Herzfeld (2002) TheAbsencePresent

Michael Herzfeld
The Absent Presence: Discourses of

Crypto-Colonialism
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

The disciplines of social and cultural anthro-
pology emerged from the ferment of West
European world domination as instrument and
expression of the colonial project. Although it
subsequently turned against the practices and
ideology of colonialism, it remains strongly
marked by that historical entailment. Among
the many effects of colonialism on anthropology,
one in particular stands out: the fact that much
of the discipline’s theoretical capital is palpably
derived from ethnographic research done in the
colonial dominions.
The Discourse of Humanity:

Echoes from the Crypto-Colonies
While anthropology lays claim to global rele-
vance, cultural groups that were never directly
controlled by those colonial powers from which
anthropology itself emanated (including coun-
tries, such as the United States, that practiced an
internal form of imperial dominion) often seem
suggestively marginal to the predominant forms
of scholarly discourse.
Within this broad spectrum of exclusion,
The South Atlantic Quarterly :, Fall .
Copyright ©  by Duke University Press.
900 Michael Herzfeld
anthropology displays two major, closely intertwined absences—one con-

spicuous, the other furtive—from its theoretical canon. The conspicuous
absence is that of modern Greece, the reasons rooted in the special kind
of political marginality that has marked Greece’s relations with the West
throughout most of its history as a nominally independent though practi-
cally tributary nation-state. While it is true that the extensive production of

ethnographic monographs about present-day Greece has done much to rec-
tify the situation in recent years, it is only rarely that one encounters the
country in, for example, introductory social and cultural anthropology text-
books—those photo-negative images of Western civilization introductory
primers.
The furtive absence is that of the classical Greek culture. It is furtive
because it shelters behind the multifarious signs of a presence, which melts
into insignificance as soon as we attempt to grasp and identify it. Much is
made of the roots of anthropology in Herodotean curiosity and in Attic phi-
losophy, but it is of a prohibitively generic character. There seems to be sur-
prisingly little that one could say with any confidence about the practical
significance of ancient Greece in the intellectual genealogy of anthropologi-
cal thought, despite a plethora of both casual allusions to, and specialized
invocations of, a hypostatized classical past.
These twin absences spring from a common source in the construction
of a discursive and geographical space called Greece. Greece tout court is
almost always automatically assumed to be ancient Greece; the modern
country, even in its own travel brochures, yields to the commanding pres-
ence of a high antiquity created in the crucible of late-eighteenth-century
Aryanism—that same tradition of cultural eugenics that bred the Nazis’
‘‘race science’’ and, at least in one controversial but persuasive historio-
graphic reading, occluded both Semitic and Egyptian (‘‘African’’) contribu-
tions to European culture.1
Although the German philologists and art historians who generated the
neoclassical model of Greek (and more generally European) culture were
not themselves military colonizers, they were doing the ideological work of
the project of European world hegemony. While much recent literature has
been devoted to the analysis of that project in the form of colonialism, I want
here to initiate discussion of a rather specific variety—or perhaps it is an off-
shoot—of that phenomenon. I shall call it crypto-colonialism and define it as
the curious alchemy whereby certain countries, buffer zones between the
colonized lands and those as yet untamed, were compelled to acquire their
The Absent Presence 901
political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence, this

relationship being articulated in the iconic guise of aggressively national
culture fashioned to suit foreign models. Such countries were and are living
paradoxes: they are nominally independent, but that independence comes
at the price of a sometimes humiliating form of effective dependence.
Two such countries are Greece and Thailand. There are many more, and

the variety among them—where, for example, should we place such diverse
entities as the former Yugoslavia, Japan, or Mexico?—and further explo-
ration is likely to undercut the category of crypto-colonies, producing still
finer discriminations. Nevertheless, these two cases, while geographically
far apart and separated by religion and language, display some common ele-
ments that at least should serve to open up discussion. I mostly confine my
remarks here to Greece, but the Thai case will be useful—albeit in neces-
sarily sketchy form—for beginning the process of complicating the category
of crypto-colonialism at its very point of genesis.
The strategy of building instability into the model right from the start
in this way is entirely deliberate. It would be a strange irony were we, in
an effort to transcend the binarism of colonizers and colonized, to gener-
ate instead a tripartite taxonomy that was no less impervious to the hugely
diverse complexities of local experience. Greece offers a further provocation
that will help in maintaining awareness of such complexities, for the country
has a unique historical relationship with anthropology: it is assumed to be
the intellectual and spiritual birthplace of the Western cultures that gener-
ated the discipline, and its relative absence from the anthropological canon
of theory is for that reason all the more striking. Thailand in this sense is
more like so many other countries that happen not to have spawned major
theoretical traditions by becoming paradigm cases, although both Thailand
and Greece have been sites of important ethnographic research and con-
siderable theoretical elaboration. But the Thai case provides n especially
useful foil here to that of Greece precisely because of the remarkable paral-
lels that appear to subsist between the two countries. While some of these
similarities do undoubtedly derive from the radiating fallout from colonial-
ism, the historical specificities of the two cases—including their very differ-
ent relationships with the emergence of the human sciences in the West—
will not permit any such simplistic closure. Other countries produce other
variations on this theme of exclusion from the theoretical canon: Japan, for
example, hardly a weak player in world politics and economics (and a con-
siderable imperial power in its own right not very long ago), nevertheless
exhibits certain features of crypto-colonial status, including its comparative

irrelevance to the production of theory in the West.2 Yet perhaps one feature
that all these countries share is the aggressive promotion of their claims to
civilizational superiority or antiquity, claims that almost always appear dis-
proportionate to their political influence. One begins to suspect that they
have been placed, or place themselves, on high cultural pedestals that effec-

tively isolate them from other, more brutally material forms of power, and
that this ironic predicament is the defining feature of crypto-colonialism.
In suggesting that comparisons of this sort can be helpful, I am also
extending an argument I have already made about the relationship between
Greece and social-cultural anthropology: that both were products of the
colonialist venture, being respectively a physical location and a discourse
through which the moral segregation of the West from the rest of the world
was effected.3 Moreover, both Greek cultural politics and anthropologi-
cal theory exhibit a progressive rejection of these presumptions over the
past several decades. Local discourses about the nature of culture, civiliza-
tion, and identity thus become immediately and interestingly comparable
to anthropological writings, on which such discourses often draw directly.
Greece is certainly not the only country in which elites cultivated among
the citizenry a deep fear of becoming too closely identified with some vague
category of barbarians. But as the alleged inventor of the term barbarian
itself, and as the alleged ancestor of the modern exponents of ‘‘civilization,’’
it serves as an intriguing locus of such concerns, particularly given the
degree to which it has been a marginal and subordinate player in the various
projects of European cultural politics.
If Thailand, like Greece, holds a mirror to Western anthropological
models, it is in some respects of a different sort. Here, we are looking at
a country that has long been regarded in the West as possessing a distinc-
tive culture. But that image is partly the outcome of some careful impres-
sion management at the level of state-supported institutions, responding
to perceived threats from the ever-colonizing West (especially in the form
of Britain and France—two major sites of anthropological emergence). For
many in the West, Greece represents the first flowering of Indo-European
language and culture on European soil from roots traced to the Sanskrit tra-
ditions of India but now deeply domesticated as Western. In Thailand, how-
ever, despite the arrival of Sanskrit and Brahmanism many centuries earlier,
the colonial powers threatened the independence of a Siam they encoun-
tered as a site of racial difference. Thus, the uses to which Greek and Thai
scholars, respectively, could put the evidence of an ancient, partially Indo-

