Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumTrad nationalist a/effects Comment on Herzfeld, Michael. 2022. Subversive archaism: Troubling traditionalists and the politics of national heritage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Sarah Riccardi-SwartzSarah Riccardi-SwartzNortheastern University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreAt a time of heightened focus on nationalisms across the globe, including hybrid formations uniting various social institutions with political factions, Michael Herzfeld’s Subversive archaism: Troubling traditionalists and the politics of national heritage provides a lens shift through which to capture the dynamic intersecting aspects of tradition, heritage, and state authority. The focal length of Herzfeld’s theoretical lens offers a clear perspective on conceptions of belonging and political tension that does not compress issues of marginality, civility, and bureaucracy; rather it brings them into sharp focus through portraits of communities who question and subvert the status quo forms of political authority they live with and in daily. In providing these rich multisited ethnographic observations, combined with archival interventions, about the embodied and lived experiences of nationalisms and heritage negotiation, Herzfeld unapologetically offers us a masterful comparative anthropological reframing in the ongoing study of nation-states. Herzfeld draws us into a tale of an adaptive structure of political change and possibility, one akin, in some respects, to what I have encountered in a far different political climate and context in the United States among the Reactive Orthodox Christian movement (Riccardi-Swartz 2022).I reflect upon Herzfeld’s book as an anthropologist of religion and politics who works on globally connected networks of Orthodox Christianity and religio-political nationalism in the United States. My goal here is not to recapitulate Herzfeld’s theories and ideas, but rather to use his concept of subversive archaism to think more broadly about the trajectory of the conversation regarding nationalism and state authority in our current global political moment, particularly at the grassroots level. Nationalism in its various manifestations, often sharply attached to the modern entity of the nation-state, powerfully shapes the discourses of heritage and belonging in institutionalized and bureaucratic ways. Often in political science, communities on the so-called fringes of political acceptability are dismissed as outliers or ignored because of their small statistical footprint. The curious beauty of anthropological research, however, is its ability to give nuance to larger political conversations by offering up examples of difference. These elements, as discrete social units, might not have large social traction, but as nodes in the expanding (and often global) networks of transforming political structures, they do have immense importance—particularly in our digitized world where information and ideas are instantaneously accessible to many around the globe.Academic conversations about nationalism, especially in the contemporary context, also tend to focus on violent expressions of political disruption, especially around ethnicity and heritage, which often creates analytical heterogeneity surrounding the concept of nationalism, as Roger Brubaker and David Laitin have noted (1998). This tendency to emphasize the more physically radical or reactive social forms of political dissidence does a disservice to our understandings of how groups imaginatively resist and align with state polities and heritage control mechanisms in less forceful and more thoughtful, intellectually adroit ways. From my vantage point, it seems that Herzfeld’s subversive archaists offer us fresh ways to think about the affective allure of traditionalism and nationalism and their effects in and on the bureaucratic systems of nation-states.In the spirit of Subversive archaism, I want to use the book to think about issues in contemporary United States politics, in hopes of, like Herzfeld, moving away from determinist barriers of geography (p. 4). More broadly, I also want to shift us away from the terms “populists” and “libertarians” when thinking about what nationalism means in the context of the contemporary, post-2016 United States. Nationalism, especially in our digital moment has become even more hybridized, drawing into itself other philosophical paradigms, some hedging toward conspiracism, which take on both familiar and original formulations. In many respects, I see the archaists in Herzfeld’s study and political dissidents with whom I have worked in the United States as exemplifying this type of nationalism; the interlocutors in my communities are largely loyal to their nation, while believing in a polity, whether religious or political, that is often at cosmological and ideological odds with the historical configuration of their nation-state.The subversive archaism expressed by interlocutors in Herzfeld’s field sites encompass visions of state transformation steeped in the idea that they “represent national culture much better than the bureaucrats” (Herzfeld 2022). While rebellious, these political actors return to thematic and historical forms of traditionalism that allow them to question the intentions and practices of the state and its relationship to national identity and belonging, suggesting that they ultimately are loyal to the nation but not the state and its bureaucratic systems of control. Unlike the banal nationalism proffered by Michael Billig (1995), Herzfeld’s reading of nationalism, in the context of both the Cretan and Thai communities, is one of dynamic tension that provides space for both cooperation and disobedience with the state in order to subvert and resist it, often by leaning into nostalgically constructed notions of sociopolitical alterity. The forms of nationalism that Herzfeld addresses are not bland, beige, or even commonplace in their approach; rather, they are socially innovative and politically ambiguous in many respects. Herzfeld argues convincingly that the groups in his field sites were not interested in an exclusionary type of nationalistic political formula or project. At the same time, as Prasenjit Duara (2021) reminds us, nationalism is ultimately a Janus-faced notion that offers a social promise hinging on the subjugation of one group in favor of the other. Thus, it could be argued that using nationalistic discourses, as Herzfeld’s interlocutors do, is to participate, even passively, in the political curation