Journal of Social Archaeology

11(2) 144157
! The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1469605311402571
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Interview
Archaeological heritage
and cultural intimacy:
An interview with
Michael Herzfeld
Denis Byrne
Office of Environment and Heritage, Department of Premier and
Cabinet NSW, Sydney, Australia
In his work in Greece, Italy, and Thailand, Michael Herzfeld, Professor at
Harvard Universitys Department of Anthropology, has involved himself with com-
munities of people who nd themselves caught up in the politics of the past. For
some of these people, the antiquity of their well-loved surroundings has been some-
thing of a curse, attracting as it does the interest of wealthy would-be residents to
their neighbourhoods, a situation which Herzfeld (2009a) has studied in the Monti
district of Rome. In other places, such as at Pom Mahakan in Bangkok (Herzfeld,
2006, 2010), the existence of monumental remains in a communitys midst has
attracted the interest of government departments intent on developing their neigh-
bourhoods as heritage precincts. Among the other categories of displaced and mar-
ginalized people in the world we now have that of heritage refugees.
Herzfelds work is of particular relevance to archaeologists and heritage practi-
tioners because of the ne-grained pictures his ethnography draws of life inside
such communities as they struggle to assert their own integrity and also because of
his interest in how local actors are able to redeploy discourses of heritage and
nationalism in their own defence. As revealed in the following interview, his
work has also led him to take a critical view of the category of intangible heritage
as it has been articulated by UNESCO in recent years.
Much of the interview references the situation in Thailand, which is Herzfelds
most recent eld area as well as being a focus of Byrnes study of heritage and
Corresponding author:
Denis Byrne, Office of Environment and Heritage, Department of Premier and Cabinet NSW, PO Box A290,
Sydney South, NSW, 1232, Australia
Email: denis.byrne@environment.nsw.gov.au
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popular religion (e.g. 1995, 2009b). The interview was recorded in Sydney in
August 2009. Kerrie McGovern produced a wonderfully accurate transcript
which was edited by Byrne and Herzfeld.
DB: In recent years you have worked on conicts between heritage and housing in
Rome and Bangkok, having earlier examined similar issues in Greece. Could you
comment on some of the dierences?
MH: Ill start with my work in Bangkok, and specically on the tiny community at
Pom Mahakan, located beside the old city wall (e.g. 2006, 2010). When in the late
1990s those people were threatened with eviction by a city government intent on
cleansing the area and turning it into a heritage park they began to realize that
the ocial narrative, the narrative promulgated by the Chakri dynasty, was a very
valuable resource for them. They also became very much more interested in the his-
tory, less perhaps of the wall, but certainly of the citadel the pom after which, after
all, the place is named, and it ended up with their saying that they wanted to become
guardians of the historic site.
Once they began to think in those terms then every piece of physical architectural
presence became grist to that particular mill. So I think that the relationship is actually
interestingly dierent. I think, in the case of Rome, there may have been some indif-
ference, but there is also a sense that this is a part of our everyday landscape and its
history is our history on the one hand, and, on the other hand, in Pom Mahakan
youve got an accidental community, more or less, which fastens onto that history and
is much more dependent on recognizing the ocial royal history than Romans are
dependent on recognizing any kind of ocial history. I should also add that theres
another important dierence that reinforces this one, because Italy, unlike Thailand,
and unlike Greece, is a culturally very fragmented place. Italy therefore has no real
sense of having one ocial history. There was an ocial narrative under Mussolini,
but that history is very largely discredited now. Im sure you know the famous saying
by Count DAzeglio about the creation of the unitary Italian state, Now that weve
created Italy, we have to create the Italians, and many Italians will tell you its still a
work in progress. In Greece, the resentment against resident foreigners is expressed in
terms of protecting an unquestioned national identity based on western classicism,
while in Thailand an ideology of an encompassing unity has been promulgated by a
state dominated by the military and by the palace in response to foreign as well as
internal pressures.
So were talking about dierent attitudes to the idea of a strong central narrative. But
most nationalist narratives lay claim to permanence, even if, ironically, they are not
always able to sustain that sense of permanence for long. It is ironic that Rome, The
Eternal City, itself perfectly exemplies how unsuccessful Italian nationalism has
been, in that the capital is despised by the rest of the country. It speaks a dialect
that is not the national language and it doesnt look like a capital in terms of many
other countries conceptions. Each city has to be taken very much on its own terms,
but the common thread has to do with how people incorporate the physical remains
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around them into the way they tell the story of their past. And thats really what so
much of my work has been about.
