herzfeld m. [lévi-strauss in the nation-state]

8/13/2019 HERZFELD M. [Lvi-Strauss in the Nation-State]

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Lvi-Strauss in the Nation-StateAuthor(s): Michael HerzfeldSource: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 98, No. 388 (Apr. - Jun., 1985), pp. 191-208Published by: American Folklore SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/540439.

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MICHAEL HERZFELD

Levi-Strauss in the Nation-State

The Mytho-logicof Exegesis: Reflexive StructuralismLEVI-STRAUSS'S RADICAL INFLUENCE on the analysis of myth has attracted awide range of critical emulation. This has come not only from anthropologistseager to recover the mytho-logiqueof particular ethnographic areas, but hasbeen matched in the fields of literature, mass culture, drama, and the visualarts. In other words, scholars in various disciplines have proved receptive tothe suggestion that myth and symbolism might not be the prerogative of"ex-otic" or "primitive" cultures and hence to the possibility of including the ex-otic and the familiar in a shared discourse.

In one area, however, this apparent openness has hardly appeared at all. Inhistoriography, the reflexive analysis of texts as symbolic statements has as yetderived little support from the Levi-Straussian methodology. The notion of ahistoriography cast in so anthropological an idiom suggests a disconcertinglyintimate relationship between history and myth. This in turn challenges theassumption, commonly made in both scholarly and popular discourse, thathistory is "factual" and as such should be opposed to the "fictional" categoryof myth. Ironically, this assumption has enjoyed a fairly extensive lease of lifewithin anthropological thought as well as among some historians. By treatingthe ideological representation of events as a form of mythology, for example,Balandier (1962) necessarily sets it up in opposition to an accessible historicalreality. For such writers, myth is the product of invention; history inertlyawaits discovery. The conceptual dissolution of this piece of academic sym-bolism has some radical consequences. By challenging the absolute validity ofhistoricist pronouncements, it permits identification of the ideological presup-positions that have influenced the criteria of relevance through which "data"are acknowledged. It "textualizes" exegesis itself, a development already pre-figured in Levi-Strauss's call (1955:435) to include Freud's interpretation as afurther transformation of the Oedipus story; commentary, no less than itsunresisting object, becomes a form of mythology that can be symbolically un-packed. Drummond (1981) has already argued for a dissolution of the similardistinction ordinarily made (or assumed) between indigenous "myths of ori-gin" and anthropological "theories of ethnicity," while a related concern tomatch analytical tools with indigenous concepts prompted Feeley-Harnik(1978) to a similar critique of the myth/history distinction. These admirable

Journalof AmericanFolklore,Vol. 98, No. 388, 1985Copyright? 1985by the AmericanFolkloreSociety0021-8715/85/3880191-18S2.30/1

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reactions, as well as Levi-Strauss's early and explicit rejection of the privilegedposition of historicist discourse (1962:348), would now seem to set the stagefor subjecting exegesis itself to critical textual analysis.'Levi-Strauss's differentiation between "cold" and "hot" societies might bethought to imply an absence of historicalconsciousness among certain peopleswho are acknowledged to have myth (Charbonnier 1961:35-46; Levi-Strauss1962:310). But in fact his treatment of history as a methodology that treatstime as a system of encoding (1962:345-348), as well as his recognition of his-torical thinking in examples of lapenseesauvage, accord with subsequent, eth-nographic demonstrations (e.g., Feeley-Harnik 1978; Hanson 1983). Anyrigid demarcation between myth and history would merely reproduce thevery distinction between inert ethnographic objects and dynamic theoreticalobservers that Levi-Strauss's critique ofhistoricism implicitly (but necessarily)renounces and that his inclusion of Freud's Oedipus in the corpus of variantsto be analyzed directly contradicts.

Scholarly exegesis is a form of official, and therefore usually privileged, dis-course. It thus shares certain ideological interests with official history. Some-times, as in the case of nationalist folkloristics, this identification is very close:scholarship and the state validate each other. Official history may truly be seenas a "theft of language" (Barthes 1957:218) that invests the political status quowith the force of an eternal verity. The literate establishment claims history,suitably hypostatized, as its own; the folk must be content with mere lore. Andbecause, as Appadurai (1981) has pointed out, the contestability of the past hasto follow certain rules, the ability to regulate access to this "scarce resource"argues effective power through the control of discourse.

