Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumIs subversion just another version of state aversion? Notes on Herzfeld’s Subversive archaism Comment on Herzfeld, Michael. 2022. Subversive archaism: Troubling traditionalists and the politics of national heritage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Erik HarmsErik HarmsYale University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMore“Valid is that which has always been”Max Weber’s famous categorization of the “Bases of Legitimacy,” which appears in the early pages of Economy and society, is written in the form of a list with four central “bases,” listed “a” through “d” (Weber 1978: 36). The list begins like this:The actors may ascribe legitimacy to a social order by virtue of:(a) tradition: valid is that which has always been(b) [… The list continues with (b), (c), and (d)]In addition to tradition, Weber goes on to list three other bases of legitimacy: “affectual,” “value-rational,” and “legal.” It is not clear if Weber meant this to be a ranked list, but the way he elaborates on tradition a few sentences later suggests that he intended it to come first. According to Weber, tradition is a powerful source of legitimacy because it achieves the pinnacle of what Paul Kockelman and Andrew Carruthers might call two kinds of “moreness.”1 For Weber, tradition is so secure in its moreness that he even ascribes it an “est” and a “most” (that is, “oldest” and “most universal”). If there ever were a Weberian Games dedicated to competing for intensities of legitimacy in a social order, tradition would most definitely win gold.The validity of a social order by virtue of the sacredness of tradition is the oldest and most universal type of legitimacy. (Weber 1978: 37, italics added)Let us pause for a moment and consider the logic of Weber’s claim, which, the more one thinks about it, is both an assertion and an example at the same time. That is, the sentence enacts the very logic it supposedly seeks to explain. Why should we believe that “tradition” is the “most universal” basis of legitimacy? According to Weber, we should believe this because he insists that it is also “the oldest,” a kind of superlative moreness if there ever was one. Weber, not known for being especially subversive, is engaging in a little bit of strategic archaism himself.There are a few lessons here, which help contextualize this compelling new addition to the long series of books Michael Herzfeld has written over a distinguished career. First, we can rest assured that Herzfeld’s ideas are in good company: even old Max Weber, who we might call archaic by now, used to say that referring to archaic old things like tradition is a way of asserting legitimacy. In evoking Weber, I am engaging in a little bit of strategic archaism myself, suggesting that Herzfeld’s work is convincing, thanks, in some ways, to the resonance his arguments have with those of archaic old Weber, who, we all know, occupies such a central spot in the archaic traditions of social thought.The second lesson, however, is a little more complicated, because it recalls what might be considered a missing piece in Weber’s explanation of the role of tradition. Weber forgot to mention that it is not just oldness on its own that earns legitimacy; it is the specific way oldness persists in the present. Importantly, Herzfeld addresses this by drawing attention to the importance of “cultural continuity” (pp. 12–13, 35, 37–38, 44), showing that legitimacy comes not only because something is old or archaic, but by also demonstrating that the old idea is still kicking around and still relevant. Something can grow old just by sitting around. To keep it current and make it legitimate takes social work. For example, Weber is an “old” thinker, but that fact alone means very little about the legitimacy of his ideas, until, of course, that oldness is combined with the fact that his ideas are still appearing in essays (like this one) one hundred years later. It is the combination of oldness and currency that enables an idea to maintain its hold on legitimacy. As we know, however, Weber’s days, like those of many “classics” in anthropology, are likely numbered. Once people stop invoking scholars from times of yore, there is a very good chance that they will just become old, and references once read as signs of legitimacy may later signify being out of pace with the times. It is worth noting that I am testing this very suggestion in a sneaky way right now: is this essay made stronger or weaker by my references to Weber? Are the preceding sentences I have written—chock full of quotations from “old ideas”—deemed more legitimate by my strategic archaism? Or does my usage only provide more evidence that I am out of touch? It is not me who will decide, but the community of readers, that is, the “social order.”The question of when something “old” legitimizes current social action and when it marks certain actors as out of touch, of course, cannot be answered by focusing only on the objective quality of oldness alone, but requires the analysis of social action and what people are doing with that oldness. One way to do this, as Herzfeld’s book shows so well, is to explore it ethnographically and historically, all while paying expansive attention to political context. The question about why some “traditions” confer legitimacy and others do not points to the very limits of Weber’s own explanation in that early section of Economy and society. The moreness of it all is not enough to prove anything—others must agree that it is an important moreness. Maybe this is why Weber actually seemed to waffle and backtrack on his initial instinct to list tradition as the most important basis of legitimacy. Sometimes other things take over, like “legal rationality,” which was, according to Weber, a historically newer kind of basis for legitimacy, one wielded by what might have been considered as a subversive new(er) kind of polity: the state.A curiously subtle, yet in my view telling, transformation takes place in Economy and society once Weber shifts his attention to talking about the modern bureaucratic state (which readers of Herzfeld’s book will recognize as a kind of punching bag in ways Weber never really pursued, except, perhaps, with his famous metaphor of the “iron cage”). Of course, Weber maintains his focus on legitimacy throughout Economy and society, but when he begins discussing states and bureaucracies, he shifts the order of