DB: Do you think archaeologists and heritage practitioners, many of whom are
archaeologists, could actually be doing more to challenge these unitary national
narratives?
MH: Well, it would depend, of course, on whom they work for. Some of them work
for the state and those people have a very specic and very clear charge. There are
archaeologists who also work against that narrative. In Bangkok, in fact, theres a
very good archaeologist with a lot of experience in cultural resource management,
Pthomrerk Kedudhat, who has been very supportive of the Pom Mahakan commu-
nity. Ajaan Pthomrerk is somebody who has put his whole being on the line to try
to help these people and many of the other communities that are threatened by the
homogenizing tendencies of the state. But I suspect that the real problem for
most archaeologists is that they imagine that the restoration of the site still aims at
a high degree of permanence. The idea that what youre going to create is a place that
will go on changing in appearance hasnt really, as far as I know, been very widely
discussed.
DB: No, and yet when you look at the Thai way of building and restoring temples, it
suggests an acceptance of impermanence. The traditional way of restoring stupas, for
instance, simply encases the old object inside another much bigger one. The original in
a sense is consumed by the restoration. This is very dierent to the international
heritage approach in that it implies such a casual attitude to built fabric. And, in Thai
Buddhism, the drive to make merit means people are constantly wanting to renovate
temples, beautify temples, build new temples.
MH: I think you get the same thing in various forms in other places too, but whats
interesting about the Thai case is that youre dealing with a culture in which people, at
least ostensibly, believe in reincarnation. Ive often wondered, in fact, whether there
was a connection between their attitude to restoration and their ideas about the
reincarnation of persons. Ive not been able to nd anything very specic but it
seems to me at least likely that their understanding of the notion of permanence
would have been very dierent from that of westerners until the great age of
crypto-colonialism, as I call it. Now they have been overtaken by a very specic
understanding of the past that commits them to a version of the fallacy of misplaced
concretenesss by which I mean the illusion that monuments last for ever and cannot
change in their dealings with the archaeological record.
There are some interesting parallels with Greece here because the Greeks, for example,
encrust icons with silver and jewellery to try to make them glorify the saints even more
eectively. Greeks will also venerate photographic copies, some of them quite garish,
of older icons, because in the Byzantine aesthetic the more intense the light the closer
it comes to Divine Grace. These are ideas that one could perhaps parallel in Buddhist
practice. And so this idea that somehow restoration to a perfect original is the goal is
surely the exception rather than the rule. This is a part of the problem with UNESCO,
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this idea that things should be preserved as they were. The Italian archaeologists
actually are adamant that you should show signs of restoration and I think that the
Roman aesthetic is very much also to make the passage of time rather apparent, so
they use materials that do register rain damage, for example, on stucco.
But even beyond that I think that theres a very large problem with the whole idea of
heritage itself. I mean we mustnt forget that the term heritage is grounded in the
European idea that inheritance, from which the word comes, of land, was something
that dened the person. So it was an elite notion in the early modern period. Richard
Handler (1985) has written very interestingly about this, and then when you get
UNESCO talking about tangible and intangible heritage, you realize how incredibly
beholden the whole system is to a Cartesian understanding of the world, one that
certainly doesnt sit very well with Theravada Buddhism, for example.
You know, one of the things that really strikes me about this phenomenon is that with
the arrival of UNESCO on the scene, big time, youre not getting internationalization,
youre getting reinforcement of national projects as, for example, with the Khmer-
ization, as it were, of Angkor and the marginalization of other ethnic presences.
UNESCO reinforces national narratives because it works with national oces.
Governments may not be acting in their own best interests by continuing to sustain
the sorts of rigid, monothetic models of national history, archaeology, and folklore
that sustained nationalism in the nineteenth century.
Its no coincidence that Greece and Thailand are the two paradigm cases for me of
crypto-colonialism. Much harder to ght o the crypto-colonial heritage than the
colonial heritage, because you rst have to admit that youve been colonized, itself
an ironic stigma in countries where, in fact, the modalities of independence have been
dened by outsiders.
