Comparisons and contradictions

Abstract

Jatin Dua also argues for expanding the scope of the concept but in a scalar modality suggested by his own deep ethnographic experience of international piracy (see Dua 2019). He asks how we might see subversive archaism at work in entities both larger and smaller than the nation-state. The archaists themselves provide some answers by way of exemplary illustration. The Zoniani, for example, regard the encompassing administrative control of the European Union with an ambivalence concentric with their attitude to the nation-state. Rozakou (2018) has also suggested that voluntarism in Greece today represents a surrender to supposedly European and colonial models of civility, thereby hinting once again, this time in her own person, that the subversive archaist may be the anthropologist. Against such views, culturally conservative elites will have every interest in contesting the idea that adherence to European civilizational norms constitutes subservience to a colonial order (see, e.g., Kindi 2019). The ambivalence of civility, as I suggest in the book and as Riccardi-Swartz observes for the Reactive Orthodox, allows for shifting orientations to official norms and standards. Such shiftiness does not sit well with any political or cultural establishment.