Anthropology Through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (review)

Reviews Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology Through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1987. Pp. xii + 260. $34.50. Much like peoples at the margins of Europe, Europeanist anthropologists are forever worrying about their identity in relation to the profession's powerful center. Herzfeld's book constitutes an attempt to vault Europeanist anthropology into that center from the periphery. The book's themes are complex and sophisticated (if perhaps too abundant, impeding the integration of its argument), for Herzfeld aims far beyond merely arguing for the relevance of Greece to anthropological theory: he is engaged simultaneously in an extended critique of the discipline (its focus on the exotic, its unwitting collaboration with "statist" ideologies, etc.), a demonstration of anthropology's links with the making of Greek identity, an implicit argument for including Giambattista Vico in anthropology's lineage, and a theory of "disemia" that would synthesize a number of themes within the ethnography of Greece (honor/shame, the language question , gender, the understanding of inheritance and marriage, etc.). Given such an ambitious agenda (some parts of it more successfully handled than others), a short review cannot adequately summarize and assess the book but must proceed selectively. Of Herzfeld's several themes, I am most interested in his discussion of the creation of Greek national identity and his brief for the significance of Europeanist ethnography within the discipline. His treatment of both is wide-ranging and erudite; I find the link he wishes to establish between them more tenuous, however, than he claims. Concerning Greek identity, he holds that special problems arose for its creators because, on the one hand, West Europeans assigned Greece a special place as sacred "ancestor" of European civilization, which meant a continual struggle for Greeks to obtain control over the process of defining their identity. On the other hand, Greece's absorption into the Ottoman empire meant a fall Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 6, 1988. 311 312 Reviews from grace, a pollution of its European qualities by the taint of the orient. The introjection of this polluting Other has posed endless problems for the construction of a stable and positive national image. Herzfeld goes on from this to present models of segmentation and disemia (a broadened version of diglossia) to describe the dialectic of Greek identity within this set of contrasts; it consists of a tension between an official/formal ideology—with its hellenizing European orientation, its suppression of diversity, its concern with honor and with normativity—and an intimate, socially embedded set of usages, loosely associated with "Romiossini" and the "inner Turk," shame, and identity-as-process rather than as fixed absolute. I am very sympathetic to Herzfeld's phrasing (indeed, I have been developing a similar argument for national identity in Romania); yet I find it a bit too heavy on schemata and weak on the actual processes whereby identity is constructed. We hear a great deal about an "official ideology" without ever finding out much about how it is produced (much less the "European" ideology so crucial to the outcome). Some of this was told in Herzfeld's excellent Ours Once More, but it needs deepening here. How did the West try to persuade Greeks to see the Turkish past as polluting? Who are the "some Greeks" of the tantalizing sentence on p. 18, "Some Greeks, some of the time, claim a European identity that other Greeks claim they have . . . never desired"? The politics of all this is crucial, for it is one thing to have an identity confusion over whether one is European or oriental, and it is quite another to have different groups voicing systematically patterned identity claims for one or other identity. In the latter case, the field of discourse overall may present a confused appearance, but close attention to its production will show something else. Again, what is the relation of Greek scholars to other possible sources of a "statist" ideology? My inquiry into the Romanian case convinces me that "statists" and the scholarly developers of nationalist ideology were not always the same people and the two sets of ideology were often at odds, yet Herzfeld tends to conflate them. I...