Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe

273 Pages·1989·8.05 MB·English

by  Michael Herzfeld

Anthropology through
the looking-glass

Anthropology through
the looking-glass
Critical ethnography in
the margins of Europe
Michael Herzfeld
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Semiotics, Indiana University
I CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211 USA
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia
© Cambridge University Press 1987
First published 1987
First paperback edition 1989
Reprinted 1992, 1993, 1995, 1999
Printed in Great Britain by
Athenaeum Press Ltd, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear
British Library cataloguing in publication data
Herzfeld, Michael
Anthropology through the looking-glass :
critical ethnography in the margins of
Europe.
1. Greece-Civilization
I. Title
306'.09495 DF77
Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data
Herzfeld, Michael, 1947-
Anthropology through the looking-glass :
Bibliography.
Includes index.
1. Athropology. 2. Ethnology-Europe.
I. Title
GN33. H47 1987 306 87-9341
ISBN 0 521 34003 9 hardback
ISBN 0 521 38908 9 paperback
RB
For John Campbell
Of the conceit of nations we have heard that golden saying of Diodorus Siculus,
that nations, whether Greek or barbarian, have each had the foolish conceit of
having been ahead of all the others in discovering the good things of human life and
of having memories of their affairs that go back to the beginning of the world.(....)
To this conceit of nations we may add here the conceit of the learned, who want
whatever they know to be as old as the world.
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744)
(1,2,3-4 [1977:174-5] [B/F 125, 127])
Contents
Preface ix
Key to symbols xii
1 Romanticism and Hellenism: burdens of otherness 1
2 A secular cosmology 28
3 Aboriginal Europeans 49
4 Difference as identity 77
5 The double-headed eagle: self-knowledge and self-display 95
6 Strict definitions and bad habits 123
7 The practice of relativity 152
8 Etymologies of a discipline 186
Notes 206
Bibliography 223
Index 245
Vll

Preface
I came to anthropology through my early fascination with modern Greece,
rather than the other way round. The route was ethnographic and experien-
tial; theory, though useful, was a means to an end. As a student, I neverthe-
less also felt the heady lures of theoretical formalism. Symbolic opposition
pitted its claims of rigor and precision against the very different intellectual
ascetism of strictly empirical approaches and considerations. But here lay a
huge irony, one that I only slowly began to perceive: the very tension
between empirical description and structured formalism was itself both a
symbolic form and a pragmatic experience.
It gradually became apparent to me that, despite their alluring neatness,
structuralist techniques were in practice the expressive paraphernalia of a
symbolism that we shared with the people we studied. They were not so
much misguided, as the fashionable overreaction against their use would
have it, as grimly embedded in the objectivism that allowed Us to study
Them. The fact that this was a symbolic opposition in its own right was
ignored, or deemed irrelevant. After all, since structuralism (like its many
predecessors) made claims to global explanatory capacities, it was obvious
that we could, if we wanted, study ourselves. But this was usually regarded
as trivial at best, pure narcissism in the less generous view; "reflexivity" - a
very different concept - was not yet part of the day-to-day vocabulary.
Meanwhile, I continued to work "on" Greek materials, to live in Greece
over long periods, and to think about my own fascination with Greek
culture and society. Educated Greek friends would sometimes intimate a
sense of unease at the application of methods and ideas derived from the
study of "primitives" to their European culture. This was a prejudice, cer-
tainly; but could I claim that my own approach was any less ethnocentric
unless I encouraged its application to "my own" culture - whatever that
was?
Such were the beginnings of this book. In it, I argue that anthropology is
as much a symbolic system, and as concerned with the differentiation of
identities, as any of the social groups that it reifies and studies. But this is
emphatically not a rejection of anthropology, any more than it is a denial of
theory. These extremes do not improve upon the blindness of positivism.
ix