Indigeneity and
historical consciousness: comparing Greek imagination with others
Dimitrios Theodossopoulos, University of Bristol
Abstract:
Many in Greece invest
with deep persuasion to their connection with ancient Greek history and
culture. This is broadly conceived in essentialist terms and supported by
competing claims to an authentic and original culture. While in everyday
conversation the causality of historical events is enthusiastically debated —
sometimes admittedly by means of original arguments — most local actors in Greece will hesitate to challenge the main
threads that sustain the master-narrative of Greek ethnohistory, such as for
example, the connection of Greek identity with ancient Greece and Europe.
Greek origin myths, like those of other powerful or powerless ethnic groups,
forge a relationship with a primordial time, and on this basis they legitimise
entitlements to territory and culture. The ‘I came here first’ principle rules
here, prioritising one previously migratory ethnic group over another.
Stripped
from its credentials of European excellence, the national Greek historical
consciousness looks very much like any other, but many in modern Greece, proud
of their paradigmatic European-ness, remain unaware of their shared similarities
with other peoples. At a more abstract level, this attitude permeates the
disciplinary compartmentalisation of anthropology, and has discouraged direct
analytical comparison beyond prescribed regions, such as, for example the wider
European or Mediterranean neighbourhoods. I see the lack of direct
communication between the Anthropology of Europe and the Anthropology of the
Developing World as representing a double (crypto-evolutionist) standard of
analysis. It is based on the idea that European history belongs to a higher
order of complexity, not directly comparable with the transient histories of
‘smaller’, ‘tribal’, ‘marginalised’ groups. Following this widely established
way of thinking, a great majority of the anthropologists concerned with
indigenous identities have excluded from their discussions European histories
and cultural traditions. In a similar manner they appear reluctant to
re-examine and put in perspective their own cultural indigeneity, thus
reserving ‘indigeneity’ as an analytical construct only suitable for discussing
the identity of others. I believe that this implicitly ethnocentric tendency
deprives anthropological analysis of new possibilities.
In this
paper, drawing upon my work in Greece and Panama I will attempt to problematise
some widely unchallenged notions of cultural authenticity that form an integral
part of Greek national consciousness.
Introduction
I have always found history documentaries or televised portraits of
Greek culture made for and presented to international audiences more inspiring
than similar Greek productions in Greek. But I have only lately discovered why.
It is not that the international ones are more expensive (or presumably, of a
higher standard). On the contrary, there are many sophisticated programmes of this
type in Greek, which are very well produced, demonstrate a better awareness of
context, and in all respects are stronger in detail. In ethnographic terms they
represent a ‘thicker’, more nuanced description. But there is often one serious
disadvantage to programmes prepared in Greek for a Greek audience. In most
cases, and to different degrees, they take the classificatory category of ‘us’
for granted; and along with it a narrow, selective, but so enormous in terms of
the detailed information it entails, imagined conception of Greek-ness.
The same, taken for granted, view of Greek history — one that
presupposes a certain amount of shared, and in most cases unquestionable
knowledge — is assumed in everyday conversation among modern Greeks; to be more
precise, those among them who identify with the dominant Greek ethnic
identification. They remain persuaded by the factual validity of a particular
version of history that is developed early in life under the guiding, but
prescriptive, influence of national education (cf. Frangoudaki & Dragona
1997; Karakasidou 1997; Bryant 2004; Hamilakis 2003). In
later life, the same convictions are maintained by the media and the rhetoric
of political parties, which further reinforce a belief in a history accepted by
all in the self-inclusive category of ‘us’. This is indeed the type of
certainty that nurtures national imagination, as has been persuasively
established by the scholars of this phenomenon—more representatively, Benedict
Anderson (1983).
I am more intrigued by a parallel manifestation of this presumptive
imagination. In many conversations that include both Greeks and non-Greeks, the
Greeks often assume that their foreign interlocutors possess a good deal of
knowledge about Greek history. A knowledge that is likely to encourage, it is
assumed, some admiration, or at least, a certain degree of appreciation towards
Greek culture. As my systematic observations demonstrate, the Greek parties in
these conversations feel particularly disappointed when the foreign interlocutors
do not meet this expectation. Such a failure is described in Greek by the noun
‘a-historitos,’ reserved to describe a person ignorant of basic
historical facts (similar to the English adjective ‘a-historical’).
My reflection on that type of interaction between Greeks and
non-Greeks have inspired me to tackle the topic I examine in this paper. This
is the privileged treatment of Greek history and its relationship to non-Greek
histories of minoritised ethnic groups, such as those described by Eric Wolf (1982)
as ‘people without history’. I will argue that the
widely held, but largely implicit expectation that Greek history deserves
privileged treatment—inspired by western European scholarship and cultivated by
Greek nationalism—discourages direct comparison with non-European histories and
identities. This attitude, I maintain, is
crypto-evolutionist in perspective: Greek-ness and European-ness are treated
with a special reverence, as representative of a higher order of civilisation,
which is beyond comparison with other, more ‘tribal’ or exotic versions of
indigenous identity.