European heritage was not the same, because it did not have the same rela-
tionship to the ‘‘Aryanist’’ project of European global domination.
My concern here is with the curious paradox of Greece, at once the col-
lective spiritual ancestor and a political pariah in today’s ‘‘fast-capitalist’’
Europe,4 and with the uses to which internal elites put civilizational dis-

courses to enhance their own power, at the cost of accepting the collec-
tive subjugation of their country to a global cultural hierarchy. While such
processes have been well documented for colonies in the strict sense of
the term—India is an especially dramatic and well-documented case 5—the
model of crypto-colonialism suggests that this hierarchy was not confined to
the colonies themselves. The Thai case is suggestive, moreover, not because
it mirrors the Greek situation exactly, but because the similarities these two
countries present do suggest that there may be some common elements,
deriving from partially common experiences, in the ways in which crypto-
colonies respond to that hierarchy by deploying a world-dominating dis-
course about ‘‘culture’’ in defense of their perceived national interests and
specificity. They appear to resist domination, but do so at the cost of effective
complicity—a model that more closely approaches the Gramscian definition
of hegemony than do more recent and controversial notions of ‘‘resistance.’’ 6
The striking paradox of the Greek case makes it both exemplary of these
processes and yet also eccentric. Reminding ourselves of suggestive par-
allels with Thailand will serve, at the very least, to rebut the temptation
of reducing all crypto-colonialism to refractions of the Greek experience,
although the latter is extremely revealing of the internal contradictions that
models of European domination all contain. The very variety of crypto-
colonialisms is the mark of the many ways in which colonial power had to
deal with persistent local ideologies and values, and the production of civili-
zational discourses—including that of anthropology—is an important part
of that history. Anthropology, moreover, cannot afford to ignore its own past
entailments in these discursive processes if it is also to maintain its claim
to critical purchase.
A Risky Comparison
The recent histories of Greece and Thailand would certainly suggest both
strong similarities and equally striking contrasts. At first blush, the simi-
larities seem to be directly related to international realpolitik, and such an
impression would not be so much inaccurate as historically shallow. Both

countries lie at the southeastern peninsular tips of continental landmasses
in which they have bordered, until recently, on countries with aggressively
communist ideologies—ideologies to which these countries’ official dis-
courses oppose their own respective ‘‘national characters.’’ (Thailand also
looks south and southeast to Malaysia and Indonesia, both of which have

also been the scenes of communist revolutionary activity and fierce counter-
repression; Greece only has Cyprus to the southeast in its immediate vicin-
ity, and here Greece’s own role is viewed by some internal critics as a form of
cultural as well as political colonialism in itself.7) The prevailing cultural and
political tensions that both Greece and Thailand entertain with their respec-
tive northern neighbors have deep historical roots that pre-date the arrival of
avowedly Marxist polities. Greece and Thailand, however, both served U.S.
interests as strategic positions in the cold war, and seem to have more or less
absorbed the American view that communism was incompatible with civili-
zation; it is this logic that has to some extent absorbed the locally specific
features of earlier antipathies.
The Greek right-wing response to communism succeeded more or less
seamlessly to preceding ideas about the country’s northern neighbors.
Greek intellectuals had, since before independence, sought to identify
Greek social atomism as a variety of ‘‘European individualism’’ in a man-
ner that at one and the same time allowed them to argue both that their
Slavic neighbors were uncivilized collectivists and that their own peasants
and workers were spiritually corrupt (because of ‘‘Turkish’’ influence) and so
incapable of working collectively without the strong leadership that the elite
stood ready to provide.8 For Thailand the idea of freedom is certainly not
a product of this Eurocentric ideology, although its expression in national
discourse may owe something to it.
The irony of this freedom, however, is that it indexes both countries’ sub-
jection to imported models. The Greeks celebrate the ‘‘free spirit’’ that ‘‘lib-
erated’’ them from ‘‘Turkish’’ (that is, Ottoman) rule and led them to pre-
fer ‘‘freedom to death,’’ while the name prathet Thai (‘‘land of the free’’) was
adopted at the height of an irredentist phase of modern Thai history par-
tially inspired by Italian and German fascist models.9 Those who dare to
oppose such models are ‘‘anti-Greek’’ or ‘‘un-Thai,’’ and are said to lack ‘‘cul-
ture’’—politismos in Greek, watthanatham in Thai.10 Such terms are archaic
coinages, said to be derived from ancient Greek and Sanskrit respectively.
Although both were coined in their respective locales as marks of indige-

nous pride, they are clearly both responses to external criteria of cultural
excellence.
In Greek, politismos means both ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘civilization.’’ Despite fre-
quent invocations of a pastoral idyll, the internal-European answer to the
‘‘noble savage,’’ 11 the European ideal was rooted in the idea of the city and

its accomplishments. In Italy, similarly, the ideal of civiltà remains a key
to urban cultural domination over the rural hinterland.12 But in Thai this
equivalence is not sustained, and that fact alone should alert us to a some-
what different dynamic, in which imitating the accomplishments of the
West has meant having khwaamsiwilai (‘‘the quality of being civilized’’),
whereas watthanatham (‘‘culture’’) might actually exclude the crass materi-
alism that some Thai critics associate with the polluting effects of Western
cultural influence. The Thai use of Sanskrit terms for lofty concepts pre-
dates the European fascination with Sanskrit that supposedly began with
Jones’s eighteenth-century explorations, and has deep roots in religious
discourse, whereas the Greek terms, while certainly intelligible to anyone
brought up on a diet of ecclesiastical Greek, were actually secular calques
on the cultural terminology of the Enlightenment. The parallel between the
two countries therefore does not lie in a shared acceptance of Aryanist theses
emanating from the groves of German academe, but rather in the fact that
both generated civilizational terms intended, through their august antiquity
and cultural dignity, to earn the grudging respect of foreign powers.
The term siwilai, by contrast, is unmistakably a European-inspired coin-
age in Thailand, and its ideological implications have to do with what Thong-
chai Winichakul, adopting a metaphor developed by Mary Louise Pratt,
describes as the ‘‘contact zone’’ that Thailand provides between local and
invasive cultures—a situation that recalls the buffer zone status of Greece in
‘‘the margins of Europe.’’ 13 Such cultural ambiguity feeds on localized forms
of otherness, onto which dominant powers and their regional agents map
larger, global divisions. Among those suspected in both countries of harbor-
ing communist sympathies were members of minority groups, some with
ethnic affiliations with neighboring and hostile nation-states. Even here,
however, there are important differences, showing how cultural specificities
inflect shared geopolitics. In Thailand, while the Muslims of the southern-
most provinces enjoy full citizenship, the hill tribes of the north—‘‘jungle
peoples’’ (chao paa) in Thai 14—have been denied full citizenship. Yet it is
these people whom the Thais, in a localized version of Victorian survival-

ism, have sometimes represented as embodying the conditions from which
siwilai has long since rescued the Thais themselves.
In Greece, the status of minorities is also complex, although the complexi-
ties take an interestingly different form. Muslims are a recognized religious
minority, as are Jews—but woe betide any who call themselves ‘‘Turks.’’ The

