Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (review)

Abstract

Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in Nation-State. New York and London: Routledge, December, 2004 (2nd edition), 280 pp. From his earliest days in discipline, Michael Herzfeld has shown an inordinate interest in theory. His first book, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and Making of Modem Greece, is a theoretical treatise and even his ethnographies (The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village; A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town; and The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in Global Hierarchy of Value) are notable for their combination of high quality ethnographic description and extensive theorizing. Other books, like Anthropology through Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in Margins of Europe and The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy, are entirely theoretical. Even his introductory textbook is entitled, Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society. Moreover, virtually all of his dozens of published articles are largely theoretical commentaries. The trajectories of his career and publications strongly suggest that Herzfeld is determined to make a truly significant theoretical contribution, not just to discipline of anthropology or even social sciences in general, but to intellectual world at large. With publication of Cultural Intimacy in 1997, Herzfeld made his bid to join ranks of elite company of social theorists of nationalism like Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson whom scholars of nationalism fail to cite at their peril. The concept of intimacy, despite some criticism (most of it constructive rather than damning), has resonated with scholars from a number of disciplines and now, ten years after Herzfeld coined it, it seems destined to join such seminal concepts as Andersen's imagined community and Foucault's gouvernmentalite as sine qua nons of any discourse on subject of nationalism and concept of nation-state. In and of itself, cultural intimacy is a rather simple and not-very-profound concept. Herzfeld describes it as the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality... (3). Exploring what he calls creative dissent within seemingly seamless fabric of nation-state, he strives to understand how people negotiate terrain of social identity and daily life in the...modern nation-state, and how they can be fiercely patriotic and just as fiercely rebellious at same time (91). Cultural intimacy can be registered in many ways and Herzfeld admits that it is not unrelated to simplistic self-stereotypes or national traits like stiff upper lip of British; but despite apparent simplicity of this concept, Herzfeld is able to imbue it with profundity while also demonstrating quite convincingly how cultural intimacy has serious implications for our understanding of nationalism and nation-state. Ultimately Herzfeld achieves his goal of demonstrating that ideologies and intimacy of everyday social life are revealingly similar (3), even when latter appear to stand in direct opposition to former. One way Herzfeld illustrates this is through an exposure of ironies, inversions and paradoxes in which he so delights. Throughout book he demonstrates how disparate groups often invoke same rhetoric/images/tropes to justify contradictory actions or ideologies. For example, he argues that law and lawless often resort to same cliches when acting in opposition to each other, citing case of Cretan sheep rustlers and authorities of Greek state as well as that of self-styled militias and U.S. government, all of whom invoke a formerly perfect social order to justify their contradictory actions (109). …