Anthropological categories often seem to mesh comfortably with such con-structions, especially inasmuch as they reflect the anthropologist's own statistbackground through the use of such concepts as kingship and social control.In perhaps the most sweeping critique of this tendency, Clastres (1974:161) hasargued that anthropologists commonly treat stateless societies as in some way"incomplete." Or again, as Beidelman (1980) has shown, the "trickster" labelhas prejudiced interpretation of a wide variety of African texts, suppressingthe centrality of the main character to the narrators' view of society-whichmay not be that of their leaders, and is certainly often not that of the academicobservers who have generated the classification in the first place. The assump-tion-recently challenged by Galaty (1979)-that order represents the commondesire of all human societies apparently explains the statist or similar bias thatwe encounter in much folklore taxonomy, whether nationalistic or colonialistin inspiration: government is the common ordering principle. Such taxonomiclabels as "kingship myths" (i.e., myths about kingship in general) privilegethat particular reading and invest it, through its very intelligibility within ourparticular cultural milieu, with special authority. Thus, among the originmyths of three Nilotic peoples (Dinka, Shilluk, and Nyoro), the account thatdemonstrates the greatest conceptual separation of human action from divineintervention (that of the Nyoro) is associated with the most differentiated and"statelike" political structure; it is clear that the maintenance of this polity is

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well served by the diachronictaxonomy providedby dynasticlists andothersuch forms of official history (see Herzfeld 1973).2Variantsof myths "aboutkingship"are seen as secondaryor primitivewhen the kings in questionlackwhat we recognize as historicity-mainly in the form of names andpersonal-ities, dates, andtoponyms-or when our system of categories s offendedbycallingthem kings at all. The creationof hypostatizedkingshipsin the corpusof Nilotic mythology is notjust acategoricalerror,although t is certainlyalsothat. It is an act of politicalconstitution,paralleledn the sphereof actualgov-ernmentby the common colonial habit of turningsymbolic figures into par-amountchiefs of considerable, f supervised,politicalauthority.The choice of whatthe text is about hus generatesthe rankingof all knownvariants;arbitrary nterpretationpreemptstaxonomy and throughit therebyin turn alsoprecludesmost alternativereadings.This is astrue of the "nationalfolklore" of 19th-century Europe as it is of the "primitive mythology" thatEuropeans deigned to recognize in their colonial domains. Songs claimedas"national," no less than the "kingship myths" of colonized "tribes," were ex-pected to validate social and political order.Logically, too, textual variantswhose heroes did not support an obviously statist ideology were classified ascorrupt derivatives. (When a written text existed and supported the statist per-spective more effectively than the oral versions, it often also served to rein-force the prevailing bias according to which literate versions preceded oralones both chronologically and qualitatively.) The heroes' "real" identity nec-essarily became transformedn the exegesis. By that very fact, the exegesis itselfbecame a new textual variant, with clear ideological presuppositions differen-tiating it from its predecessors. This ideological dimension is both missingfrom Levi-Strauss's original call for the inclusion of exegetical comments inthe gamut of variants, and necessary in order to make sense of it. The origi-nally collected texts and the collectors' exegetical treatment of them could onlybe compared to each other within some common frame of reference, and ar-guably, the most accessible such framework is supplied by ideology in itsbroadest sense.

Moving the Peripheryto the Center:Exegesis as Transformation

Levi-Strauss's contribution to text analysis essentially consists in the rec-ognition of variant texts as transformationsf a basic symbolic structure. Thus,if treating exegesis as text is to be more than a purely rhetorical speculation,the next stage entails seeking the structure and its transformations in an actualsequence of"folk" and "scholarly" texts. To that end, I now turn to a bodyof material from modern Greece.

The material in question consists of a set of verbal song texts and the folk-lorists' discussions and presentations of them. The song texts dwell on thetheme of social ambiguity in various realizations. The official ideology of theGreek nation-state, however, has elevated these same texts into an affirmationof national integrity. In other words, the official mode of exegesis turns the

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conceptual exploration of society's blurred outer edges into a celebration ofclearly defined political boundaries. Thus, the exegesis can be shown to haveeffected a structural transformation of the categorical system upon which thesong texts in question are based.

The nationalistic scholars laid claim to a more or less homogeneous culturalidentity that encapsulated both the authors and performers of the song textsand the folklorists themselves. They privileged their own discourse over thatof the oral texts in order to appropriate the latter to their vision of a unifiedHellenism. Thus, perhaps ironically, it is their own key tenet thatjustifies theprocedure adopted here; for, as Levi-Strauss (1955:435) remarks, "a myth re-mains the same as long as it is felt as such," and the nationalistic folklorists'immediate aim was precisely that of demonstrating the essential identity of thesingers' vision with their own. In seeking historical continuity with the Clas-sical and Byzantine past, they also sought to constitute political and culturalcontinuity synchronically; and continuity, Appadurai (1981:218) suggests, iswhat the effective control of history ensures. Consequently, the nationalisticscholars "felt" the song texts in question to belong to a culture of which theywere fully participating members. For this reason their recensions and inter-pretations deserve to be treated as transformational variants of a shared sym-bolic structure in exactly the sense in which Levi-Strauss indicates. Their ownreasoning forces us to reject the privileged position that they accorded theirown discourse; and, in fairness, the present analysis should be considered sub-ject to the same stricture in its turn.