DB: The UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Intangible Heritage, which is a
bit of a curiosity in its own right, stems from a realization at a certain point in the
1980s that there were these dierent traditions of dealing with old places the
Japanese tradition, for instance, of completely rebuilding the Ise Shrine, in wood,
every cycle of twenty years. They realized that, in social practice, there were ways
of relating to old places that simply could never be accommodated under the old
concept of heritage. And I wonder whether the creation of this new category of her-
itage, and the creation of a convention to conserve it, is almost, by way of displace-
ment, a means of allowing the old category of the tangible to remain intact. I mean
that the truth behind the notion of intangible heritage really throws into question the
very idea of such a thing as tangible heritage.
MH: Thats a very interesting perspective. Certainly, the whole UNESCO structure
seems to me to be a perpetuation of nation-states concerns, embedded, I would argue,
in a taxonomy of value what I call the global hierarchy of value which is predom-
inantly western. Its the moral, ethical and aesthetic successor to the military structure
of colonialism, and it has real-world consequences, because if the aesthetics that are
being applied, including the separation of the material from the symbolic, are of
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predominantly western origin, this perpetuates a kind of western hegemony, even in
those countries that claim to be contesting it.
If you look at what happens to those things that are listed under intangible heritage,
the danger becomes very clear. Nation-states which, after all, have a deep investment
in protecting what I call their cultural intimacy, are not going to present, as part of
their national traditions, dirty jokes, obscene songs, stories that are favourable to their
enemies, examples of culture that they think might bring ridicule upon them from
more powerful countries, and so on. What was previously listed as folklore or tradi-
tion therefore gets driven even further underground; it becomes, if you will, even more
intangible, while the ocially acceptable gets reied. Even though the reication is
textual, I would argue that it creates tangibility, because now you can pick up the
book and read the text, and if you misread it somebody will say Thats not the right
version. This is simply reproducing the old authoritarianism of the nineteenth-century
folklorists who would go out and tell the natives how to get it right. So I am very
deeply critical of the whole idea of separating tangible from intangible. It seems to me
that this separation perpetuates a fundamentally Cartesian and colonial model. Of
course, at the same time, this is the ethical dilemma that all of us who criticize the
system face: what do you then do about all of these cultural phenomena that are
vanishing?
I would argue that rather than trying to perpetuate them in a form that is clearly
articial, we should focus on recording them. We materialize them by recording them
whether or not they eventually vanish in the form in which we originally encounter
them. And the same thing is true of archaeological remains. Time will eventually wear
them down. Tourists are carting away pieces of the Colosseum. Theres a huge alarm
about this in Italy. I dont like it, I think its wrong, I think its objectionable, but its a
fact of cultural and social life in the world in which we live. Just as the grati that you
see all over the walls of the old city of Rome and elsewhere are a fact of life, and they
are cultural phenomena. If they were ancient Roman grati, like the ones found in
Pompeii, wed be excited about them. Because theyre modern, everyone gets upset. Of
course, I personally nd the ancient ones more interesting too. But, having said that,
Im beginning to appreciate the modern ones.
When I think of grati now, I realize that Ive been a dupe in some sense of my own
classical training rst as a classicist high school student and then as an undergrad-
uate archaeologist, and also as somebody who has been brought up in this very
western frame of reference. That said, if somebody says, Well shouldnt we be
trying to protect the antiquities as best we can? I would say, Yes. But the key
phrase there is as best we can, and this has to include recognition of the rights of
those people who live among those remains. Thats where I get into questions like
Pom Mahakan, because it seems to me that at the point at which the restoration or
preservation of a site by an ocial agency erases all traces of a human presence that is
perhaps more recent but is still connected to that site by historical bonds, it creates a
much greater tragedy than the mere disappearance of a few antiquities or a few
ancient walls. And Im not prepared to accept that that is the way we have to go.
