Possible Alternative Relationships of Religion, Nationalism, and Archaeology

discussion article

Yanms Hamilakis and Eleana Yaloun SaCral ISing the Cults of archaeology in modern Greece'

Abstract The paper discusses the religious undertones classical Greek heritage is vested with in Greece. Drawing on the argument that nationalism and religion need to be seen as similar cultural systems, we show that classical antiquities have become powerful emotive icons for performances of national memory in the process ot imagining the topos of the Hellenic nation. This process is open to all social actors and not simply to State bureaucrats and intellectuals. We offer an explanation of this phenomenon by examining the position of antiquity in the construction of the imagined community of the Hellenic nation, as well as the ways by which Orthodoxy and classical antiquity became enmeshed in the formation of Hellenic national identity.We finally explore some of the implications that this phenomenon has for archaeology as a discipline and as social practice.

Keywords archaeology; modern Greece; nationalism; religion

Introduction

Recently we have experienced the dusk of the era of political innocence in archaeology. More and more people realise that we can no longer ignore the political implications of archaeological work. We cannot underestimate archaeologists' significant contribution to the social construction of the past and its prominent role in the negotiation of identity roles and power relations in modern societies. While the literature on politics and archaeology is becoming more and more voluminous, the problematisation of the subject is still under- developed. Many archaeologists still adopt an objectifying position and a positivist approach which views the politics of archaeology and the past simply in terms of abuse of the empirical record and distortion of'objective' past reality. The recent explosion of books and articles on nationalism and archaeology is a case in point (e.g. Atkinson et al. 1996; Diaz-Andreu and Champion (eds) 1996; Kohl 1998; Kohl and Fawcett 1995; Meskell 1998; cf. Hamilakis 115 1996;Jones 1997,11-12).While some studies develop a sophisticated argument about nationalist discourses and the past, the majority present a historiographic account of'abuses' of the archaeological record by states and nationalist intellectuals. In many archaeological writings nationalism is treated as an isolated, fixed political programme and at best as a 'false' ideological structure, rather than as a complex cultural and ideological system (cf. Fox 1990; Kapferer 1989). Such a viewpoint fails to recognise that the nationalist use of the past is a complex phenomenon which is linked to other essentialist ideologies and practices such as imperial- ism and colonialism (cf. Hamilakis 1998), and involves not only State bureaucrats and intellectuals but all social agents. A plain historiographic account, however useful and necessary, might miss the most interesting aspect of the argument: the appropriation and internalisation of the nationalist discourse by social groups and individuals and its re-deployment in the poetics and politics of everyday life (cf. ComarofF 1995, 250). Modern Greece is an interesting case in this respect. Only recently has it come under scrutiny and investigation by archaeologists, despite the volume of works by historians and anthropologists. We have argued elsewhere that the case is a rather complicated one and resists any simplistic discourses (Hamilakis andYalouri 1996). We proposed that antiquity in modern Greece operates as 'symbolic capital' (Bourdieu 1977, 1990) and as 'authoritative resource' (Giddens 1984) which is open to various readings and uses by the state, as well as by different interest groups and individuals (cf. Herzfeld 1991). In this paper, we investigate one aspect of this particular argument and some of its implications for Greek archaeological research and for modern Greek society. We offer some ideas for the interpretation of the phenomenon by discussing some ideological characteristics of nationalism in general and of Greek nationalism in particular. In doing so, we touch upon many complex issues concerning the politics of archaeology, the past in the present,'heritage', as well as archaeological, historical and anthropological issues specific to the Greek context. Here we only attempt to elu- cidate the aspects most relevant to our argument; a more general critical consideration of the above issues is beyond the scope of this paper.

Antiquities as artefacts of secular religion in modern Greece

The official rhetoric surrounding antiquities in modern Greece is often charged with religious connotations: antiquity is referred to as 'sacred heritage' whereas the common metonymy for the ultimate specimen of Greek classical antiquity, the Athenian Acropolis, is 'the sacred rock'. The same adjective, 'sacred', is often used to describe other important archaeological monuments and sites. All antiquities belong to the State by law, and regula- tions concerning private collections are strict compared with those of other countries. One of the early public documents of the newly founded Greek State, a directive issued in 1829 by Panagiotis Anagnostopoulos (the Commissioner of His in the Peloponnese), is revealing in underlining the importance of collecting and preserving antiquities:

116 These [antiquities] awake the spirit of modern Hellenes. They remind them of ancestral brilliance and glory and motivate them to imitate it. These [antiquities] convey honour to the Nation.These [antiquities], honoured by wise Europe and daily sought after by travellers, reveal their value; and it is as if they are saymg to [the Hellenes] 'you should not ignore the heirlooms of your ancestors! They have assisted you and it is your duty to respect them because they are sacred and they belong to you and they offer you honour and dignity' (Petrakos 1982, 112; our translation). Legal direct financial transactions involving antiquities are unthinkable (Hamilakis and Yalouri 1996) and commercialisation of the 'sacred heritage' is often condemned by intellectuals and the press. Georgios Oikonomos, secretary of the Archaeological Society of Athens (1924-1951), director of the State Archaeological Service (1933-1938), and professor of archaeology at the University of Athens (1938-1951) (Petrakos 1987b, 166), declared in 1936, during the preparations for the centenial celebrations of the Archaeological Society in Athens:

[These celebrations] should not simply be an intellectual gathering and a nice jour- ney around this country. They should be a pilgrimage to the idea of high humanism that we especially need in these crucial moments of the world. Because Hellenic archaeology, gentlemen, is not a profession but a sacred mission (cited in Petrakos 1987b: 168; our translation).

More recently, religious terminology can be found in the writings of leading Greek archaeologists, such as Manolis Andronikos (1919-1992), the excavator of Vergina. Andronikos, has acquired the status of the 'national' archaeologist (Hamilakis 1999a) since his excavations in Greek Macedonia (cf. Kotsakis 1998; Silberman 1989, 12-29). He is the first Greek archaeologist who was honoured by being depicted on a stamp. Here follow some citations from some of his several newspaper articles. The first is related to the discussion over the restitution of the Parthenon (or 'Elgin') marbles to Greece (cf. Hamilakis 1999b with bibliogra- phy).The second refers to the finds from his excavations atVergina, Greek Macedonia, where he claimed to have found the tomb of Philip II of Macedonia.

The request for the restitution of the Parthenon sculptures is based upon a simple and undisputed argument: these sculptures belong to the most sacred monument of this country, the temple of Athena, which expresses the essence of the Greek spirit and incorporates the deepest nature of the Athenian democracy (Andronikos 1983; our translation).

I can assure you all that one day — I want to believe not a very distant one — Philip's skeleton will be placed in a case worthy of him, in front of or in his tomb, if possible, for truly pious pilgrimage (Andronikos 1988; our translation).

Similar discourses are reproduced in some of Andronikos' academic writings. In another news- 117 paper article referring to the impressive results of his excavations at Vergina, the excavator acknowledges the fact that the tomb assumed to be of Philip was found on the 8th of November, the day when 'the Orthodox church celebrates archangels Michael and Gabriel, the rulers of the Other world' (Andronikos 1987, 113). The association here (which is also made in his posthumously published autobiography; Andronikos 1997, 115) is quite interesting. What is implied is that the saints, who in the Greek Orthodox tradition are linked with the Underworld, might have intervened and led the archaeologist to discover such an important funerary monument (on the relationship between Orthodoxy and nationalism see below). Museums and archaeological sites are often reminiscent of sacred locations and some critics have even associated them with churches (cf. Hourmouziadis 1984, 18).They demand formalised behaviour, seek to generate emotional reactions and mystify visitors with the presentation of isolated, fetishised artefacts. Museum guards consider themselves responsible for maintaining and safeguarding the silence of'worship'. One of us was reminded of this quite recently during a guided tour with a group of archaeology students around the Archaeological Museum of Herakleion in Crete. The large group of students entered the first gallery of the museum loudly, only to be told off by the guard ('Keep quiet please, this is a museum!'). The association of visiting archaeological sites and museums with a pilgrimage has been noted by several researchers. The folklorist D. Loukatos writes about the place for pilgrimage par excellence, the Athenian Acropolis:

Visitors to archaeological sites and ruins are, in a sense pilgrimages [sic]; one glance at what happens everyday beneath the entrance to the Acropolis of Athens is adequate confirmation. The people climb toward it in silence; they look up reverently at the lofty height of the columns; then they stop, quite moved, before the sight of the Parthenon. When they reach it, they touch the marble with pious gentleness; they lean against the 'sacred' columns (a good chance for a photo); they meditate; then they descend its stairs, again in silence, to the adjacent museum, where another pilgrimage, to the statues of the well-dressed Kores [maidens] and the scenes from the frieze of the Parthenon, detains them. The whole visit is made in a magical and archaic atmos- phere. Even people who know nothing of the history or the importance of the Acropolis let themselves be 'sanctified' by the simple fact that they have seen it (Loukatos 1978, 178).2

Moreover, perceptions of purity and pollution, which characterise many religious systems of thought, dominate behaviour towards antiquities and the past in general. Practices or things which violate the social order defined and structured by antiquities are considered impure, out of place, and should be erased (Douglas 1966). Let us illustrate the point with some examples. In 1925, a prominent Greek photographer with the pseudonym Nelly, known for her excellent photographs of archaeological sites took a series of photos the pseudonym of a naked female dancer, Mona Paiva, on the Athenian Acropolis. She did so with another dancer, Nicolska, a few years later (1929) (figure 1).These incidents were considered a grave offence, 118 a sacrilege, and a row arose among archaeologists and journalists (Alexopoulos 1995, 151; Xanthakis 1988). In her recently published autobiography the photographer describes how archaeologists, intellectuals and journalists referred to these incidents as 'sacrilege of a sacred place' (Nelly 1989, 103). The 'frivolous' or even 'polluting' connotations of the naked body were perceived as a threat to the sanctity of the most important national monument. Many years earlier, between 1836 and 1874, a large scale purification program took place at the Athenian Acropolis. Prior to the Greek war of Independence (1821-1829) apart from the classical period buildings on the site of the Acropolis (and of course, the earlier, less con- spicuous remains) there was a plethora of later buildings - private houses, a Muslim mosque, Figure 1. Tlie dancer Nicolsca photographed by Nelly on the Parthenon in 1929 (reproduced from PhUippidis 1994, fig. 17). and a Frankish defensive tower, amongst others (figure 2). A few years after the establishment of the Greek state, one of the first Greek archaeologists, Kyriakos Pittakis, had most of the later buildings demolished without recording them. In 1874, the Archaeological Society of Athens, having the financial support of Schlieman, completed the demolition by pulling down the Frankish tower (MacNeal 1991; Petrakos 1987a, 46; 1987b, 97-98). The incident incited strong reactions in the press from some intellectuals. It is interesting that in their discourse, the supporters of the demolition emphasised the sanctity of the monument and its need to be 'cleansed'. In 1877, L. Kaftanzoglou, one of the prominent members of the Archaeological Society, responding to a criticism concerning the Society's action to destroy the Frankish Tower in search of more ancient Greek inscriptions, wrote: 'in such a sacred place [as the Acropolis] we believe that it is impious and improper to maintain the dark relics of the passing waves of barbarity' (cited in Petrakos 1987b, 98). Another 'purification act' of a different kind, this time not through official intervention, was carried out during the early days of the Nazi occupation of Greece. On the night of 119 the 31 of May 1941, two young Greeks removed the flag with the swastika from 'the sacred rock', the Athenian Acropolis.This event enjoyed wide publicity (figures 3-4) (it was broad- cast worldwide), inspired one of Picasso's drawings (figure 5) and is still acknowledged today. It is also considered as marking the beginning of the resistance struggle against the occupation forces in Greece. The Nazis reacted strongly because, as it is well known, they also drew heavily on imagery and conceptions from classical antiquity and had attached enormous symbolic significance to the monument (the occupation of Athens was officially marked with the hoisting of the swastika on the Acropolis) (Petrakos 1994, 111). VBDUTADEL CAST. DACROPOLIS I1ALLA PARTB DIMEZO GIORN"

Figure 2. Drawing by the engineer Vereda (1687) showing some of the post-classical monuments of the Acropolis, such as the Frankish tower (with the flag) and the minaret (Cte De Laborde, Athenes aux XV,XVl et XVII siecles, v. 11, Paris 1854; reproduced from Petrakos 1987b, 106).

120

Figure 3. Artwork by Nikos Kastanakis published in the newspaper 'Eleftheria' (Freedom) on 25 March 1945, depicting the removal of the swastika from the Acropolis on 31 May 1941 (reproduced from Petrakos 1994, 31). Figure 4. Ttie event depicted in figure 3 in another drawing by A. Kontopoulos, painter of the National Museum at Athens (1941) (reproducedfrom Petrakos 1994, 116).

121

Figure 5. Drawing by P. Picasso (2 July 1959) dedicated to the event depicted in figures 3 and 4; the flag carries a pigeon: Acropolis as a symbol for peace (reproduced from Petrakos 1994, 111). Arguably, the above discussion is based on highly selective material of diverse nature, ranging chronologically from the establishment of the modern Greek state in the 19th century to the present. It may thus run the risk of being read as contributing to the notion of timelessness in the attitudes towards the Greek past. This is a thesis that this article aims to demolish, as can be seen below. Certain attitudes towards antiquities have changed significantly during the last two centuries; this article, however, focuses on a fundamental phenomenon that seems to have persisted, although as it will be seen, its deployment in the politics of the past has been quite diverse. This arbitrary selection is a necessary abstraction that aims to demonstrate that the sacralisation of ancient monuments is a salient feature of official and non-official discourses on monuments, from the establishment of the Greek nation- state to the present. It will become obvious throughout this article that the sacrahsed monuments acquire diverse meanings and are entangled in multiple webs of signification, during their eventful lives.

