Greek Exceptionalism and Contemporary Historiography: New Pitfalls and Old Debates

My intention in this brief essay is to initiate a dialogue on the state of contemporary Greek historiography. The theme of the conference of which this paper was a part, “Whither the Neohellenic?” is both timely and important. The conference’s purpose was to investigate where the field is going or is likely to go in the future. Historians are notoriously reluctant to play the role of prognosticators, and I share the uneasiness of my colleagues. My anxiety about discussing the future was compounded when I discovered how vague my understanding was of what could be meant by the neohellenic. What I aim to do in this article is to place the historiography of Greece in the modern era within the larger framework of the discipline of history. Two caveats are in order. First, my comments reflect primarily my own subfield of social history, although I am afraid that they essentially apply to the discipline as a whole. Second, as someone whose intellectual formation was in anthropology and archeology but who teaches and writes on history in a history department, my comments on the state of history reflect both an insider’s and outsider’s perspective. This also allows me to draw some comparisons between the two fields. I state the quandary regarding neohellenic history as baldly and provocatively as I can in the hope of sparking further discussion.

We are at a crucial juncture in the development of Greek historiography. Until very recently, the field had been almost nonexistent in the wider discipline for reasons that I shall present shortly. However, there are indications that this is beginning to change. Younger scholars working both in Greece and elsewhere are starting to produce works that address mainstream topics in forums that bring the study of modern Greece to the attention of historians whose research is empirically grounded elsewhere. Threatening to strangle this incipient movement at birth are the pleas for Greek exceptionalism. Seductive as they may be, these cries must be resisted if the field is to emerge from the doldrums that have beset it for so long. Let me begin with an assessment of the past.

In order to gauge the presence of modern Greek history in the wider discipline, I examined three aspects of professional activity: (1) participation over the last ten years in scholarly, professional-association conferences (the American Historical Association and the Social Science History Association); (2) the incidence of inclusion of works on Greece in edited collections that address major themes in the history of Europe; (3) the publication of articles on Greece in the leading social history journals. In each case I draw comparisons with the other discipline to which I am connected, anthropology, and, by so doing, make some stark differences evident.

The Social Science History Association is the most important organization in the field of social history. Each year its annual conference attracts scholars from around the globe. I examined programs for a ten-year period, and I tabulated for two of those years all papers relating to Europe in which a precise country-level focus was designated. I found one paper specifically on Greece during the decade sampled, and that one paper was by me, in 1995, on homicide in Athens during the late nineteenth century. In table 1 I present data on the complete distribution of papers on Europe.

Table 1.

Social Science History Association Meetings

	1991	1994	Total
Great Britain	20	18	38
France	20	9	29
Germany	15	9	24
Holland	8	6	14
Sweden	1	7	8
Russia	4	3	7
Italy	6	1	7
Ireland	3	3	6
Norway	4	2	6
Belgium	4	1	5
Poland	2	2	4
Finland	0	3	3
Croatia	2	1	3
Spain	0	2	2
Ottoman	2	0	2
Austria	1	1	2
Portugal	1	1	2
Denmark	0	1	1
Hungary	0	0	0
Slovenia	1	1	2
Bulgaria	0	1	1
Latvia	0	0	0
Greece	0	0	0

These data demonstrate that a paper was presented on nearly every country in Europe except Greece. I repeated this exercise with the...