what he emphasizes. When writing of “the types of legitimate domination,” for example, he introduces another list, superficially similar to the earlier one, but not exactly the same (Weber 1978: 215):There are three pure types of legitimate domination. The validity of the claims to legitimacy may be based on:1. Rational grounds—resting on a belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands (legal authority),2. Traditional grounds—resting on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them (traditional authority); or finally,3. Charismatic grounds—resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person […]The shift we see in the ordering of this list is instructive. If, according to Weber, the “social order” (described on page 36 of Economy and society) was legitimized first by tradition, then the coming of a radically new (and in that sense subversive) kind of social order will have to push tradition to the side (as shown in the list from page 215). This reordering, in Weber’s view, became necessary when people started to allow themselves to submit to forms of legitimacy associated with the state’s own brand of “subversive modernity,” which successfully shifted the place of “rational” and “legal” bases of legitimacy from fourth to first. Through such subversion, tradition was bumped from gold medal status to silver in the Weberian Games. In a modern state, tradition (along with charisma) is still an important basis of legitimacy, but it is supposed to come after “rational grounds.”The coming of the state, in other words, at least from such a Weberian perspective, constituted its own form of subversion. The state relegated tradition to a position below modern rationality, even though, as we can now see in retrospect, states have taken that rationality to irrational extremes, producing spaces of hyperrationalized cruelty, violence, and robotic, bureaucratic, dehumanizing, alienating idiocy that sap vast populations of their species-being. Despite what it became, the state was at one time subversive too, subverting the weight of “tradition.” But some people realized the state ain’t all great, and, as Herzfeld shows, subversive archaism offered some of them a way to work towards a new subversion.Subversive archaism as one (but not the only) kind of strategic archaismThis long setup, by way of a detour through Weber, brings me more directly to the topic at hand, which is Herzfeld’s concept of “subversive archaism.” As with many of Herzfeld’s concepts, this one is catchy, thoughtful, and well illustrated, with rich ethnographic and historically contextualized examples (in this case from Bangkok and Crete). The book is a pleasure to read, and brims with useful ideas on every page. The concept is also sufficiently generalizable, so that it will likely be cited far and wide, and it will apply to numerous contexts beyond the cases he has used. Congratulations are in order.Still, I would like to push and tug a bit on the concept, not to disagree with it, so much as to put it into context and perhaps refine it a bit. Specifically, I would like to suggest two things. First, the formulation of “subversive archaism” is unnecessarily limited if only understood as a response to “the nation-state.” Certainly, it can be a response to the nation-state, and it is indeed so in the specific cases Herzfeld has described. Yes, subversive archaism does commonly respond to the excesses of nation-states in many cases around the world. My suggestion, however, is that the concept can be much more broadly applied. Subversive archaism also happens in nonstate contexts, and perhaps we can take a cue from Weber’s use of the term “social order” when suggesting the importance of “tradition” as a key basis of legitimacy. The ethnographic literature is filled with examples of nonstate actors legitimizing their authority vis-à-vis those in power by referring to aspects of the past that justify overturning the current order. The key feature of subversive archaism, then, is not that the past is mobilized against a nation-state, but that it is mobilized by group that perceives itself as subordinated to another. There can be subversive archaists in any kind of polity, and in fact in any kind of social grouping. Postcolonial nation-builders, for example, successfully mobilized subversive archaism to justify throwing off the colonial yoke (Jomo Kenyatta, for example, and virtually all nationalists in Southeast Asia, from Ho Chi Minh to Sukarno), but they were often not ultimately opponents of the nation-state. In some cases, the nation-state provides them with quite a powerful platform for the skillful deployment of subversive archaism. In other cases, as with the ones Herzfeld describes, subversive archaists go on to deploy their version of archaism against the very state that used such tactics in an earlier era. Environmentalists might deploy forms of subversive archaism to imagine alternative greener lifestyles, but it is not always clear that they are opposed to “the state”—it is consumer capitalism they wish to undermine. Even college students might very well mobilize subversive archaism against an administration wishing to change a mechanism for choosing courses. The point I am making is that being subversive is not only defined by being against the state. Being subversive is defined by being opposed to a perceived power holder of any kind. That is why it remains possible, as Herzfeld notes, for many forms of subversive archaism to seem distasteful to mainstream observers, as in the case of Tea Party activists, constitutional originalists, and so on. Many progressives will see them as dangerous, but they will see themselves as subversive.Second, subversive archaism might be better understood as a subset of a more encompassing category we might simply call “strategic archaism.” Within the broader category of strategic archaism, we might then recognize two basic subcategories, hegemonic archaism and subversive archaism. A possible third category, reactionary archaism, emerges when hegemonic archaism responds to subversive archaism. (The constitutional originalists in the United States, for example, or the anti-Vaxxers and White Nationalists, whom Herzfeld smartly considers [p. 165], but in my view insufficiently analyzes, seem more properly understood as engaging in “reactionary archaism” than in subversive archaism). This broader categorization of strategic archaism makes it possible to be more precise about