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The whole issue to me is an ethical one. And ethics has to be a matter of practice,
not just of theory. Ive also lived through an era of military dictatorship in which the
use of folklore, which after all is a classic case of intangible heritage in Greece, has
been an instrument of cultural repression in Greece. I think my comprehension of it
was much slower than it should have been. It took many years for me to realize just
how incredibly manipulative the whole process was, and eventually, a few years ago,
I wrote a piece for an Athenian newspaper called The True Greek Tragedy and it
was precisely about the imposition of, essentially, an eighteenth-century model of
ancient Athenian culture on modern Greece. The idea was that if the Greeks couldnt
live up to it they clearly were somehow inferior. And of course there was a substantial
part of the Greek elite that was complicit in that. My view is that Greece, like other
countries, has had a vibrant modern culture and people have suered greatly from
having the things that they regarded as their everyday practices disrespected to
that extent.
DB: You say the Greeks have a vibrant, modern culture. The vibrancy of culture is
something which the whole concept of intangible heritage, at least the way it is
operationalized, seems to negate. It seems to be driven by an essentialist anxiety
that old things are disappearing and nothing new or nothing authentic is replacing
them. So its like a continual decit model. It seems to represent a profound
pessimism, in a way, about culture and about the continuing ability of people to
generate culture.
MH: I think thats true, I think it represents a very condescending view on the part of
an elite that they, and only they, understand what culture really is. I dont share that
pessimism. To me, recording is important, and we have fantastic means of doing that
nowadays, so things are not really lost in that sense, but it seems to me that forcing
people to adopt a model of their culture that is entirely static actually entails a gen-
uinely tragic loss. The idea of a national culture has become stereotyped and stylized.
Its largely a nineteenth-century European invention, and its a real albatross around
the neck of people who instead want to live in, yes, a vibrant way. But lets go back to
that notion of vibrancy, its actually a very deceptive word I dont mean by vibrancy
something that you can display in bright colours and be sure that those colours will
remain intact ten years hence. I mean something that is a process rather than a thing.
And actually, Ive been heartened by the fact that whenever I say, in Thai, to Thai
friends, that culture is not a thing (singkhong) but a process (krabuankaan), their
response has always been to understand immediately what Im talking about. And
that suggests to me that there is more than a lurking awareness that the imposition of
a unitary model of culture is problematic and that it may be saving up trouble for
the future.
DB: Going back to the construction of a national identity in Thailand: in your 2009
article in Ethnography you maintain that ordinary people are not coerced into national
loyalty by a hegemonic state, rather that they have their own loyalty to a fellowship
of the awed (see also Herzfeld, 1997: 28). Do you think weve overplayed the states
capacity to nesse a consensus through the construction of national identity?
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MH: Thats a very good question. I would have to accept some small share of the
collective responsibility, because, along with many other anthropologists in the 1980s,
I was very interested in trying to analyse the discourse of the state as it attempted to
map the idea of a unitary culture onto a concept of a unitary territory. As Jean
Jackson (1995) pointed out in a very important article in American Ethnologist,
when we do that, not to a state but to a minority group, in other words when we
use a constructivist argument to show how they got to be what they now say they are,
were actually putting them at risk because it makes it easy for the state to say Ah, so
its not real, theyre just inventing themselves. But one can say exactly the same thing
about the state. So, on the one hand I would say that if theres been a mistake its been
a tendency to treat what the state does as being of a totally dierent type from what
ordinary people do. I think, in fact, that these are social processes to an equal degree.
But the state has a much greater capacity to claim a lien on eternal truth. The whole
goal of the state is to produce a sense of timelessness. Actually, Ive often remarked
that Le vi-Strausss denition of myths as machines for the suppression of time is really
most applicable to nationalistic historiography. I mean I dont want to give the
impression that I think that the states version of history is necessarily nonsense. It
is another social fact.
So, to take a parallel example, its very easy to read my distinction between monu-
mental and social time, in my (1991) book on Crete, A Place in History, as saying
theres monumental time, which is the time of the state, and then theres social time,
which is the time of ordinary people. Monumental time is also social time. It has its
own rhythms, theyre slower, and that slowness is what the state cultivates to its own
advantage. And thats where archaeology, by the way, becomes very important,
because archaeology gives a much longer time depth, and therefore provides the
instruments of both legitimation and serious subversion.