TheMaterialsThe rest of this discussion centers around the verbal texts of some Greek

songs that describe the exploits of heroes of mixed or suspect origins. Havingpublished a detailed commentary elsewhere (Herzfeld 1980), I confine myselfhere to giving a stylistically representative text (Aravandinos 1880:227, #460)3as well as a summary of the principal themes in diagrammatic form (Figure 1).Text (no. III)

Among the plane-treesof Ai-Yoryi, a festivalwas underwaywith dancinghereanddancingthere, instrumentsandsong,anda thousandslaughteredbeastswere a-roastingallaroundthe festival."Eat anddrink,lads, dance,sing,andpraythatTsamadhoscome not nigh to affrightus all."Scarcelywere thesewords spokenwhen Tsamadhosappeared,rushingdown from the mountainside,down to the festivities.He stampedon the mountainandit shook, shouted till the valleysechoed,carriedanuprootedtreeon his shoulderwith wild beastshangingfrom its branches.As he drew close, the dancingceased,the feastingtablesfroze,andeveryonemadeway, and stood therefull of fear.

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"Who has a marble chest and arms of iron,to come and wrestle with me on the marble threshing-floor?"Nobody stepped forward, nobody replied;and only the widow's lad, the fine son of the widow,stepped forward to go and wrestle with him on the marble threshing-floor.There where Tsamadhos trod, the threshing-floor caved in,and where the lad trod, there too it caved in and sank.Wherever Tsamadhos struck home, the blood flowed like a river,and wherever the boy struck he shattered bones."Stop my fine lad, stop let me ask you,what bitch of a mother bore you, who was your father?""When my mother was widowed, I was yet unborn,and I looked like my father and shall yet surpass him."Tsamadhos seized him by the arm and ranwith him to find his mother, to seek out her house.The widow espied them and prepared the table for feasting,and there, as they ate and drank, the widow filled their glasses,poured wine for her son, poison for Tsamadhos.

Of these texts, I, II, III, IV, and VI are usually classified as "Akritic" in thetraditional academic taxonomy, and V as a "ballad" (paraloyi),while VII couldonly be listed as an unusual text of religious character. But the conventionaltaxonomy is highly motivated as both the tool and the expression of a nation-alistic ideology, and it is the exegetical apparatus which relates the texts to thistaxonomy that provides the critical focus of the following discussion.All the texts, although not aligned in a single class in the taxonomy, sharecertain features, and it would be useful to specify these as a means of pointingup some key elements in the construction of the taxonomic system. The mostobvious feature is the "marginal" birth of the hero, usually under humble cir-cumstances, but often with the suggestion of a noble or exalted paternity; thebirth of Christ logically fits this pattern as a limiting case. In each text, too,there is a final struggle, essentially between the hero and some personage rep-resenting his ancestry. In text IV, that personage is Death personified, fulfill-ing the role of the hero's mother's spouse: death is frequently represented inGreek folk imagery as a marriage with the black earth, so that the widow'ssuicide structurally represents a form of remarriage. In the case of text VII,whose inclusion in the series is my own, the biblical account of how the Sonof Man died at the hands of men and was then resurrected both fits this patternand, in a sense, resolves it best of all. For in all of these stories, the hero's strug-gle is a symbolic reenactment of his ambiguous origins; in text VII, however,that ambiguity is retained and ultimately resolved in Christ's human death anddivine resurrection. Moreover, Christ's birth "on the mountainside" is a re-duplication of his mother's outsider status, since ascent of a mountain is oftenexpressed in Greek by the verb vyeno (go out). Biblical narrative is no less sus-ceptible to local restructuring than any other essentially imported symbolicidiom (see, e.g., Dundes 1971).At this point, a literalist might well object that I had no right to include this

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I. II.Andronikos loseswife to pirates,gives birth in jail.

Child's rapidgrowth.

III.Widow/Jewess/Nun gives birth injail (Porfiris).

IV.Widow's son

V.

Digenes, widow's Kostas, the mer-son chant

Child's rapidgrowth.

Boasts he fears not King hears of hiseven the king. powers.

All hope T. will (?)not come.

rejoices at absenceof brigands.

Goes and finds Sar-acens at sport.They tie him up. King sends Sara-

cens to capturehim.

T. does come. Death comes. Brigands do ap-pear.

He escapes and re-turns.

He says not to takehim to where hisbeloved is; they doso; she says: lookwhat comes ofboasting; gives himsword; he insultsking.



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Asks for his father, Merchant provokeswho has a black brigands(death-color) tent;father challengeshim to fight; he ac-cepts.

who attackChallenges all towrestle; widow'sson alone accepts.

Death kills Di-genes.

Recognition; rec-onciliation.

T. asks name; lad ishis son

and wound himmortally.Brigand chief rec-ognizes merchantas brother

Widow gives ladwine, T. poison.

Widow swallowspoison.

Fratricidal woundscan't be cured.

Figure 1. Diagrammatic summary of texts.