Greek authorities counter such self-ethnicizing terms on the grounds that
not all Greek Muslims are culturally Turkish, which is in fact true: Pomaks
speak Bulgarian, while there are others who speak Albanian and other lan-
guages. But the state’s solution has been to deny the existence of ethnic
minorities altogether, which means that those with potentially dangerous
affiliations to neighboring countries—especially Macedonians and Turks—
find their ethnicity completely silenced by their (Greek) citizenship.
At first sight one might deduce that this was the exact analogue of the
situation facing the hill tribes in Thailand. Yet it is not so much the chao
paa—despite their noncitizen status—who are treated as subversive in Thai-
land; the authorities are particularly suspicious of southern Muslims of
harboring separatist sentiments and equally suspect Chinese residents of
supporting the communist cause. But they see the chao paa as instead
representing the Thais’ own ‘‘primitive past,’’ a past to which energetic
cultural regimentation will now bring these remaining personifications of
Thailand’s collective childhood.15 If the chao paa are potential Thais in the
making, however, communists—and all who might be suspected of sym-
pathizing with them—are treated as irremediably ‘‘un-Thai.’’ 16 In this last
respect the Thai and (pre-) Greek situations have exhibited significant
convergence. Hellenization in Greece and the quest for a pan-Thai siwilai in
Thailand, moreover, are both about the creation of a strong, centralized cul-
tural identity designed to protect the ‘‘weaker’’ members of the nation from
the immoral blandishments of the ‘‘uncivilized’’ and ‘‘subversive.’’
To make sure that this crypto-hegemony was properly locked in place,
moreover, local cultural and political leaders have waged aggressive central-
izing campaigns to homogenize their respective national languages. Here
again we see national pride and cultural independence as a mark of political
dependence. But whereas in the Greek case the model of ‘‘purist’’ (kathare-
vousa) speech, which remained the official language of state until , was
constructed in emulation of West European ideas about the classical Greek
language, leaving the local dialect of Athens to perish from neglect, Thai
language reforms seem to have been directed more to homogenization and

to the adoption of a Sanskritic vocabulary that would—nonetheless—match
the demands of academic and philosophical discourse in the West. Both, in
other words, were attempts to emulate the West; but their relationship with
local linguistic practices was interestingly divergent.
One common feature springs from the resentment that elite emulation of

Western models has engendered. Both countries are, significantly, home to
religions in which monasticism plays an important role, one that is increas-
ingly, albeit through marginal groups (such as the neo-Orthodox movement
in Greece and reformist programs in Thailand), generating opposition to
Western and materialist morals and models. Indeed, such reactions even
turn against the official repositories of religious authority; the neo-Orthodox
complain about the ‘‘protestantization’’—at least in a formal, Weberian
sense—of the Church of Greece, while criticism of the Sangha in Thailand
by groups such as Santi Asoke has similarly attacked its bureaucratic struc-
ture as well as its tolerance of corruption and materialism. While this is
not the whole story—other religious developments, such as the Dhamma-
kaya movement and certain local cults, have appeared to sanction material-
ist concerns—it does at least suggest that one common reaction to crypto-
colonialism may take the form of antimaterialist religious activity in places
widely separated by geography and culture.17
Such parallels, I suggest, are far from coincidental. If Thailand and
Greece had to make major concessions to the European powers in order to
maintain any semblance of sovereignty, internal cultural regimentation—
the space where the agents of foreign powers displayed, so to speak, their
own agency—provided such deals with a firm base: they established a pre-
sumed common code of diplomatic morality, empowering these elite indi-
viduals and groups to consolidate their authority, using culture as its pri-
mary measure and economic coercion as its most compelling instrument.
There were important differences at this level also, to be sure. Thailand,
unlike Greece, had existed as a recognized sovereign state, albeit in much
more fragmented form,18 for many centuries. Its monarchy was locally
embedded in religious systems, whereas the Greek kings had to make sym-
bolic claims on a Byzantine crown that rang especially hollow in that the
ancient Byzantium was now the enemy’s—Turkey’s—most important city,
Istanbul. The Greek monarchy was always derided as foreign, because it was
widely perceived to be a key agent of the crypto-colonial process.
Anthropology and the Quest for Origins: Hellenism Bound

So Sanskrit was the bedrock; but Greece was assumed to be where it
was thought to have erupted in a truly recognizable burst of European
genius, individualism, and initiative. Such is the discipline’s implicit ori-
gin myth. This anthropology, moreover, is not the anthropologia (the study

of humankind’s role in the cosmos) of Orthodoxy, but the project of a
supposedly ‘‘superstition’’-free rationality.19 I have encountered informal,
casual attempts to represent both anthropologies as fundamentally the
same, just as there is a long history in post-Independence Greece of try-
ing to prove that the ancient philosophers were the intellectual forerun-
ners of Christianity, but these are after-the-fact versions of the long-standing
Greek agony over how (pagan) Hellenism and (Christian) Greekness might
be combined.20 Nor is the study of ‘‘ordinary people’’ (anthropi, classical
anthropoi), with all their socially lubricating flaws and twists, the model
for anthropology as it conceived itself until very recently. That model is
severely neoclassical—as neoclassical as a nineteenth-century bourgeois
Greek house, and, I suggest, no closer than that to the conceptual systems
of high antiquity.
Because the Greek case allows us to ironize the history of the discipline
so effectively, an exploration of the peculiarly unsatisfactory classical gene-
alogy of anthropology may be useful in assessing critically its role in the
description and analysis of society and culture in Thailand—or, indeed, in
any other country that might plausibly be counted among the ranks of the
crypto-colonies. This is not to essentialize the crypto-colonies and so reduce
them to yet another case of anthropological classification. It is to use taxon-
omy to undo taxonomy, but always with an eye on significant differences
that will also make any generalizations usefully unstable. It is in this spirit
that I propose the Greek case as offering a way into the disentanglement
of a discourse that, while purporting to celebrate national independence,
actually seems to further its effective strangulation at birth.
Historians and Anthropologists

The usual institutional starting-point of anthropology as a discipline co-
incides with E. B. Tylor’s earliest use of the word in .21 But underlying
assumptions about Western civilization appear to have pushed the origins
back to a far earlier date. Margaret Hodgen, for example, argued strongly
against the Tylorean claims to originary status, adducing impressive evi-

dence for the emergence of a truly anthropological perspective in medieval
and Renaissance Europe and—in an unconscious echo of the Greek histo-
rian’s own etymological myths of origin—‘‘tracking down’’ its ultimate ori-
gins to Herodotus.22
At least since her impassioned but scholarly attempt to set the record

straight, the older, classical line of ancestry has been the received wisdom.
In this recension, Herodotus is not only the ‘‘father of history’’ but also
the ‘‘father of anthropology,’’ a suggestively unilineal descent attribution
that also generates the quarrelsome myth of the rival siblings, history and
anthropology, in the contested history of anthropology. At several stages in
the development of anthropology—but most dramatically in the scientis-
tic rejection of history as a model for anthropology—anthropologists have
fought over whether history was even relevant to anthropological concerns.
Such debates have particular relevance for the present discussion when they
occur at the heart of empire. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, for example, saw the
specificity of history (what he called its ‘‘idiographic’’ character) as neces-
sarily incompatible with the kind of dehistoricized cultural science that he
wanted to create; E. E. Evans-Pritchard, at once product and critic of the
colonial enterprise, saw in that same specificity the possibility for an under-
standing of culture lodged in the social experience of ordinary people—a plu-
ralist vision of history, a multiplicity of histories.23
The suppression of history paralleled the suppression of philological con-
cerns; in the aftermath of survivalism, questions about cultural origins were
in bad odor. Yet, as Vico had shown, the philological and historical tool most
used for the legitimation of power—etymology—could also be used subver-
sively, in order to generate what Nancy Struever has recognized as a critique
of civil disability.24 Precisely because the seeming persistence of word forms
may mask considerable disruptions of older meanings, etymology is a two-
edged sword. Evans-Pritchard, whose reading of Vico through the works of
R. G. Collingwood may have sensitized him to the subversive possibilities of
etymology, recognized that ‘‘anthropologists have seldom made very serious
efforts to reconstruct from historical record and verbal tradition the past of
the people they have studied. It was held that this was an ‘antiquarian’ inter-
est and that it was irrelevant to a functional study of institutions to know
how they have changed.’’ 25 But Evans-Pritchard was probably more inter-
ested in the simpler question of recovering facts about the past. Even though
scholars of oral tradition were subsequently, and somewhat controversially,

to reintroduce the techniques of manuscript genealogy,26 the majority of this
kind of work remained in the hands of nationalist folklorists. And they were
certainly not interested in subverting authoritative etymologies; they were
more interested in constructing their own.
Evans-Pritchard’s vision was an important step in the decolonization of

