Michael Herzfeld and Greece (1989)

John Davis is professor of anthropology at the University of Kent at Canterbury and has published widely on the Mediterranean. Michael Herzfeld's new book was also commented on in A.T., February 1988, p.2, 'Pot Pourri'. Most anthropologists at some time or another notice that the people whom they encounter while doing fieldwork express mixed feelings, divided loyalties, uncertainty, ambivalence and disguised contempt or rejection. And some anthropologists advance propositions which essentially undermine their own work. It seems clear, for instance, that one burden of Malinowski's work is that it is not possible to speak or write of 'savages' as others distinct from ourselves. Similarly it is hard to believe that Evans-Pritchard did not notice the tension in his work on the Zande, between saying that witchcraft is an orderly, effective, coherent mistake, and saying that Western knowledge (including anthropology) is orderly, effective, coherent and correct or true. Indeed, he seemed to relish it: both men were, with different degrees of self-awareness, auto-subversives. But few have celebrated these uncertainties, to make them a centre of their understanding. Ernest Gellner elaborates an argument to the effect that because words and actions have plural meanings they can be understood by different people simultaneously in at least two senses; social life (and social change) become much smoother. Godfrey Lienhardt's parallax allows him to explore the ways in which Dinka and their missionaries could maintain an amiable agreement about religious matters, because they were able to conceal the extent of their mutual misunderstanding in a language which shared key terms but allowed free range to their quite different connotations. Ambiguity is a crucial lubricant of social relations. In English it was perfectly possible for a bank manager to write in the 1960s 'You have been our client for seventeen years, and we are sorry to lose a patron of such long standing': power in this case at any rate shifting from one party to another with the ups and downs of the balance. The same necessary shiftiness is there in Berber (agurram) and Arabic (mrabt), and in other social groups and relations where power switches from situation to situation or indeed is changeable and unfixed. Two people can make as if, in spite of temporary dislocations, they are fundamentally in balance, equal. In his latest book Anthropology through the Lookingglass: Critical ethnography in the margins of Europe (Cambridge, ?24.50), Michael Herzfeld makes ambiguity (what he perhaps rather restrictively calls disemia) into a central principle of analysis and of reflection on anthropology. For instance, he recounts that he was complimented on his Greek: he spoke 'better' than the villagers, they said, and he was momentarily flattered into accepting the higher status of literate scholar. On reflection, he was less seduced. The flattery, like hospitality and deference, was an exclusion, a rejection of his pretensions to live the common life and to penetrate the everyday. Moreover, the compliment was quietly destructive. Herzfeld had been speaking a selfconscious demotic, but was complimented on his katharevousa (the then official national 'pure' Greek). His demotic Greek also possessed elements of urban scholarly and nationalist systematization: supporters of demotic, with one view of Greek national culture, wished to supplant the supporters of katharevousa, who had another. But they were all statesmen, and their demotic excluded the Greek spoken by Rhodian villagers. 'You speak better Greek' therefore lumped him with urban statesmen: it was flattery, a rejection of urban political demotic, an assertion of the value of local chaos over statesmen's attempts to control; and those Rhodians who made or witnessed the false compliment no doubt waited to see if Herzfeld's vanity would let him take it at face value. So he perceived an instance of disemia: an apparently amiable acceptance of inferiority and of the inauthenticity of Rhodian village speech (and culture and social organization); and at the same time, for those in the Rhodian know, a covert assertion of authenticity, a carefully maintained and nurtured sociolinguistic banditry. Herzfeld argues that such disemia is recurrent in Greek cultures because of the extreme politicization of cultural and social organization. That is a consequence of action by nationalist statesmen, who in turn responded to international cultural pressure. His argument, briefly, is that successful and powerful nationalist states elevated Greece into the 'cradle' of 'our' civilisation. But in the early nineteenth century it was clear that contemporary Greece lacked the qualities befitting the nursery furniture of romantic nationalist France or Britain: Byron's Greek contemporaries could never have been responsible for our democracy, philosophy, rationality, for they were tainted by Oriental despotism, and had become lazy, fatalistic, contentious and poor. To become worthy living ancestors, Greeks had to be redeemed; and their statesmen found a legitimating task in the consistent denial of authenticity to actual Greek cultures. Hence disemia: a world in which every action is a duck-rabbit, authentic and inauthentic, deferential and mocking. Herzfeld analyses aspects of language use and policy, of sexual conduct and morality, of folklore, of history and history-making with great subtlety. And he argues and demonstrates the importance of disemia to ethnography: anthropologists in Greece are automatically identified with the literate statesmen (and in fact, since they are representatives of the superior powers which got them in the fix in the first place, the urgency of the pressure on them to be a sort of cultural trump card to be played against local teachers and bureaucrats is presumably that much greater). The trap, which not all anthropologists have avoided, is to be misled by their own presuppositions into seeing only the rabbits which villagers offer to statesmen. It does seem appropriate to speak of disemia in fairly simple situations, as when you want to tease an anthropologist. In others, which involve statesmen and government, taxation, law courts, schools, local administration, it could be more sensible to speak of trisemia, nsemia a whole farmyard of multivalencies and exploitable multiguities. Perhaps Herzfeld also overemphasizes the extent to which local meanings are hidden from the state. The statesmen (the churchwardens and constables of Corinth and Salonika, the teachers, folklorists, bureaucrats and politicians who create and represent a nationalist policy) are themselves villagers, or urban villagers, in other aspects of their lives. All but the stupidest statesmen must be acutely conscious of the 7