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variant in the analysis. It is stylistically quite different from the other texts; ithad not been related to the series by any previous investigator; and, accordingto the old polarity, the New Testament could be said to belong more to historythan to myth. But what do any of these objections mean in practical terms?Stylistic differences have not prevented folklorists from classifying texts to-gether on thematic grounds, even when they are couched in different lan-guages; the insights of the earlier folklorists do not justify the privileging oftheir taxonomies to the exclusion of thematic parallels that we ourselves canrecognize; and finally, other rules of historical relevance and textual consis-tency than those with which a particular scholar approaches the New Testa-ment may be operative for the narrator of text VII (cf. Hanson 1979). Oncewe accept the possibility that (for example) a mountainside makes better sensethan a manger as the place of Christ's birth from the narrator's point of view,the distinction between the mythical and the historical becomes increasinglyhard to sustain. It insists on the constructed nature of myth while ignoring theconstructedness that many writers (e.g., Goldstein 1976) now recognize ascharacteristic of all historical discourse.

Similar difficulties are encountered in the claims some authorities have ad-vanced for the historicity of the texts categorized as "Akritic." This categoryis especially associated with Basil Digenes Akrites, the hero of a set of manu-script poems from the Byzantine period. Digenes, whose name means "bornof double stock," has also been identified with the hero of several sets of folk-songs, and, consequently, these have been known collectively as the Akriticcycle. The ambiguity of Digenes's birth is matched in his title: Akrites (or Ak-ritas in songs) means "borderer," and alludes to the boundaries (akra) of theByzantine Empire. The exact relationship of the songs, relatively few of whichname Digenes as such, to the long manuscript poems is a matter of consider-able complexity. Nationalist folklorists, especially those of more conservativeideological persuasion, have tended to accord compositional priority to thelong poems, thus (as we have already noted in a general sense) according ori-ginary status to narrators who seemed to them to be more like themselves.(Some Marxist interpreters [e.g., Lambrinos 1947] have preferred to accordthat priority to the oral poems of the people.) The likeliest scenario would nowseem to be a two-way influence which often spilled over the confining tax-onomic boundaries created by the philologists and folklorists.

The epic was hailed as "the national epic of the modern Greeks" (Politis1906). This is immediately curious: the text is about borders, and about a heroof ethnically ambiguous birth who challenged the supreme authority of thepolitical center quite brazenly. The paradox recalls the self-contradictory ir-redentist concept of a "Helleno-Christian civilization," that is, of a civilizationwhich is at once Hellenic (i.e., pagan) and yet Christian too. This concept,which apparently originated with Spiridon Zambelios in the mid-19th century(cf. Herzfeld 1982b:141; Kitromilides 1983:54), reached its apogee under themilitary regime of 1967-74. Its conceptual congruence with a category of na-tional akritesis hardly coincidental: both were put to the service of the same

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irredentist ideology, and both represented ethnological claims to all the terri-tories in which the Greek language was endemic. Moreover, political slogansof this sort behave much as Levi-Strauss thought myth did (1967:30) by pa-rading internal contradictions in an apparently insurmountable form; this isthe characteristic that Goldschlaeger (1982) identified as the hallmark of au-thoritarian discourse. The discourse of ideologically motivated scholarship be-haves in similar fashion: the exegeses, especially if we treat them as variants ofthe original narrative texts, partake of this same mythopoeic property. This ishardly surprising in an academic discourse that analyzes narrative in order touse it for the expression of territorial control.

Furthermore, the folklore taxonomy reproduced certain key presupposi-tions of 19th-century Balkan geopolitics. The new national frontiers couldnow be viewed as a new taxonomic ordering in their own right, possessed ofso compelling a logic of their own that whole populations were relocated on"their" respective sides of the borders in a series of demographic exchanges inthe early years of this century. This was often done against their will, but al-ways on the implicit assumption that people "belonged" by classificatory fiatto a particular territorial and political entity. But synchronic rearrangementsalso provide a matrix for rethinking the past. The Byzantine era, to which theexploits of Digenes are attributed, was the essential link between the modernGreek state (kratos) and the city-states (poleis) of Classical Greece (Paparigo-poulos 1853; Zambelios 1852). To the extent that it was an ethnographicallyheterogeneous and politically fragmented entity, it was retrospectively recastin the image of the newer polity. This occasioned, above all, some implicitleveling of the highly variable political control exercised by the Byzantine ad-ministrative center. Modern nation-states are constituted on the assumptionthat control should be evenly distributed throughout the entire territory con-tained by the national borders. The margins ("marches") are militarily, polit-ically, and conceptually converted into fixed frontiers. Instead of a gradual oruneven diminution of centralized power from center to periphery, the periph-ery itself now expresses the power of the center. The drawing of frontiers onany 19th-century map certainly took that premise for granted. As a carto-graphic performative utterance, so to speak, it reiterated the power of thestate, and, in an etymologically literal sense, "de-fined" it. Folklore taxon-omies of the period served to confirm this redistribution of authority by con-verting relatively independent border barons into a national gendarmerie.