Nationalism as secular religion

We believe that a satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon should be sought in the role of antiquity and the past in the construction of national identity. Many scholars have pointed out that nationalist imagining and consciousness have strong affinities with religious ideology (e.g. Anderson 1991, 10-12; Balaknshnan 1995; Balibar 1990, 348; Gellner 1983,56; Herzfeld 1992, 34-39; Hobsbawm 1992, 67-68; Kapferer 1988; Llobera 1994a, 134-147; Mosse 1976; Veer and Lehmann 1999). Rousseau has called nationalism a 'civic religion' (Hobsbawm 1992, 85). Durkheim maintained that the best example of a society creating new gods was France immediately after 1789 (Llobera 1994b, 137). Anderson takes the argument one step further and attempts to explain this association by looking at the cultural roots of nationalism. He suggests that the dawn of nationalist ideology in Europe in the eighteenth century coincides with the dusk of religious systems of thought. The new form of group identity, the imagined community of the nation, had to absorb and incorporate many religious concepts and ritual practices. Nationalism, Anderson therefore concludes, has to be understood not as a political ideology but as a cultural system much like the ones it replaced (Anderson 1991, 12). Kedourie, who has also reached similar conclusions, adds two important dimensions; first that with this association, nationalism exploits the powerful loyalties created through the much older traditional religions and, second, that these loyalties are used 122 quite implicitly (1966, 76). Their effect is, therefore, much more powerful. The assertion, however, that nationalist ideology replaced religious ideology, may not be necessarily valid in all contexts. While its critical re-evaluation is beyond the scope of this paper, the brief discussion on the relation between Orthodoxy and Greek nationalism below may indicate that it is not a matter of replacement of conventional religion by nationalism so much as incorporation of religious ideological and cultural elements by the similar but more powerful nationalist cultural system. Nationalism may be connected to specific political (Hobsbawm 1992) and socio- economic (Gellner 1983) conditions as well as technological innovations (Anderson 1991) in the West during the 18th and 19th centuries. However, as Mosse notes, it managed to attract audiences neither for its economic advantages nor for its political programmes but because of its 'political liturgies', its rituals and ceremonies (Mosse 1976, 40 and passim). Nationalism needs to sustain the collective group memory, which has been selectively and carefully constructed. In attempting this, ritual performances are most effective due to their formalised character. Commemorative ceremonies are often employed to make explicit reference to prototypical events and to re-enact the cult of the dominant narrative (Connerton 1989, 60- 71). Furthermore, Smart suggests that the nation is a performative construct, a phenomeno- logical notion which acquires the properties of sacredness due to the formalised and highly charged feelings and behaviours which it demands (Smart 1983).

Imagining the nation in modern Greece

Nation-building in Greece has been a matter of considerable discussion and debate which cannot be adequately summarised within the limits of this paper (see for example Diamandouros 1972;Dimaras 1989; Friedman 1992, 1994; Gourgouns 1996; Herzfeld 1982, 1987; Just 1989; Kitrormlides 1989; Kremmydas 1992; Moskof 1979; Politis 1993; Skopetea 1988;Tsoukalas 1977). For the purposes of the present argument, and with the risk of over- simplification, we will concentrate on some crucial points. From the 15th century up until the Greek War of Independence, the people living in the area known- today as Greece were under the central administration of the Ottoman Empire. As the Empire's internal organisation was classified into different communities (millets) according to their members' religion, these people formed part of the Millet-i Rum, the largest millet after the Muslim one and it comprised both Greek and non-Greek speaking Christians. The millet-i Rum was under the intellectual and legal authority of the Patriarchate of Constantinople that was itself staffed almost exclusively by Greek-speaking people belonging to the upper strata of Ottoman subjects. This was the first step in the development of the Greek national consciousness (Tsoukalas 1977). It was combined with another important development. From the mid-17th century a new merchant social group emerged based on trade rather than on traditional forms of wealth such as land (e.g. Diamandouros 1972; Moskof 1979, 99-118; Stoianovich 1960).This new social group, multi-ethnic in the beginning, was soon 'Hellemsed' due to the political and economic influence of the Orthodox Church and the domination of the Greek language throughout the Balkans and in parts of Asia Minor. Moreover, Greek was established as the language of commerce and signified 123 higher social status (Stoianovich 1960, 310):

The Hellemsation of the upper social strata of the non-Greek Balkan orthodox peoples made possible the emergence of a single relatively united, inter-Balkan merchant class, which was of Greek,Vlach, Macedo-Slav, and Bulgarian ethnic origin, but called itself and was known to others as 'Greek' (Stoianovich 1960, 311). This new social group absorbed facets of the Western European (especially French) bourgeois mentality and consequently adopted equivalent life styles and modes of behaviour reflecting these mentalities (e.g.Tsoukalas 1977, 39-44). It also came in contact with classicism, one of the dominant ideological movements in Europe at that time, through the many ethnic Greek intellectuals who lived and worked in Western Europe. Influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment as well as by developments such as the French Revolution, they 'rediscovered' their destiny as the successors of the classical past. This past as perceived and constructed by European intellectuals at the time, provided a set of ideals which could legitimise the existence of this new social class, the economic development of which was held back by the old systems of government and administration such as the Ottoman Empire (Diamandouros 1972;Tsoukalas 1977, 44). By adopting classicism and presenting itself as the legitimate suc- cessor of classical Greeks, this new social group and its intellectuals did more than simply establish a firm link with the European middle classes. It also worked out a new political programme in direct contrast to the autocratic Ottoman institutions and oligarchic systems of self-rule, common in the Greek peninsula and much favoured by the traditional Greek elites. Those two elements had considerable influence on developments such as the European intervention which guaranteed the success of the Greek War of Independence but also the establishment of the position of power for the new merchant middle class in the internal struggle during the War and the first crucial years of the new Greek State. The preservation, collection, promotion and study of ancient artefacts (primarily of the classical period) was a priority which went hand in hand with the establishment of the Greek state and the development of its institutions. Moreover, the new State had at the same time an urgent need to construct a strong sense of national consciousness which could unify the ethnically and religiously diverse populations of the newly founded Greek State. So the promotion and study of archaeological material served two interlinked aims: the legitimation of the political and economic programme of the middle classes, and the construction of national consciousness for the people of the Greek State as a whole. There are countless examples that illustrate the above phenomenon and demonstrate the crucial role of the classical past and its material manifestations in the construction of the Greek nation. The vocabulary used in this process is revealing. The nation-building process which started with the War of Independence was referred to as Paliggenesia (Resurrection, regeneration-renaissance), a term which conveys the notion of the resurrection of the 'past glories' of Classical Greece (Skopetea 1988, 207). Dimaras has noted (1989) how in the beginning of the 19th century personal names of classical antiquity, such as Leonidas, Athena, 124 Perikles orThemistocles, became extremely fashionable among the new elites, in many cases replacing Christian ones. Moreover, the intellectuals who played a key role in this process propagated a new name for the Christian population of the Greek peninsula. Romioi, Christianoi (Christians), or Kritikoi (people from Crete), Momites (people from Peloponnese) etc. were the names used for self-definition before the War. The name Hellenes, evoking the Classical Greeks, was adopted soon after the eruption of the War (e.g. Politis 1993, 33-35).' The War of Independence itself was portrayed as a continuation of the ancient Greek wars against oriental 'barbarians' (we should not forget that this is the time of the construction and consolidation of orientalist stereotypes in the West). Direct references to ancient battles and personalities are abundant in the speeches and writings of national leaders who were trying to promote the revolutionary spirit (cf. Loukas 1996, 20 and passim). The foundation of the Greek State did not mean that the process of the building of the nation was over; far from it. The classical past and its remnants continued to receive considerable attention and figure prominently in the process of the construction of national identity. The transfer of the capital from Nafplion to the small dusty town of Athens with all its associations with classical Greece and, more importantly, with the visible standing monuments of the Classical era, is an aspect of the same phenomenon. Likewise, the rebuilding of Sparta, which was intended to become the second city of the Kingdom, in its ancient location served the same need (Politis 1993, 76). An important measure of the significance attributed to classical antiquities, especially in the formative years of the Hellenic nation, is the concern for the protection of monuments of the past. This was considered a priority, despite the urgent social and political problems that the population faced before and after the foundation of the State. Even before the War of Independence there were attempts by intellectuals to preserve ancient monuments and stop their looting which had become endemic. The first document calling for the preservation of antiquities was that by A. Korais (in 1807), the most eminent intellectual of the Modern Greek Enlightenment (e.g. Jeffreys 1985; Kokkou 1977, 27-31). In 1813 a Society called Philomousos Etalreia (Society of the Friends of Arts) was founded -with two main aims.These were the education of the youth and the discovery and collection of antiquities alongside the foundation of an institution (a museum) for their storage and exhibition (Protopsaltis 1967, 22).The classical temple of Erechtheion on the Acropolis was selected for the site of the first museum, but the building was serving urgent as an armoury (Kokkou 1977, 38). During the War of Independence, and despite other more urgent needs, intellectuals continued their appeals to the fighting Greeks for the preservation of ancient monuments. Moreover, the Prosorini Dioikisis (Temporary Government) protested whenever looting was reported and official directives advised public servants to collect and preserve antiquities so that:

In time, every school should have its own museum. This is of the utmost necessity for history, for the recovery of the ancient names of cities and places, for getting to know the abilities of our ancestors; also for the justified respect that they enjoy among the wise nations of Europe which accuse us of giving antiquities away or selling them at low prices to [European] travellers 'who freqvient Greece (Ephimeris Athinon 38, 24 June 1825; cited in Kokkou 1977, 41; our translation). 125 As with many nationalist discourses, ancient monuments in Greece provided the most powerful currency of this specific form of symbolic capital, due to their materiality, visibility (especially in case of prominent architectural monuments), authenticity, age and sense of timelessness (cf. Diaz-Andreu and Champion 1996, 19-20). Moreover, they possessed the ability to create a spatiality, to reconcile the timeless, homogeneous, empty space of nation with a sense of concrete place (Appadurai 1995, 213). Physical, authentic monuments which provided a sense of continuity and eternity were crucial elements in the process of'dreaming the nation' (Gourgouris 1996). They were instrumental in constructing a topos that was at the same time within history and outside it (Gourgouris 1993). A topos structured by a specific temporality: a 'monumental' time distinct from the 'social' experiential time of everyday life (Herzfeld 1992; Hamilakis andYalouri 1996, 122). If most archaeological remains possess the above properties, classical antiquities had the additional advantage of occupying a central position in western imagination and cosmology. Thus Classical antiquity was promoted as symbolic capital, generated from raw materials found in the West. On that symbolic and authoritative resource, rights to political self-deter- mination for the Greek population as a whole could be built (cf. Hamilakis and Yalouri 1996). The first president of the Archaeological Society in Athens, I. Rizos-Neroulos, stated during a meeting of the Society held on the Athenian Acropolis in 1838 (cited in Kokkou 1977, 16; our translation): 'Gentlemen, it is to those stones which, due to Praxitelises, Phidiases, Iktmoses, Agorakritoses and Myrones, became more precious than diamonds or agate, it is to a large extent to those stones that we owe our political renaissance.' Given the role that antiquities played for the construction and reproduction of the idea of the nation of modern Greece (cf. among many others Clogg 1985; Friedman 1992, 1994; Herzfeld 1982, 1987; Kotsakis 1991, 67; Lowenthal 1988; Morris 1994; Petrakos 1988, 99; Politis 1993; Skopetea 1988;Tsigakou 1981) and their subsequent incorporation within the rhetoric and imagination of national consciousness, it is not surprising that they are invested with religious connotations. Hobsbawm has noted that the link between religion and national consciousness becomes stronger when nationalism, instead of being a minority ideology, becomes a mass force (1992, 67-68). It is possible to trace this gradual transformation in the Greek case. Before the formation of the new nation-state, folk tales show popular perceptions of antiquity were quite different from those that we know from later periods (Kakridis 1979). In the pre-nation-state period, antiquity was perceived as belonging to the legendary sphere. Ancient Greeks, often depicted as giants with supernatural powers, were thought to be quite distinct from the contemporary population. National imagination transformed this perception adopting religious connotations, with the emphasis on direct continuity. The situation changed dramatically in the following decades. The nation had to establish and consolidate itself, to expand its territorial boundaries and to negotiate its role among the older and more powerful western nations. For the construction and reproduction of its version of social memory it had to rely heavily on its monopoly of ideological mechanisms and institutions, primarily on state education (Kitromilides 1989, 163-164; cf. Gellner 1983, 34). Antiquities, therefore, and mainly classical antiquities, were very often assigned the role of 126 icons in the worship of the secular religion of Hellenism.4 As such, antiquities provided the stage and the scenery for ritual performances celebrating the new dogmatic principles such as the continuity and the superiority of the 'Hellenic spirit' through the millennia. Two recent examples of such ceremonial and ritual performances will help to illustrate the arguments outlined above and will hopefully show that these attitudes are very much alive today. The first took place in the British Museum, in the room with the Parthenon ('Elgin') marbles, on Thursday 10 March 1994, a few days after the death of Melina Merkouri, ex-minister of Culture for Greece, well known for her crusade for the restitution of the Parthenon marbles to Athens.That afternoon a group of around 100 Greek and Greek- Cypriot students visited the museum bearing flowers and demanded to be allowed to leave the flowers on the marbles, in memory of Melina Merkouri. After negotiations they were allowed in. They were not allowed, however, to leave the flowers on the marbles. The con- gregation was gathered around the remains of the Parthenon sculptures and someone read a petition of the Society of Greek Students in London reaffirming their promise to continue Merkoun's crusade. Then, they all sang the Greek National Anthem before the eyes of surprised guards and visitors. They managed to leave some flowers on the marbles despite the prohibition, and then they left (Metaxas 1994). The second incident took place in Toronto in 1990 and is part of a series of conflicts between the Greek-Macedonian and the Slavo-Macedonian community there. As Anderson points out (1994) exile is very often the nursery of nationalist ideology and imagination. In May 1990, the Greek-Macedonian community erected a bust of Alexander the Great in a small square in Toronto despite the protests of other Greek organisations that preferred a bust of Kolokotroms, a hero of the Greek War of Independence. In July of the same year, a Slavomacedoman organisation decided to lay a wreath at the statue celebrating the supposed 2346th anniversary of the birth of Alexander. Their decision caused controversy and anger among the Greek-Macedonian organisations that decided to prevent the whole ceremony:

With their bodies wrapped in blue and white Greek flags the Greek Macedonians formed a human wall around the statue. As the Macedonians approached, a fight broke out that required the intervention of the Toronto police. When the police assured them that the Macedonians would not be allowed to lay their wreath at the statue, the Greek-Macedonians left. According to reports in the Greek press the Greek community of Toronto had successfully prevented 'any dirty hand' from 'defiling' this statue of Alexander the Great, a 'symbol of the unity and the fighting spirit of Hellenism'.The entire event had been 'another golden page in the glorious history of the defence of all that is sacred and holy to the Fatherland' {Makedhoniki Zoi, October 1990, 48-49; Danforth 1995, 173-174).

