Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage by Michael Herzfeld (review)

Abstract

S Archaism interrogates the assumptions that underpin modernist models of social order presided over by technocratic elites. Its protagonists are marginalized people who refuse to grant primacy to the modern state’s vision of national heritage, which leave little space to alternative forms of community. However, against difficult odds they persist, and mobilize their own definitions of tradition to carve out a niche within the formal polity that encapsulates them. In a nutshell, this is an account of the apparent triumph of the nation-state form and of the varieties of social aggregation that cannot be permitted to exist within it. Herzfeld’s “subversive archaists” are recalcitrant traditionalists, often radically conservative. Theirs is not a revolutionary impulse as much as it is a reformist one. However, while they do react to the strictures imposed by modern forms of sociopolitical organization, their subversivism is not a form of “primitive rebellion” (Hobsbawm 1959) as much as it is a desire for recognition of unsanctioned models of tradition that are fully loyal to the nations of which they are part. Despite this, they are targets of state suspicion and bourgeois disdain because they do not fit within the master plan of the sanitized order that projects onto the global plane an image of the nation-state as sober, serious, and respectable, and, importantly, Western-inflected. They are the lower classes who eagerly play the game of national heritage, but not according to the rules devised by technocratic elites at the helm of the national bureaucracy. As conceptual holdouts against a modernizing order that seeks to displace their folk model of the society, they provoke within the nation-state bureaucracy an “anxiety of