In this way, we can begin to appreciate how the marginal hero was accord-ingly transformed, through a nationalist redaction, into a symbol of the center.Thus, Megas (1946:44) wrote of the medieval struggle between Greek Ortho-doxy and Islam: "From this centuries-long struggle there flourished, too, thenational epic tradition of the modern Hellenes, the epic of Digenes Akrites,which crowned the desires and ideals of the Greek nation." Note, in the firstplace, Megas's assumption that this is the epic tradition of the Greek nation;the ideological equation of nation with state, while not necessarily inaccessibleto analysis in a purely formal or terminological sense (cf. Campbell 1976), is

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here encoded in a form of discourse that invests it with intransigent authority(cf. Eco 1968:94). The concept of Greek national identity, though applied tothe Byzantine period, is calqued on the experiences and perspectives of mod-ern irredentists, for, as Eco remarks, "ideology interacts with the communi-cative setting, and may banish its implications from view." What we see hereis a recasting of one symbolic complex in terms of another-specifically, of astatement that at least partially addresses the problems of marginality in theterms of a rigid, politically dominant idiom of classification.

Megas's argument, which sprang largely from Politis's original (1906) en-dorsement of the "national epic" and his recognition of its similarity to thefolksongs he accordingly labeled "Akritic," thus represents a symbolic trans-formation in its own right. The context is ostensibly a discussion of Bulgariannational poetry, and the article was published in the first warnings of violentcivil war in Greece; hostility between Greece and Bulgaria also had a long-standing basis, and has already occasioned at least one other Greek nationalistscholar to condemn the Bulgarians' folk poetry for its supposedly crude andbarbaric sentiment. Megas argued that the Bulgarians in fact had no nationalepic of their own; he attributed their songs about Marko Kraljevitch, who hadfrequently collaborated with the Turks, to a poor imitation of the Greekepic,spoiled, however, by a supposed absence of both patriotic sentiment and com-mon humanity. Indeed, again using folksong evidence, he accused the Bul-garian brigands of failing to distinguish between Turks and Christians (his tax-onomy ) as victims. Text V suggests that the contrast between Bulgarian andGreek brigandage may have been less definitive in this regard than Megasthought, but the point is that he was drawing taxonomic and moral boundariesto match the political ones. In other words, we see here a process of progres-sive reordering-Megas goes considerably further than his predecessors in thisinstance-and thus of the construction of historical actuality.

Some students of Greek history have argued that the nationalist scholarswere simply wrong. This, however, is as literalistic a position as the one itopposes, and is thus no less ideologically transparent. We can, in fact, trace thedevelopment of such an alternative ideology in order to substantiate furtherthe argument that exegesis continues the transformational process of the orig-inal texts. An early commentator (Karolidis 1906), in explaining Digenes'sethnic marginality as a representation of the "culture derived from a doublestock" that he saw as characteristic of the border regions of the Byzantineworld, implicitly challenged the developing irredentist argument that the Em-pire had been thoroughly Greek. By the time of the Greek Civil War, the po-litical consequences of such a position were much more apparent. Lambrinos(1947), a Marxist, pursued Karolidis's argument in order to deny the irreden-tist position any basis in historical fact. He argued instead that the Akritic her-oes, like the much later revolutionary guerrillas of Greece's War of Independ-ence, had really been participating in an incipient class struggle, and that thisstruggle had always transcended ethnic or religious boundaries. In this modeof argumentation, the political center disappears altogether; the marginality of

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the hero-figure is identified with the internationalharacterof historicalpro-cess. This resemblesthe nationalistposition in its replacementof marginalityby doctrinalunity, but at the same time diverges radicallyfrom it in treatingnational borders as tangentialto the common struggle for collective humandignity. The politicalembodimentof the internationalist rgument n rhetoricand action is often far from trivial. In the aftermathof Turkey's invasion ofCyprusin 1974, the Greek left wing turnedits ire againstthe NATO powersas anappropriatecommon targetfor Greekand Turkish efiancealike.The exegeticaldialecticthatI havebrieflysketchedhere canbe usefully rep-resentedas a simpletransformational eries n which thekey terms concerntheconceptualrelationshipbetween centerand periphery(see Figure2). Of im-mediate interest is the apparentpairingof the epic with the irredentiststruc-ture, andof the songs with the structureof the Marxistexegesis, in respectofthe treatmentof the centralauthority.The reasonsarenot hardto guess:if theepic representsa more or less "aristocratic"view of events, even though itmight be thatof unrulyborderbaronswho were not averseto challengingthepersonalauthorityof particular mperors,it neverthelessalso entailsaconcernwith the defense of the imperialborders.To thatextent, then, it canbe logi-cally identified with the later concernsof the 19th-centurynation-state overthe safeguardingof a sometimes precariousterritorialintegrity. But the epicis also contrastedith nationalisticexegesis in the matterof thehero'sinsubor-dination:where the epic portraysa rebelliousman of action, the nationalistexegesisproducestheepitome of theGreeknational deal.Given theconflationof ethnos nation)with kratos state)on which the statistideology was predi-cated, the very hint of internalcontradiction s rhetoricallydissolved: if Di-genes was the defender of the ethnos, he kratos adnothing to fearfrom him.In the nationalists'exegesis andvarioussynopsesof the epic, the hero's insu-bordinationhasbeen effectively categorizedout of existence.

