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

Journal of Social Archaeology 11(2) 144157 ! The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1469605311402571 jsa.sagepub.com

In his work in Greece, Italy, and Thailand, Michael Herzfeld, Professor at Harvard Universitys Department of Anthropology, has involved himself with communities 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 something 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 neighbourhoods as heritage precincts. Among the other categories of displaced and marginalized people in the world we now have that of heritage refugees. Herzfelds work is of particular relevance to archaeologists and heritage practitioners 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 history, 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 indifference, 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 community. 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 Khmerization, 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 heritage, and the creation of a convention to conserve it, is almost, by way of displacement, 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 predominantly 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 tradition 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 undergraduate 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 genuinely 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 vi-Strausss denition of myths as machines for the suppression of time is really that Le 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 monumental 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 etymology, which leaders use to legitimate their power, can by the same token be used to delegitimize 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 themselves, 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 cultural 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 operates, 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 destroying these sorts of communities is very similar to the way the state arrogates the discourse 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 dominates your lives and does not really give you the freedom to determine what is appropriate 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 nationstate, 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 interesting, 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 anthropology 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 perhaps 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-attachment. 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 familiar. 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 perhaps vulnerable is not the right word for something which I think you would maintain 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 essentialism 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 intervening 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 ontology and that is one area in which social anthropology and archaeology come together very closely and indeed must seriously do so.

References
Appadurai A (ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Byrne D (1995) Buddhist stupa and Thai social practice. World Archaeology 27(2): 266281. Byrne D (2009) Archaeology and the fortress of rationality. In: Meskell L (ed.) Cosmopolitan Archaeologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 6888. Campbell JK (1964) Honour, Family, and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Handler R (1985) On dialogue and destructive analysis: Problems in narrating nationalism and ethnicity. Journal of Anthropological Research 41: 171182.

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Herzfeld M (1991) A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Herzfeld M (1997) Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York, NY: Routledge. Herzfeld M (2006) Spatial cleansing: Monumental vacuity and the idea of the West. Journal of Material Culture 11: 127149. Herzfeld M (2009a) Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Herzfeld M (2009b) The cultural politics of gesture: Reflections on the embodiment of ethnographic practice. Ethnography 10(2): 131152. Herzfeld M (2010) Engagement, gentrification, and the neoliberal hijacking of history. Current Anthropology 51(Supplement 2): S259S267. s, Jackson J (1995) Culture, genuine and spurious: The politics of Indianness in the Vaupe Colombia. American Ethnologist 22(1): 227. Thomas N (1996) Colonialisms Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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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