Let me just say here that on this point I see a very close parallel with something that
Giambattista Vico, who happens to be one of my principal cultural heroes, articulated
in his New Science in the third edition published in 1744. He points out that etymol-
ogy, which leaders use to legitimate their power, can by the same token be used to de-
legitimize or challenge that power, because the very idea that the meaning of a word
may not be stable (even if the form is stable) undercuts the kinds of equivalence that
are claimed for etymological correspondences. And I think you can say exactly the
same thing for the uses of archaeology. The fact that you have the Colosseum sitting
right at the end of the street that Mussolini ended up cutting through the Roman fora
might seem to legitimize claims to being essentially the same as the ancient Roman
Empire. Thats what Mussolini wanted. But we shouldnt forget that Mussolini cut a
modern road through the fora in a way that violated the ancient spatiality in order to
make that claim to an ancient identity. So there you have both the problem and the
advantage that it presents. I think that if we think of monumental time as itself social,
we can do quite a bit of useful damage to the pretensions of the state. And by the way,
lets not forget that Vico also said that the pretensions of the state and the pretensions
of scholars are very similar.
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DB: In your use of the term, fellowship of the awed, am I right in thinking youre
suggesting that ordinary Thais, say the inhabitants of Pom Mahakan, think of them-
selves, or at times think of themselves, not so much as Thais in that unitary state
construction but as a community awed in the eyes of authority to the extent of not
being able to, or wanting to, measure up to that ctive category, Thai?
MH: To understand that, we need to step back a bit. Id like to take you back to my
work on Greece, because its not coincidental that I came up with the model of cul-
tural intimacy (1997) in Greece and this term, the fellowship of the awed, is a way of
describing the space of cultural intimacy. The Greeks seem to me to have had an
exceptionally powerful sense of the dierence between what they presented to the
outside and what they know about themselves on the inside. Every nation has that.
But the Greeks were forced to defend a particularly strong version of it, because, since
the western Europeans insisted that they had to be like the ancient Greeks, they really
had a tremendous investment in hiding anything that didnt look ancient Greek. So,
for example, the language: they tried to get rid of all the Turkish and Arabic and
Albanian elements in the language. The same logic is architecturally often reproduced
in the sense that bourgeois houses in the nineteenth century often had classical motifs,
the facades had classical forms and even names and parts of the interior had local
features and names that may or may not have been of Turkish origin. But Greek
Orthodox people also have a very powerful sense of the meaning of original sin, as my
own former supervisor, the late John Campbell, pointed out in his famous book,
Honour, Family, and Patronage (1964). And so they recognize that they quarrel a
great deal or theyre very noisy, they cheat when they can, some of their sexual
behaviour doesnt follow the strict mores they claim for it, and theres a great deal
in their culture that is of Turkish and other less than respectable origins in terms of
this, again, global hierarchy of value. They also recognize that to be part of this rather
disreputable interior is much more fun than being a saint. This is what real social life is
about.
Saints are terrible company, sinners are fun, and, besides, khristianos, the Greek word
for Christian, actually means sinner, as the equivalent does in Italian (cristiano).
DB: So it is a fellowship that is awed in the eyes of the state but also in its own eyes?
MH: Yes, thats the fellowship of the awed. Because as in Christianity, so too in the
case of Buddhism, theres a very widespread recognition that people are imperfect
and, indeed, people in the community talk about their problems, they talk about how
they have to solve them together, but they recognize these as I mean there wouldnt
be any need for a belief in reincarnation, with all the various levels that are implied, if
people behaved perfectly.
DB: On the matter of intimacy, Im thinking that when walking through Pom
Mahakan one notices that the public spaces are actually extremely small, tiny in
fact. The narrow alleyways, for instance. And even in those open spaces, lines of
sight are obstructed, so if you are looking at someone just a few metres away in an
open space between houses, there will be three or four things for instance, some
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clothing hung out to dry on a line between you and that person. Its obviously an
extremely intimate space in any understanding of spatiality. And against that we have
monumental space, particularly the monumental space of late modernity with, as you
describe, its emphasis on cleansed space and long vistas, clear points of view, an
absence of clutter. And it seems to me very clear that the way heritage practice oper-
ates, one way or another it ends up being against spatial intimacy. We implicitly
favour that other space the space of late modernity.
MH: I think thats exactly on target. To me, what the state is trying to do in destroy-
ing these sorts of communities is very similar to the way the state arrogates the dis-
course of kinship to itself. In older communities you favoured your kin and that was
considered morally correct. The state regards that, at least ocially, as nepotism or
corruption. Now what the state wants to do is to clean up, in the same way, the
physical spaces that are most emblematically associated with its version of history.