The songs, on the other hand, like the Marxistexegesis, seem to suggestthat the problem of a divided identity can be transcended n some ultimatefashion, by death, resurrection,victory, or proletarianunity. Whereas n thesongs ethnic marginalityis only one among severalpossible forms of socialoddity, however, in the orthodox Marxistexegesis it is hypostatizedas a re-alizationof the internationalistdeal.

RegionalExegesis:RelocatingheMoralCenterSo far, we have consideredtexts only at the locallevel of performativecon-text, and at the nationallevel of exegesis. There is, however, an interestingintermediate set of texts, consisting of regional exegeses of song texts. Greekfolklore studies include an impressive range of local publications, includingcollections from particular islands, provinces, and even single villages. An ex-ceptionally interesting case in point is provided by Crete. There, while ex-pressing a generalized pride in their participation in Greek culture as a whole,

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A. VERSE TEXTS1. Manuscript Epic:TWY-BORN BORDERER

insubordinateo centerbut defends it +

vs. outsiders2. Songs:SOCIALLY MARGINAL HERO

challengesown "parent"/olderbrotherand defeatshim +

B. EXEGESES1. Nationalist Exegesis:PERFECTLYHELLENIZED BORDER GUARDIAN +

defendsstate +and defeatsits enemies

2. Marxist/Internationalist Exegesis:ETHNICALLY HETEROGENEOUS/AMBIGUOUS BORDERERchallengesnational concept

by embracing +its neighbors +Thus:Al:A2 ::B1:B2, andA1:B1 :: A2:B2

Figure 2. Transformations.

local folklorists have nevertheless shown a frequent reluctance to grant Clas-sical Athens the apical primacy in their cultural pedigree that has been com-monly accepted in other parts of the country. Cretan folklorists have shiftedthe moral center to their own island, citing the glories and indisputable antiq-uity of Minoan civilization, as well as the martial grandeur of Nikiforos Fo-kas's recapture of Crete from the Saracens in 961. Thus, their comments onsongs conventionally included in the "Akritic cycle" sound somewhat differ-ent from those of their colleagues in other regions. They express not politicalseparatism but cultural localism: a reluctance to accept the dominant ideologyaccording to which ancient Athens takes pride of place and modern Athensrepresents the cultural and moral center. In their writings we see a relocationof the conceptual center to what is now a politically and geographically "mar-ginal" region.In the resulting transformation of the Digenes story, a quintessentially Greek

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hero defends the nation by investing the borderswith the moral force of thecenter. In one instance, this is done by a questionable etymological identifica-tion of Digenes with Herakles, son of the (Cretan) god Zeus, while the CretanDigenes is said on these grounds to be a different persona from others of thatname found elsewhere in Greece (Vlastos 1909). An alternative strategy wasprovided by the argument that Attic culture had left relatively little mark onmodern Crete, unlike both the earlier Dorian and the later Byzantine traditions(Hadjidakis 1952). In both cases the conflict between periphery and center issuperficially resolved by constituting a peripheral location as the center.4Such recasting of the nationalist ideology in localist terms may bear witnessto a fiercely contemptuous view of the actual political center and a resentmentof its pervasive domination.5 This may even be true of those who ostensiblyespouse the nationalist view most ardently, but whose enthusiasm for the na-tional cause does not necessarily entail yielding pride of place to Athens. In thecase of Cyprus the point is admirably illustrated by the late General Grivas'smemoirs, especially in the contrast between the Greek edition (representing aninternally directed view) and the English-language edition (edited for externalconsumption, and therefore less full of esoteric but revealing detail).In the English-language version (Grivas 1964:3), the general relates that heenjoyed his school studies,in which the glories of Greek history always took first place. I was particularly fascinated by thelegends of Dighenis Akritas, the half-mythical guardian of the frontiers of Alexander's [sic] em-pire. Not far from Trikomo [Grivas's birthplace] was a huge rock, which the village elders as-sured me had been hurled there by Dighenis, and my mother often sang folk-songs recountinghis acts of heroism.That is all: Digenes was a hero of Greek national history, important in Cypruscertainly, but of equal significance throughout the Hellenic world. Lest Di-genes's "half-mythical" status somehow undermine the historical significanceof his reminiscence for his irredentist argument, Alexander's evocative nameprovides reinforcement. (It is ironic that Alexander was celebrated in folk po-etry for his dual origins, in much the same fashion as Digenes.) There is noth-ing in this version of the general's account to suggest any kind of departurefrom the official version of history as it was disseminated for decades throughthe medium of the Greek schools.