This last example is instructive in many ways. It did not involve an ancient monument but the representation of a central, almost mythical figure in the pantheon of Hellenism, Alexander the Great. It demonstrates that sacralisation involves not only 'authentic' ancient monuments but also ancient figures, concepts and notions and their representations, especially when access to physical material remains of the past is not possible. 127

Nationalism, Greek Orthodoxy and the secular religion of Hellenism

We hope to have established above that antiquities in modern Greece operate within an ideological framework dominated by religious connotations. We have attempted to explore the phenomenon by looking at nationalist ideologies in general, and at the construction of national identity based on antiquity in modern Greece in particular. Below we will investigate another important aspect of the same phenomenon: the connection between Greek nationalism and Greek Orthodoxy, as well as the interweaving of this relationship with antiquities and archaeological monuments. Although the issue deserves closer investigation, it is fair to say that the consolidation and the spread of the secular religion of Hellenism based on antiquity, owes some of its success to the power and the specific character of Greek Orthodoxy. The relationship between Greek nationalism and Orthodoxy is an extremely complex one and well beyond the scope of this paper (see Arnakis 1963; Just 1988; Kitromilides 1989; Stewart 1994 for discussions). It is important, however, to make brief reference to the issue and illuminate its links with the phenomenon explored here. As Just (1988), Hart (1992), and Dubisch (1995) among others have shown, Orthodoxy is today an integral part of the national Greek identity to the extent that many local social actors would make no distinction between the two and they would treat Orthodoxy or even Christianity in general as exclusively Greek. Extreme nationalist right- wing governments and dictatorships during the country's recent political history have exploited this close link between Orthodoxy and nationalism. We only need to be reminded of the main slogan of the Colonels' dictatorship (1967-1974) which encapsulated their political philosophy:'Hellas of the Helleno-Christians' (cf. Just 1988, 21). The relationship operated at several subconscious levels, as can be seen in the metonymic use of symbolic images which can function in both the national and the Orthodox Christian system of thought. For example, the image of the phoenix arising from its ashes, a national symbol in the early years of the Modern Greek State as well as the main logo of the Colonels' dictatorship, can be subconsciously connected with the image of the resurrected Jesus, so familiar from the iconography of Greek Orthodoxy, being the dominant theme of the most important event in the Christian Orthodox calendar as well as in the Greek feast calendar (Just 1988,21). The history of the relationship between nationalism and Greek Orthodoxy, however, is extremely complicated and turbulent. Kitromilides (1989) provides an interesting, clear and concise exposition. As we mentioned above, before the War of Independence the Christian population within the Ottoman Empire was socially organised under the millet-i-Rum, which included the Greek-speaking people as well as other Christian ethnic groups. With the emergence of Greek nationalism the leading intellectuals called for ethnic identification on the basis of language and the 'common classical heritage'. They thus advocated a break from the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual 'imagined community' of Orthodoxy in favor of the new 'imagined community' of Hellenism. The leadership of the Orthodox Church (based in 128 Constantinople), that enjoyed certain privileges, foresaw the danger. It sensed the threat from the new 'secular religion' and its sources of inspiration such as the ideological, philosophical aspects of the French Revolution. The first years of the Greek War of Independence also marked a struggle between the Church leadership and the nationalist intellectuals and the 'enlightened' clergy, who sided with the 'new religion'. The doctrines of the 'new religion' were dismissed as 'phyletism' aiming to replace a more open, inclusive community, the community of the faithful. In spite of the condemnation of the War of Independence by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Greek nationalism finally won the battle. This victory was marked by the declaration of the autocephaly of the Church of Greece and its independence from the Patriarchate in 1853. From that point onwards as Kitromilides says 'the Church of Greece spearheaded all nationalist initiatives in the later part of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century' (1989, 166). In the process of construction of the Greek nation, the national ideology had to deal with some severe tensions. One of the most important resulted from the fact that the Christian Orthodox nation was to embrace the ideals of a paganistic past, classical antiquity. This tension mirrors the one between the Classical and the Byzantine past, another serious bone of contention for the nationalist narrative in the first years of the Greek state (cf. Dimaras 1989; Hamilakis andYaloun 1996; Mango 1965; Pohtis 1993, 110-ll;Yaloun 1993).The first tension was successfully resolved with an interesting venture of religious synthesis and syncretism (Stewart 1994). Folklorists, along with archaeologists and historians, were assigned the crucial national mission of demonstrating the continuity of the Hellenic spirit over the millennia (Herzfeld 1982). They managed to find 'survivals' of the ancient Greek religions in the Orthodox tradition, emphasising however, their material aspect — e.g. worshipping locations - rather than their spiritual one which would have led to a direct confrontation with the Church (Stewart 1994, 138). Some even suggested that ancient Greeks were unknowingly Christians (Stewart 1994, 140). One of the most persistent memories from our 'religion' classes at school is the story our teachers would narrate, that St. Paul found ancient Athenians worshipping in addition to their Olympian deities another one,'The Unknown God': a subconscious perpetuation of the same argument which portrays ancient Greeks as proto- Christians. The second tension, that between Classical and Byzantine past was far more complex. The transition from the open hostility of nationalist intellectuals to the Byzantine past (in favour of the classical past, the main symbolic capital of the Greek Nation-State) to its acceptance involved the copious effort of the national historian, Konstantinos Paparigopoulos, who saw the Byzantine past as the necessary bridge which would secure the continuity between Classical and modern Greek past (cf. Augustinos 1989, among many others).The urgent need to confront Fallmerayer's argument for the hybridic nature of modern Greek society which had lost all its ancient Greek elements (see Skopetea 1997, Stewart 1994; Veloudis 1982 among many others), acted as a catalyst in the intellectuals' efforts to bridge that gap in the national narrative. Given the prominent and central role of Christianity within Byzantine institutions, the incorporation of the Byzantine past within the main body of the national narrative promoted further the fusion between Orthodoxy and Hellenic national identity. At the same time that relationship made the bridging between Classical and Byzantine past less difficult. 129 Two further ideological parameters that facilitated the fusion between nationalism and Orthodoxy should be mentioned. The first relates to the messianic and teleological nature of both Greek nationalism and Orthodoxy. We should bear in mind that Greek nationalism from its very early stages had internal and external dimensions. The internal had to do with the construction of the nation and the establishment of a homogeneous state. The external dimension has to do with the perception that HeUenism was much broader than the borders of the nation-state as they were defined in the first years of its life (in 1832 the Greek state included only the Peloponnese, the Cyclades, and part of the southern mainland Greece). National consolidation would be achieved only once all Greek-speaking populations in the area could be included in the national body (Kitromilides 1989, 161).The second important ideological parameter had to do with the ritual character and practice of Orthodoxy, which is quite distinctive from other Christian denominations. A tradition that relies heavily on mysticism, miracles, and the worship of eikons (Herzfeld 1992,43; Stewart 1989,77), has provided a fertile ground for the new secular religion. A very interesting example, which illustrates the relationship between Orthodoxy, antiquities and nationalism was recendy discussed by Andreadis (1989, 289-299). This happened during the Greek-Turkish confrontation in Asia Minor (1919-1922) (cf. Clogg 1992 for a brief account). In March 1922, a soldier from one of the Greek regiments that had camped at the village of Ilme-Tciflic (near the town ofYegigaze in NW Turkey) asked to see his commander. He reported that on the previous night he dreamt of the Virgin Mary surrounded by ancient Greek soldiers. The Virgin Mary requested that a nearby cave should no longer be used for the stalling of animals because, as she said, it was a shrine devoted to her.The ancient Greek soldiers asked for archaeological excavations to be carried out at a nearby hill since, as they said, it was their graveyard after a battle 'which took place in antiquity at that spot. In the following days the soldier insisted that he kept having the same dream. The commander, after widespread pressure from the other soldiers, decided to fulfil the requests and ordered an excavation to be carried out. The excavation at that spot, which turned out to be a previously known archaeological site, did indeed reveal gravestones and other ancient Greek artefacts. The commander in his memoirs published in 1937 reported the above incident and it was discussed in the press at that time as well as by historians of the period. It is an extremely interesting and multi-dimensional case (which reminds us of Gourgouris' assertion that national imagining should be treated as dreaming cf. Gourgouris 1993, 83; 1996). For the purposes of this discussion it will suffice to mention that the experience of theophany which is quite widespread in the popular imagination in modern Greece (Stewart 1989, 77), provides the means for the appropriation of the distant past in the individual and collective popular memory. In the above-mentioned story the religious experience and the experience of the ancient Greek past become inseparable. For the soldier who was fighting away from home, in a terri- tory which, according to the national narrative, was part of the space of Hellenism and was imbued with meaning not least because of the ancient Greek presence, there was no distinction between reality and dreaming, past and present, the Virgin Mary and Ancient Greek fight- ers. If the ancient Greek past was sacred, as the educated elite of the nation had been saying for a century, then the uneducated soldier (being more 'pure', a true folk) had the ability to 130 communicate with it, not via knowledge but directly as he did with God.

Antiquities between domination and resistance

There is, however, a significant difference between religious — in the traditional sense - ideology and the secular religion of nationalism, with serious consequences. As Gellner has noted, while in religious rituals society worships itself through the camouflaged medium of religion, in the rituals of nationalism society worships itself openly and overtly (Gellner 1983, D6; emphasis added; cf. Breuilly 1993, 64). While we would not suggest that religions do not allow popular appropriations of their discourse (see for example studies in James and Johnson 1988; cf. Kenna 1995 for examples from Greek contexts), in nationalist discourses ritual imagination is less restricted. Every individual is potentially a priest and does not depend on others for ritual services (Gellner 1983, 142). But this phenomenon creates a certain paradox: the nationalist discourse as a hegemonic device attempts to fix meaning on the basis of its dogmatic principles. On the other hand, nationalism as secular religion allows popular appropriation and rephrasing of that meaning, as long as the fundamental dogmatic principles are not challenged. The images of the secular religion of nationalism, through their material expression in archaeological monuments and objects, are invested with what Ricoeur has called 'surplus of meaning' (Ricoeur 1976; cf. Connerton 1989, 56-57). That is why antiquities as symbolic capital and authoritative resource in modern Greece are often used by different groups, sometimes with conflicting interests in the process of negotiation of power, despite the hegemonic and imposing discourse of nationalism. The sigmfiers of the new secular religion have often been used by the state and dominant groups in order to impose and legitimise their authority. They have also been used by subordinated groups in resistance, or by individuals or groups against the bureaucracy of the state. They can also empower individual social actors, as in the case of the soldier above who became the central figure and was able to 'reverse' the military hierarchy and compel his superiors to carry out excavations. In a previous example above we saw how the removal of the swastika from the Acropolis was an act of resistance. Elsewhere (Hamilakis and Yalouri 1996), we described a different example: the soldiers exiled by the Greek totali- tarian regime due to their left-wing political affiliations during the late 1940s on the island of Makronisos were forced to build, along with replicas of guns, replicas of the Parthenon as part of their'rehabilitation programme' (Rodocanachi 1949). The Acropolis in the service of resistance in the first case, the Acropolis in the service of suppression in the second. Antiquities as signs and icons of the new religion are re-contextualised within the national framework and acquire a multiplicity of social lives. Rituals, Kertzer says, abrogate history and time (1988, 10).They are mostly about images and performances. Nationalist narratives construct social memory using isolated images and themes from the material culture of the past. Incorporated in the dominant narrative of the nation, this material culture is highly charged and acquires immense emotional power, as social agents mobilise powerful symbolic resources in the form of antiquities that have acquired the properties of icons. In doing so, the nationalist discourse may appear subversive, since it empowers alternative, anti-hegemonic political, social and personal agendas, such as the resistance to the hegemony of Nazi 131 occupation in the example above, or to the hegemony of the government, the State and supra-State organisations in the case of strong, public opposition to travelling exhibitions of antiquities, such as the riots and blockades outside the Herakleion Museum in Crete in 1979 (see Hamilakis andYalouri 1996). But how subversive are these alternative actions, since they work within the cosmological realm of nationalism? We would argue that they reproduce in other forms the same bounded, fixed, essentialist notions on identities. They perpetuate the dominant conceptions of identities as primordial, static attributes, rather than performative, lived, experiential constructs (cf. Handler 1994; Astuti 1995 among others). Epilogue

The nation thus comes to command the domain of both the sacred and the profane. In occupying and exploiting the mysterious space of the sacred in our contemporary 'secular' world, the nation revitalises the profane. In mobilising a society with the signs of resurrection or eternal life, often to acts of unspeakable violence, the nation lends to the profane a sacred status. Therein lies the sublime force of the nation's seduction. Therein lies also the formidable enactment of its dynastic violence (Gourgouris 1993, 96).