And emptiness seems to me to be the key word here. I mean, what they want to do in
Pom Mahakan, what they started to do in Pom Mahakan, was to create a lawn, and
eventually the whole place was going to be a lawn with two or three of the old historic
buildings, including the fortress, left or restored, and a balustrade in the older style all
around it. Now, what they did was to clear the front area: they put up the balustrade,
they constructed the lawn, and for a few glorious months it looked quite beautiful if
you happened to like that kind of thing. I, of course, saw it as simply an erasure of a
wonderfully lively political space in which the community would come and discuss its
problems two or three times a week and would also hold their protests for public
consumption. But then nature took the side of the community, because the rain began,
and suddenly potholes appeared in the lawn, people started leaving rubbish all over
the place, it got muddy and messy, but the community members continued, on their
side of the fence that had been put up, to keep their rather mean streets very clean, as
you probably saw. On the outside of the old wall of the city, on the sidewalk, the usual
mess is still present. Its very clear that the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration
[BMA] does not have the workforce to maintain that level of tidiness and cleanliness.
And here we come to the point behind the residents project, because what they want
to do is to become, essentially, employees of the Bangkok Metropolitan
Administration, responsible for maintaining the historic space in good order, and
their own community within it.
DB: Can we go back to that business of intangible heritage, but to look at it from the
point of view of what gets missed out, what in culture isnt compatible with that
conceptual category?
MH: Well, its all the things that youd nd in the space of cultural intimacy. The state
has a vested interest in keeping quiet about all of that. But paradoxically, the state
would not be able to survive without those things either. Part of my cultural intimacy
thesis is that citizens loyalty is actually predicated on all that.
DB: One of my interests over the last several years has been in the heritage of popular
religion in China and Thailand, and particularly in the supernatural, magical element
of popular religion and the way it engages with place and built fabric.
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MH: Spirit shrines, for example.
DB: Yes. The idea that shrines, temples and stupas have ecacy or agency, and the
popular belief that certain persons are also miraculously ecacious. All ideas which
are unorthodox in terms of the modern rationalist construction of Thai Buddhism.
MH: The Protestant version so to speak.
DB: Exactly. Theres no recognition of that dimension of popular culture in Thai or
Chinese heritage practice at all. We go out and record those places and try to conserve
many of those places, but without any reference to the fact that people actually see
them as supernaturally animated.
MH: Well I think in fact that the dilemma comes out very nicely in Pom Mahakan
because there are, of course, a lot of spirit shrines.
Actually in the lm that Im making there is a whole section that I devote to this,
because the spirit shrines have changed in meaning since the struggle began.
Originally, clearly, they were shrines to the ancestors, the spirits of the dead of the
various families. There was what they call the saan yai the big shrine, which is the
communitys collective shrine and people used to go there and make oerings to it in
the hope that they would get good fortune on certain special occasions. Now, when
the BMA started making plans to invade, there was no provision made to spare those
shrines, and there was no provision made to spare the various sacred trees either.
From the residents point of view, destroying all of these things would have been a
form of sacrilege, and it was very clear that they saw it in those terms, that the BMA
was really no respecter, in their point of view, of their religion. So the community
actually pushes back quite eectively against this by saying that these are not just the
shrines of the residents ancestors but of the ancestors of the Thai people as a whole.
DB: On another tack, do you think there is an assumption that what tourists are really
interested in is a kind of theme park heritage whereas, in fact, tourism could be
compatible with intimacy, and perhaps not just compatible with it, but it could be
organized in a way that actually encouraged it?