The Greek text, however, is suggestively different at this point from itsEnglish-language counterpart:Cyprus had been Greek for three thousand years and more. . . . The Greek character of the is-land was preserved unsullied throughout the entire medieval period, when Christianity consti-tuted a source of renewal and cohesion for the Greek world. Cyprus then became the centerof theHelleno-Christian civilization. . ...

In Cyprus, at that time, the bravery of the Byzantine borderers was celebrated in song morethan in any otherpart of the Greek world. There, Digenes and Andronikos and the other heroes ofthe Akritic cycle impressed traces of their heroic passage upon legend and tradition. At a distanceof only a few kilometers from the house where I was born, the houses and the Rock of Digeneswere admiringly shown to me by the old men, while my mother often used to lull me to sleep

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on her knees with the folksong verses that extolled the bravery of the heroic borderers. [Grivas-Digenes 1961:5; my emphases]

Note here how the moral center has shifted to Cyprus, an island physicallylocated on the outer margins of the Greek-speaking world. The ideologicalpremise of a Helleno-Christian culture is retained without change, but, as inthe Cretan folklorists' work, its origins-and therefore its moral epicenter-have now been categorically dissociated from the political center.All this might seem nothing more than a scholastic appendage to Grivas'sromantic reminiscences, were it not for two circumstances. First, General Gri-vas was no ordinary local soldier, but a commissioned officer of the Greeknational army and an ardent advocate of enosis (union [with Greece]) whoplayed a decisive if controversial role in bringing Cyprus full independencefrom Britain in 1960; later, he even rebelled against his erstwhile ally PresidentMakarios when the latter seemed to prefer Cypriot independence to enosiswithGreece. Second, during his struggle against the British, he actually used thenom deguerreof "Digenes."While independence was seen at the time as a prelude to the eventual incor-poration of Cyprus into the Greek State, the process that had already takenplace in Crete several decades earlier (1898-1913), many Cypriots feared thatenosis would deprive their newly sovereign island state of some of the eco-nomic and political benefits that independence had brought. Even the mostardent supporters of enosis faced this dilemma. Thus, in Grivas's musings onthe essential Hellenism of Cyprus, we can detect the besetting concern thatenosis should entail full recognition of Cyprus as a central source of culturalregeneration for Greece as a whole. The mainlanders, whom Cypriots oftencontemptuously dismiss as kalamaradhes pen-pushers, i.e., bureaucrats, menof words rather than of deeds), should now abandon the condescension withwhich they have customarily regarded Cypriots and their culture. Here is amoral tension between periphery and center, between rural warriors and ur-ban bureaucrats, that has recurred again and again throughout recent (post-1821) Greek history as the central administration gradually extended and con-solidated its territorial control. The mountain dwellers of Western Crete, forexample, express a fairly comprehensive disdain for the political and bureau-cratic power brokers in Athens. Other tensions of a related nature continue tosubsist, at least in the form of verbally expressed attitudes, between the variousregions.

Unity, not internal tension, is nevertheless the appropriate mode for pre-senting the Greek realities to outsiders; differences of both opinion and cultureare reserved for internal discussion, where they concern the collective self-identification of Greeks and include negatively valued features that are thoughtto be unsuitable for external consumption. This distinction between an extro-verted and an introspective model of the collective self, best known throughthe sociolinguistic construct of diglossia (Sotiropoulos 1977), can be usefullyextended to cover the entire range of expressive modes and domains. In all ofthem, we can detect a radical discrimination between ideologies of national

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identity that is in turn rooted in the historical genesis of modern Greek nation-alism (see Herzfeld 1982a). In an important sense, the difference between theGreek original and the English-language edition of Grivas's memoirs ex-presses and reproduces precisely this ideological tension: only withinthe Greekworld could it be comfortably conceded that a single region-in this case, Cy-prus-enjoyed special status as a fount of Hellenism; for in this context, Cy-prus vies with all other Greek lands for an internal cultural primacy. To theoutside world, however, all Greek-speaking territories must be presented asequally Greek.Grivas was indisputably an ardent exponent of national unity and of the in-corporation of Cyprus in the Greek State. But even the attenuated glimpse wehave snatched of his reminiscences suggests the tension between Classical andmore recent models of identity that is encapsulated in the "Helleno-Christian"oxymoron. Thus, Cyprus appears to subordinate Greece to its own self-im-age. Nor is the relocation of the moral center at the geographical and admin-istrative periphery confined to political figures; on the contrary, it has an ob-vious appeal for the peasantry of the outlying areas. Thus, Rhodian villagerswho complained to me that they lived "at the edge of the world" (i.e., in anisolated and neglected place) regarded themselves as genetically and morallythe "purest" Greeks, untainted by the wickedness of the cities. Such is thestructural tension of Greek identity, which represents a conversion into his-torical and ideological terms of the ambiguities also expressed variously in theseven folksong texts discussed above. The heroes of these texts conjoin super-human qualities with the mundane messiness of actual social experience, thegloriously idealized with the sometimes embarrassingly familiar. Like the her-oes of these songs, so many Greeks not only wrestle with the tension betweenthe idealizations of neo-Classicism on the one hand and the introverted butoften scathing idiom of self-appraisal on the other, but also confront similarconflicts between public and private images at many different levels of socialinclusion and exclusion. Some, of course, opt ideologically for one or theother extreme. Thus, at the national level, General Grivas shows in the moreintroverted (i.e., domestic) version of his autobiography how he came toterms with the inherent paradox of modern Greek identity and the tension be-tween his concentric loyalties to Cyprus and to Greece: he cast his Akritichome island as the true center of Hellenism and himself as the Digenes of hisown day. Was this myth or history? Perhaps it would be better to say insteadthat it was, in the context of the times, an intelligible construction upon theperceived political and cultural world.