anthropology. He recognized the effects of events on what seemed to be the
most intractably atemporal forms of social structure, both in his treatment
of Nuer lineage segmentation and also, especially, in his work on the rise of
the Libyan monarchy. One of his pupils, J. K. Campbell, an anthropologist
and historian who trained numerous scholars in both disciplines, moved
the seemingly ahistorical idiom of Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of moral com-
munity into the European setting of Greece, where history, even though the
marginal population of shepherds he studied might be officially excluded
from it, nonetheless could not be sidestepped by the ethnographer.27
History and anthropology are curiously ambivalent about each other. The
complementary opposition between them lies in the ease with which each
discipline can stifle its own object. Institutionalized histories abolish time in
the name of time; what Radcliffe-Brown called ‘‘nomothetic’’ ways of doing
anthropology can abolish the structuring of social experience or in the name
of social structure.28 Analysis of these processes entails a committed resis-
tance to the process of progressive amnesia: like Vico, demanding a sub-
versive view of etymology precisely because institutions habitually used ety-
mology to legitimize themselves, we should try to turn the discipline’s name
into a critique of Eurocentric identity situated in the particularities of its
inescapably material history.29
In the nomenclature of anthropology (or of any other scientific discourse),
the rhetoric of classical etymology is not just a posture; it is also a strong
instance of that ultimate rhetorical trick, that of a rhetoric that denies that
it is rhetorical at all. The simplest demonstration of this point is likely to be
the most effective. Etymology not only legitimizes a connection that does
not necessarily subsist, but also deflects attention away from the ephemer-
ality of that connection—indeed, materializes it—by the device of proclaim-
ing the cognate signifiers as though they were a single signified, collaps-
ing all temporal shifts in meaning into a single, indivisible, timeless truth.
The derivation of anthropology from anthropos and logos rests on idealiza-
tions, arguably more appropriate to the Enlightenment and Romanticism
than to classical thought, of both humankind and discourse. To turn again

to Thailand, where the terminology of the human sciences is all derived
from Sanskrit, the term for anthropology—maanuthyawithayaa, ‘‘the science
of humankind’’—is calqued on Western terminology but evokes scriptural
authority through its use of Sanskrit; the usual word for ‘‘person,’’ khon
(as in khon Thai, ‘‘Thai person’’), does not possess this resonance, would

not make sense in a modern Thai academic context, and yet (together with
phuu and the prefix nak-) captures more or less the range of social mean-
ings implied by the everyday Greek use of anthropos (‘‘person’’), although it is
neutral with respect to the everyday moral flaws that go with being an ordi-
narily sociable person and that are implied in the Greek phrase anthropi dhen
imaste? (‘‘aren’t we human?’’). It is perhaps significant that whereas in Thai-
land anthropology as a discipline taught in the national university system
has a history of several decades, the first Greek department of social anthro-
pology was founded only in .30 Not only did Greek anthropologists have
to address the entrenched hegemony of nationalistic folklore studies, but the
very ordinariness of the discipline’s subject matter made it hard to grasp: the
resentful municipality of Mytilene, where the first university department of
social anthropology replaced the popular (and populous) education depart-
ment, voted for a motion criticizing the ‘‘cloudy [that is, vague] discipline of
social anthropology.’’
The problem is precisely that in Greece the name anthropoloyia appeared
to confirm the sense, entertained by many Greek scholars, that anthropolo-
gists were simply making a lot of academic noise about perfectly ordinary
matters that required no elucidation. Outside Greece, however, the grandi-
ose resonance of the Tylorean coinage produced the opposite effect. Like
those verbose medical Hellenisms that mystify the work of doctors in a way
that Hippocrates would surely have found objectionable, the very name of
anthropology appeared to lodge its origins in classical thought. Above all,
it evoked a notion of abstract theory that has come—as Détienne pointed
out 31—to be identified in the writings of Hegel with the very notion of
Europe itself. It appealed at once to an Enlightenment view of the exercise of
pure reason and a Romantic vision of human nature. Greece’s relationship
with European claims on intellectual hegemony and even transcendence—
a phenomenon that Humphreys specifically traced to the ancient Greeks—
makes its relative exclusion from the theoretical canon a point of particular
interest.32 But we must also consider why other countries have been simi-
larly excluded. It is not a matter of size (Thailand, for example, has about
five times the population of Greece); nor, obviously, is it the result of colo-
nial domination, not only because these countries are precisely the ones that
were not directly ruled by the colonial powers, but also because it is precisely
these former colonies that have long been and remain the sites of some
of the most energetic theory-building—India, Indonesia, large swathes of

sub-Saharan Africa, the Australian outback, the Maghreb, just to name the
obvious cases.
Lineages and Identities

So total is the assumption that Greece is the Hellas of the classical past
that the first major ethnography of a modern Greek community actually
had to be subtitled A Village in Modern Greece.33 (Being an ethnographer of
Greece today provides a fine introduction to the problem, since one’s inter-
locutors are apt to assume automatically that one is a classical archaeolo-
gist.) At least other civilizations that the West could bring itself to canonize
as ‘‘great’’—India, China, Japan—were exotic enough, and clearly ‘‘not us.’’
As such, their extension into modern times did not pose as great a poten-
tial threat to the self-constitution of ‘‘Europe’’; they seemed unambiguously
and emphatically not ‘‘really modern.’’ European nationalist ideologues col-
lectively distinguished the world’s ancient civilizations, including that of
Greece, from modern civilization, by invoking the relative homogeneity of
the former as compared with the latter.34 But this is not the whole story; for
the assumption that ‘‘the Greeks’’ somehow fathered the West as a whole
meant that they had to be invoked and suppressed at the same time. Claude
Lévi-Strauss, who argued that all our commentaries on ancient myths are
but variants of those myths, might be intrigued to discover here an Oedi-
pal process at the very heart of European intellectual history.35 Herodotus
is, let us recall again, hailed as the father of modern anthropology. (Perhaps
it is no coincidence that a closely related intellectual tradition, this time in
the form of classical philology, succeeded—according to Martin Bernal—in
suppressing this same Herodotus’ opinions about the origins of Greek and
therefore of European culture, in order to generate a myth of spontaneous
genesis? 36)
The classical Greece of the anthropologists is thus, for the most part, a
chimera. Those who made exciting discoveries by applying anthropologi-
cal techniques to classical materials remained marginal to anthropology at

least, if not to classical philology as well. Jane Harrison was a philologist
by training, while the explorations of Louis Gernet in classical culture have
rarely been invoked by modern anthropologists except a few who share his
special interest in classical Athens and its social life—S. C. Humphreys,
for example. Indeed, the general apathy that greeted the republication in