As a remedy to this problem, I have argued in a recent paper
(Theodossopoulos n.d.) for a more inclusive treatment of the notion of
indigeneity, one that acknowledges all cultures as indigenous to a certain
socio-political context. My position developed as a response to a previous
debate about the concept ‘indigenous’, as this unravelled itself in the pages
of Current Anthropology, Anthropology Today and Social
Anthropology. Adam Kuper (2003), initiated the debate with his article,
‘The Return of the Native’, in which he presented the term ‘indigenous’ a
remnant of 19th century evolutionism, a more politically correct
equivalent of the terms ‘primitive’ and ‘native’. He proposed that the term
should be abandoned, provoking passionate protest from many other
anthropologists, who often employ indigeneity to advocate the rights of several
dispossessed groups (see in particular, Kenrick & Lewis 2004).
I set apart my position from both sides of the debate. Any traces of
evolutionism that might be identified in the term indigenous, I argued in
response to Kuper, are the result of the anthropology’s unexamined tendency to
search for indigenous people in far away lands, and the denial of many
anthropologists themselves to put in perspective their own indigeneity. Instead
of abandoning the term, I propose to treat it reflexively, with a sense of
humility that examines all cultures within the same analytical order, and
without separating ourselves — as researchers, or as the subjects of our study
— from others. For this reason, I also tried to differentiate my argument from
the critiques of Kuper, who treat indigeneity — in their defence of the rights
of minoritised groups — as the exclusive attribute of these groups. Their
perspective, I maintain, despite its noble intentions, contributes in the
‘tribalisation’ of the people they study and try so hard to defend.
The stereotyping attributes of the term indigenous — its potential
to Otherise, orientalise, tribalise — are to be found, like all other kinds of
categorisation, in its capacity to exclude. I would like to stress that social
exclusion can simultaneously realize two goals: first, to discriminate Others,
and second, to implicitly underline the superiority of oneself (and one’s
ethnic category). This observation brings me at once closer to the topic of
this paper, the indigeneity of the Greeks, and their privileged European
credentials. Drawing connections with their famous ancestors, many in modern Greece employ
their indigeneity to validate claims of cultural distinction. Like
anthropologists who study far away lands, they appear unwilling to compare
themselves as equals with other peoples that do not lay claim to such a
distinguished history.
It is worth noting that this ethnocentric disposition is not
representative merely of the Greeks, but is a more widespread Western attitude.
It has been apparent in Western academia, even within anthropology, the
discipline that has paradigmatically defined itself in an attempt — not always
successful — to defy social evolutionism (see, Argyrou 2002). To encourage some
reflection on this issue, I will attempt to compare Greek indigeneity with that
held by of the Embera, a kind of people that represent an unlikely point of
comparison in standard everyday conversation among Greeks, but also among
students of Greek culture. This comparison, I hope, will help us see the
privileged position of Greek history in the European imagination, from an
unusual, but stimulating perspective.
Comparing Greek imagination with others
The Embera do not have their own, separate nation state, a body of
literature written in their language, an academia that produces an official
history representing their point of view. Dictionaries of their language and
guidebooks to its grammar exist only in photocopies, while their children are
educated in Spanish and gradually learn to adopt many of the ways of the wider latino
society that surrounds them. Their ancestral homeland has been the lowland
Choco in Colombia, while
significant numbers have migrated to Southeast Panama.
There are not any ancient monumental buildings on their land, and
archaeologists have been, until recently, unmotivated to dig out their past. In
all these respects, the Embera differ from the Greeks: they have neither marble
monuments, official, national(ist) history, nor many foreign specialists
theorising their past.
At first sight, one can argue that this is an ethnic group
dissimilar to the Greeks. But then again, it is this striking difference that
can help us think about and appreciate some of the similarities more deeply. I
will highlight here those that relate to the topic of this paper more closely.
The Embera I met in Panama
heavily rely on their indigenous identity to promote their cultural and
political representation. Their relationship with the outer world, their pride
and self-respect, is based on the distinctiveness of their identity and
cultural tradition. When they have an opportunity to present themselves to
others, they derive inspiration from awareness of their indigenous heritage. In
those cases, the Embera indigenous traditions — their dance, music, artefacts
and knowledge of the rainforest — capture the imagination of Western travellers
in ways comparable to the monumental architecture of the Mayans, the Incas or
the Greeks.
When the Embera talk about their migratory history, they don’t
express a sense of rupture from an original homeland. Some of my Embera
respondents in Panama
have stories to tell about a time when their grandfathers fought their
neighbours, the Kuna, with spears and poison darts and took their land. This
was the time when their ancestors migrated from Colombia, following a strategy of
dispersion within inaccessible rainforest environments. This strategy,
historians and anthropologists describe (see, Kane 2004; Williams 2005), was a
response to persecution by the colonial authorities, overpopulation, internal
division, or simply exhaustion of local resources. In all cases, migration in a
landscape carved by rivers and thick, ever-growing vegetation has been a
readily available option for the Embera.