In this essay we have touched upon numerous and complex issues. The issue of nationalism alone is notoriously difficult to define and understand. We attempted to show that since nationalism and religion can be seen as similar cultural systems (Geertz 1993[1973]), the process of'dreaming' and imagining the nation can result in the sacralisation of national culture (cf. Brow 1990, 3), and the sacralisation of ancient (mostly classical) monuments, sites, and other archaeological material in this specific case. Ancient monuments become an indis- pensable apparatus for ritual, commemorative ceremonies, and become the stage for and powerful emotive icons in performances of national memory in the continuous process of imagining and dreaming the topos of the nation. This process is open to all social actors and not simply to State bureaucrats and intellectuals. It can be reconciled with a diversity of political agendas but it does not undermine the ontological basis of the nationalist ideological and cultural system, the essentialist and static conception of individual and collective selfhood." The phenomenon described above cannot but have profound implications for archaeology as a discipline and as a social practice, as well as for society in general. It will take a long time and serious effort to explore these implications, but it will be interesting to mention at least some of them here. To start with, we must seriously reconsider the validity of the dichotomy between academic or scholarly interpretations and readings of the past based on a strict logical epistemic framework, and 'fringe' readings and interpretations based on faith, emotions, mystic and psychic properties. As we hope to have shown, academic discourses working within the nationalist genre often produce archaeologies which resemble some of the 'fringe' readings (cf. Andronikos' writings above). Moreover, both academic and non- academic nationalist readings and appropriations of the past deserve much more than mere dismissal as distortions and abuses of objective empirical past reality. Being cultural phe- 132 nomena with a wide relevance and appeal, they are of immense importance in their own right (cf. Lampeter Archaeology Workshop, 1997). At the same time, their study could illuminate the social conditions and the ontology and epistemology of academic disciplinary discourses and practices, in this case archaeology and history, since very often, as it is evident from the above, the raison d'etre and the legitimacy of these disciplines are intricately linked with nationalism and the politics of identity (cf. Hamilakis 1996). By way of an example, consider this: in a recent article Silberman (1995) refers to the well-known case of the archaeologist as a hero. In this essay we could recognise another type: the archaeologist as a 'priest' or a 'shaman'. The clearest example discussed here is that of Andronikos. He mediates between the world of ancients and the world of moderns but he also communi- cates with the supernatural forces in general, including Christian saints, as in the case of his discovery on the day of Archangels Michael and Gabriel. He is able to communicate directly with the ancients and the personified ancient artefacts. For example, in one of his newspaper articles he talks about the ancient Greek antiquities and statuses which are kept in non-Greek museums and describes their 'feelings' of sadness, and the joy and pride which the ones that were 'repatriated' feel (Andronikos 1985). Indicative of his status and immense authority within Greek society is the fact that he is honoured with a stamp devoted to him, and was honoured with a highly emotional funeral attended by six Ministers and the Prime Minister (Heller 1992). Of course, as we saw in the case of the soldier in the Asia Minor War, the archaeologist does not have the exclusive rights to ritual communication and control but s/he still com- mands enormous power. What does this specific case mean for the politics of academia, for the social role of archaeology, and for modern society in general? These and many others are issues that still need to be explored. Furthermore, the social definition of a monument is seriously affected by what has been imposed as collective social memory venerated and worshipped in the rituals of nationalism. Material remains that are not considered pure are either ignored or demolished, as was the case with the 'barbaric remains' on the Athenian Acropolis. Artefacts that do not have the qualities required for the performances of the commemorative ceremonies have much less chance of being preserved, promoted, and studied. Archaeological interpretations are very often confined to the dominant narrative imposed by the secular religion of nationalism. The communication of archaeological knowledge to the public has to follow certain rules, which do not violate the dogmatic principles. A hands-on approach to archaeological practice for example, cannot easily be accepted: sacred symbols are not for kids to play with. The recent discourse of'heritage management', therefore, and the principles and strategies that heritage managers adopt and promote, especially in contexts such as Britain where the 'heritage industry' has become the substitute for the declining traditional industries (Walsh 1992; cf. Memman 1996 on the debate), might not be applicable to contexts such as modern Greece. Indeed, attempts at hyper-commercialisation of Greek antiquities have been met with public and media resistance. As we have shown elsewhere (Hamilakis andYalquri 1996), following Bourdieu (1977, 1990), antiquities as symbolic capital can be transformed into other forms of capital, but part of their power lies in the fact that they are masked and mis-recognised as such (that is, as capital). Resistance seems to have been greater towards suggestions for heritage theme parks such as the ones found in Britain and the USA. We 133 would not argue that this attitude has to do exclusively with the sacralisation of antiquity. Arguments about the perceived violation of authenticity as well as aesthetic values and standards are often employed to resist suggestions for heritage theme parks. But we do believe that such suggestions are also seen as a sacrilege, a violation of the authentic and eternal icons of the secular religion of nationalism. Finally, we would like to return to the quotation at the top of this section. As we have hoped to show in this essay, antiquities incorporate immense symbohc power due to their key position within the national-religious system of thought.We have tried to show that this symbolic power can back seemingly anti-hegemonic discourses and practices (e.g. the 'purification' of the Acropolis by removing the Nazi flag as an act of resistance), leaving at the same time the ontological foundations of the nationalist discourse unchallenged. More often, however, it turns into symbolic dynastic violence, as Gourgouns says, and as we have shown with some examples above. More significantly, in both cases the very act of pilgrimage requires submission, self-depreciation, and sacrifice (cf. Smart 1983, 23). And while, as we have said, this power is in theory accessible to all, the winner is usually the individual, social group or mechanism that can set up the most elaborate ritual performance, which can control most effectively the channels for the dissemination of dogmatic principles and ideology.

Notes

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at is beyond the scope of this paper. Also, we would the First Annual Meeting of the European not wish to imply here that Acropolis would Association of Archaeologists (Santiago, Spain, evoke the same feelings to all visitors (Greeks Sept. 1995), at the 28th Annual Chacmool and non-Greeks). Conference (Calgary, Canada Nov. 1995) and at The term Romios was destined to have a com- the Research Seminar of the Department of plex social biography in more recent years. As Archaeology and Prehistory, University of Leontis (1991) has shown, one of its derivatives, Sheffield (November 1995). We would like to Romiosini, was appropriated by intellectuals who thank the audiences in the above occasions for advocated at the turn of the twentieth century their comments and encouragement.Thanks are the introduction of Demoticism — the change of also due to Kathryn Denning who took the the official language of the State from paper to Calgary and to Jasmin Habib for read- Katharevoussa (purist) with its archaic elements, ing it. Financial support that enabled one of us to Demotiki (the language of the people), the (YH) to travel to Santiago was provided by the language of Romiosini. More recently the term University of Sheffield. A number of colleagues was appropriated by modernist poets and intel- and friends commented on earlier versions of lectuals (like Seferis and Elytis). In both cases, this text. Among them we would like to thank the discourse associated with it portrayed the particularly Keith Brown, Stella Galani, Karoline 'people' (o laos) and its artistic and cultural von Oppen, Mark Pluciennik, Charles Stewart, expressions as the true descendants of ancient and Chris Tilley. Thanks are also due to the edi- Greeks. It was therefore juxtaposed to Hellenism,

134 tors and the anonymous referees of this journal, the official version of national discourse (Leontis and the Media Centre of the University of 1991). The appropriation and use of the term Wales, Lampeter for the reproduction of the Romiosini, especially in more recent years had illustrations. explicit left-wing political connotations (as it There is no doubt that this passage also echoes can be shown in the poetry of Ritsos and the the well-known argument that tourism in mod- music of Theodorakis): the discourse of ern societies (especially in the form of museum Hellenism was one of the ideological corner- visiting and archaeological sightseeing) is a kind stones of all right-wing and authoritarian of pilgrimage (cf. Home 1984), an issue which regimes in modern Greece (see below the case of Makromsos).The left-wing movement, rather Orthodox tradition and for which we would than undermining the foundations of Hellenism reserve the term, 'eikon' (cf. Kenna 1985, note and its logic, worked within the same national 1). We use the term 'icon' in its broader sense as narrative (e.g. by accepting the stereotypes on encountered in cultural analysis and semiotics, the superiority of ancient Greece) and attempt- signifying the fetishised images within a secular ed (in some cases quite successfully) to appro- cult or 'worship' ritual. priate it on behalf of the 'people'. It would be interesting to compare the Greek By using the term 'icon' here we do not imply case with cases in other contexts where nation- that antiquities and monuments have acquired al and religious ideology and imagination are the properties of the two-dimensional visual interlinked (e.g. Ireland, Israel, India). representations encountered in the Christian

135 discussion

MULTIPLE READINGS OF THE SAME GOLDEN AGE

Margarita Diaz-Andreu The increasingly voluminous literature on nationalism and archaeology published in recent years is providing archaeologists with a firm basis to self-analyse the connection of their endeavours to the socio-political context of which they are imbued. Yet, the work underta- ken is not beyond criticism, as the authors make clear in their introduction. Most studies, including this one, approach the topic adopting a historiographical perspective. Yet, trying to summarise two hundred years of politics and archaeology in a few thousand words is not an easy task. It makes it necessary to simplify usually very complex processes into seemingly neat sequences of events. In addition, •writing for an archaeological audience does not make things easier. Most archaeologists have an understandable lack of knowledge on the complexities of the political aspect of the argument, a problem aggravated in the case of discussions of countries other than the one most of the readers are more familiar with. A detailed analysis of the intricate political context is simply unattainable and although references to other analytical works are often provided, it is difficult for authors to avoid giving the impression of adopting an objectifying position and a positivistic approach. Despite Hamilakis and Yalouri's awareness of this problem (p. 115), on occasion their account falls precisely into the latter cat- egory (especially in the section 'Imagining the nation in modern Greece'). As someone who has often been faced with this problem in my various publications on the relationship between archaeology and nationalism in Spain, I am still convinced of the validity of offer- ing general overviews, despite the risks entailed. It is only after producing an intelligible outline, as they in fact have done, that it is possible to undertake a deeper and more sophisticated analysis of more concrete issues related to the connection between archaeology and nationalism. One of the other reproaches that is rightly made of other authors' analyses is that nationalism is usually treated as 'an isolated, fixed political programme' (p. 115). I completely agree with their view, as I have discussed elsewhere (Diaz-Andreu 1997).There is no single nationalist ideology. Rather, perceptions of nationalism vary according to gender and class, and to one's position on the political spectrum. The way in which a particular nation — say Greece, 136 Spain or Catalonia — is understood may vary enormously between left and right, and even within the same parties divergent groups of interest may maintain contradictory positions. Regional and national movements different to the hegemonic one may also have distinctive approaches to the way in which antiquity is appropriated. This may result in the same Golden Age being seized upon by various groups with contrary aims. Finally, one cannot exclude from the analysis an element as slippery as opportunism, which can go a long way in explain- ing the particular choices made by both archaeologists and non-archaeologists regarding the use of the past in order to legitimise the existence of an ethno-nation.Yet, despite Hamilakis and Yalouri's rejection of the idea of nationalism as a fixed programme, only a few hints of the complexities outlined above are suggested in their article. The way in which the Greek classical past was and is appropriated by Greek nationalism is mainly presented here as monolithic and unproblematic (especially, again, in the section 'Imagining the nation in modern Greece'), although some reference to possible tensions is subsequently offered in the explanation of the negotiations to integrate the Byzantine past as one of the other Golden Ages of the Greek nation. There were surely many more. One of these tensions may have derived from the divergent ways in which different social strata internalised the nation's past. Nationalism initially emerged as a political ideology held almost exclusively by the middle and upper-middle classes (Hobsbawm 1992).The impression given in this article is, however, that there was no such a class distinction in Greece.Thus, when the authors argue that 'in the pre-nation-state period, antiquity was perceived as belonging to the legendary sphere' (p. 126), the implication is that from the beginning of the nineteenth century the situation radically changed for all Greeks. This seems highly unlikely as the experience of other countries shows, both looking at this issue from the perspective of nationalism (see discussion on class and national consciousness in Britain by Colley (1986)) and of today's peasantry's perceptions of the past in countries such as Portugal (Pina-Cabral 1989) and Italy (Odermatt 1996); (see also comment on Greek peasantry attitude to nationalism during the fight for Greek independence in Just (1989)). Regarding the latter social strata, my limited knowledge of Greece points to a much nar- rower personal engagement with the archaeological ruins by the peasantry than that implied by Hamilakis andYalouri. I would not be surprised to hear that, as in the Portuguese example, today's Greek peasantry generally categorise the past into the immediate, the known and the ancient past, the latter being similar to what the authors categorise as the legendary sphere of the pre-nationalist era. The continuation of the lucrative antiquities market during the nineteenth and twentieth century thanks, most probably, to the collaboration of the Greek peasantry seems to indicate that the past may not have had the same meaning for it as it had for the more affluent classes in Greek society. Archaeologists, as members of more well-off strata in society, sometimes have difficulties in realising that their interest in antiquity is not only related to nationalism, but also to class identity, and that not everybody in their country shares their concerns. One of the examples the authors use to argue for nationalism being a complex phenomenon is their account of the tension between the Classical and the Byzantine pasts, which they maintain is linked to the religious connotations of Greek nationalism. Although the examples provided make such a link apparent, a complementary explanation of this tension — and one which is, in my opinion, more revealing — comes from a consideration of the 137 context in which antiquity was adopted by nationalism. The lesser importance conferred to the medieval past was not exclusive to Greece, but quite the contrary, it was common in all early nationalisms and this attitude had a long history behind it. From the Renaissance, the past appropriated as a metaphor for new political post-medieval ideologies was the Classical past (Rosenberg 1990). Authoritative knowledge originated from it, and not from what could be called the 'Barbarian' past, i.e. their own country's non-classical antiquity, including both the prehistoric and the medieval periods. The first type of successful nationalism, civic nationalism (Hobsbawm 1992, 22; Smith 1991, 9-10), represented in many ways a continuation of the discourse of the past articulated in the previous centuries, and therefore the Classical past had a major role to play until the 1860s-1870s.The power of the classical discourse explains the success in France of the Parisian Central Museum of Arts - the first name given to the Museum of the Louvre — as against the failure of another museum created in the same year of 1793, the Museum of French Monuments, which displayed material culture — especially architectural remains — dated from the Gothic and Renaissance periods (Gran- Aymerich 1998, 38). Britain is a similar case. Since its creation in 1759 and for a long time the British Museum mainly housed classical antiquities brought from abroad (Ponrian 1990, 42). Despite some popular demand, neither antiquities from Britain were included among the collections, not a comparable museum was opened in London. It was only in 1867 that under private initiative a short-lived Museum of National Antiquities was opened in Liverpool (MacGregor 1998, 133). In this context, therefore, the earlier hostility of nationalist intellectuals to the Byzantine past as part of the Greek national history (p. 129) becomes more understandable and less exceptional in the European context. Moreover, Hamilakis and Yalouri argue that the later acceptance of the Byzantine past is related to the messianic and teleological nature of both Greek nationalism and Orthodoxy (p. 129). However, such a link is, again, not unique to Greece, as an analysis of the relationship established between Protestantism and medieval archaeology in Britain (or indeed with Greek archaeology (Edwards 1999, 12)), and Catholicism in the same period in France and Spain (for the latter see Diaz-Andreu 1996) reveals. This last point leads me on to a further consideration regarding Hamilakis and Yalouri s article. The authors' reflect on how nationalism is appropriated and internalised, and in order to develop their argument they pay particular attention to Geertz's hypothesis that nationalism and religion need to be seen as similar cultural systems (Geertz 1993 (1973)) Although I have no problem with this if it means both sharing common characteristics such as the existence of icons, of ritual performances, and of a wide community of'worshippers', I would argue that this comparison should not be overdrawn. One could assert that even more than nationalism, football and religion are similar cultural systems.Yet, this fact weakens the authoritative appeal of the comparison between religion and nationalism. Indeed, the authors seem to have some doubts to the extent of these similarities when they say that 'There is, however, a significant difference between religious — in the traditional sense — ideology and the secular religion of nationalism' (p. 130). I would argue that the comparison between religion and nationalism is interesting as an intellectual game, but that it may have prevented Hamilakis and Yalouri from exploring what for me constitutes one of the most intriguing aspects of Greek 138 nationalism, one that makes it really quite unique: its stress on the 'sacred' nature of antiquities, something that it certainly does not share with most other nationalisms. An examination of the specific context of Greek nationalism as a reaction against the great Islamic power at the time, the Ottoman empire, would in this respect certainly be worth exploring. A final consideration I would like to make is not specifically related to ways of further understanding Greek nationalism and archaeology opened by Hamilakis andYalouri's important article, but is a more general comment that originates from my experience of writing historiography. Very general historiographical accounts may leave the reader wondering about the extent to which the examples chosen are as representative as the text implies.When in 1829 Panagiotis Anagnostopoulos stated that antiquities awoke the spirit of the modern Hellenes (p. 116), to what extent 'was his opinion shared by other Greeks? In order to assess the relevance of a specific quotation it would be necessary to have some information about its impact. The same could be said of the two other figures mentioned, Georgios Oikomos and Manolis Andronikos.To •what extent are they representative of Greek nationalists or even of the whole Greek archaeological community? We are left in the dark on whether other archaeologists agreed with them. Because the authors suggest that their interpretations, especially those of Andronikos, were similar to those of fringe non-academics (p. 132), their -or at least Andronikos' — impact seems to be nuanced. In relation to this, I would also point out that historiographers should be cautious regarding the content of introductions. They are usually the place where more explicit opinions are stated, but also where political opportunism (cf. Hroch 1996) is most clearly displayed. Therefore, they are not always wholly representative of the author's postulates. In relation to this, it is not clear whether the latter was Andronikos' case or whether he was someone who seriously manipulated his data in order to fit the outcome of his research to his political ideology. A correct evaluation of the importance of an author's opinions, or indeed of archaeology in general, for nationalist politics needs to take into account opportunism and its consequences. Rather than attempting to diminish the importance of the article, my comments are suggestions on issues that, in addition to the multiple threads woven together in the article, I would like the authors further to develop. Theirs is one of the most illuminating insights into the politics of archaeology of Greece and in particular into the relationship of nationalism and archaeology.