the ways in which archaism always plays out on a field of social and symbolic struggle, with some versions being subversive, others hegemonic, and others reactionary. Of course, how we define what is considered subversive will constantly change in relation to historical context, and in relation to who occupies which positions in the so-called landscape of power.2A comparative example from another Tai (not Thai) context, in what is now known as Northwest Vietnam might prove instructive. In Contested territory, Christian Lentz (2019) describes a consequential period in Tai-speaking areas near the Vietnam-Lao border zones beginning around the revolutionary 1940s, lasting through the defeat of the French at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, and extending into the era of Vietnamese high socialist state- and nation-building. For Tai-speaking people in that region, what it meant to be subversive depended on your own position within existing hierarchies. To some Tai speakers, the existing Tai leadership in the Northwest, who had ascended to their positions via traditional hierarchies arranged in terms of muang polities (the regional equivalent to the moeang Herzfeld describes in Thailand), were considered to have a stranglehold on power. With the coming of the lowland Vietnamese (ethnic Kinh), some less powerful but aspirational Tai leaders saw subversive opportunity to overturn existing power structures. Becoming “cadres” aligned with lowland Kinh offered some ethnic Tai an opportunity to subvert regional power dynamics that had until then squeezed them into positions of subordination. While it is true that the Vietnamese socialist state regularly styled itself as new and modern, it also combined such subversive modernity with its own versions of subversive archaism by reading national solidarity into a distant past, which imagined “Vietnam” as a space of natural solidarity where upland and lowland peoples, ethnic Tai and majority Kinh, could believe themselves to be brothers-in-arms. Of course, this nationalist version of strategic archaism was constructed on thin historical grounds and has been continuously contested by other ethnonationalist Tai constructions ever since. Just like residents of Pom Mahakan, alternative polities prioritize the archaic muang past to contest contemporary relations of power. They too are subversive archaists who continue to this day to wish to delegitimize the nationalist claims of a Vietnamese state dominated by ethnic Kinh majority interests. What we see through this history is not a single subversion, but oscillating, contested subversion inversions. Whether viewed from the vantage of the hills or the valleys, the archaism is in all cases strategic, but whether the observer sees it as working to shore up hegemony or to subvert it depends on where one positions oneself in that struggle.Examples of such strategic archaism abound. There are countless “top-down” examples in the vast literature spawned by Benedict Anderson’s provocative reference, in Imagined communities, to the “objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eyes vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists” (Anderson 1996: 5). Plus, there are the numerous works inspired by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s (1983) fruitful encouragement to seek out and identify instances of the “invention of tradition.” Without formally recognizing it, all of this scholarship can be understood as engaging in the study of strategic archaism, riffing off of Weber’s original one-liner about the role of tradition, but then exploring, through critical study after critical study, all the ways in which “tradition” is not only a “basis” of legitimacy, as Weber noted, but a strategic and often instrumental manipulation of the symbolic trappings of tradition to perpetuate a particular sociopolitical order. It’s not only about recognizing existing bases of legitimacy but twisting and bending them for strategic ends. What Weber overlooked, perhaps because he wasn’t much of a fieldworker, is that the “bases” don’t just happen to exist by accident. When it comes to legitimate authority, contentious actors sometimes build that base to assert authority and sometimes to subvert it.With that, I end with a riddle, posing as an honest question, while turning the title of this essay into its end: Is subversion just another version of state aversion? No, it is actually more.Notes1. For more on the meaning of moreness (and for clever prose not meant for morons) see Carruthers 2017, 2019 and Kockelman 2022. It could be useful to consider what might have developed had Carruthers and Kockelman not only focused on moreness but on estness, which is of course the morest moreness of them all. As any schoolchild knows, anything “-est” is best.2. By “landscape of power,” I refer to Scott’s (1985) notion that the form any struggle takes, even if one does not wish to use the term “resistance,” as Herzfeld insists (p. 123), can only really be understood in relationship to an analysis of the form of power under contention.ReferencesAnderson, Benedict. 1996. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. New York: Verso.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarCarruthers, Andrew M. 2017. “Grading qualities and (un)settling equivalences: Undocumented migration, commensuration, and intrusive phonosonics in the Indonesia-Malaysia borderlands.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 27 (2): 124–50.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 2019. “Policing intensity.” Public Culture 31 (3): 469–96.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarHobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 1983. The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarKockelman, Paul. 2022. The anthropology of intensity: Language, culture, and environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarLentz, Christian C. 2019. Contested territory: Điện Biên Phủ and the making of Northwest Vietnam. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarScott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarWeber, Max. 1978. Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarErik Harms is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Council on Southeast Asian Studies at Yale University.Erik Harms[email protected] 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/10.1086/725205 © 2023 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.