Herzfeld’s model of subversive archaism offers us an example of understanding how marginalised groups challenge and subvert authority. Herzfeld is not proposing that any given group needs to fit neatly into the category of subversive archaists, but rather how some groups reach back into the past to offer an alternative future, writes Olivia Porter, reviewing Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage by Michael Herzfeld

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‘The nation-state depends on obviousness because, in reality, its own primacy is not an obvious or logical necessity at all. It is presented as a given, and most people accept it as such. Implicitly or explicitly, subversive archaists question it’ (Herzfeld 2021: 123).

The excerpt above encapsulates the central thesis of the social anthropologist and heritage studies scholar Michael Herzfeld’s Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage. That being, that the modern nation-state is widely accepted as the primary unit of territorial and cultural organization, but that there are a group of people, subversive archaists, who question this rhetoric. Subversive archaism challenges the notion that the nation-state, constrained by bureaucratic organization and with an emphasis on an ethnonational state, is the only acceptable form of polity. Subversive archaists offer an alternative polity, one legitimized by understandings of heritage that date back further than the homogenous ‘collective heritage’ proposed in state-generated discourses for the purpose of creating a ubiquitous representation of national unity (2021: 2). In Chapter One, we learn that subversive archaists instead reach further back into the past to reclaim older and often more inclusive polities and understandings of belonging, and in doing so, they utilize ancient heritage to challenge the authority, and very notion, of the modern nation-state.

In this blogpost I shall provide a chapter by chapter overview of Subversive Archaism before considering Herzfeld’s archaists in relation to James C. Scott’s anarchists, and how these categorizations of marginalized peoples relate to my own research on the Tai Zawti, a marginalized Buddhist community who live on the borders of Myanmar and China. I shall then consider how Herzfeld’s notion of subversive archaism puts a name to the lines of argument used to challenge the authority of the nation-state in the contemporary world, and how the tools of subversive archaism might become more prevalent in response to the increasing global popularity of nationalist ideology.

Herzfeld examines this concept of subversive archaism through comparative ethnography, drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with two communities:  1) the Zoniani of Zoniana in Crete, Greece, and 2) the Chao Pom of Pom Mahakan, Bangkok, Thailand. At first, the two communities appear geographically and culturally distinctively dissimilar. However, they share one important feature—neither country has ever been officially colonized by a Western state. Herzfeld ascribes the term ‘crypto-colonialism’, a ‘disguised’ form of colonialism, to both Greece and Thailand, as states that despite never being officially colonized, were both under constant pressure to conform to Western cultural, political, and economic demands (2021: 12). Herzfeld explains that such countries place a great emphasis on their political independence and cultural integrity having never been colonized, yet many forms of their independence were dictated by Western powers.

In Chapter Two, Herzfeld explores the historical origins of the images and symbols mimicked by subversive archaists to challenge the dominant, often ethnonationalist, narrative of the nation-state.  Subversive archaists ransack official historiography and claim nationalist heroes as their own, and in identifying themselves with the heroic past of the nation state, they legitimize their own status as rightful members of the nations in which they now find themselves marginalized. Rather than reject official narratives, subversive archaists appropriate them, in ways that undermine state bureaucracy. For example, the Zoniani (and many Cretans) do not reject the official historiography of the state, which emphasises continuity with Hellenic culture. In fact, they fiercely defend it, and go one further, by citing etymological similarities between Cretan dialects that bear traces of an early regional version of Classical Greek. In doing so, they make claims that they have a better understanding of history than the state bureaucrats. Both the Zoniani and the Chao Pom are proud of their respective identities as members of their national majorities, and despite official attempts to question their origins, they have the authority of majority status on their side (2021: 60).

