The perils of national narratives

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumThe perils of national narratives Comment on Herzfeld, Michael. 2022. Subversive archaism: Troubling traditionalists and the politics of national heritage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.James C. ScottJames C. ScottYale University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreMichael Herzfeld takes two non-earthshaking examples—one from Thailand (Bangkok) and one from Greece (Crete) to illuminate an issue that is of earthshaking importance: namely the historical narrative crafted and broadcast by the nation-state. Every nation-state at least attempts to legitimate itself to its subjects/citizens and to outsiders by, as Herzfeld asserts, “produc[ing] official narratives emphasizing cultural, social, economic, and political harmony and unity.” “They deploy an array of carefully selected, emblematic cultural products, collectively dubbed heritage, as legitimating evidence of the nation’s deep past and as a mark of the state’s benign tutelage” (p. 1, emphasis in original).He is quick to point out that this narrative typically obscures unresolved debates and even violent political, ethnic, religious, and linguistic differences that cleave the actual body politic. In view of this, it might be more appropriate in most cases to treat the “national narrative” as an aspirational claim that, for the moment, is asserted by the reigning national power-holders. The prevailing narrative may or may not have a largely agreed-upon core, but it is certain to have elements that are still the subject of hot, sometimes violent, dispute. And, over time, the narrative will change in keeping with historical contingencies and the preferences of those currently in power. The change may be radical. Think, for example, of the French national narrative before and after the revolution of 1789, or the Russian national narrative before and after 1917! Some historical narratives simply evaporate, along with the nation-state they were intended to justify: e.g., Yugoslavia, to be replaced by “sub-narratives,” e.g., Serbia, Slovenia.Herzfeld is not concerned with radical challenges to the post-Westphalian narratives on national heritage. That is, say, the challenge of republicanism to the monarchical dynastic heritage narratives, the challenge of national liberation movements to paternal (and patronizing) colonial yarns, or revolutionary socialist challenges to the capitalist narrative of open markets and wealth creation. The prey Herzfeld is tracking is “small game” but, given his analytical acumen and breadth of knowledge, he convinces this reader that the conceptual stakes are substantial. As he puts it, he is interested in groups that “embrace the trappings of nationhood” but in a way that “exceeded the traditionalism of the state” (p. 5). Each of these groups takes the raw material of their own heritage and deploys it to assert, often by exaggeration, that its claim to the national heritage is both prior to and purer than the alternative peddled by what they deem the modern, contaminated, cosmopolitan bevvy of bureaucrats and placeholders who falsely claim stewardship of the national heritage.The Thai example of a small quarter of Bangkok’s population (Chao Pom) is both weird and, for that reason, intriguing. The neighborhood in question was, in the mid-nineteenth century, known as a quarter reserved for the retainers and families of the reigning monarch, Rama III. That was some time ago. In the interim the quarter had become a place for all manner of petty traders, day laborers, craftsmen, vagrants, bird-cage builders, and squatters. They were, as squatters, vulnerable to the urban-renewal planners who were determined to clear the quarter of the residents they considered an unsightly rabble. In apparent self-defense, the residents crafted an aspirational national narrative of their own. They claimed to defend the traditional architectural heritage of the quarter, to be avid traditionalists dedicated to Queen Sirikit, to represent the original welcoming spirit of the city, and to uphold traditional values, customs, and order. In other words, they tried to outdo the authenticity and heritage of the official narrative. As the French would say, they were “plus royaliste que le roi.” They failed. They were unceremoniously cleared out and dispersed, but not before having won some sympathy from the press and some historical preservationist architects, not to mention from Michael Herzfeld who pled their case.The Greek case is both less weird and more rooted in ancient Greek history. It concerns the upland Cretan residents of Zoniana who, of course, can claim a Minoan heritage that not only outdates the modern Greek state but, in fact, outdates the revered classical age of Athenian culture on which so much of the Greek national narrative still relies. It is as if the Iraqis living on the sites of Ur and Uruk would lay claim to be the true interpreters and custodians of the national heritage of their modern nation state of Iraq. As in the Bangkok case, the population in question is largely stigmatized by the national political and bureaucratic elite as backward violent pastoralists given to blood feuds and the theft of sheep and, in more recent times, as smugglers, marijuana-growers and dealers linked to the underworld. Their patriarchal clan structure and suspicion of outsiders are seen to be a threat to national order and by many as constituting a “no-go” zone akin to mafia-dominated quarters of, say, Catania. Their confrontation with the national police resulted in one policeman being killed but, unlike the Bangkok residents of Chao Pom, they remained in