FROM SACRALISING TO SACRILEGE? POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE RELATIONSHIPS OF RELIGION, NATIONALISM, AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Neil Asher Silberman In this elegant and wide-ranging essay, Hamilakis andYalouri have offered us a sophisticated analysis of the utilisation of the ancient past in modern Greece. They have traced the powerful political connection between images of the past and contemporary political structures. They have described how different modalities of veneration have been conscripted for this task. Yet I want to offer a few conceptual clarifications and highlight some possible alternative social contexts that may — I hope — strengthen the central points that they make. These concern a tendency to reify 'religion' (specifically in this case specifically Greek Orthodoxy 139 as a unitary phenomenon) and to privilege nationalism as the only socio-political behaviour that actively utilises the cultural capital of archaeology. The two points are closely related. For while the nationalistic use of archaeology may mimic the external forms and even literary topoi of religious veneration, State and Church are potentially competing power structures within a particular society. In many places, the cultural tensions between State and Church (or between rival States and Churches) are becoming increasingly intense. The recognition of those tensions may help us more effectively to problematise—to use Hamilakis and Yalouri's phrase—the socio-politics of archaeology. Hamilakis and Yalouri have made a powerful case for their main thesis of the deep inter- twining of nationalism and religion in the project of modern Greek state-building through archaeology. Indeed, their basic presumptions seem to me to be inarguable—that the involvement of archaeology in the national and religious ideology of a modern state like Greece is a vital expression of a complex public discourse, and is not merely a readily diagnosable (and treatable) scholarly pathology. Indeed, as a number of observers have noted over the years, nationalistically-inspired retellings of a particular state's archaeological history create a fund of images, symbols, and landscape elements that can be deployed for a wide variety of purposes in a wide variety of contemporary international, domestic, economic, and personal conflicts. No reader is likely to forget the authors' vivid vignettes of modern Greek archaeological history: the posed photographs of naked dancers on the acropolis (and the outrage they evoked); the righteous act of pulling down the Nazi occupiers' flag from the same site (and the worldwide acclaim it earned); or the modern battlefield pleading of modern Greek soldiers to ancient Greek ghosts. However, I would argue that even these examples are part of a wider spectrum of alternative ideological uses of archaeology than merely 'nationalist','religious', or 'religio-nationalist'. There is no question that Hamilakis and Yalouri are correct in their observations on the specific ways that the past has been 'sacralised' in modern Greece. Many of them are familiar to observers of the ideological use of the past in other regions of the world:

1. Expressions of the 'sanctity' of archaeological remains borrowed from religious language. 2. Reluctance to sell or commercialise antiquities, or consider them private property. 3. Demand for the repatriation of artefacts in the possession of others. 4. Belief that artefacts are the embodiment of the spirit of the people. 5. Linkage of archaeological imagination to popular metaphysical beliefs. 6. Demand of submissive decorum of visitors to museums and antiquities sites.

I agree completely with the authors' observation that these ritualised reifications of national patrimony may be used both by groups in positions of dominance over others (i.e. states) or by minority groups struggling against a dominant power for autonomy. Further, I found quite enlightening their observation that, whether used by those in dominant or subordinate positions, the icons of a sacralised past tend to perpetuate conceptions of identities 'as primordial, static attributes, rather than performative, lived, experiential constructs'. 140 What is particularly striking in Hamilakis andYalouri's presentation is the remarkable case of the thorough syncretisation of imagery by institutionalised religion and secular state institutions in Greece. I say 'remarkable' because my own observation of the process of state- building (and archaeology's role in it) in the Middle East and among native peoples in North America suggests that such far-reaching syncretisation between Church and State is rare. While in most cases local religious authorities and aspiring nationalist leaders may form coalitions in the immediate pre-state period, their inherent conflict as competing power- blocs within the nation-state eventually destroys their detente. And archaeology can often become the cultural battlefield on which their subsequent conflicts are fought. Unlike the case in Greece, where Orthodoxy and State have become closely and consensually inter- twined in the public consciousness, one cannot say the same of Islam and the Arab Republic of Egypt or certain Jewish sects and the State of Israel, for example. This is due to the fact that powerful religious factions within those states have sought to reinforce their political position against the rival forces of nationalist secularism. In addition, there are cases where religious or ethnic minorities within a state actively contest dominant sacralisation without substituting a sacralisation of their own. Three specific examples of alternative scenarios come to mind: Disputes over jurisdiction—In Israel, in particular, established religious bodies have contest- ed the authority of the national Antiquities Authority to study or even deal with human remains (Shanks 1998).This conflict between traditional religion and archaeology is similar to that between indigenous North American peoples and archaeological institutions. The primary difference is that in Israel, even small religious factions can carry inordinate political weight in a tortuously fragmented parliamentary party system. As a result, the issue of bones—and the larger issue of the right to jurisdiction over traditional holy places—furthers parochial political aims. It does so by undermining the authority of archaeologists and brand- ing them as agents of the 'de-sacralisation' of the past. Reinforcement of religio-chronological boundaries—The willingness of Greek Orthodoxy to accept openly its connections to the pre-Christian past is by no means a common phenomenon. The Islamic concept of the Jahiliya—the era of darkness before the advent of Islam— still negatively affects the easy acceptance of a purely archaeological history in many states in the Islamic world. The case of Egypt is a classical example of the difficulty of this attempted secular sacralisation of the past (Hassan 1998). The particular choice of the Cairo Museum and the Temple of Deir el-Bahri as scenes for violent fundamentalist attacks on visiting tourists underlines the ideological distancing that is going on. Demonisation of material heritage—The response of 'alternative, anti-hegemonic' factions within a state is not always the construction of alternative sacralisations. In some cases—those of Northern Cyprus (Knapp and Antoniadou 1998: 24-29) and the states of the former Yugoslavia (Chapman 1994) are two recent examples—the response of ethnic states or ethnic states-in-the-making to the archaeological celebrations of their perceived rivals is to demean or destroy the icons of sacralisation. In a pointed counter-ritualisation, the typical 'sacralising' behaviours described by Hamilakis and Yalouri—and listed above—are precisely reversed. It should be noted that demonisation of the archaeological remains of the despised Other also plays an important role in official sacralisation in the attempts of state authorities to 'purify' the nation's material heritage, as noted by the authors. 141 Of course none of these alternative scenarios in any way contradict the important points that Hamilakis and Yalouri have made. I mention them here—alongside the enlightening Greek example—to underline the wide spectrum of possibilities that may be relevant to the ongoing study of the complex interplay of religion, nationalism, and archaeology. CONTINUITIES: ESSENTIALIST OR SENSORY?