The Anthropologistas DigenesStructuralism has conventionally been regarded, as I pointed out earlier, aseffectively irrelevant to the concerns of political anthropology. That percep-tion derives from a rigidly statist and mechanistic view of what constitutespolitical relations, a view that treats rhetoric and discourse as secondary ratherthan integral to political processes. It also stems from a failure on the part of

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formal structuralism to exploit concepts of time as a form of symbolic classi-fication.Myth, unlike history, is regarded as achronic; therefore, time has no placein the mytho-logique.That, at least, seems to have been the implicit assumption.Yet, in this sense, the "ethnographic present" is also a myth-like eternal verity;it, too, is a "construction upon" the data, a taxonomic grid of simplistic de-

sign. The concept of history introduces the notion of time as a device for clas-sifying and relating events within an intellectually accessible format. But itsconstructed nature still retains that combination of formal arbitrariness andideological motivation that characterizes the entire phenomenon of social se-miosis.

It is this that allows us to deconstruct the distinction between myth and his-tory as itself an artifact of a particular discourse with its own ideological mo-tivations and institutional reinforcement. We thus commence a dual semioclas-tie: we provide a metacommentary for both local folkloristics and global socialanthropology, emphasizing at the same time what may perhaps seem obviousenough, that the distinction between the two disciplines is similarly embeddedin ideologically contrastive taxonomies of the human phenomenon. How dowe escape these dilemmas? The anthropologist is a Digenes of the intellect,caught in the tension between common humanity and ethnographic "other-ness," between a persistent search for the general and an immediate immersionin the particular, between the recognition of informants' theoretical capacitiesand a sensitivity to the ethnographic conditionality of the anthropologist'sown world view.6 But which Digenes that of statist folklorists or that of vil-lage perceptions? Maintaining an uncritical distinction between myth and his-tory ranges the anthropologist on the side of the statist Digenes. Acknowl-edging the conditionality of anthropology's own constructs allows the scholarto step instead into an ambiguous role that fits far more comprehensively withthe experienced uncertainties of social life.

NotesI offer this essayin respectfulcelebrationof the30thanniversary f thepublicationof Levi-Strauss'snspi-

rational"The StructuralStudyof Myth," which appearedn this ournalundertheeditorshipof ThomasA.Sebeok. I would also like to recordmy debt to Cees Post and Gerardvanden Broekfor encouragingme towrite the presentpiece.

'Such a shift of emphasiswould seem entirelynecessary o the claimsof reflexivegenerativity hat havebeen madefor varietiesof poststructuralistnthropology.Thisdisciplinedisplays eaturesof bothhistoryandmyth as these termsareordinarilyunderstood.2W.A. Arens has recently suggested(1979)that the Shillukrethmay have hadsome considerablepoliticalpower and thatthis was in some measurevalidatedgenealogically.

3Ofcourse, thequestionof what constitutesatruly"representative"ext is itselfcomplexandideologicallyladen. So, pursuingthe argumentto its logical extreme, is the choice of "variants":what arethe criteriaofinclusion?This does not mean that we should henceforthavoid any kind of analysis,only that we shouldadmit the inevitabilityof this type of bias.

4Theresolutionappears o occuratthe rhetoricalevel;Cretanvillagersremaindeeplyaware hatthecenterexerciseseffectivepoliticalcontroland that urbanMainlandGreeksgenerallyregard hem with contempt.

5Ihave elsewhere attemptedto suggest the ideologicalconnectionsthatbind folkloristsand villagersto-getherin a solidarylocalismin Crete (Herzfeld1985a).

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6Greekvillagerscertainlyhave a strong senseof historyin the conventionalsense, although they bring toit organizingprinciples hat deserveattentionasanindependent onceptualapparatushat sometimesappearsto placetheirhistoricalperceptions n oppositionto thoseof ethnographers.For a fullerdiscussion,see Herz-feld (1985b)

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