place, and, thanks to the patron-client pattern of political alliances, they were not collectively punished. Neither, as near as I can make out, did their claims to heritage, longevity, and authenticity succeed in altering the narrative of the modern Greek nation-state one iota. It may well have served the defensive purpose of holding their own, but Zonianans are still considered by contemporary Athenian elites to be something of a national embarrassment.Despite the range of references, the breadth of Herzfeld’s knowledge, and the occasional “throw-away” lines about current events that bear on his theme, there are, I believe, some very significant “roads not taken.” I briefly discuss four of them that seem to me both to clarify and to limit the value of his analysis.The first concerns a major theme of the two dominant case studies he examines: namely that each of his protagonists’ claim to authenticity and historical validity is wrapped in protestations of loyalty to the true traditions of the national heritage. As he writes, what “makes them representative of a very wide form of resistance to state hegemony, is their demand for reciprocal respect and their capacity to play subversive games with the state’s own rhetoric and symbolism” (p. 134). Not only is this assertion correct, but I would argue that it is the prevailing mode of premodern dissent for virtually all claims except for those groups that have fled the jurisdiction of the state. It is also the safest way to protest, while waving the flag of allegiance. Nowhere is this better elaborated than in Daniel Field’s, Rebels in the name of the tsar (1976), a study of peasant uprisings in pre-revolutionary Russia. The typical peasant petition, often associated with an incipient open rebellion, began with the invocation of the asserted majesty, benevolence, and solicitude for subjects that was at the core of the tsarist claim to legitimacy. Somewhere toward the middle of the petition was the grievance: often that unbeknownst to the tsar the boyars had been imposing ruinous taxes and confiscating land in violation of the tsar’s sacred duty to protect his subjects. The petition, which became relatively standardized (it was drafted by literate notaries), ended with a reinvocation of the tsar’s devotion to his subjects, urging him to put an end to the abuse perpetrated by officials and landlords. One imagines tsarist officials skipping quickly over the ritual protestations of loyalty to the “real” threat which might often be glossed as: “Lower taxes/conscription or else we—your loyal subjects—will be forced to revolt.” In cases where it became clear that the tsar would not intervene, the belief arose that the tsar was a false tsar and that the true tsar was being held captive by their oppressors. Occasionally, peasants came to believe that “pretenders” such as Stenka Razin or Pugachev (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively) were the “true” tsar and would liberate them.Two forms of protest prevailed in tsarist Russia. One was for serfs to vote with their feet and flee European Russia altogether; many of them became the famous “Cossacks,” a new “ethnicity” at the frontier. For those protesting from the “inside,” the only safe mode was to invoke the hypocrisy of the tsarist state and to insist that it fill its mandate or risk open rebellion. In any event, the threat was virtually always couched in the language of true loyalty to the cult of the monarchy. The same can be said for the most forms of protest in pre-revolutionary France. To read the “cahiers de dolèance” assembled immediately before the convocation of the Estates General in 1789 is not to read documents calling for revolution, but rather a plea for a benign monarch to eliminate abuses by officials and local aristocrats that betrayed the implicit pledge of the monarchy to safeguard its subjects. I use the term “subjects” deliberately because the term citoyen, implying equal rights and voluntary allegiance, appears only after the revolution. The point is that before democratic norms are propagated, virtually all forms of protest are couched in deferential terms that assume a hierarchical social contract. What is perhaps odd in the cases Herzfeld examines is that, especially in his Thai case, it is deployed when, in principle, other modes of nondeferential claims are available, as in the “Red Shirt” protests later.A second issue that merits comment concerns the “other” with which Herzfeld’s subversive archaists are contending: namely the modern nation-state. The conflict, in his view, is one of contending views of what should constitute the narrative of belonging. As he puts it, “What both communities share, then, is an awareness of the replacement of an older polity by a modernist nation-state of largely foreign inspiration.” It is hard to escape the impression that this is not just the opinion of the “subversive archaists” he is examining but also his own view: that the nation-state as a political form and institutional structure is an alien import ill-suited to the expression of local culture and its sense of community. Hence, the clash. His sympathies lie overwhelmingly with the underdog, subversive archaists.This is a quite myopic view of the system of nation-states as it has developed over the roughly four centuries since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Many of states arising from that treaty were explicitly designed to accommodate differences in language, culture, and above all, religion. The empires that survived to the nineteenth century (e.g., the Mughal, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian to name but three) were structurally designed to rule over various political