Chapter Three explores belonging and remoteness through kinship structures and geographical location. Herzfeld highlights how the nation-state uses the symbolic distancing of communities as remote or inaccessible as a tool to marginalize communities. Pom Mahakan is located on the outskirts of Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, and nowadays Zoniana is accessible by road. These locations are not inaccessible, and communication with the two communities is entirely possible. Herzfeld argues that the characterization of these communities as remote and inaccessible is applied by hostile bureaucracies rather than by the communities themselves as an extreme form of intentional political marginalization (2021: 60, 68). In Chapter Seven, Herzfeld revisits the use of ‘marginal’ to describe groups such as Chao Pom and Zoniani and suggests that the term “marginalized” is more appropriate, since no group of people is ever inherently marginal, but are instead marginalized in a historically and ethnographically observable process by powerful social actors who define the centre and periphery (2021: 150). Emphasizing geographical remoteness, and in turn social and ideological remoteness, are examples of this process.

In Chapter Four, Herzfeld proposes that we reframe the assumption that religion shapes cities and instead think about how cosmology shapes polities (2021: 69). In particular, how Zoniani society is still structured by a patrilineal clan system, and Chao Pom society by a mandala-based moeang system. These structures represent an older, and alternative, system of polity to the modern bureaucratic nation-state. For example, the Chao Pom embrace religious and ethnic minorities, arguing that diversity is representative of true Thai society, and that tolerance and generosity are true Thai ideals (2021: 40). The notion of polity itself is the focus of Chapter Five which explores how Pom Mahakan and Zoniana have cosmologically distinct identities that, when conceptualized as part of the same system as the nation-state, both mimic and challenge the state’s legitimacy, thus inviting official violence (2021: 118).

In Chapter Six, under a sub-heading titled “the art of looking governed”, Herzfeld explains how neither the Zoniani nor Chao Pom fit into the James C. Scott’s concept of “the art of not being governed”, proposed by Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009). Herzfeld responds to Scott throughout the book, highlighting the differences between Scott’s Zomian anarchists who flee from state centres into remote mountainous regions of Zomia, a region which spans across northeastern India; the central highlands of Vietnam; the Shan Hills in northern Myanmar; and the mountains of Southwest China, and his subversive archaists who actively engage with the state. Scott’s Zomian anarchists are hill peoples, whom he describes as best understood as runaway communities who have fled the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys, namely, slavery, conscription, taxes, etc (2009: IX). For Scott, these communities have made a deliberate decision to physically leave the centres of authority and retreat into the hills, where they can keep the state at arm’s length. Herzfeld argues that what sets subversive archaists apart from the “state-shunning groups” described by Scott, but also makes them representative of a widespread form of resistance to state hegemony, is their “demand for reciprocal respect and their capacity to play subversive games with the state’s own rhetoric and symbolism” (2021: 134). Arguably, the reason that the Zoniani and Chao Pom can demand ‘reciprocal respect’ is related to their ethnic, historical, and cultural affiliation with the majority that marginalizes them. The ethnic minorities of Zomia do not benefit from the same types of affiliation.

My own research focuses on a Theravada Buddhist tradition called the Tai Zawti. The Tai Zawti are a religious community, but they are closely associated with the Shan ethnic group who inhabit the borders of Myanmar, China, and Thailand. The Shan, who inhabit Scott’s Zomia, are an ethnic minority in all the modern nation-states they inhabit. Scott, drawing on the work of the anthropologist E. M. Mendelson, identifies the Tai Zawti as an example of a “heretical sect” who escaped lowland central authority by fleeing into the Shan Hills, to support his argument that hill demography and geography facilitated religious heterodoxy and served as a “zone of refuge” for heterodox groups. In my PhD thesis, I identify how the Tai Zawti have employed strategies, namely self-imposed isolation, to avoid centralised control and persecution in order to protect their strong commitment to a strict and literal interpretation of the Theravada canon, especially its monastic codes.