English of Gernet’s major work on classical Greece would seem to suggest
that the very idea of a theoretical perspective derived from the classical past
must be decidedly unwelcome.37
Appeals to a presumed knowledge of the classical world were also little
more than caricature. Thus, for example, Ruth Benedict’s characterization
of cultural ethos as either Apollonian (restrained and rationalistic) or Dio-
nysian (frenzied and orgiastic) merely took a complex segment of Greek
religious philosophy, already refracted through the writings of Nietzsche,
as the basis for creating ideal types that lost their original meaning through
the simple act of reifying them in this way. In ancient Greece these per-
sonified conditions of the human psyche drew significance from the play-
ful tension recognized to subsist between them throughout human society;
Benedict, by quite openly severing them from their roots in Greek social
life, turned them into caricatures that had virtually nothing to do with the
ancient culture from which she claimed to have derived them. Benedict did
acknowledge some of these departures: ‘‘Apollonian institutions have been
carried much further in the pueblos than in Greece. Greece was by no means
as single-minded. In particular, Greece did not carry out as the Pueblos
have the distrust of individualism that the Apollonian way of life implies,
but which in Greece was scanted because of forces with which it came into
conflict.’’ 38 Indeed they could not have done, if they were to remain the
emblematic ancestors of those most determinedly self-proclaimed individu-
alists, the Europeans. There are historical indications of this: ‘‘Greek civiliza-
tion . . . is unintelligible without recognizing the Dionysian compensations
it also institutionalized. There is no ‘law,’ but several different characteristic
courses which a dominant attitude may take.’’ But then, one might ask, why
invoke the Greeks at all?
Here, I think, the answer is to be sought in the history of European
identity. Benedict is, perhaps unconsciously, reflecting a view of European
civilization, and especially of its Greek starting point, in which the possi-
bility of choice constitutes the characteristic ideology and practice of agency
known as individualism—an agency linked historically not only to the rise

of property ownership but also to the emergence of that collective individu-
alism known as nationalism.39 American ‘‘rugged individualism,’’ itself a
colonial ethic, falls within the same tradition. Benedict probably saw no
need to interrogate such assumptions beyond remarking, with the preci-
sion of a good scholar, that the Greek model from which Nietzsche derived

these ideal types, could usefully be dismembered and distributed among
the various native peoples she studied. She evidently felt no urge to ques-
tion the motivating assumption that this move indicates: that native peoples
lack the hallmarks of true, European civilization—agency, individualism,
and the ideological choice that today we associate with the idea of ‘‘civil
society.’’ One might make similar judgments of the eagerness with which
some anthropologists of structural persuasion, no doubt delighted to find
their work cited in elicitation of the prevalence of binarism in pre-Socratic
thought,40 perpetuated the view that the simpler forms of binarism also
represented a ‘‘cold’’ state of cognitive development and so unwittingly used
the synamic history of Greek philosophy to perpetuate the survivalist view
of a world divided between natives and Europeans—a simple binary opposi-
tion if ever there was one, and only slightly transmogrified in the opposition
between colonized and colonizers.
Greece and the Multicultural World

That European identity is the issue becomes immediately clear when we
more critically examine Margaret Hodgen’s tactics for tracing the history of
anthropology much further back than its conventional point of origin in the
professional establishment of Victorian academe. Hodgen’s approach is at
once scholarly and ideological. In an approach that reproduces the ancient
historian’s own Hellenocentrism,41 Hodgen explicitly credits Herodotus
with a rationality and a relativism that anticipates modern anthropology;
moreover, she strongly emphasizes his appetite for travel, something that
he shares with Thucydides but that thereafter only reappears with Colum-
bus and the Europeanization of America. It is also relevant in this context
that she castigates medieval writers for lacking understanding shown by
Herodotus, pointing out that it was only with the renewal of contact beyond
the immediately known world that tolerance for exotic others reappears:
knowledge means understanding, and collapsing history in this way sim-
plifies the implicitly Hellenic claims of Western epistemology. At several

points she makes it clear, moreover, that her goal is a historical justifica-
tion, not merely of anthropology as a discipline, but more particularly of its
diagnostic activity—fieldwork by participant observation.
Hodgen’s distrust of medieval observers springs from the same idiom of
Eurocentrism that has also banished Byzantium from the entire history of

anthropology. It was in the stormy history of Byzantine relations with the
Latin West that European identity became definitively separated from that
of contemporary Greeks, so that the neoclassical revival in Greece would
eventually generate the strains that are so characteristic of Greek culture
and politics today—especially a pervasive binarism of motives, in which
outer-directed neoclassicism vies with a potentially self-critical (but often
merely ‘‘nationistic’’ rather than ‘‘nationalistic’’) form of eastern-oriented
nativism, an imploded Orientalism.42 The widespread hostility shown by
Greek monks and others to the Pope during his  visit to their country
shows that ‘‘the West’’ is by no means viewed with equanimity or pleasure,
even when the target is not the United States or the European Union (of
which Greece is now a member-state).
Like the Greeks’ official, neoclassical self-presentation, which is a rejec-
tion of the specificities of local history and social experience, Hodgen fore-
shortens anthropological history; and so, in part, she abolishes it. An-
thropologists may easily recognize the process as the sort of temporal
‘‘telescoping’’ characteristic of many nonliterate cultures and most com-
monly expressed through the ‘‘structural amnesia’’ of lineage systems.43 By
seeking ostensible links between Herodotus, Columbus, and the Victorians
(she also slights the Enlightenment as a period of intellectual regression for
anthropology), she links up a whole series of ideological topoi: rugged indi-
vidualism, enterprise, visual exploration, imperial or mercantile contact,
and, quite simply, just ‘‘being there’’—the major claim, as James Clifford
has pointed out in his provocative analysis of fieldwork ideology, of ‘‘ethno-
graphic authority.’’ 44
Doubtless, the medieval writers who mined Herodotus did indeed, as
Hodgen claims, simplify and recast much of what he had to say. Their experi-
ence of other parts of the world was, as she points out, less direct than his,
and their interest more inwardly directed. That Hodgen has not discussed
the equally striking elements of their similarity with Herodotus is most of
all an index of the philological standards by which she judges them; those
standards, however, are also the means by which European culture avoided
seeing its own textualizations of alterity as symbolic of an ideologically nec-
essary commitment to cultural difference. Remarkably like Greek nation-
alist writers of the nineteenth century, who either ignored that phase of
Greek culture or simplified its Greekness beyond recognition, historians
of modern anthropology have thus constructed a genealogy in which the

Middle Ages simply do not figure at all, or treat that phase as an aberrance
through which something of the ancient genius nevertheless managed to
survive, then to be reborn under conditions of nascent modernity. It is a
convenient story.
In a Eurocentric world that defines itself in circular fashion by evoking
a classical Greece that it has itself constructed, the role of anthropology
as a myth of origin might be expected to yield a strong commitment to
some form of classical derivation. Under these circumstances, the paucity
of explicitly classical points of reference is telling. It parades an ancestry
that cannot be too precisely traced. For anthropology, in order to lay claim
to the status of a modern science, must be able to claim roots in the ancient
culture: a precise replication of the besetting paradox of European national-
ism itself, which wanted to root itself in classical Greece while at the same
time relegating the latter to the domain of the premodern, socially and cul-
turally undifferentiated, ideologically primitive type of society—a necessary
projection in a truly survivalist universe.
The rediscovery of ancient Greece has required a very different develop-
ment, one that is consistent with the more reflexive and anticolonialist lean-
ings of the discipline today. It is telling that, precisely at the point when
the classics are disappearing from many Western curricula, a more gener-
ous engagement with classical Greece has begun to emerge. The gradual
fading of classical learning from the schoolrooms of the West accompanied
the demise of the imperial world hegemonies that had most enthusiastically
supported it. In consequence, the Greeks only return to consciousness as
significant players in the constitution of anthropology at the same time as
the beginning of a more systematic interest in the modern Greeks gets under
way. Hodgen’s rehabilitation of Herodotus appeared in the United States in
the same year, , that J. K. Campbell’s Honour, Family, and Patronage was
published in England.
Hodgen had earlier noted that the form of survivalism acquires peculiar
contours when anthropology finds itself dealing with the role of the Greeks,
ancient and modern, in the constitution of European culture.45 In the

