CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter CLASSICAL PRESENCES The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past. The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece YANNIS HAMILAKIS 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Yannis Hamilakis 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hamilakis, Yannis, 1966– The nation and its ruins : antiquity, archaeology, and national imagination in Greece / Yannis Hamilakis. (Classical presences) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN–13: 978–0–19–923038–9 1. National characteristics, Greek. 2. Greece–Antiquities. 3. Archaeology–Greece–History–19th century. 4. Archaeology–Greece–History–20th century. I. Title. DF741.H33 2007 938–dc22 2007013670 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–923038–9 13579108642 To my parents Óı ªò ı This page intentionally left blank Preface This book investigates the links and associations of classical antiquity in general, classical antiquities in particular, archaeology, and national imagination. It is a book that answers a series of interrelated questions, such as: Why does national imagination need material traces from the past? How do these traces operate in the everlasting process of imagining the nation? How do antiquities contribute to the dreaming of the national topos and the production of its materiality? How does archaeology as the oYcial device of western modernity produce the materiality of the nation? How do diVerent social actors (from the nation-state, to intellectuals, to various diverse social groups, including the ‘others’ of the nation) deploy antiquity in general and material antiquities in particular, in constructing their own versions of national imagination and in pursuing various agen- das at the same time? What can we learn from this exploration, not only about archaeology and antiquity but also about the nation and its work, especially in contexts that have received less attention? This book is thus about the production of the topological dream of the nation through the deployment of antiquities. To put it in another way, it is about the materialization and objectiWcation of the national imagination and memory. My locus in exploring these questions will be Greece. The very mention of the word ‘Greece’ evokes for most people, especially in the western word, classical antiquity, temples and marbles, ancient battles, and the origins of democracy. Yet my focus here is not classical antiquity itself, nor Hellenism as understood by most western scholars (the idealization of classical antiquity in western Europe from the eighteenth century onwards; cf. Morris 1994), but a diVerent set of Hellenisms: the neo-Hellenism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, imported into Greece, and mostly what I called Indigenous Hellenism—the appropriation of western Hellenism by local societies in Greece in the mid to late nineteenth century and its recasting as a novel, syncretic, and quasi-religious form of imagining time and place, past and present, of producing viii Preface and reproducing national identities (see Sigalas 2001 for the mean- ings and uses of the term Hellenism in Greece; cf. also Koumbourlis 1998). This is a book that invites classicists, archaeologists, histor- ians, and anthropologists to consider a particular recasting of Hellenism, a reconWguration which, apart from its importance in its own right, can contribute to the understanding of the broader phenomenon of Hellenism as one of the most pervasive western intellectual and social phenomena. Anthropologists have for some time now drawn attention to the value of exploring in depth the ways in which people in Greece dealt with the weight of classical tradition; they have also pointed to the paradox of the centrality of the classical past in the western imagination on the one hand, and the relative marginality of the modern nation-state of Greece in the modern geopolitical nexus on the other (e.g. Herzfeld 1987). This discourse has produced many valuable insights, but the lack of detailed atten- tion to both the social (and sensory/sensuous) role of the material traces of classical antiquity as well as to the disciplinary processes that produced its materiality had to be addressed (cf. Porter 2003). This is one of the aims of this book. It will be shown in this study that material antiquities have, since the late eighteenth century, played a fundamental role in the lives of people in Greece, perhaps more so than in many other modern nation-states. In addressing in detail a series of case-studies, in bringing up and attending to endless episodes involving archaeologists, state oYcials, politicians, intellectuals, people from various groups and in a diversity of contexts, this book oVers the opportunity to study the materiality, time, and processes of national imagining in detail; to observe the mutual constitution of objects and people (cf. Miller 2005 for recent discus- sions); and to reXect on modernity and its imaginary and material production, especially in the European periphery. As such, it contributes to the writing of alternative histories of modernity and its devices, histories that fully account for the diversity, multiplicity, and complexity of its forms. I will need to say a word or two on my own intellectual and personal archaeology; this will help explain my choice of the topic, justify the theoretical approach taken, and illuminate the methods used. It is my contention that any study of this kind, any attempt to understand the nation and its fragments (literally and Preface ix metaphorically), avoiding at the same time political pitfalls, is possible only from a position of reXexivity. I came to this topic almost by accident. I was trained as an archaeologist, Wrst at the University of Crete and then at the Univer- sity of SheYeld, England. Since 1996, I have taught archaeology and anthropology at universities in Britain, and have researched, in addition to this topic, aspects of prehistoric Aegean societies focusing on food consumption and the consuming body, memory and its political economy, and the bodily senses. It was mostly my under- graduate years that shaped my interest in archaeology and the nation. The curriculum at the time was designed (or shaped by default) within the German tradition of classical archaeology, a traditional art-history-oriented discourse, (one that has now been heavily critiqued within classics, e.g. Morris 1994), and one that was directly linked to the processes of European identity as well as to processes of Greek national imagination (cf. Hamilakis 2000c). My dissatisfaction with this paradigm stemmed partly from my own early politicization (which distrusted both the elitist connotations of this paradigm, and its national ideological correlates), and partly from an understanding that it cannot satisfactorily explain the material and social world of the past. An early, and largely naı¨ve, interest in trying to expose the nationalist ‘uses’ of the past in Greece, led to haphazard research on the topic, more like a part-time hobby at the margins of the serious scholarship I was conducting. It was the spatial and social distance from Greece itself from 1988 onwards and the exposure to the then active and Werce debates on the nature of archaeological work, and the meanings of the past, that helped me articulate my arguments and situate them in relation to the social context of archaeology in Greece. Without meaning to suggest that the critique of the nation is not possible from ‘inside’, that distance was essential in escaping the naturalization of the national imagination, but also in placing the Greek context in comparative perspective, and in relation to other national projects. The Wrst paper on the topic (co-authored with Eleana Yalouri) in 1993 at a session on theory in Greek archaeology, held as part of the Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting at Durham, England (Hamilakis and Yalouri 1996), was a key moment in forming an early framework. Since then, the project took on a life of its own, x Preface and resulted in many more papers and presentations, and more, and more extensive (and intensive), work, along with my other work on Greek prehistory and archaeological theory.