.3. Archaeology–Greece–History–19thcentury.
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Preface
Thisbookinvestigatesthelinksandassociationsofclassicalantiquity
in general, classical antiquities in particular, archaeology, and
nationalimagination.Itisabookthatanswersaseriesofinterrelated
questions, such as: Why does national imagination need material
traces from the past? How do these traces operate in the everlasting
processofimaginingthenation?Howdoantiquitiescontributetothe
dreamingofthenationaltoposandtheproductionofitsmateriality?
How does archaeology as the oYcial device of western modernity
producethematerialityofthenation?HowdodiVerentsocialactors
(from the nation-state, to intellectuals, to various diverse social
groups, including the ‘others’ of the nation) deploy antiquity in
general and material antiquities in particular, in constructing their
ownversionsofnationalimaginationandinpursuingvariousagen-
das at the same time? What canwe learn from this exploration, not
onlyaboutarchaeologyandantiquitybutalsoaboutthenationand
itswork,especiallyincontextsthathavereceivedlessattention?This
book is thus about the production of the topological dream of the
nation through the deployment of antiquities. To put it in another
way,itisaboutthematerializationandobjectiWcationofthenational
imaginationandmemory.
My locus in exploring these questions will be Greece. The very
mention of the word ‘Greece’ evokes for most people, especially in
the western word, classical antiquity, temples and marbles, ancient
battles, and the origins of democracy. Yet my focus here is not
classical antiquity itself, nor Hellenism as understood by most
western scholars (the idealization of classical antiquity in western
Europefromtheeighteenthcenturyonwards;cf.Morris1994),buta
diVerentsetof Hellenisms: theneo-Hellenismofthelate eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, imported into Greece, and mostly
what I called Indigenous Hellenism—the appropriation of western
Hellenism by local societies in Greece in the mid to late nineteenth
century and its recasting as a novel, syncretic, and quasi-religious
form of imagining time and place, past and present, of producing
viii Preface
and reproducing national identities (see Sigalas 2001 for the mean-
ingsandusesofthetermHellenisminGreece;cf.alsoKoumbourlis
1998). This is a book that invites classicists, archaeologists, histor-
ians, and anthropologists to consider a particular recasting of
Hellenism, a reconWguration which, apart from its importance in
its own right, can contribute to the understanding of the broader
phenomenon of Hellenism as one of the most pervasive western
intellectual and social phenomena. Anthropologists have for some
timenowdrawnattentiontothevalueofexploringindepththeways
inwhichpeopleinGreecedealtwiththeweightofclassicaltradition;
theyhavealsopointedtotheparadoxofthecentralityoftheclassical
past in the western imagination on the one hand, and the relative
marginality of the modern nation-state of Greece in the modern
geopolitical nexus on the other (e.g. Herzfeld 1987). This discourse
hasproducedmany valuableinsights, butthelackof detailedatten-
tion to both the social (and sensory/sensuous) role of the material
tracesofclassicalantiquityaswellastothedisciplinaryprocessesthat
produceditsmaterialityhadtobeaddressed(cf.Porter2003).Thisis
one of the aims of this book. It will be shown in this study that
material antiquities have, since the late eighteenth century, played a
fundamental role in the lives of people in Greece, perhaps more so
than in many other modern nation-states. In addressing in detail a
seriesofcase-studies,inbringingupandattendingtoendlessepisodes
involving archaeologists, state oYcials, politicians, intellectuals,
people from various groups and in a diversity of contexts, this
book oVers the opportunity to study the materiality, time, and
processes of national imagining in detail; to observe the mutual
constitutionofobjectsandpeople(cf.Miller2005forrecentdiscus-
sions); and to reXect on modernity and its imaginary and material
production, especially in the European periphery. As such, it
contributes to the writing of alternative histories of modernity and
itsdevices,historiesthatfullyaccountfor thediversity,multiplicity,
andcomplexityofitsforms.
I will need to say a word or two on my own intellectual and
personal archaeology; this will help explain my choice of the
topic, justify the theoretical approach taken, and illuminate the
methods used. It is my contention that any study of this kind, any
attempt to understand the nation and its fragments (literally and
Preface ix
metaphorically), avoiding at the same time political pitfalls, is
possibleonly fromapositionofreXexivity.
I came to this topic almost by accident. I was trained as an
archaeologist,WrstattheUniversityofCreteandthenattheUniver-
sityofSheYeld,England.Since1996,Ihavetaughtarchaeologyand
anthropology at universities in Britain, and have researched, in
additiontothistopic,aspectsofprehistoricAegeansocietiesfocusing
on food consumption and the consuming body, memory and its
political economy, and the bodily senses. It was mostly my under-
graduateyearsthatshapedmyinterestinarchaeologyandthenation.
The curriculum at the time was designed (or shaped by default)
within the German tradition of classical archaeology, a traditional
art-history-oriented discourse, (one that has now been heavily
critiquedwithinclassics,e.g.Morris1994),andonethatwasdirectly
linkedtotheprocessesofEuropeanidentityaswellastoprocessesof
Greeknationalimagination(cf.Hamilakis2000c).Mydissatisfaction
withthisparadigmstemmedpartlyfrommyownearlypoliticization
(whichdistrustedboththeelitistconnotationsofthisparadigm,and
itsnationalideologicalcorrelates),andpartlyfromanunderstanding
that it cannot satisfactorily explain the material and social world of
the past. An early, and largely na¨ıve,interest in trying to expose the
nationalist‘uses’ofthepastinGreece,ledtohaphazardresearchon
thetopic,more like apart-timehobbyatthemargins oftheserious
scholarship I was conducting. It was the spatial and social distance
from Greece itself from 1988 onwards and the exposure to the then
active and Werce debates on the nature of archaeological work, and
the meanings of the past, that helped me articulate my arguments
and situate them in relation to the social context of archaeology in
Greece.Withoutmeaningtosuggestthatthecritiqueofthenationis
notpossiblefrom‘inside’,thatdistancewasessentialinescapingthe
naturalization of the national imagination, but also in placing the
Greek context in comparative perspective, and in relation to other
nationalprojects.
TheWrst paperon thetopic (co-authored with Eleana Yalouri) in
1993atasessionontheoryinGreekarchaeology,heldaspartofthe
Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting at Durham, England
(Hamilakis and Yalouri 1996), was a key moment in forming an
early framework. Since then, the project took on a life of its own,