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Continuities: Essentialist or Sensory?

Hamilakis and Yalouri make an important contribution to the recent growth in studies of Greek nationalism, which is part of a more general trend in history, anthropology and related disciplines to analyse nationalism as a cultural phenomenon, and the politics of ‘invented traditions’. By focusing on the sacralisation of archaeological remains, they add an important piece to the general picture of the uses of the past in modern Greece. While doing this they make their argument relevant to those authors looking at the power of objects and material remains to serve as sites for memory and historical consciousness, objects and/or rituals whose function is to ‘recall the past without enumerating it’ (Rappaport 1994: 76). In particular, archaeological remains resemble those ‘inalienable possessions’ which because of their power to symbolise continuity with ancestors, are withdrawn from the circuits of gift and commodity exchange (Weiner 1992). Objects from the past, much as we may attempt to preserve them behind glass cases in museums, have a ‘social life’ and are deployed in struggles for power and ideological legitimacy in the present. Given the sacred or ‘religious’ character that archaeological remains play in the Greek national narrative, Hamilakis and Yalouri sensibly argue that archaeologists, like historians and other scholars, must see their work as necessarily political. We cannot escape into objectivity; studies of the past are always in some way also reflections of the values of the present and the future. The authors rightly point to the hegemonic status of the ancient past in contemporary Greece. As I discovered during my research into historical consciousness on the island of Kalymnos, Kalymnians of radically different religious and political persuasions were united in the view that History should be read for what it revealed about the continuity in character of peoples and nations. Like archaeology, the narrative of Greek nationalism dominated written history on Kalymnos. Popular memories which conflicted with this narrative — for example, of women-led collective action — could still be found, but had none of the social capital to compete with ‘official history’, as written by an educated elite (see Doumanis 1997; Sutton 1998; 1999).