Michael Herzfeld

The Poetics Of Manhood: Contest And Identity In A Cretan Mountain Village

The description for this book, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village, will be forthcoming.

The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism

The disciplines of social and cultural anthropology emerged from the ferment of West European world domination as instrument and expression of the colonial project. Although it subsequently turned against the practices and ideology of colonialism, it remains strongly marked by that historical entailment. Among the many effects of colonialism on anthropology, one in particular stands out: the fact that much of the discipline’s theoretical capital is palpably derived from ethnographic research done in the colonial dominions.

Spatial Cleansing Monumental Vacuity and the Idea of the West

This article comprises preliminary remarks about spatiality and power, with a particular focus on field data from Greece and Thailand (with secondary materials from Italy). I suggest that the creation of large open spaces in city contexts, generating a marked contrast with local tolerance of crowding, represents the intrusive presence of regimentation and aesthetic domination. Within a larger pattern of conceding to hegemonic ideas about classical ornamentation as well as rational town-planning, such idioms of ‘spatial cleansing’ create a context entirely compatible with the current structures of economic inequality. They also occlude the understandings of past experience that characterize local groups wishing to remain in historic centers; it is noteworthy that in Thailand, where the middle class has not yet succumbed to the global fashion for antique domestic spaces as has its counterpart in Italy (and to a lesser extent in Greece), it is the poor who seem more interested in calibrating their lives to official master narratives in the hope of being rewarded with continued rights to inhabit their existing lived environment.

Engagement, Gentrification, and the Neoliberal Hijacking of History

Drawing primarily on fieldwork in Greece, Italy, and Thailand, I examine the use of historic conservation to justify gentrification. This commoditization of history expands into urban design a classification that serves the goals of neoliberal modernity. By thus refocusing the classic anthropological concern with taxonomy on the analysis of the bureaucratic production of everyday experience and knowledge, I explore a new global habitus in which dominant interpretations of history spatially reinforce current ideologies. Historic conservation often provides an excuse for intervention into urban life. In a revision of high modernism’s focus on science, logic, and efficiency, this trend invokes “the past.” But which past? The concept of “heritage” is grounded in culturally specific ideologies of kinship, residence, and property, but the universalization of the nation‐state as a collectivity of similar subunits has given those concepts globally hegemonic power. In consequence, phenomena that governments treat as “merely” cultural or symbolic are not taken seriously as sources of poverty and subjection. By juxtaposing historic conservation and gentrification with a critique of the public management of knowledge, I thus sketch a critical trajectory for anthropological engagement in “the politics of mereness” by asking who defines what matters in residents’ lives.

Localism and the logic of nationalistic folklore: Cretan reflections

The object of this article is to explore a familiar paradox of folklore studies: the promotion of powerfully localist readings in the service of an inclusive national entity. In the logic of European nationalism, this might seem an irresolvable paradox. The object of the nation-state is to unify all potentially divergent cultural and social entities within a single framework, so that localist sentiment ceases to represent the threat of political separatism. In some nation-states, the most harmonious symbiosis of localism with nationalism appears in those regions that are stereotypically regarded as culturally and politically marginal and are consequently subjected to the double-edged opprobrium of being both “simple” and yet also corrupted by a vast range of allegedly foreign elements both culturally and “racially.” A study of these tension-laden matters must dodge among several levels in order to go beyond the limitations both of purely local ethnography and of national-level historiography. If the former too easily occludes the effects of larger events on local perceptions, the latter can, and often does, fail to account for the success of nationalist ideologies in securing loyalty unto death even—or perhaps especially?—from populations that are notoriously unwilling to accept state rule in more mundane matters of law and order.

Is poverty in our genes? A critique of Ashraf and Galor, "The 'out of Africa' hypothesis, human genetic diversity, and comparative economic development," American Economic Review (Forthcoming)

We present a critique of a paper written by two economists, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, which is forthcoming in the American Economic Review and which was uncritically highlighted in Science magazine. Their paper claims there is a causal effect of genetic diversity on economic success, positing that too much or too little genetic diversity constrains development. In particular, they argue that “the high degree of diversity among African populations and the low degree of diversity among Native American populations have been a detrimental force in the development of these regions.” We demonstrate that their argument is seriously flawed on both factual and methodological grounds. As economists and other social scientists begin exploring newly available genetic data, it is crucial to remember that nonexperts broadcasting bold claims on the basis of weak data and methods can have profoundly detrimental social and political effects.