The Tai Zawti do not necessarily fit neatly into Herzfeld’s characterization of subversive archaists, given that they do not associate themselves with the ‘majority group’, which in their cultural context could be the wider Shan community or Burmese society more broadly, and they have their own history, culture and cosmology. However, they do share some features, and have the potential to employ some of the techniques, of subversive archaists. The Tai Zawti were forced out of the centres and fled to the Shan Hills, where they enjoyed social and ideological isolation, and therefore freedom to practise their religious traditions, beyond the gaze of the disapproving Burmese Sangha. This enabled them to preserve religious practices that are rooted in the Pali canon, the most authoritative Buddhist religious texts, that have been lost in mainstream Burmese Buddhism as a result of numerous Sangha reforms. In this way, the Tai Zawti’s retention of, to use Herzfeld’s terminology, ‘archaic’ Buddhist rituals that have been lost elsewhere, signals an understanding and commitment to the Buddhist religious texts that goes beyond the mainstream. In this way, the religious orthopraxy of the Tai Zawti could be utilized for potentially subversive ends. However, rather than vocalizing these differences to challenge the hegemony of the Burmese Sangha, the contemporary Tai Zawti do not draw attention to their religious orthodoxy, in order to protect themselves, and preserve their tradition.

Ultimately, Herzfeld’s model of subversive archaism offers us an example of understanding how marginalised groups challenge and subvert authority. Herzfeld is not proposing that any given group needs to fit neatly into the category of subversive archaists, but rather how some groups reach back into the past to offer an alternative future. In Chapter Eight, Herzfeld explores the future of subversive archaist communities, and also how subversive archaism might mutate into nationalist, and potentially dangerous, movements. The Chao Pom embrace ethnic and religious minorities on the grounds that acceptance and inclusion are true Thai ideals. However, there are dangers to invoking ideologies attached to ‘true’ ideologies of national cultures and traditions, and other types of communities can utilize the rhetoric of subversive archaism. For example, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, “antimaskers” use the language of “liberty” and “democracy” against the modern bureaucratic state, seeking to transform the present into an idealized national past (2021: 166).

When I first read Subversive Archaism, I was sceptical about who qualified as a subversive archaist. At first, the term seemed too rigid, a community had to be marginalized by the state authority, but associate themselves with the majority and use the language of the state to legitimize themselves their alternative polity. Then, the term seemed too broad, it is not specific to a certain geography, ethnic identity, or religion, and can apply to religious and non- religious groups. Subversive archaism might help us make sense of the Chao Pom and the Zoniani, but who are the subversive archaists of the contemporary world? Then, one morning, when listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service covering the inauguration of India’s controversial new parliament building, I heard a line of argument, from the Indian historian Pushpesh Pant, that struck me as being rooted in subversive archaism.

When asked about the aesthetics of the new parliament building, Pant remarked “I think it is a monstrosity… If the whole idea was to demolish whatever the British, the colonial masters, had built, and have a symbolic resurrection of Indian architecture, I would even go, stick my leg out and say Hindu architecture, it should have been an impressive tribute to generations of Indian architectural tradition Vastu Shastra. Vastu Shastra is the Indian science of building, architecture.” He goes on to say: “How does this symbolize India? What is Indian about the pentagonal building. It’s not even like a star of David, it’s not like the Sri Yantra, it is not like a tantric image, instead of having an Indian symbol, is it a hundred petal lotus? It is not… is it evoking the mighty rivers of India? It is not. What is Indian about it?”

In invoking the Vastu Shastra, the ancient Sanskrit manuals of Indian architecture, and the Sri Yantra, the mystical diagram used in the Shri Vidya school of Hinduism, Pant demonstrates his deep understanding of ancient Indian architecture and imagery. And in doing so, he highlights the missed opportunities of the bureaucratic state in designing their new parliament building to create a building that was truly representative of archaic Indian architecture. He does what Herzfeld describes as “playing the official arbiters of cultural excellence [here, the BJP] at their own game” (2021: 30). I suspect, given the rise of nationalist movements across the globe, the tools of subversive archaism, rather than subversive archaists groups per se, will become all the more visible.

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* This book review is published by the LSE Southeast Asia blog and LSE Review of Books blog as part of a collaborative series focusing on timely and important social science books from and about Southeast Asia.

* Banner photo front cover of Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage by Michael Herzfeld. 

*The views expressed in the blog are those of the author alone. They do not reflect the position of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.