David Sutton Hamilakis andYalouri make an important contribution to the recent growth in studies of Greek nationalism, which is part of a more general trend in history, anthropology and related disciplines to analyse nationalism as a cultural phenomenon, and the politics of 'invented traditions'. By focusing on the sacralisation of archaeological remains, they add an important piece to the general picture of the uses of the past in modern Greece. While doing this they make their argument relevant to those authors looking at the power of objects and material remains to serve as sites for memory and historical consciousness, objects and/or rituals whose function is to 'recall the past without enumerating it' (Rappaport 1994: 76). In particular, archaeological remains resemble those 'inalienable possessions' which because of their power to symbolise continuity with ancestors, are withdrawn from the circuits of gift and commodity exchange (Weiner 1992). Objects from the past, much as we may attempt to preserve them behind glass cases in museums, have a 'social life' and are deployed in struggles for power and ideological legitimacy in the present. Given the sacred or 'religious' character that archaeological remains play in the Greek national narrative, Hamilakis and Yalouri sensibly argue that archaeologists, like historians and other scholars, must see their work as necessarily political. We cannot escape into objectivity; studies of the past are always in some way also reflections of the values of the present and the future. The authors rightly point to the hegemonic status of the ancient past in contemporary Greece. As I discovered during my research into historical consciousness on the island of Kalymnos, Kalymnians of radically different religious and political persuasions were united in the view that History should be read for what it revealed about the continuity in character of peoples and nations. Like archaeology, the narrative of Greek nationalism dominated written history on Kalymnos. Popular memories which conflicted with this narrative — for example, of women-led collective action — could still be found, but had none of the social capital to compete with 'official history', as written by an educated elite (see Doumanis 1997; Sutton 1998; 1999). While in broad agreement with the thesis of this paper, I would like to engage the authors on one of their particular claims which I find interesting but in need of further elucidation and discussion. Given that they adopt a political stance in their argument that I would characterise as 'debunking' modern Greek continuities with the ancient past as recent inventions, what does this mean for the ontological and epistemological status of'continuity' per se? Is the positing of continuity in itself, as the authors seem to suggest, a necessary contribution 142 to the more retrograde policies of the nation-state, and in particular 'dynastic violence'? Are all claims to continuity also claims to essentialism that must be rejected on both political and intellectual grounds? Can we characterise continuity as a resource, or 'cultural capital' to be mobilised by different actors, without first interrogating the different forms and meanings of continuity for a given people? And on a more practical level, who does own the past, and what does the stance of debunking continuity imply for struggles over the material remains of history? This last issue recently came to light in the case of skeletal remains found in Kennewick, Washington State, which were dated at nearly 10,000 years old. That dating has subsequently been called into dispute, along with many other aspects of the Kennewick Man case, including the 'racial classification' of the bones. These bones were claimed by Native American rights groups as ancestral bones for burial as part of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a claim for continuity which outdistances in sheer number of years even the most elevated claims for Hellenic culture. Land rights claims throughout the world, which offer some protection for subordinated groups, involve the demonstration of continuity with the ancient past that by necessity essentialises history, as a refuge from the claims of more powerful,'modernising' states. Indeed, the decimation of the Native American population over the past five centuries points to the fact that dynastic violence can be carried out in the name of the 'future'just as easily as it can in the name of the 'past'. At the same time that this struggle over 10,000 year-old bones was playing out, the Labour Party in Britain came to power, and quickly reneged on its longstanding promise to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece. To paraphrase the words of a British Museum official interviewed at the time: We've had them for over one hundred and fifty years, they're our heritage now. This view takes on a particular hue when placed in the context of the ongoing attempt by Northern Europeans to claim that they were the true descendants of the ancient Greeks, while modern Greeks were unworthy descendants of their classical ancestors, if truly descendants at all (see e.g. Herzfeld 1987). I raise these issues to suggest some of the unintended political ironies that can arise from a position that focuses on debunking continuity, but also to further dialogue between archaeologists and anthropologists as to the ontological and epistemological status of the concept of continuity. Hamilakis andYalouri are uncomfortable with claims to continuity, even when used by popular actors in opposition to state power, because they leave 'the ontological foundations of the nationalist discourse unchallenged' (p. 134). Does this apply only to claims of long-term continuity? Or only to claims about the Hellenic (as opposed to Ottoman, Byzantine or Frankish) past? I would argue that even claims to the Hellenic past can hide multiple, non-nationalistic understandings. While few in Greece would question that Alexander the Great was 'Greek', I was surprised to find that in high school classrooms on Kalymnos at the height of the Macedonian Controversy students and teachers were discussing and debating whether Alexander the Great's mission was civilising or expansionist, and whether he 'brought the light of Greek culture to the East' or mixed with and adopted cultures of the East. In each case, it was the latter, non-nationalist position that was adopted by the teacher and the majority of the students in the class. That this might come out in a high school classroom but not in the statements of Greek politicians and ministers or in written texts reflects the fact that attitudes toward the past are context-dependent, as Hamilakis 143 and Yalouri recognise. Nationalist simplifications may predominate in the context of Greek self-presentations to non-Greek outsiders, but not necessarily in the context of in-group discussion (see Herzfeld 1987). It also seems relevant to clarify that ideas about continuity are not always the creations of nationalist elites that are subsequently appropriated by local actors, but may in fact arise from popular sources. The authors raise the issue of the change in baptismal naming practices among elites in 19th century Greece from Christian Saints' names to ancient Greek ones as part of the 'resurrection' of the glories of Classical Greece. The giving of baptismal names, whether Christian or ancient, is in fact referred to in common parlance as 'resurrection' (anastisi), because it involves a claim to continuity with ancestors both living and dead. In many parts of Greece children are typically named after grandparents, though in some cases they may be named after other relatives who have recently died. While most immediately this naming is a claim to short-term continuity, the psychic bond felt to exist between a child and its eponymous grandparent, there is simultaneously a claim to longer-term continuity, since that grandparent was in turn named after his or her grandparent, and this process is imagined to extend into the distant past. This is not a claim to static identity, since both similarities and differences are recognised. In some cases names that may have been lost in previous generations because of lack of offspring or other factors may be reclaimed by later generations, thus suggesting that continuity does not need to be 'unbroken'. In many parts of Greece naming is also tied to material continuities with the past, since ideally property is supposed to pass along with names so that land, houses, olive trees and family heirlooms form a link to the distant ancestors who cultivated them. In this manner genealogy becomes a metaphor for the embodied imagining of historical continuity for Kalymnian islanders. Thus a young Kalymnian who told me that when he goes to museums -with archaeological remains his 'hair stands on end' (perhaps suggesting the religious awe that Hamilakis andYalouri discuss) did not explain this to me in the nationalist rhetoric of the superiority of Hellenic culture, but rather by saying 'imagine if you knew that your grandfather had made these things'. I bring up this example to argue that there is nothing necessarily ontologically or structurally different in claims to continuity with the recent past and with the far distant past. They both involve invention, imagined continuity and fiction to some degree. Indeed, even the claim to continuity with earlier versions of ourselves is sustained by narrative fictions and inventions. Given this, I believe it is difficult to dismiss arguments over continuities a priori, simply because it is long-term continuity that is claimed. Anthropologists working in modern Greece have displayed changing attitudes toward the issue of continuities based on changing theoretical paradigms within the human sciences. From an initial unreflexive folkloric concern with survivals, the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of functionalist and structuralist approaches which were explicitly synchromc and bracketed any explicit consideration of the past, short- or long-term except in terms of'modernisation' theory and the perceived loss of tradition. The influence of post-modernism has brought an interest in flux, indeterminacy and constant motion. It is suspicious of any claims to continuity,'even when the actors themselves proclaim continuity' (Harris 1996). For Greece this has produced a spate of studies that have analysed the ideological uses of the past both from 144 the top-down and from the bottom-up. There has also been a growing interest among anthropologists, while still incorporating the post-modern critique, to re-examine issues of continuity, not as static essence or exact repetition, but as a more dynamic concept that incorporates change and struggle, history and event, or what used to be called 'living tradition'. I use the work of Seremetakis to illustrate this trend because of its focus on material culture. In her work, based in the Peloponnese, Seremetakis has examined burial and exhumation rituals as well as 'what she calls the relationship between memory, material culture and the senses (Seremetakis 1991; 1994). Seremetakis sees death rituals, often controlled by women, as a place for the 'communication between the symbolic categories of several historical periods', because they bring forward into the present, through gesture and structure, previous temporalities which she traces as far back as Classical Greece. She suggests a long-term genealogy of struggles between local actors (women) and institutions (church and state) over the fate of the dead. Different outcomes of this struggle are grouped into long-term categories of attempts to personalise the dead on the part of mourners and attempts to depersonalise the dead on the part of institutions. She also asserts continuity in the structure of mourning song in terms of the use of poetic devices such as antiphony, and ritual structures of movement. Hamilakis andYalouri, citing Connerton, rightly note that ritual is a primary locus for the nation-state to invent national narrative; to demand loyalty from the populace by making references to prototypical events. This is in line with recent perspectives that see ritual as performance and improvisation. But Connerton also sees the formal character of ritual as the property which in many cases makes it resistant to change, the limited repertoire of ritual gestures that become 'embodied' or second nature, and thus act as particularly effective mnemonic systems (Connerton 1989: 59). In this view death practice in Greece is neither synchrony nor diachrony, survival or rup- ture, but rather changing continuities. In Seremetakis' study of material culture and the senses she employs archaeological metaphors of 'depth' and 'sedimentation' in showing how everyday objects: food, embroidery, olive trees, can be used to communicate across temporalities. She sets this in opposition to the role of objects in capitalist modernity, drawing on Walter Benjamin and implicitly on Marx's concept of commodity fetishism. In this view, the object gams its mysterious 'aura' as commodity precisely because its history (of human labour employed in its creation) has been forgotten. This alienation occurs at the point of con- sumption as well, since the high turnover or planned obsolescence of goods necessary for the functioning of the capitalist economy means that the use of objects 'never lingers long enough in the senses as social memory to be stitched into a historical fabric with the others it has displaced' (1994, 10).The post-modern insistence on discontinuity becomes here not an analytic tool, but a product of our current 'modern' predicament. Like Hamilakis andYalouri, Seremetakis uses Greek archaeologist Manolis Andronikos as a touchstone for her argument. But for her, Andronikos is portrayed positively, and represents the anti-modern attitude toward material culture, of deep perception and memory, which she wishes to validate. She cites Andronikos' diaries at length, and sums up with a discussion that calls to my mind the fact that one can find in many homes on seafaring islands ancient clay pots (layines) found on the sea floor. They are not preserved under glass, described in writing, in a sacred spot, but mingle with the other household objects, or are decoratively surrounded by sponges, that other 'product' of the seabed. Here is Seremetakis: 145

[Andronikos] turns to tactile dialogue. Classificatory frameworks objectify a rinding as 'the king of Asinis'but the perceptual dynamics of excavation involve 'a touch...with our fingers' of'the touch of the existential person with his joys and sorrows, hopes and pains'. The two existential tactilities, the senses, meet and exchange through the centuries via the object. Andronikos explicitly challenges the fixity of the authenti- cating artefact as an arbitrary inheritance, and as imposed code from the past. The past is as unavoidable as the sea. He looks at the existential structure of the present, its shift- ing positions, as mediating and animating the perception of history to the extent that the past is 'endlessly pumping out' meanings and consequences for the present. (Seremetakis 1994, 140)

No doubt there is more than one Andronikos: both high priest of the national religion and 'sensory witness' to the power of objects in forming a dialogue through time. These two impulses call for a scholarly practice sensitive to both: to the pretensions of nationalist sta- tism, and to the ongoing chorus of influences, none fully determinate, between past and present

OF ACTS AND WORDS

Alexandra Alexandri 'Sacralising the past: cults of archaeology in modern Greece' appears within the framework of recent discussions on archaeology and nationalism and attempts to produce a reflexive and sophisticated analysis of the construction of nationalist discourses, both at the level of state and on an individual basis. Along these lines, Hamilakis and Yalouri argue that attitudes toward classical antiquity in modern Greece constitute what they term a form of 'secular religion' which presents distinct affinities with Orthodoxy. In constructing their argument the authors combine a number of analytical domains and touch upon a multitude of issues, all of which merit extensive discussion. However, the main point of their thesis concerns the relationship between the classical past and Greek Orthodox religion, a link forged during the creation of the modern Greek state. According to the authors, apart from being at the roots of nationalist state discourse, this link has also been a persistent, even dominant, feature in the popular perception of classical heritage. The role of classical heritage during the formation of the modern Greek state has always been a focus of extensive research by historians, particularly recently. Classical antiquity provided an intellectual link with the European states that were to play a fundamental role in ensuring the survival of the newly founded state, while also becoming, alongside Orthodox Christian religion, the cornerstone of Greek national identity. Official attempts to interweave antiquity with Christianity can be detected during this period. However, the extent to which this link was popularly embraced is still a matter of debate. Furthermore, research has focused primarily on the earlier periods, leaving considerable gaps in an already patchy narrative.This 146 unevenness in our background knowledge is reflected in the present paper where the argument is more cogent in reference to the formative years of the modern Greek state and less convincing for later periods. In fact, Hamilakis andYalouri essentially consider that once the official machinery is placed in motion, the link between antiquity and Orthodoxy becomes a more or less established feature of the Greek perception of the past. In the authors' view, religious connotations in reference to the past can be discerned in the official rhetoric, as well as in the writings of archaeologists, intellectuals and the press. It can also be inferred through certain acts of ritualised character which are 'performed' in relation to antiquities. The use of some form of broad religious metaphor in the representation of the past, or indeed in reference to any emotionally charged issue, is a widespread, if poorly understood, phenomenon and few would be surprised that this should also be the case in Greece. Indeed, the authors mention, albeit rather cursorily in the footnotes, that the past is often imbued with religious imagery in other countries as well. The argument here is that in the Greek case this imagery is specifically Orthodox. On the face of it, such an assertion may not be surprising given that the dominant religious paradigm is Greece is Orthodoxy. However, this observation is important only to the extent that it can throw new light on our understanding of the processes through which the past becomes embedded in social life in the particular case of Greece and by extension in other countries. Nevertheless, the specific relationship between antiquity and Orthodoxy, as articulated by the authors, is not particularly convincing. To begin with, the authors' argument rests primarily on the use of certain stock phrases employing religious imagery in reference to ancient monuments. However, they present a homogenising, 'ahistorical' account of the use of particular terms, suggesting that words like 'sacred' carry the same connotations now as they did 50 or 100 years ago. Part of the problem lies in ascribing the definition of certain concepts (like 'purity' and 'pollution') as the sole domain of religious systems and in considering that certain terms (like 'sacred' or 'pilgrimage') have unique referents.Yet, the same concepts and words are used in reference to a wide spectrum of issues, ranging from the fundamental importance of the family to speeches by trade unions concerning the right to strike. The notion that words acquire meaning(s) through the context in which they are used is certainly not new and in order to understand the full impact of these 'terms' one has to analyse their use within various contexts. Although the examples provided by the authors come from a wide range of sources, there is no attempt to differentiate between them. As a result, the disparate examples tend to dif- fuse the argument. The elaborate, if formalised, rhetoric of official speeches is not comparable to a series of popularised archaeological accounts or newspaper articles. If anything, the common feature among them is that any religious connotations remain general. To take two of the examples, Nelly's naked photographs of Mona Paiva in 1925 and the removal of the flag with the 'swastika' in 1941 may have a common setting, but one could argue that the reactions they elicited in Greece were less concerned with a presumed 'sanctity' of the place, than they were with the acts themselves. Pictures of a naked woman in 1925 would have evoked the same response in most settings, the offence being primarily against societal norms and not in relation to a specific place. Couched in semi-religious terms, the 'veiled' discourse that ensued served to remove the focus from the circumscription of the female body. To suggest, however, that this resulted from the imposition of religious restrictions on antiquities is 147 rather superficial. On the other hand, the Acropolis, apart from being a symbolically charged monument, is one of the most visible features in Athens and the removal of the 'swastika' is not so much an act of'purification', as it is one of political resistance with a highly visible result. Indeed, the international impact of this act is, perhaps, more indicative of how a particular discourse about the past has developed in Greece. It is by virtue of the dual role of classical antiquity as a fundamental element in the construction of a specifically Greek and at the same time common European, and by extension western, identity that both the state and smaller groups use a specific imagery at times of perceived national crises. This imagery is considered more or less as international currency, a set of irrefutable arguments that make sense not so much within internal discourse, but as an externally validated belief system. In discussions of nationalism, particularly in relation to the role of antiquity in the construction of collective identities, it is important to draw a distinction between the self-definition of a group (an agreed set of common characteristics) and the representation of the self to others (the particular features that the group chooses to promote to others).This duality is not particularly explored in this paper. The second religious feature, expressed through the notion of'cult', although featured prominently in the title, is not fully developed within the body of the text. The existence of a cult implies a series of rituals or ceremonies, a set of actions performed more or less regu- larly in relation to a specific object of worship, whether concrete or notional. Such practices cannot be readily identified as a salient feature of the treatment of antiquities in Greece. The examples provided of 'rituals' enacted in relation to antiquities are the exceptions rather than the norm. More to the point, religious undertones are not particularly evident and one could argue that these 'acts' are performed as a form of political resistance to a 'perceived' oppres- sor or opponent. In the case of the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum, rather than a memorial service for Melina Merkouri, the students' gathering becomes an act of protest focused on the long history of British intervention in modern Greek politics. Indeed, although parts of the Parthenon are housed in Paris and in Basil, these have not been the focus of action either by the Greek state or by Greek nationals. Apart from their different 'acquisition' histories, here we are also dealing -with different historical interpretations of political involvement. Finally, it is not clear how this presumed relationship between antiquity and Orthodoxy affects archaeological practice both in a narrow and a broader sense. Any religious references in archaeological interpretation are actually sporadic and idiosyncratic occurrences rather than a shared idiom. Similarly, the 'christianisation' of ancient Greeks is neither a modern nor a Greek prerogative since attempts to incorporate ancient Greek philosophy into Christian theology long antedate the formation of modern Greece. On the other hand, the picture of museums and archaeological sites presented by the authors is unrealistic. Obviously, the formalised behaviour demanded of visitors is no different from that expected in museums all over the world. The authors' example, of a museum guard asking a loud group of visitors to keep quiet, is not particularly telling: one would expect this to be the norm in such locations, along with admonitions not to touch the exhibits or to refrain from consuming food 148 or drink within the premises. One could equally argue that the exhortation is for respect and not for religious reverence. Yet, beyond these internationally encountered standards, neither the Greek state nor the population at large shows a heightened concern for museums and archaeological sites. This is not the venue to elaborate on the state of abandon of numerous archaeological sites, especially the ones located off the well travelled tourist routes, nor to enumerate the long list of unmet operational needs of most of the smaller museums. However, it is important to note that the 'preservation' of antiquities by the state has often been a matter of verbal 'performance', rather than concrete measures. Similarly, the local population does not always prioritise the need to preserve and care for these 'repositories' of antiquity, in stark contrast to the way they might care for religious relics. In this light, the authors' claim that ritual imagination is less restricted in nationalist discourses than it is in religious practice would be refuted by the case of Orthodoxy and classical antiquities in Greece. In fact, their view of religious systems seems to be surprisingly firmly embedded in a processualist paradigm. Yet ritual imagination in Orthodoxy is given ample opportunity for expression and certainly does not require a priestly source of authority, ritual being firmly embedded in everyday life. By contrast, antiquities are sectioned off in museums and archaeological sites and access to them is restricted, and therefore no real opportunities for 'ritual' action are provided. Despite the initial criticisms of the authors that the recent studies of the role of archaeology in the formulation and consolidation of nationalist identity have concentrated on the 'abuse' of the past by the state, they do not, in fact, offer a viable alternative approach. The discourse herein recreated is that of a centralised and controlling authority, while the appropriation of this discourse by smaller groups or individuals is seen as negative, merely repro- ducing the hegemonic narrative rather than subverting or modifying it. The authors are careful to suggest that they do not wish to reproduce a 'notion of timelessness'. Nevertheless, by insisting on the existence of a fundamental phenomenon, based on an arbitrary selection of disparate occurrences or anecdotal evidence, they do not manage to escape the very pitfalls they criticise. After all, the extrapolation of general features from specific instances is not a straightforward exercise. Nor is it enough to merely pre-empt criticism; it is also necessary to develop a different narrative by situating arguments within space and time. In this light, instances like the incident with the soldier in Asia Minor, where there is a clear link between antiquity and Orthodoxy, rather than being one example among many, provide an excellent opportunity for microhistory. This incident, as related by the com- manding officer, captured the nation's imagination and was extensively discussed precisely because it was out of the ordinary. It is relatively easy to construct a picture of nationalist use of antiquity during times of political crises. Insecurity, whether in periods of civic unrest or by virtue of belonging to a diaspora, will produce a heightened need for the re-assertion of identity and will paint a homogeneous, at times extreme, picture. The case of Greek nationalism, in particular, can lend itself to facile interpretations due to the specific historical, political and economic tra- jectory of the country and the international repercussions of the re-evaluation and re-appro- pnation of classical heritage. However, the incorporation of the past in social life is nebulous, inferred rather than examined, let alone understood. The question still remains how this past 149 is perceived, embraced and absorbed in everyday life.