MH: A condent nation-state could handle that. So one of the things thats been very
interesting to me in Greece is that since the fall of the colonels regime, and since the
relative increase in Greeces freedom from external pressure, the Greeks have been
much more willing to show those parts of their culture. I mean there always was the
Zorba side of things, you know, but it was pretty sanitized as well. Now, I think,
Greeks are less obsessed with showing foreigners only the good side of the country
than they used to be. But you will still sometimes hear that concern expressed, Im
afraid, and youll also hear it in Thailand. And I think I would say to the authorities
what I said to the residents of Pom Mahakan: dont imagine that people believe
everything is perfect here. And I would also ask, Why do you think that those aspects
of your culture are bad? Why do you accept the global hierarchy of value that dom-
inates your lives and does not really give you the freedom to determine what is appro-
priate for your people? Why dont you just let your people determine it for
themselves? Challenging that old, dominant cultural order seems to me the ultimate
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goal and obviously its utopian in certain ways, but one does see in dierent countries
very varying degrees of interference in the representation of national culture. The
Chinese, for example, do a lot of defensive representation. Western European societies
dont feel they have to. Perhaps the extreme case of reversal is Germany, which is
probably the only country in the world that has erected monuments to the shame of its
own crimes. You know, it may be a form of collective repentance, but the Germans
are certainly not hiding the dreadful history of Nazism from the rest of the world. But
Germany is a very self-condent economic powerhouse and one of the most central
and powerful components in the European Union.
DB: Collectors have tended to be regarded as enemies of archaeology and heritage,
mainly because of the damage to sites caused by looters who supply antiquities
dealers and their agents and, ultimately, collectors. It is noticeable, however, at
least in Asia, that collectors often identify themselves as protectors of heritage and
certainly they are often well versed in heritage discourse. It also seems that the nation-
state, with its heritage inventories and monumentalization of local sites, could be seen
as collector-in-chief. Harking back to Arjun Appadurais edited volume, The Social
Life of Things (1986), and then the work of people like Daniel Miller, anthropology
has taken an interest in the trajectories of objects, the reworkings of their meaning,
and their deployment as cultural capital. Archaeologists have shared an interest in the
new study of material culture but on the subject of antiquities collecting there almost
seems to be an embargo on objective discussion of the interplay between people and
antiquities in the sphere of private collecting which, as I say, tends to be seen as
unmitigated evil. It is not dicult to understand why, but would you care to comment
on this?
MH: I would say that clearly the antiquities market and the prestige that accrues for
some people from having antiquities in their homes have together created a great deal
of damage. Again, I am not unsympathetic to the concerns of either the state or the
archaeologists that the state employs. That said, I think we also need to understand
the tomb robbers and the antiquities merchants as themselves participating in social
networks that could be very interesting for thinking about how prestige is constructed
for example. I would nd that a dicult one to do but you know I think its inter-
esting, and I think some scholars are beginning to address it. One has to suspend ones
moral judgement, as I did with the animal-rustlers I studied in Crete, at least to the
extent of understanding their actions in context but that does not mean that one
does not see the moral objections others have to their actions. Social life and anthro-
pology are both full of ethical conundrums; think, for example, of the clash between
housing rights and ocial claims to represent and preserve heritage in the name of a
larger common good.
DB: Much has been made of the timelessness of old-style ethnography, the way in
which the use of the ethnographic present as a literary device left subject peoples
stranded out of time (Thomas, 1996) in a zone of changelessness. It could also per-
haps be said that many of these ethnographies were strangely placeless. While portable
material culture was often a preoccupation, they were often very sketchy on the
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subject of the built environment and the activities of place-making and place-attach-
ment. To what extent would you say this has changed in more recent ethnographic
work?
MH: I have to say that, to me, this is why it is important to treat ethnography as being
as much an art as a science. In the Rome book (Herzfeld, 2009a), for example, I talk
about the scene in which my friends were signing away their right to continue to live in
the house where their family had been for generations. And I have to say I think that
is one of the best pieces of writing I have ever done, partly because I was able to talk
about where we were and the kinds of objects that were there. I dont know if you
remember but theres this comment about a souvenir from the Holy Land. I didnt
write down what that souvenir was and I didnt have a photograph of it and, of
course, my perceptions were a bit dulled that day by the sheer misery of the situation,
so I tried to convey a sense of that. But I also have a very strong generic memory of
the place and I tried to give a feeling of it not just through describing the place but
describing the way other sensory triggers gave me a sense of that place footsteps on
the old oorboards, for example. And then I try to reinsert it into time by talking
about the wreckers ball that would presumably come and get rid of everything famil-
iar. And that leads me to another example, which is the very opening scene in which I
describe these three women walking back after theyve had an unsatisfactory meeting
with some municipal ocials. What I was trying to do was to capture both time and
space. Here they are, walking along Via dei Fori Imperiali, a very wide street that
Mussolini had cut through the ruins of the ancient fora. The tempo of their own
movements seemed to me to bring together both the conventionally very unhurried
walking style of middle-aged Roman women with a certain sense of aront. They were
angry and this was their way of expressing their anger, and their dignity too. But I was
also trying to suggest that they were crossing this historical space which was itself a
violation of another historical space, and that all of this was linked to the history of
their own attempt to try to protect themselves from being evicted. And by doing it in
this very descriptive way at the beginning of the book, I tried to draw the reader in,
not just to my own emotional reaction to it all, but to a real feel for the place itself.