communities while, at the same time, avoiding interference in their religious and cultural affairs. The origin of modern federal states and confederations of states is owed to a compromise providing considerable autonomy to various communities within the federal structure. The Swiss confederation of relatively independent cantons and communes was the precondition for Swiss state-making, not to mention the desire not to be swallowed carved-up by an expansive France or Germany. To see the post-Westphalian world as simply liberalism’s imposition of an alien state form is to utterly miss the degree to which it was a historic accommodation of cultural differences. I should add that I make this point as one who is deeply sympathetic to the anarchist case against the nation-state as an institution of repression and war!Where the modern nation-state has not found a way to accommodate deep cultural differences by local autonomy and forms of federalism, it has often simply disintegrated into fragments that became new nation-states, the most spectacular case of which is ex-Yugoslavia. And where the module of the state persisted as an institutional shell, it might conceal autonomous zones of rebellion as in the Kachin, Karen, and Karenni areas of Burma or, in far more institutionalized cases such as Belgium, a more or less amicable divorce within the same household. I share with Herzfeld a sense that the modern nation-state is often ill-suited to cultural minorities who wish to be left alone, if not respected. This is particularly true in upland Southeast Asia where many ethnic minorities (e.g., Hmong, Kachin, Chin, Naga, Mon) spill across several national borders and tragically lack any means, short of full sovereignty, to give institutional expression to their cultural and linguistic unity.A third issue has to do with the perils of any national narrative of historical heritage and belonging that is culturally coded. Any such code is a boundary-marker that embraces some and stigmatizes others. “Belonging” is a fraught issue because it is a rare nation-state that has not redrawn the boundary of inclusion and exclusion from time to time. In the Ming Dynasty the reports to the court about the “tribes” in the southwest of the country, especially Yunnan, are revealing, inasmuch as they appear to rank different communities by how assimilable they seem to eventually join the ranks of “Han” people. There are groups that are “almost” Han, others “on-their-way-to-being” Han, still others “could-be-if-they-wanted-to-be and-if-we-wanted-them-to-be” Han, and finally a category of “no way” for those judged too primitive to ever join the Han. More problematic, especially in contemporary China, are the Tibetans, the Hui, and especially the Uyghur Muslims who are of doubtful eligibility for “Hanness.” Although Han identity has no obvious religious test for inclusion, the Uyghurs would seem comparable to Jews in early modern, Christian Europe, not eligible for full membership. A striking example of how the boundary can shift with historical contingencies is the case of the Ainu in Japan. Before the Meiji Restoration, they were the Japanese “other”; where the Ainu began in northern Honshu and Hokkaido, so did “Japaneseness” end. They were beyond the pale. After the Meiji Restoration, however, when it was imperative for the new Japanese nation-state to claim its northern territorial frontier, the Ainu were now deemed “unfinished,” “unpolished,” “slightly less evolved” Japanese on-their-way to becoming full-fledged citizens.A final issue is raised by Herzfeld’s closing pages in which he strenuously tries to distinguish his cases from contemporary right-wing populist movements with their white, Christian, militantly exclusionary rhetoric against immigrants, minority races, ethnicities, and religions. His groups by contrast, merely desire respect and toleration from the nation-state and therefore pose no threat. By this preemptory defense, I think “he doth protest too much.” His claims on the last page of the book are carefully hedged. For example:“They [his groups] can often see beyond the conflation of nationalism with racism or other forms of exclusion.”“Subversive archaists can reach back into the mists of time to recover earlier and more inclusive politics …”“Unlike ultraright populists, who often appeal to a glorious past, they are not interested in necessarily excluding or humiliating people of different identity …”(all quotes from p. 170)Beware! He is dealing with comparatively powerless groups, heavily stigmatized and seeking acceptance and tolerance. Their Golden Age is a quasi-mythical vision like the English legend of equality before the “Norman Yoke.” They are not in power! Were they to achieve power, their modest claims might have well given way to utopian visions enforced by coercion.ReferenceField, Daniel. 1976. Rebels in the name of the tsar. New York: Unwin Hyman.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarJames C. Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is co-Director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University. He is the author of Weapons of the weak (Yale University Press, 1980), Domination and the arts of resistance (Yale University Press, 1985), Seeing like a state (Yale University Press, 1998), The art of not being governed (Yale University Press, 2008), Two cheers for anarchism (Princeton University Press, 2013), and Against the grain: A deep history of the earliest agrarian states (Yale University Press, 2017). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 13, Number 1Spring 2023 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725102 © 2023 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.