SACRED PASTS, PROFANE PERFORMANCES: A REPLY

Yannis Hamilakis and Eleana Yalouri We would like to thank all commentators for their engaging responses and their useful and constructive remarks. Their commentaries offer us a second chance to clarify some of the issues which, in the interest of brevity and due to the broad nature of our analysis, we were not able to develop in the paper. At the same time they point to some of the methodological, ethical, and political problems that this kind of analysis faces. Our article was deliberate- ly broad ranging, both in terms of time-scale and categories of evidence. This breadth has allowed us to trace a phenomenon from its genesis to its subsequent development and per- sistence, despite variations, up to the present-day. It also allowed us to demonstrate that the phenomenon is encountered in both official and unofficial discourses. It is expressed in a number of media, from public rhetoric to archaeological discourse, the mass media, social practices, and political rituals involving antiquities. Furthermore, in our attempt to demonstrate the interrelationships of the phenomenon with a whole range of other parameters, we have touched upon a number of issues without further exploration. Some of these issues, which have been explored by others in length, were omitted from our analysis. This is the case for example with 'disemia' (Herzfeld 1987, 95-122); the differentiation between the Greek self-presentation and the representation of Greek identity to (non-Greek) outsiders. This issue has been commented upon by some (Sutton, Alexandri) and, given its complexi- ty, we would prefer not to discuss it within the limits of this commentary. We should note, however, that the phenomenon of the sacralisation of the past seems to be associated with both strategies. Given that the commentaries have largely focused on different issues, we have decided to treat them separately, making the links where appropriate. Diaz-Andreu raises a number of methodological issues in the study of nationalism and archaeology that are worthy of consideration. In our paper we tried to theorise the phenomenon of the sacralisation of the past in Greece. In doing so, we could not avoid certain generalisations that we believe were far from representing a 'monolithic and unproblematic' approach to the whole issue, as Diaz-Andreu argues. Our historical outline provided the background for our discussion. We believe that we overcame this historiographic level by demonstrating how this phenomenon is produced, experienced and interpreted by various people in Greece, in different spatial and temporal contexts. We do not claim that every single Greek sees antiquities as sacred objects, nor do we suggest that such a view is uniform. However, the phenomenon of 'sacralising the past', is so 'widespread in Greece that it certainly merits attention. As for the claim that we ignored the issues of class identity, in our paper we emphasised that the Greek national project was largely to do with the emergence of the middle classes. National ideas based on antiquity were clearly serving the interests and the political programme of those classes. In some of the examples we also pointed to the complexities and 150 ironies in the deployment of the sacralised past: how the hegemonic power of the nation- alised past can, for example, be harnessed by subordinate groups and individuals and become both suppressive and empowering. Diaz-Andreu is right in saying that the lesser importance conferred to the medieval past was not exclusive to Greece but common to many European nationalisms. Greece was not immune to political and cultural trends of the time. We would add that even the eventual interest in Byzantium was not independent from what was going on in the West around that time. Within the frame-work of'Romantic Historiography' there appeared an interest in history as a continuous process that connected the past to the present and future (Dimaras 1989, 403 ). Moreover, the study of history in Europe began to favour the Greek medieval period, a fact of which Paparrigopoulos, the historian who was instrumental in bridging the gap, was very much aware (Dimaras 1989). We would like to take issue with two other comments made by Diaz-Andreu. The first has to do with a misunderstanding on her part: we did not 'argue that the later acceptance of the Byzantine past is related to the messianic and teleological nature of both Greek nationalism and Orthodoxy' (p. 138). Drawing on several other scholars we attributed the acceptance of the Byzantine past as part of national history to the necessity of bridging the gap between the Classical past and the present, and to prove the perceived continuity of the Greek nation from ancient to modern times . The second has to do with the claim that the sacralisation of antiquities is a phenomenon unique to Greece. As Silberman reminds us in his commentary, such a phenomenon is known, in various shapes and forms, from many different contexts. Silberman's enlightening commentary was invaluable in putting the Greek case into a comparative perspective. He is right in pointing out the peculiarity of the Greek case as far as the links between Church and State are concerned. As we tried to show, syncretism may today be the dominant aspect of their relationship, but we should not forget the tensions and contradictions engendered by this relationship that have never been entirely reconciled. The on-going battle involving the Greek Archaeological Service (its Department of Byzantine Antiquities) and the Church over the monument of Rotonda in Thessaloniki (Lavvas et al. 1997; Stewart 1998) is an apt reminder of this. A monument built by the Romans in the 4th century A.D., it has been used in its long and multicultural history as a Christian church, Islamic mosque, museum, heritage monument and venue for cultural activities. For the last six years or so the site has been the locus of a fierce and at times violent conflict between the Church (including a number of devoted Christians) demanding the exclusive use of the site as a Christian church, and the Archaeological Service and a citizens' movement, supporting its designation as a primarily secular archaeological monument. Sutton raises two very important issues; the first has to do with the ethical and political consequences and dilemmas encountered by researchers of nationalism, as well as by scholars and intellectuals, anthropologists and archaeologists, when dealing with communities who make claims and form positions on the basis of the past,'tradition', ancestry, and continuity. The second concerns the ontological and epistemological status of continuity itself, both in the Greek context and more broadly. Neither of the two issues raised by Sutton were central to our argument and they will both need serious consideration beyond the confines of this reply. The first concerns a well- known dilemma, which has recently been addressed by a number of researchers. Sutton is 151 correct in pointing out that essentialisms which sacralise the past and claim unbroken continuities of ancestry, are often deployed by marginalised groups against the hegemony of powerful nation-states. The case of Native Americans, and the associated issues of 'repatriation'and the acknowledgement and recognition of tribes, is one of the most prominent cases. There is no easy answer to this dilemma (cf. Field 1999; Haley and Wilcoxon 1997 for recent discussions), and a politically committed intellectual will often have to take tactical decisions depending on the specific context and the issues at stake. However, as has been pointed out (e.g. Field 1999), the processes of authentication that groups such as the Native Americans have to go through rely on essentialist and therefore inherently conservative claims, constructed by the dominant western intellectual discourse. Notions of tradition, tribal identity, and ancestry which present-day Native American groups use, were constructed by early anthropologists who, often in association with State bureaucrats, treated cultural identity as primordialist, ancient, and persistent over time (Haley and Wilcoxon 1997, 766; Field 1999). Despite their short-term empowering force, these essentialisms constitute very shaky foundations upon 'which to base alternative anti-hegemonic agendas. As for the notion of continuity and its thorny problems, we will confine ourselves to one or two passing comments. We would agree with Sutton that 'ideas about continuity are not always the creations of nationalist elites, 'which are subsequently appropriated by local actors, but may in fact arise from popular sources' (p. 143), as his important work in Kalymnos has shown (Sutton 1998). We are not suggesting that the past is constructed only from above, and one should be very careful not to underestimate ideas about continuity which 'arise from popular sources'. We •would also add that we cannot prioritise either of the two; the top-down or the bottom-up are variations of each other. It is important, however, not to forget the regimes of truth and power within which specific notions of continuity are constructed (Foucault 1980, 31-32; cf. Hamilakis 1999). In other words, we should be careful not to underestimate the hegemonic role of the nation-state as an institution in which both elites and non-elites operate. It is the same setting within which they both produce or reproduce attitudes and ideas. The Kalymnian whose 'hair stands on end' upon visiting an archaeological museum may appropriate the distant past, invest it with emotional weight, and comprehend it in his own terms (by calling the ancient inhabitants of Greece his 'grandfathers', for example) but he operates within a social reality influenced by the nationalist ontology and has been through such powerful institutions such as the extremely centralised educational system, amongst others. Alexandras commentary is based on a serious misunderstanding of our topic, which is not 'the relationship between the classical past and Greek Orthodox religion' (p. 146). As all other commentators have noted, our main thesis has to do with the sacralisation of antiquity, mostly due to its links with nationalism. As a result of this mis-understanding, the author criticises viewpoints that are not expressed in our paper. Moreover, she takes a very narrow view of the concept of ritual, equating it more with traditional religion, whereas it is clear from our paper that we employ a much broader definition of ritual as 'symbolic behaviour that is socially stan- dardised and repetitive' (Kertzer 1988, 9). Furthermore, Alexandria commentary is contradictory. She accuses our article of paying little respect to the context, and then goes on to de- contextualise the meaning of the social practices discussed. For example, according to her, 152 Nellys photographs would have caused a row whether they were taken on the Acropolis or not; likewise the removal of the swastika from the Acropolis had to do with the visibility of the monument, and not so much with the specific location! Alexandn claims that our 'argument rests primarily on the use of certain stock phrases employing religious imagery in reference to ancient monuments' (p. 147). In fact, the analysis of official and unofficial discourses forms only part of our argument, which also includes specific episodes from the social history of Greek archaeology (such as the demolition of post-classical monuments from the Athenian Acropolis), and many episodes involving monuments and diverse social actors. Let us take only a couple of examples and show, using more empirical data and information, how her remarks are misplaced. Alexandri argues without substantiation that 'pictures of a naked woman in 1925 would have evoked the same response in most settings, the offence being primarily against societal norms and not in relation to a specific place' (p. 147). Let one of the main protagonists of the episode, the photographer Nelly, reply to her: 'Various archaeologists, some journalists and intellectuals started attacking me for this [the photographs of the naked dancer] and commenting upon it disapprovingly, calling it a "sacrilege of the sacred places'" (Nelly's 1989, 103; our translation). Even if the intentions of some of the critics were to support specific social norms, the fact that the androcentric moralising discourse had chosen the idiom of the sacralisation of antiquity to express itself, indicates the power and authority of this idiom in modern Greek society. It is also worth noting that during fieldwork one of us (EY) was surprised to find out that these photos can still be considered provocative, and even shocking, despite the substan- tial change in the moral evaluation of nudity in the public realm today. The reactions were manifold. A 17 year-old student presented with these images expressed his astonishment that nude photos were taken on the Acropolis. Mentioning Nelly's narrative on how, when she saw Paiva changing on the Acropolis, she decided that she would have liked to take some nude photos of her, the student interrupted: 'She was changing on the Acropolis? So what is the Parthenon then, a changing room?' Asked whether he thought that an artistic nude photo should not be taken on the Acropolis, he answered: 'Of course not! The Acropolis is a monument, not a strip-tease club!'. To take another example, Alexandri believes (again without any supporting evidence) that the removal of the swastika from the Acropolis had to do with the visibility of the monument, rather than its meaningful associations and symbolic position. There were many other locations with the swastika, some more visible than the Acropolis. However, it was the flag at that particular site that disturbed Glezos and Santas, the two young men who removed it. That was the one that they considered intrusive and incompatible with the location. In an interview with the newspaper Ethnos (24 March 97), they stated: 'We wanted to throw it down, to tear it apart and thus, to wash out the dirt from the Sacred Rock'.This symbolic event is still alive in the popular imagination and memory and still evokes similar feelings. An Athenian said to one of us (EY) that his father used to refer to the swastika on the Acropolis as 'the stain'. It was that 'stain' that had to be removed for the monument to be cleansed. He added that there was another swastika opposite to where his father lived, on the top of the National Archaeological Museum. It was the one on the Acropolis, however, that was 'a stain' for him. Glezos and Santas' act was indeed 'political resistance with a highly visible result'. A political 153 act, however, is context specific and it is conceived in cultural terms, purification being one of them. As a matter of fact, the visibility of the Acropolis is one of the several elements contributing to the 'sacredness' of the Acropolis. Also known in the early years of the foundation of the Greek state as the Fortress of Athens ('to Kastro tis Athinas') and intimately associated with the history of the Greek nation, it is the principal site that in people's minds has to remain 'clean' from any element 'staining' the nation that it represents (Yalouri in prep.). Alexandri argues that the abandonment of some archaeological monuments and sites in Greece indicates that they do not enjoy the veneration that religious relics do. As she herself says, however, a verbal performance does not always translate into practical measures. This is as true for archaeological monuments as it is for religious monuments, as the plentiful remnants of ruined churches in the Greek countryside indicate. But cross-cultural comparative analysis will reveal that Greece has one of the strictest protection regimes of archaeological monuments anywhere in the world, and that debates over the 'proper' and 'improper' ('dis- respectful') presentation of monuments, the commercialisation of the past, the politics of private collecting, and travelling exhibitions, occupy a significant part of the public debate, much more than in many other countries. The discourse over these issues is often expressed in terms of purity/pollution, sacrilege, and respectability. Finally, Alexandri seems to believe that the phenomena analysed in our paper are exceptional and have to do with nationalist reactions common mostly at times of crisis. This is a simplistic understanding of nationalism: rather than seeing it as a form of national imagination which structures time, place and social experience, and permeates all forms of social life, a kind of ontology (e.g. Kapferer 1989), it is often seen (as in her commentary) as something which only happens at times of pohtical crisis. Maybe it is at times of crisis that nationalism is most visible. But if nationalism did not reside in everyday life, it would not be available to be invoked at times of crisis. We hope that readers will benefit from this exchange as much as we have. We would like to finish by saying that rather than being the final word on the topic, our article and the debate that followed should be seen as a starting point for the long-overdue sustained investigation of the socio-politics of archaeology in Greece, seen comparatively and in the context of the broader international discussion.