DB: In your book, Cultural Intimacy (1997), you make the point that the state does
not have a monopoly on essentialism, that it is something we are all prone to. One
would think that archaeologists working in the heritage eld or discoursing on the
heritage value of their material might be especially vulnerable in this respect; or per-
haps vulnerable is not the right word for something which I think you would main-
tain was a commonplace of social life.
MH: Its about what gets essentialized and what gets ignored. What gets materialized
and what doesnt? I think that is a very interesting point because most critiques of
nationalism focus on its fundamentally essentialist nature, right? But what is essen-
tialism but another word for reication, and reication is all about making something
material. Now, if you take the Vichian, the generally anti-Cartesian position that I do,
that the distinction between the material and the symbolic is analytically useful but
ontologically bogus, you can see very clearly then how the politics of culture can be
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framed as a discussion of ontology. Ontology and power that is, who gets to dene
what is. I sometimes like to say that the most dangerous word in the English language
is is.
Ive certainly had the experience of hearing archaeologists claim that their data were
fundamentally material in a way that social realities did not seem to be. I think that
this, as I said earlier, is an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, because
even things that are very hard to describe, or maybe cannot be described very well, are
just as real. And if we were to reduce the realm of possible knowledge to only those
things for which we, at the moment, have limited instruments of apprehension, we
would have a very impoverished sense of reality. Anyway, it seems to me that this is
not a productive way to go. And therefore one asks, well why is it that nation-states so
often seem so hell-bent on trying to reduce the richness of cultural life to a kind of
crass materiality dened in terms of a single style and a single chronology and a single
archaeology? I believe its because, ultimately, the nation-state has to translate its
territorial integrity into the temporality of a nite point of origin.
Think of Evans-Pritchards notion of structural time you know, the time back to the
common ancestor that denes a distance between two people in the present. The
nation-state claims always to have been there. It therefore has to point to a single
point of origin that then also telescopes everything in such a way that all the inter-
vening complexities disappear. The Greeks, for example, tried to get rid of their
Ottoman history. And they also, very conveniently, forgot the fact that they never
did have a Greek nation-state before 1821. I think the Thais are now engaged in
something rather similar. Theyre understandably nervous, given the situation in the
south and some restiveness in the north and north-east as well. But the Thais are also
trying to write the history of Thai national identity very much in terms of the dynasty,
which gives history a nite feel, but also then associates the dynasty with a much older
history, going back to such things as the invention of the alphabet attributed to King
Ramkhamhaeng. Which, by the way, is why there was so much fury when a Thai
historian challenged the authenticity of the inscription said to initiate the use of that
alphabet. In other words, what were really talking about here is the politics of ontol-
ogy and that is one area in which social anthropology and archaeology come together
very closely and indeed must seriously do so.
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Author Biographies
Michael Herzfeld is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University, where he
has taught since 1991. He is the author of 10 books (most recently The Body
Impolitic, 2004, and Evicted from Eternity, 2009) and numerous articles and
reviews, and his honors include the J.I. Staley Prize and the Rivers Memorial
Medal (both in 1994). He has served as editor of American Ethnologist (19958)
and is currently editor-at-large (responsible for Polyglot Perspectives) at
Anthropological Quarterly. His research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand has most
recently addressed the social and political impact of historic conservation and
gentrication, the dynamics of nationalism and bureaucracy, and the ethnography
of knowledge among artisans and intellectuals.
Denis Byrne leads the research program in cultural heritage at the Oce of
Environment and Heritage, Department of Premier and Cabinet NSW in
Sydney. He is also adjunct professor at the TransForming Cultures Centre,
University of Technology, Sydney. His interests include the everyday engagement
of people in Asia and Australia with their material past, the materiality of popular
religion, and ctocritical archaeological writing, the latter resulting in his 2007
book, Surface Collection.
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