Book Review of The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece, by Yannis Hamilakis

Abstract

National identity and ideology have lately received much attention. In national rhetoric, meanings and roles are ascribed to material culture in national museums or in tales of heroic national endeavors and thus tend to become infected topics, especially in nations and for groups that have been victims of colonialism. In this volume, Hamilakis argues that nationalism is an everyday ideology, and that nationalistic imagination is constantly constructed, both from the top and from the bottom of society.