Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage by Michael Herzfeld (review)

Subversive Archaism interrogates the assumptions that underpin modernist models of social order presided over by technocratic elites. Its protagonists are marginalized people who refuse to grant primacy to the modern state’s vision of national heritage, which leave little space to alternative forms of community. However, against difficult odds they persist, and mobilize their own definitions of tradition to carve out a niche within the formal polity that encapsulates them. In a nutshell, this is an account of the apparent triumph of the nation-state form and of the varieties of social aggregation that cannot be permitted to exist within it.

Herzfeld’s “subversive archaists” are recalcitrant traditionalists, often radically conservative. Theirs is not a revolutionary impulse as much as it is a reformist one. However, while they do react to the strictures imposed by modern forms of sociopolitical organization, their subversivism is not a form of “primitive rebellion” (Hobsbawm 1959) as much as it is a desire for recognition of unsanctioned models of tradition that are fully loyal to the nations of which they are part. Despite this, they are targets of state suspicion and bourgeois disdain because they do not fit within the master plan of the sanitized order that projects onto the global plane an image of the nation-state as sober, serious, and respectable, and, importantly, Western-inflected. They are the lower classes who eagerly play the game of national heritage, but not according to the rules devised by technocratic elites at the helm of the national bureaucracy. As conceptual holdouts against a modernizing order that seeks to displace their folk model of the society, they provoke within the nation-state bureaucracy an “anxiety of unmodernity,” a fear that threatens to upend the realization of full membership among the “civilized” states of the world. Their subversiveness is of a kind that offers a vernacular alternative to the status quo, and that champions a grittier narrative and style of national culture.

Based on the author’s 2018 Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, the book generates analytical framings that breathe new life into the anthropology of the state, and offers a vibrant middle-range theorization of power based on ethnological comparison across multiple cases. Individual chapters reveal facets of a multilayered narrative. Following a concise presentation of key axioms and frameworks in the opening chapter, Herzfeld considers, in Chapter 2, the tussle between the official and unofficial visions of national origins, and subversive archaists’ desire to retain control over national narratives that might permit them to stake a claim as central characters within nationalist historiography. Chapter 3, on belonging and remoteness, is concerned with the tactics by which the bureaucratic state distinguishes its own self-definitions from those of rural folk or urban underclasses with a strategic imputation of backwardness that amounts to a denial of coevalness (Fabian 1983).

Chapter 4 considers the cosmological foundations of subversive archaism in Thailand and Greece, while Chapter 5 asks, “What is a polity?” Here, we see an exposition of the demotic lineaments that decenter the official claims of the state form, and that present an alternative vision of life as concentrated on forms of solidarity that are intangible, evanes-cent, spontaneous and not rigid. Chapter 6 zooms out from the particulars of the Greek and Thai cases and presents a series of comparisons that underscore cross-cultural similarities and differences in forms of identity subversiveness. What we note here are universal dynamics of power that position marginal communities pursuing alternative models of society in structurally similar positions. Chapter 7 takes up this latter concern with an assessment of “the discursive styles of confrontation” (137) between subversive archaists and the state, where, respectively, the interplay of parody and civility come to define a dynamic that can, and regularly does, degenerate into forms of invective that bring to the fore the bureaucratic state’s antipathy to plebeian orders. The concluding chapter raises a series of questions about the future of subversive archaism across time...