Social Tension and Inheritance by Lot in Three Greek Villages

Property-division by lot is known in various parts of Greece, although there is some variation in the type of property so divided, as well as in the social relationships concerned. In this brief analysis, three normative variations of the practice are examined in relation to local differences in kinship, residence, and inheritance rules. Lots are thereby shown to mark whichever categories of property are locally perceived as the primary focus of contention between coheirs. Thus, division by lot emerges as the constant through which the variables of inheritance and residence rules and kin relationships are balanced so as to avert conflict. It is thus a device the use of which transcends particularistic local norms.

Looking both ways: The ethnographer in the text

Every ethnographer is in some sense marginal to the society being studied. That marginality is not a static condition, however, but entails a constant (if inconsistent) shifting to and fro across social boundaries that are themselves highly volatile. The condition of marginality allows informants, who are just as interested in the curious human intruder as the latter is in them, to include or exclude the ethnographer more or less at will. The ethnographers own dexterity thus consists of anticipating such shifts, but this is not always easy or even possible; if the ethnographer proves slow to learn the significance of certain reactions, disaster that a wiser or more experienced observer could perhaps have predicted may strike in a seemingly unpredictable way. The ethnographers marginality is not simply a passive structural anomaly or a safe perch on the cultural fence; most of the time, the ethnographer is either an insider or an outsider. But — and this is the real crux of the mattter — no ethnographer can ever claim to have been one or the other in an absolute sense. The very fact of negotiating ones status in the community precludes any such possibility. Anthropologists have to learn to adapt to events in which they themselves are significant actors. This creates a sense of imperfect closure every bit as disconcerting for us as taxonomic anomalies in a symbolic system. In this essay, I propose to tackle three cogently interrelated issues: the negotiability of the insider/outsider discrimination; the articulation of that discrimination with larger (e.g., national) levels of discrimination; and the negotiation of the ethnographers status through the interplay between the various levels of differentiation. I do so using a set of somewhat unhappy field experiences of my own; the fundamental point of this exercise is to demonstrate the importance of recognizing ones own mis-steps in the fieldwork process as a valuable source of perspective. In particular, I want to stress immediately that part of my problem lay

Performing Comparisons: Ethnography, Globetrotting, and the Spaces of Social Knowledge

Two key aspects of social and cultural anthropology are comparison and reflexivity. For a genuinely empirical anthropology, these must be mutually engaged. In exploring various kinds of comparison--from formal intercommunal analyses to comparisons between nation-states, between anthropology and its cultural objects, and between anthropological and other kinds of writing--the anthropologists personal trajectory is critically influential on choices made and paths taken. In contemplating my earliest work in Greece, my decision to compare forms of identity in Greece and Italy, and a recent move to the geographically broader framework offered by including Thailand, I have also had to consider the role of differently situated anthropologists (e.g., local as opposed to foreign), points in career trajectory and developing linguistic competences, and shifting epistemological contexts. As a result, over time, I have found the linkage between comparison and reflexivity increasingly central to the empirical understanding of social and cultural phenomena.

When Exceptions Define the Rules: Greek Baptismal Names and the Negotiation of Identity

Personal names reflect the tension between social and individual levels of identity; their conferral and subsequent use in address and reference are consequently invested with ideological significance for actors. Exceptions to norms of both conferral and use may be justified in the same ideological terms as are normative practices, so that apparently rigid, local-level norms seem to be elements of a larger, more flexible semiotic complex encompassing norms and exceptions alike. By way of illustration, Greek data reveal an ideology of commemorative naming as reciprocity. This ideology entails choices about whom to recognize as a benefactor, and thereby shows how the existence of a set of rules for the selection of namesakes actually allows the strategic and selective expression of social alignments. In such a system, naming practices allow people to adjust genealogical history and other kinds of formal relationships to current social experience.