Tylorean version, survivals pointed back to more primitive times, whereas
the neoclassical version tired to identify the remnants of a process of decay
rather than advancement—the ‘‘sad relics’’ of a glorious past immured in the
passive peasant stupidity of today. Yet the paradox lay in this circumstance:
the classical past was both the ideological imprimatur of cultural respect-

ability and at the same time a necessarily less complex, less sophisticated
version of the European present. The collapse of survivalism in the next gen-
erations of anthropology buried that paradox once and for all by rebuilding
it on the ruins: it removed classical Greece from both the self-conscious
intellectual ancestry of the discipline and the corpus of legitimately com-
parable ethnographic cases. By the time Hodgen sought to restore Herodo-
tus to his place at the head of the disciplinary genealogy, and J. K. Camp-
bell, Ernestine Friedl, and Irwin T. Sanders began the important process
of bringing Greece into the domain of acceptable ethnography, the process
of structural amnesia had permitted the sophisticated European rationality
conjoining Herodotus to modern anthropology to replace the crudely racist
European superiority of such writers as Gobineau (who regarded the Greeks
as ‘‘orientals’’ although he also professed to like them.46 This rationality, in
Hodgen’s work as in Gobineau’s pontifications, stifles the ‘‘superstitious’’
medieval phase by treating its denizens much as earlier anthropologists had
treated the ‘‘primitive’’ cultures they studied. The Greeks had definitively
disappeared from the hegemonic definition of European; swallowed up by
the ‘‘medieval’’ Byzantines and the ‘‘oriental’’ Ottomans. Thus safely quaran-
tined from the realities of modern European culture and society, they could
now reappear (as ‘‘modern Greeks’’) in the writings of a few anthropologists
as ‘‘ethnographic subjects.’’ 47
With the increasingly rapid disappearance of the classics from both the
schoolroom and the diplomatic reading list, even the legitimating resuscita-
tion of ancient authors begins to yield to a much more critical understand-
ing of the role of ancient Greek history in the schooling of imperial power
brokers. Such tectonic shifts, however, are deeply unsettling for the crypto-
colonial elites whose roles depended on maintaining the old understand-
ings. Many educated Greeks today, especially those of conservative inclina-
tions, are outraged by Martin Bernal’s rejection of the idea that Hellenic
culture sprang fully formed from the soil of Greece: the idea that Greek
culture might be ‘‘African’’ comes across as a betrayal of the most faithful
cultural sycophants—a not-uncommon fate of fully colonial elites as well,

it should be noted.48 Even those who lean further to the left are upset by
the threat to the Greeks’ one claim on universal importance that they see in
the rise of Western multiculturalism, which they link to the demise of the
classics; a sympathetic journalist, who otherwise reported my comments
on Greek nationalism quite accurately, nonetheless incorrectly represented

me as treating Greece as the ‘‘victim of a new fashion [that is, multicultur-
alism].’’ 49 Yet it is precisely at this point that anthropologists begin to treat
ancient Greece, not as a quaint ethnological curiosity (as did the survival-
ists), not as a vague source of ancestral authority for the West, but as part of a
global history in which colonialism may have spread the word but local inge-
nuity has actively transformed it. Multiculturalism recognizes the contribu-
tion of the Greeks, but not according to the canonical history constructed
in the heyday of imperial domination.
Let me illustrate this with a single, striking illustration of what this shift
can entail. Stephen Gudeman has collaborated with a local (Colombian) col-
league to trace a veritable genealogy of ideas from Aristotle and other, later
thinkers to the ‘‘folk theories’’ of Colombian peasants and anthropologists
alike.50 But note that his is a double act of defiance: not only do he and his
colleague reintroduce classical Greek models in order to trace the origins of
variants they encounter in the new world, a move that Gudeman has subse-
quently expanded in his theoretical work, but they also compare them with
indigenous models and take the latter seriously as theoretical constructs. In
so doing, they collapse the absolute distinction that many writers presup-
pose between theory and ethnography. Such a move challenges scholarly
authority as well as the larger authority of the Western canon. But it also
involves sharing that quintessentially Hellenic and European ancestry, not
only with a local scholarly collaborator, but also with ‘‘the natives.’’ This is a
genuinely reflexive shift of perspective.
Anthropology and the Fate of Hellenism

Such shifts reimport ironies into the original space of analysis. The term
modern Greece, for example, is increasingly subject to informal question-
ing, although it persists in everyday scholarly usage. There is a reason for
this: those of us who do ethnographic research in Greece, confronted by
the automatic assumption that we must be archaeologists (an assumption
made all the more recalcitrant by the now-deafening absence of any general
knowledge about classical Greek culture), cannot dispense with it entirely,
if only because it provides one of the few ways of reminding people that
the country is still inhabited! Ironically, the model of seamless continuity
between ancient and modern Greece, as articulated in the crypto-colonial
and nationalist discourses, cannot now be allowed to disappear, because it

would apparently take awareness of the living population away with it as well.
We can begin to search for the common ground of such exclusions by
thinking about the languages of scholarship. Although what follows is an
impressionistic judgment, I submit that it is precisely in the crypto-colonies
that the local languages, rather than the languages of imperial rule, serve
the goals of academic publishing. This is a proud assertion of cultural inde-
pendence, and indeed it should be so interpreted. But it is also, and here
lies the rub, a means of self-exclusion, and not only from the broader inter-
national academic community dominated by English, French, and Spanish
(with increasing doses of Japanese, Chinese, German, and perhaps Russian
and Arabic); it also contributes to a two-tier system in which local schol-
ars have tended to write in isolation from their foreign counterparts, who
rarely cite the local scholars’ work except when it is published in English or
French.
That situation is beginning to change. If one checks the bibliographies of
recent monographs about the ethnology of Greece, the proportion of Greek
titles has increased, and works based on Greek research but purporting to
offer a wider theoretical purview are beginning to figure in the citations
of monographs dealing with other parts of the world; significantly, in the
present context, Seremetakis, writing (in English) about Greece, appears in
a recent study of Thailand.51 (Oddly enough, the ethnography of Italy lags
further behind here; despite the heroic attempts of George Saunders to pro-
mote the thinking of Ernesto de Martino, for example, most Italian-language
references in ethnographies of Italy are to historical, sociological, political-
science, or journalistic works, and largely ignore the impressive roster of
Italian scholarship on Italian local worlds—a tradition that seems to have
fallen afoul of a publishing situation no less riven by localism than the poli-
tics of the country as a whole! 52)
Such changes show that crypto-colonialism has real consequences, and
that these are sometimes unpredictably slow to respond to changes in the
global balance of power. Indeed, I suggest that the crypto-colonies have
been doubly victimized: not only have they suffered many of the economic
and political effects of colonialism itself, but they have then found them-
selves excluded, materially and epistemologically, by the massive forces
upholding the binarisms of late-twentieth-century realpolitik. Caught in the
exclusionary logic of cold war oppositions, they have also been squeezed
between the imperial powers and their officially recognized victims. This

has enabled local elites to maintain their grip on power in ways that else-
where proved vulnerable, and has also led to challenges that seem remark-
ably similar in some crypto-colonial situations. The trajectories leading to
the  Polytechnic students’ uprising in Athens and the  student mas-
sacre at Thammasat University in Bangkok, as well as subsequent develop-
ments in both places, are sufficiently similar to suggest that these events
may index comparable (although not identical) consequences of cold war
dynamics. But these dynamics followed in already well-established paths
of global politics, in which crypto-colonies were forced to play roles not of
their own choosing. Within that larger geopolitical context, their civiliza-
tional discourses—pleas for recognition and respectability—followed the
parallel dynamic of a global hierarchy of culture. The relative indifference
with which the West has generally reacted to such appeals suggests that
the crypto-colonies—which in the postcolonial world cannot persuasively
lay claim to economic or cultural ‘‘reparations’’—must continue to struggle,
burdened by their ancient pasts, with a future for which there is as yet no
clear categorical slot.
The reality of colonialism’s heritage is that the global hierarchy of cultural
value it has created persists long after the demise of the political and mili-
tary empires. The Greeks’ struggles to conform to dominant images of Hel-
lenic culture only confirmed their cultural subordination to such imported
models. They were caught in a double bind. If they emphasized familiar cul-
tural idioms, they were ‘‘contaminated’’ by Turkish and Slavic influences;
the everyday was not really Greek. But if they instead followed the Hellenic
models, they were derided for their slavish devotion to a past they were held
to have lost and for the recovery of which they were beholden to the very for-
eigners who mocked them. There is nothing intrinsically ‘‘bad’’ about Slavic
or Turkish influence; nor is there any reason to suppose that the values cele-
brated by Enlightenment and Romantic Europe were particularly good. But
they have come to dominate the global environment, sustained by interna-
tional realities, and the crypto-colonies have for long had to choose between
adapting to them or risking ever more crushing marginalization. It is easy,