Note

We would like to thank Mark Pluciennik for useful bibliographic leads and Charles Stewart and Karoline von Oppen for their comments.

References

Alexopoulos, G., 1995: O teleutaios romantikos kai oi chriseis tou parelthontos, / lexi 126, 142-155. 154 Anderson, B., 1991: Imagined communities. Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism, London. Anderson, B., 1994: Exodus, Critical inquiry 20, 314-327. Andreadis, G., 1989: Ta paidia tis Antigonis. Mnimi kai ideologia sti Neoteri EUada, Athens. Andronikos, M., 1983:Ta glypta tou Parthenona, To Vima 3-7-83. Andronikos, M., 1985: Stm xenitia, To Vima 3-3-85. Andronikos, M., 1987: Epeteios, To Vima 8-11-87. Andronikos, M., 1988:Apories kai erotimatika, To Vima 3-7-88. Andronikos, M., 1997: To hroniko tis Verginas, Athens. Appadurai, A., 1995: The production of locality, in R. Fardon (ed.), Counterworks. Managing the diversity of knowledge, London and New York, 204-225. Arnakis, G., 1963: The role of religion in the development of Balkan nationalism, in B. and C.Jelavich (eds), Tlie Balkans in transition, Berkeley, 115-144. Astuti.R., 1995:'The Vezo are not a kind of people'identity, difference and'ethnicity'among a fishing people of western Madagascar, American ethnologist 22, 464-482. Atkinson, J.A., I. Banks and J. O'Sullivan (eds), 1996: Nationalism and archaeology, Glasgow. Augustinos, G., 1989: Culture and authenticity in a small state: historiography and national development in Greece, East European quarterly 23(1), 17-31. Balakrishnan, G., 1995:The national imagination, in New left review 211, 56-69. Balibar, E., 1990: The nation form: history and ideology, Rei'iew: Fernand Braudel centre 13, 329-61. Bourdieu, P., 1977: Outline of a theory of practice, Cambridge. Bourdieu, P., 1990: TTlie logic of practice, Cambridge. Breuilly.J., 1993: Nationalism and the state, Manchester. Brow.J., 1990: Notes on community, hegemony and the uses of the past, Anthropological quarterly 63, 1-6. Chapman,J., 1994:The destruction of a common heritage: the archaeology of war in Croatia, Bosnia, and Hercegovma, Antiquity 68, 120-126. Clogg, R., 1985: Sense of the past in pre-independence Greece, in R. Sussex and J.C. Eade (eds), 7-30. Clogg, R., 1992: A concise history of Greece, Cambridge. Comaroff, J., 1995: Ethnicity, nationalism and the politics of difference in an age of revolution, in J.L. Comaroff and PC. Stern (eds), Perspectives on nationalism and war, Luxembourg, 243-276. Connerton, P., 1989: How societies remember, Cambridge. Danforth, L., 1995: Tlie Macedonian conflict. Ethnic nationalism in a transnational world, Princeton. Diamandouros, N., 1972: Political modernization, social conflict and cultural cleavage in the formation of the modern Greek state: 1821-1828, Columbia (Unpublished Ph.D). Diaz-Andreu, M., 1996: Islamic archaeology and the origin of the Spanish nation, in M. Diaz-Andreu andT. Champion (eds), 68-89. Diaz-Andreu, M., 1997: Nationalism, ethnicity and archaeology. The archaeological study of Iberians through the looking glass, Journal of Mediterranean studies 7, 155-168. Diaz-Andreu, M. andT. Champion, 1996: Nationalism and archaeology in Europe: an intro- 155 duction, in M. Diaz-Andreu andT. Champion (eds), 1-23. Diaz-Andreu, M., and T. Champion (eds), 1996: Nationalism and archaeology in Europe, London. Dimaras, K., 1989: Neoellinikos diafotismos, Athens. Douglas, M., 1966: Purity and danger. An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo, London. Doumanis, N., 1997: Myth and memory in the Mediterranean. Remembering fascism's empire, London. Dubisch, J., 1995: In a different place. Pilgrimage, gender, and politics at a Greek island shrine, Princeton. Edwards, C, 1999: Introduction: shadows and fragments, in C. Edwards (ed.), Roman presences. Perceptions of Rome in European culture, 1789-1945, Cambridge, 1-18. Field, L.W., 1999: Complications and collaborations: anthropologists and the 'unackowledged tribes' of California, Current anthropology 40(2), 193-209. Foucault, M., 1980: Power/knowledge, New York. Fox, R.G., 1990: Introduction, in R.G. Fox (ed.), National ideologies and the production of national cultures, Washington D.C., 1-14. Friedman,J., 1992:The past in the future: history and the politics of identity, A merican anthro- pologist 94, 837-859. Friedman, J., 1994: History and the politics of identity, in Cultural identity and global process, London, 117-146. Geertz, C, 1993: Tlie interpretation of cultures, London (1973). Gellner, E., 1983: Nations and nationalism, Oxford. Giddens, A., 1984: Tlie constitution of society, Cambridge. Gourgouns, S., 1993: Notes on the nation's dream-work, Qui parle 7, 81-101. Gourgouris, S., 1996: Dream nation. Enlightenment, colonization and the institution of modern Greece, Stanford. Gran-Aymerich, E., 1998: Naissance de V archeologie moderne, 1798-1945, Paris. Haley, B.D. and Wilcoxon, L., 1997: Anthropology and the making of Chumash tradition, Current Anthropology 38, 761-94. Hamilakis, Y, 1996: Through the looking glass: nationalism, archaeology and the politics of identity, Antiquity 70, 975-8. Hamilakis, Y., 1998: Archaeology and the politics of identity in Cyprus, Journal of Mediterranean archaeology 11, 107-111. Hamilakis, Y, 1999a: La trahison des archeologues? Archaeological practice as intellectual activity in postmodernity, Journal of Mediterranean archaeology 12, 60-79. Hamilakis, Y, 1999b: Stories from exile: fragments from the cultural biography of the Parthenon (or 'Elgin') marbles, World arcliaeology 31, 303-320. Hamilakis,Y, and Yalouri, E. 1996: Antiquities as symbolic capital in modern Greek society, Antiquity 70, 117-129. Handler, R., 1994: Is 'identity' a useful cross-cultural concept?, in J.R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations. Tlie politics of national identity, Princeton, 27-40. Harris, O., 1996:The temporalities of tradition: reflections on a changing anthropology, inV. Hubinger (ed.), Grasping the changing world. Anthropological concepts in the postmodern era, 156 London, 1-16. Hart, L.K., 1992: Time, religion and social experience in rural Greece, Lanham. Hassan, F, 1998: Memorabilia: archaeological materiality and national identity in Egypt, in L. Meskell (ed.), 200-216. Heller,Y, 1992: Macedonia puts its faith in ancestor worship, Guardian weekly 12-4-92, 14. Herzfeld, M., 1982: Ours once more. Folklore, ideology, and the making of modern Greece, Austin. Herzfeld, M., 1987: Anthropology through the looking-glass. Critical ethnography in the margins of Europe, Cambridge. Herzfeld, M., 1991: A place in history. Social and monumental time in a Cretan town, Princeton. Herzfeld, M., 1992: Tire social production of indifference. Exploring the symbolic roots of western bureaucracy, Oxford. Hobsbawm, E.J., 1992: Nations and nationalism since 1780. Programme, myth and reality, Cam- bridge (second edition). Home, D., 1984: Tlie great museum. Tite re-presentation of history, London. Hourmouziadis, G., 1984: Sholia stin elliniki mouseiologia, Epistimoniki skepsi 18, 15-20. Hroch, M, 1996: Epilogue, in M. Diaz-Andreu andT. Champion (eds), 294-300. James,W., and D.H.Johnson (eds), 1988: Vernacular Christianity. Essays in the social anthropology of religion, Oxford. Jeffreys, M., 1985: Adamantios Korais: language and revolution, in R. Sussex and J.C. Eade (eds), 42-55. Jones, S., 1997: Tlie archaeology of ethnicity. Constructing identities in the past and present, London. Just, R., 1988: And-clericism and national identity: attitudes towards the Orthodox Church in Greece, in W.James and D. H.Johnson (eds), 15-30. Just, R., 1989:Triumph of the ethnos, in E. Tonkin, M. MacDonald and M. Chapman (eds), History and ethnicity, London, 71-88. Kakridis, I.Th., 1979: 1 archaioi Ellines sti neoelliniki laiki paradosi, Athens. Kapferer, B., 1988: Legends of people, myths of state, Washington D.C. Kapferer, B., 1989: Nationalist ideology and a comparative anthropology, Ethnos 54, 161-99. Kedourie, E., 1966: Nationalism, London. Kenna, M.E., 1985: Icons in theory and practice: an Orthodox Christian example, in History of Religions 24, 345-368. Kertzer, D.I., 1988: Ritual, politics and power, New Haven. Kitromilides, P., 1989:'Imagined communities' and the origin of the national question in the Balkans, European history quarterly 19, 149-94. Knapp, A.B. and Antomadou, S., 1998, Archaeology, politics, and the cultural heritage of Cyprus, in L. Meskell (ed.), 13-43. Kohl, P.L., 1998: Nationalism and archaeology: on the constructions of nations and the reconstructions of the remore past, Annual review of anthropology 27, 223-46. Kohl, P.L., and Fawcett, C. (eds), 1995: Nationalism, politics and the practice of archaeology, Cambridge. Kokkou,A., 1977:1 merimna gia tis archaiotites stin Ellada kai ta prota mouseia, Athens. Kotsakis, K., 1991: The powerful past: theoretical trends in Greek archaeology, in I. Hodder (ed.), Archaeological theory in Europe. Tlie last thirty years, London, 65-90. Kotsakis, K. 1998: The past is ours-images of Greek Macedonia, in L. Meskell (ed.), 44-67. 157 Kremmydas, V, 1992: Ypodohi ton evropaikon ideon apo ton Ellinismo sto telos tis Tourkokratias, 0 politis 120, 40-42. Lampeter Archaeology Workshop, 1997: Relativism, objectivity and the politics of the past, Archaeological dialogues 4, 164-198. Lawas, G., Th. Stephanidou-Tiveriou, A. Mentzos, N. Zaharopoulos, I. Konidaris, P. Akanthopoulos, Ch. Mauropoulou-Tsioumi, and A. Manitakis, 1997:1 Rotonda ston "kyklo me tin fe/mo/i

160