of the other.This political curation is also present, it seems, in labeling the Zoniana and the Pom Mahakan as traditionalists. In a book that draws our attention to traditionalism, in various registers, the concept itself often does ambiguous work in pushing forward Herzfeld’s idea of subversive archaism. Herzfeld argues that “traditionalizing citizens may challenge the bureaucrats’ self-ascribed cultural authority” (p. 3). In doing so they become a problem for the nation-state, for it is not always warm to this type of ideological subversion on the part of its citizenry. Yet, Herzfeld also argues that traditionalists “look like what they oppose” (p. 5). This is arguably how my interlocutors challenge the political status quo, too. While participating in a far different political milieu than those Herzfeld is writing about, my interlocutors are nevertheless grappling with how they understand authentic or correct national culture in opposition to what they see expressed or championed through the structures of the current American political system. My interlocutors see themselves as challenging the popular system’s notion of what it means to be an American, what is means to be loyal to one’s country, and what it means to be traditional.I want to pause here to elaborate on the concept of traditionalism as it is expressed in both Herzfeld’s book and nod to the wider academic discourse about the political traction this idea has had as of late. My previous research project was in the Appalachian Mountains with a large and vibrant community of white American converts to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). These American citizens were dismayed by encroaching secularism and the progressive politics they believed were transforming the national culture of the United States. They possessed a bricolage of political ideas associated with what is typically termed the far right; however, the underlying impulse that enlivened these beliefs was that of traditionalism. Some of my interlocutors were quite open about their affinity for traditionalism and how it related to their political worldviews, namely those of fascism or monarchism. Traditionalism, for my interlocutors, was well defined. It had an intellectual heritage, coming from Fr. Seraphim (Eugene) Rose, a little known American religious mystic, who drew on the ideas of radical European philosophers, including René Guénon and Julius Evola.Traditionalism particularly in the strain espoused by Julius Evola, a thinker much favored in fascist Italy who is now invoked across Europe in radical groups, focuses on the defense of primordial and universal truth, angst about racial and sexual purity, and fears over white extinction (Sedgwick 2004). For groups such as the Reactive Orthodox, traditionalism becomes the language of both sociocultural reaction to the advancements of modernity and the values of secularism, and the foundational plan for a world-building project of trad futurity; that is, a future of traditional (religious) values guiding the social sphere. Guénon and Evola have, since the latter half of the 2010s, experienced a revival in readership among conservative Europeans and Americans, including political actors such as Steve Bannon (Teitelbaum 2021). Tradition, or traditionalism, possesses, as Eugenia Shanklin (1981) reminds us, the anthropological possibility of being an analytic by which we understand social processes at work, or an ideology through which processes are worked out in the world. To use the term traditionalism in relationship to the political actions of subversive communities has a particular framing in the contemporary public context, one that makes the word much more burdensome to implement as an analytic, unless it is fully fleshed out.While Herzfeld’s interlocutors draw on the language of traditionalism and nationalism as a rhetorical way to subvert state authority, they are also committed to a political project that repurposes the past to build a futurity of inclusivity. In some contrast, my traditionalist interlocutors also draw on similar thematic ways of thinking about the world, but for different aims. Their ideal world was one in which America converted to Russian Orthodoxy, and in which America would ultimately have a political system that allowed the church (the Orthodox Church) to work in tandem with bureaucratic powers to build out a society that embraced the true national culture of America, namely that of a Christian nation guided by a divinely ordained leader—a monarch. Thus, they looked for a model of political authority that might create a societal future of Edenic traditionalism. In this community, and others like it, that leader happened to be Vladimir Putin. Yet despite this hopeful, imaginative world-building project that looked abroad for political salvation, the community was not at odds with the American political system in which they took part. Indeed, Reactive Orthodox often run for public office or seek to transform governmental systems from within (Riccardi-Swartz 2021).While the types of traditionalism that I have encountered seem to be conversant with that of the subversive archaists, my suspicion is that for Herzfeld these groups would not be easy conversation partners. However, the Reactive Orthodox with whom I have worked and continue to research might be aligned with the ideological integralists that Herzfeld mentions in his book. They are also keen on using bureaucracy, or what Ann Stoler has called the “technologies that reproduce states” (2009: 28), to make their vision of the world a reality. Herzfeld suggests that traditionalists often work with bureaucracy in their attempts to wrestle with the power of the nation-state. This desire to somehow transform the technologies of statecraft are present among my own interlocutors who, eschewing the stereotypes thrust upon them, were not rural populists who wanted to follow the MAGA doctrine of American nationalistic glory, but rather wanted to make American holy again—whether through the creation of a monarchy or a Christian bureaucracy. In a moment when populism has become the popular academic word to denote far/alt-right communities, it is crucial to remember that not all groups clustered under these umbrella terms want power to be distributed to the people or their representatives. Just like traditionalism, the term populism has become burdened with assumptions about motive and method, leading to a homogenization of disparate political groups at the margins—in the United States and in the global context.Perhaps because of the way