in these terms, to see why work like Bernal’s provokes such a tense mixture
of anxiety and resentment in Greece.
In the case of Thailand, we see a closely related dynamic. Especially in
their cultivation of foreign rulers, the nineteenth-century Thai kings were
petitioners for a cultural recognition few were prepared to vouchsafe them;

the Russian czar, who was the sole ‘‘European’’ monarch to receive the Sia-
mese King Chulalongorn with full dignity, faced widespread doubts about
his own country’s right to account itself ‘‘European’’ and was no doubt
happy to show himself more civilized than those of his fellow-monarchs
who despised his country. As Thongchai has shown, moreover, the attempts
of the Siamese to present themselves as equal partners with Europe in the
work of civilization, especially at the great world fairs of colonialism’s hey-
day, led to continual humiliation. It was only when the Siamese pavilion was
literally placed among those of colonies that they were able to address that
humiliation directly and to any effect and succeeded in getting it reclassified
and relocated; most of the time, Siam appeared as a country more imitative
than productive.53
Whereas the Siamese project of siwilai was an attempt to capture the aura
of technological achievement associated with the West, an attempt that per-
haps still infuses aspects of Thai modernity, the Greeks’ project had more
to do with recapturing the aura of an eternal European quintessence. That
project still informs the common Greek lament that the West ‘‘stole the
light’’ from Hellas and justifies the appropriation of West European cul-
tural elements—grammatical structures, for example—in what, according
to the dominant ideology, is the true culture of Greece. But whereas the
Greeks saw this project as a return to cultural leadership, their European
patrons simply saw it much as they saw the Thai civilizational projects—as
an attempt to catch up with the West.
Crypto-colonialism is thus about the exclusion of certain countries from
access to the globally dominant advantages of modernity. That exclusion
is reflected in the history of anthropology. Whereas the former colonies
became important objects of theoretical reflection, the crypto-colonies had
a much more ambiguous and frustrating relationship to the production
of anthropological theory. While I do not want to exaggerate this distinc-
tion, which is also much less applicable now than it would have been two
decades ago, I suspect that much of the theoretical labor conducted in the
crypto-colonies has remained marginalized—in dramatic contrast with, for

example, ‘‘subaltern studies’’ in the Indian subcontinent or ‘‘postcolonial
studies’’ in sub-Saharan Africa.
I do not want to suggest that particular countries should appear as the
bearers of new theory. Theory is itself a problematic category; its close ety-
mological links with the Greek for ‘‘observation’’ should, following Vico’s

subversive use of etymology, undermine any simplistic discrimination
between theory and observation as contemporary forms of academic prac-
tice—and observation itself, as Johannes Fabian notes,54 is a trope of domi-
nation. My goal is thus not to prescribe a return to the pedestal, historical
or theoretical. More modestly, I want to argue that those countries that have
been excluded to any significant degree from the production of social theory
may now instead serve as sources of insight into the hegemonic pretensions
that social theory has—often inadvertently—tended to endorse. If compar-
ing anthropology and Greek nation-building has seemed a useful exercise,
might we not gain comparable insight from comparing anthropology (or
sociology, or cultural studies, or even history) with the Thai discourse of
siwilai, for example?
Such exercises, of which the potential variety is enormous, would chal-
lenge a hegemonic structure that, initiated under colonialism, repeats itself
as both tragedy and farce in its successors.55 The opposition between colo-
nizer and colonized is itself a discursive part of that deeply problematic heri-
tage. Breaking apart the binarism of colonizer and colonized may be dis-
tasteful to some, especially those whose commitments and struggles have
helped to pinpoint and dismantle the evils that it indexes. But that move
will concomitantly reveal the presence of other hegemonies, harder to dis-
assemble precisely because they have been well concealed. Meanwhile, it is
important not to reify crypto-colonialism: even the shadowy account of the
Thai experience that I have sketched in as a foil to the Greek may suffice to
illuminate the similarities and the differences alike.
The world is no longer made up of colonizers and colonized alone, nor
was it ever so simply split. The provisional category that I have identified
as crypto-colonialism offers a critical perspective on the distribution of cul-
tural significance in anthropology and the world: instead of simply accepting
the idea that some countries might be unimportant while others might be
uninteresting, we ask who defines the nature of importance and interest and
so challenge the established world-order politics of significance. This moves
anthropology to the critique of new subalternities and new complexities of

power. In the process anthropology may again show the capacity that has
ensured its survival against repeated expectations of its intellectual bank-
ruptcy and demise: the capacity to rethink itself and its role in the world.
Notes

I would like to thank the following, who read versions of this essay at quite divergent moments
in its long birth and provided precious insights to which I have tried to rise: Loring M. Danforth,
Nancy Felson-Rubin, Gregory Jusdanis, Prista Ratanapruck, Sohini Ray, Eric Schwimmer,
Saipin Suputtamongkol, Stanley J. Tambiah, and Thongchai Winichakul.
 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Bruns-
wick: Rutgers University Press, ).
 A few key authors (for example, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, The Monkey As Mirror: Symbolic
Transformations in Japanese History and Ritual [Princeton: Princeton University Press,
], –) have begun to turn the tide, but this development has, significantly, arrived
slowly and late.
 Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Mar-
gins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
 Douglas Holmes, Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, ).
 See, for example, the useful comparative overview provided by T. M. Luhrmann, The Good
Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, ), –.
 See James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven: Yale University Press, ); but
see also Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of
Power through Bedouin Women,’’ American Ethnologist  (): –; Deborah Reed-
Danahay, ‘‘Talking about Resistance: Ethnography and Theory in Rural France,’’ Anthro-
pological Quarterly  (): –.
 This is the position of those who now call themselves Neokiprii (‘‘Neo-Cypriots’’)—mostly
young intellectuals who resent the rapid cultural as well as institutional absorption of the
Greek-Cypriot world by the Greek nation-state.
 The idea that Slavs were subject to a ‘‘somehow communistic influence,’’ possibly attrib-
utable to their living in extended family structures that were later to be taken as posi-
tive evidence for that supposed proclivity, was articulated early; see Dora d’Istria, ‘‘La
nationalité hellénique d’après les chants populaires,’’ Revue des deux mondes  ():
–; see especially . The converse view, that the true European must be an indi-
vidualist, remains prominent in the discourse of Greek identity politics, especially among
right-wingers.
 See Scot Barmé, Luang Wichit Wathakan and the Creation of a Thai Identity (Singapore:
ISEAS, ), –, –; the Greek phrase, emblematic of the struggle especially
on the island of Crete, was celebrated by the novelist Nikos Kazantzakis in the novel pub-
lished in English as Freedom or Death (New York: Simon and Schuster, ).
 On the Thai terminology, see Barmé, Luang Wichit Wathakan, ; Thongchai
Winichakul, ‘‘The Quest for ‘Siwilai’: A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational Think-
ing in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century Siam,’’ Journal of Asian Studies
 (): –.
 David Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, ); George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability
and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, ), .