This fairly recent link with the land does not appear to threaten
the indigenous identity of the Embera. In contrast to wider, non-Indian
Panamanian society, the Embera are in position to demonstrate a strong and
continuous link with the Americas,
a relationship with the land that is deeply embedded in their culture and
history. Their American history, like the European history of the Greeks,
provides access to a primordial connection with a land of myth, an identity
that defies the constraints of time. In this respect, the geography of Embera
indigeneity relies on an archaeology that is so old, and so vaguely defined,
that it is almost timeless. There are many parallels here with the indigeneity
of the Greeks.
The ancestors of the modern Greeks, like those of the Embera,
inhabited a wide geographic area that does not coincide with their contemporary
residence. Furthermore, in both cases, their ancestors lived for centuries in
large multicultural Empires. The Ottomans, like the Spanish in Latin America,
were the conquerors of many peoples indigenous to Southeast Europe and Anatolia, whom they united under their government by
right of conquest. There was, many admit, some mixing of populations, and lots
of economic and social exchange, which gave birth to the Ottoman culture. The
informants of anthropological research in Greece have recognised this
‘mixing’, and attribute to it several of the common characteristics, the
cultural traits, that unite the Greeks, the Turks and other people in the
Balkans (Theodossopoulos 2007). They also discuss mixing in terms of both blood
and culture, a combination that naturalises the resulting hybridity. Comparable
ideas are also very prominent in Latin America.
In that continent they call it mestizaje (Wade 1997).
Like the people indigenous to the Americas, the Greeks have
systematically developed a historical consciousness that stresses the
historical importance of being conquered by an exogenous invader. In Greece this is
encapsulated by one of the most widely used metaphors in popular and official
national imagination: the 400-year long Ottoman yoke. This number is a
figurative expression, as different parts of what is now the Greek national
territory were part of the Ottoman empire for
longer or shorter periods of time (see, Just 1989: 74; Theodossopoulos 2004).
Simplifications of that type, however, can be tremendously inspiring for
nationalist imaginings. The modern Greeks blame those notorious 400 years for
most of the shortcomings of their nation, a causal relationship that
anthropologist, were quick to identify and vividly portray in their
ethnographies (see for example, Herzfeld 1982, 1992). In more general terms,
the Ottoman conquest is frequently used in everyday discussion in Greece to explain the Greeks’ peripheral
position in the contemporary world — a causal relationship between conquest and
powerlessness, which is, once more, very familiar in Latin
America.
And as much as the Embera and other Amerindian groups stress their
link with the Americas, the
Greeks stress their connection with Europe.
They point to their ancestors who set the foundations of a distinctly European
culture, and demarcated its boundaries through systematic stereotyping of
non-Greek people: the invention of the barbarians (Cartledge 1993), a very
ancient example of what Said (1978) describes as Orientalism. This negative
form of classificatory logic introduced the basic parameters for establishing
the idea of Europe, a powerful concept in
Western civilisation, but not necessarily a well defined one. What is important
to note here, however, is that European-ness, like indigeneity, is a concept
that thrives in imprecision. Its dynamic relies on its ill-defined
inclusiveness and exclusiveness.
This imprecision allows modern Greeks to pose as the quintessential
Europeans. They are old Europeans for that matter, the first of the kind,
indigenous to Europe and bearers of the most
antiquarian credentials of European indigeneity. Other European nations, such
as England and Germany, have adopted the prestigious
civilisation of their ancestors as their own (Knox 1993), putting classical Greece on the
pedestal of a paradigmatic European-elite culture. I argue that it is this
privileged quality of Classical Greek history that can stop us from seeing the
simplicity of Greek indigeneity. It inspires a taken for granted admiration
that hides the naturalisation of Greek claims to excellence, to difference, to
primacy.
In those terms, the Greeks, the people with that heavy history,
claim a position of privilege in the world; but like many underprivileged
indigenous groups — the people ‘without history’ — they share the same
apprehension, frustration and anger towards the processes that promote their
own peripheral-isation. Among the Greeks, but also among the Embera,
indigeneity is the vehicle for claiming rights, safeguarding territory, names
and place-names, a sense of belonging in a competitive world. Like most other
kinds of identity, indigenous identities are constantly transforming
themselves, adapting to new challenges and circumstances. The ancestors of the
contemporary Greeks, people who once shared different histories, were brought
together under the auspices of a new nation state. Since then, they have been
encouraged to imagine their history — and to expect others to understand that
history — in similar terms. The ancestors of the Embera shared different
histories too. They now learn how to imagine themselves, and the expectations
others have from them, in mutually reinforcing ways. In both cases, indigeneity
and historical consciousness inform and inspire each other in the context of an
unpredictable, but analytically comparable, process of imagination.
In the remaining sections of this paper, I discuss (first) the idea
of historical continuity with ancient Greece, which I see as representing the
principal origin myth of Greek indigeneity, and (second) the advantages of
direct comparison between European and non-European histories, adopting a
critical position towards a crypto-evolutionist Western European standard of
analysis that encourages the production of ‘ethnographies for “traditional”
communities’ and ‘history for the “modern” world’ (Comaroff & Comaroff
1992: 6). I conclude by highlighting the privileged character of Greek
indigeneity and its reliance on a European myth of cultural superiority.
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