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.
Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences, Emeritus, in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok and Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome.
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments ix Foreword / Robert J. Foster and Daniel R. Reichman xiii 1. The Nation-State Outraged 1 2. National Legitimacy and the Illegitimacy of National Origins 27 3. Belonging and Remoteness 51 4. Cosmologies of the Social 69 5. A Plurality of Polities 97 6. Subversive Comparisons 121 7. Civility, Parody, and Invective 137 8. Does a Subversive Past Have a Viable Future? 157 Notes 171 References 205 Index 229