 Sydel Silverman, Three Bells of Civilization: The Life of an Italian Hill Town (New York:
Columbia University Press, ).
 Thongchai, ‘‘The Quest for ‘Siwilai,’ ’’ , following Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes:
Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, ); Herzfeld, Anthropology
through the Looking-Glass.
 Thongchai, ‘‘The Quest for ‘Siwilai,’ ’’ .
 Thongchai, ‘‘The Quest for ‘Siwilai,’ ’’ , .
 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, ), .
 On Santi Asoke, see Marja-Leena Heikkilä-Horn, Santi Asoke Buddhism and Thai State
Response (Åbo: Åbo Akademis Förlag, ). On the Dhammakaya movement, see the
special report on research by Apinya Feungfusakul, Bangkok Post, no.  (December
). Rosalind C. Morris, In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in North-
ern Thailand (Durham: Duke University Press, ), , discusses the engagement of
medium cults with issues of modernity.
 Stanley J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity
in Thailand against a Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
).
 Stanley J. Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, ).
 Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass, , .
 E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, ).
 Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), .
 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Essays in Social Anthropology (London: Free Press of Glencoe, ),
–.
 Nancy Struever, ‘‘Fables of Power,’’ Representations, no.  (Fall ): –; the discus-
sion of civil disability is on .
 Evans-Pritchard, Essays, .
 For example, Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, ).
 On lineage segmentation and event structure, see E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A
Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, ); Paul Dresch, ‘‘The Significance of the Course Events Take in
Segmentary System,’’ American Ethnologist  (): –. On the rise of the Libyan
monarchy in this framework, see E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, ); compare J. Davis, Libyan Politics: Tribe and Revolution—An
Account of the Zuwaya and Their Government (Berkeley: University of California Press,
). On Greece and Europe, see J. K. Campbell, Honour, Family, and Patronage: A Study
of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
); J. Davis, ‘‘History and the People without Europe,’’ in Other Histories, ed. Kirsten
Hastrup (London: Routledge, ), –.
 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (Glencoe, IL: Free Press,
), . On structuration, see especially Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society:

Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, ).
 See Struever, ‘‘Fables of Power.’’ I might add, ironically, that even those anthropologists
who have mined Vico for his very considerable insights have virtually ignored the cen-
trality to these of a subversive reading of classical history—and thus of a subversive classi-
cal history to the critical project of examining the Eurocentric assumptions that underlie
anthropological practice. In these ‘‘neutral’’ of ‘‘professional’’ anthropological readings of
Vico (for example, José Guilherme Merquior, ‘‘Vico et Lévi-Strauss: notes à propos d’un
symposium,’’ L’Homme  []: –), the material Vico used appears to be incidental
to the ideas, rather than—as Vico intended—critical for understanding a modern world
in which we have reexpropriated classical culture for exclusive ideological ends.
 At the University of the Aegean, Mytilene (Lesbos); see Evthymios Papataxiarchis and
Theodoros Paradellis, Taftotites ke Filo sti Singkhroni Elladha (Athens: Kastaniotis, ).
 Marcel Détienne, The Creation of Mythology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 
[]), .
 S. C. Humphreys, Anthropology and the Greeks (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ).
 Ernestine Friedl, Vasilika: A Village in Modern Greece (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Win-
ston, ).
 Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass.
 Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘The Structural Study of Myth,’’ Journal of American Folklore 
(): –.
 Bernal, Black Athena, .
 Louis Gernet, Anthropologie de la Grèce antique (Paris: François Maspero, ).
 Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), .
 On possessive individualism, see C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Indi-
vidualism: From Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); on its exten-
sion to nationalism, see Richard Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ); Michael Herzfeld, ‘‘The European Self:
Rethinking an Attitude,’’ in Anthony Padgen, ed., The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the
European Union (Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, and Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ), –.
 G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); compare, for example, Rodney Need-
ham, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, ), xxix.
 See Hodgen, Early Anthropology, ; compare François Hartog, Le miroir d’Hérodote: Essai
sur la représentation de l’Autre (Paris: Gallimard, ).
 The terminological distinction follows Dimitrios Tziovas, The Nationism of the Demoticists
and Its Impact on Their Literary Theory (–): An Analysis Based on Their Literary
Criticism and Essays (Amsterdam: A. M. Hakkert, ).
 The terminology is that of Ioan Lewis, ‘‘Force and Fission in Northern Somali Lineage
Structure,’’ American Anthropologist  (): –.
 See James Clifford, ‘‘On Ethnographic Authority,’’ Representations, no.  (Spring ):
–.
 Margaret T. Hodgen, The Doctrine of Survivals: A Chapter in the History of Scientific Method

in the Study of Man (London: Allenson and Company, ),  n. .
 Campbell, Honour, Family, and Patronage; Friedl, Vasilika; Irwin T. Sanders, Rainbow in
the Rock: The People of Rural Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ). On
Gobineau, see the special issue of Nouvelle revue française (): .
 The groundwork for this process had been laid centuries before. By equating the Arabic-
Turkish name for their Byzantine forebears with a non-European identity in which they
recognized themselves (as Romii), the Greeks had perforce acquiesced in the process of
their marginalization from the European mainstream: this was an already corrupt Roman
Empire become Ottoman, and so foreign to the Hellenic spirit that Europeans so much
admired. The Greeks (or, more precisely here, the Hellenes) had, for all intents and pur-
poses, ceased to exist. Their reconstitution as an ostensibly independent nation-state dur-
ing the half-century immediately before anthropology became a professional discourse
provided a cordon sanitaire between Europe and the Orient in cartographic time, while
anthropology performed the same function in discursive space (Herzfeld, Anthropology
through the Looking-Glass); the Greeks could be Hellenes only if they accepted to belong to
a bygone era, cultural coelacanths that validated the West’s self-appointed right to sneer
at their primitivity and their decadence.
 See, for example, Luhrmann, The Good Parsi.
 Takis Mikhas, ‘‘I Elladha, thima mias neas modhas,’’ Eleftherotypia, February , , .
 Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera, Conversations in Colombia: The Domestic Economy
in Life and Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.
 Morris, In the Place of Origins, cites C. Nadia Seremetakis, ‘‘The Memory of the Senses:
Historical Perception, Commensal Exchange, and Modernity,’’ Visual Anthropology Review
 (): –.
 For example, George R. Saunders, ‘‘ ‘Critical Ethnocentrism’ and the Ethnology of Ernesto
de Martino,’’ American Anthropologist  (): –.
 Thongchai, ‘‘The Quest for ‘Siwilai,’ ’’ –.
 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York:
Columbia University Press, ), –.
 See, for example, Achille Mbembe, ‘‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony,’’ Africa 
(): –.

Herzfeld (2002) TheAbsencePresent

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Herzfeld (2002) TheAbsencePresent

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Herzfeld (2002) TheAbsencePresent

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Michael Herzfeld

The Absent Presence: Discourses of

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

The Discourse of Humanity:

anthropology displays two major, closely intertwined absences—one con-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence, this

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

exhibits certain features of crypto-colonial status, including its comparative

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

scholars, respectively, could put the evidence of an ancient, partially Indo-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

impression would not be so much inaccurate as historically shallow. Both

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

Although both were coined in their respective locales as marks of indige-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

these people whom the Thais, in a localized version of Victorian survival-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

language reforms seem to have been directed more to homogenization and

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

Anthropology and the Quest for Origins: Hellenism Bound

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

Historians and Anthropologists

against the Tylorean claims to originary status, adducing impressive evi-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

scholars of oral tradition were subsequently, and somewhat controversially,

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

than to classical thought, of both humankind and discourse. To turn again

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

Lineages and Identities

cal techniques to classical materials remained marginal to anthropology at

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

known as individualism—an agency linked historically not only to the rise

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

Greece and the Multicultural World

pliﬁes the implicitly Hellenic claims of Western epistemology. At several

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

ancient and modern, in the constitution of European culture.45 In the

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

cultural sycophants—a not-uncommon fate of fully colonial elites as well,

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

Anthropology and the Fate of Hellenism

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

adapting to them or risking ever more crushing marginalization. It is easy,

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

crypto-colonies has remained marginalized—in dramatic contrast with, for

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

anthropology to the critique of new subalternities and new complexities of

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/101/4/899/469102/08.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN user on 28 January 2022

You might also like