American politics has continued to unfold in somewhat of an oppositional binary, political communities at the margins or so-called fringes of the political spectrum are perpetually neglected by social scientists. Broadly, Herzfeld’s book points to this problem and suggests that interrogating the political affects and the social effects of these subversive archaists proves helpful for understanding how identity and mythmaking are tied to and separate from the concept of the nation (p. 5). Herzfeld’s analysis of how materiality plays a role in the reactive and proactive methods of dissent reminds us that media worlds are curious political spaces in which discontents build out their visual, aural, and textured language of social empowerment. Within the context of my own research, the use of media, as a means through which community solidarity and political world-building projects take shape, particularly via memes distributed on social media, is key in the grassroots negotiation of state power (Zigon 2017).Memes are the visual language by which many politically subversive communities technologically disseminate their ideological visions for their authentic homelands. They become coded and encoded artifacts of media worlds that orient users to the proper discourse through which to express their cosmological understandings of the nation-state and themselves (p. 72; see also Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002). One popular meme among the Reactive Orthodox communities offers two images in opposition. A slightly greyed-out image at the top of the meme is a screenshot of a popular film that depicts men in army fatigues holding automatic weapons, with these words hovering in the lower third of the picture: “What you thought joining the resistance would look like.” The lower half of the meme is composed of what looks to be an overexposed periodical drawing of a man, woman, and three children, all of whom are turned away from the gaze of the viewer and toward a white steepled church in the left quadrant of the image. Emblazoned across the lower section this image is the follow-up to the thought positioned above: “What it actually looks like.” This meme, I suggest, is a prime example of what Herzfeld calls the “continuing tension at the core of the national cultural project” (p. 74) of Reactive Orthodoxy. Nationalistic mobilization for political and religious freedoms is often seen in the United States news media in its most blatant and public demonstrations, such as January 6, 2021; however, hybridized forms of resistance are found not only in violent or public displays of heritage negotiation, but also in the networked and communal expressions of subversion that create new historiographies of national “privileged authenticity” (p. 11).In the meme mentioned above, the assumed civility of white Christian Americana becomes a defiant visual amalgam of complicity and disobedience, especially when paired with other memes that swiftly move across digital space, including the image of a tree growing under and around a fence, with the phrase “become ungovernable” photoshopped across it. At the heart of this meme discourse is the rebellious return to an assumed traditionalism of a premodern and even early modern past, in which these images signify the right rights to fight for and how to paradoxically do so in a nonviolent way. This desire to reclaim the traditional past often looks to previous forms of political resistance to formulate a new way forward, a new future. As Herzfeld rightly notes, “Rebellious citizens can point to historical antecedents in their local cultural heritage that not only are older than the state itself but also represent alternatives to its disciplined modernity” (p. 3). This is most assuredly the case with Reactive Orthodox beyond my Appalachian field site, especially those in the American South, who unite Orthodox Christian principles with the neo-Confederate lost cause movement (Sarkisian 2021).What is to be made of a group comprised largely of American citizens that understands nationalism in opposition to modernity and democracy? At the same time, what can we make of professed monarchists who run for political positions in the democratic government of the United States? Perhaps this a type of ideological chicanery that utilizes the potential power and access of bureaucratic responsibility for subversive means. As I consider the theoretical applicability of subversive archaism to my own work on Reactive Orthodox Christians, a question posed in the foreword to Subversive archaism by Robert J. Foster and Daniel R. Reichman comes to bear: “What if the struggle does not mainly concern the definition of the nation but rather the political structure in which the nation is embedded?” (p. xiii). Ultimately, issues of traditionalism, nationalism, and other social phenomena and events are discrete albeit connective elements—pixels—that help us make sense of how communities image and imagine state authority and social belonging. In my own research, and it seems perhaps by the end of the Herzfeld’s book as well, the question is not so much one of political structures or power (or even a/effects of traditionalism and nationalism) as is it one of ontological angst about modernity and how to skillfully (out)maneuver some of its administrative, authoritative trappings.ReferencesBillig, Michael. 1995. Banal nationalism. London: Sage.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarBrubaker, Roger, and David Laitin. 1998. “Ethnic and nationalist violence.” Annual Review of Sociology 24: 423–52.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarDuara, Prasenjit. 2021. “The Ernest Gellner Nationalism Lecture: Nationalism and the crises of global modernity.” Nations and Nationalism 27: 610–22.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarGinsburg, Faye D., Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, eds. 2002. Media worlds: Anthropology on new terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarHerzfeld, Michael. 2022. 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Her research focuses on social politics, racism, media worlds, digital communities, and Orthodox Christianity. Her first book, Between heaven and Russia: Religious conversion and political apostasy in Appalachia (Fordham University Press, 2022), was based on extensive fieldwork with politically radicalized American converts to Russian Orthodoxy.Sarah Riccardi-Swartz[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/10.1086/725203 © 2023 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.