Localism and the Logic of Nationalistic Folklore: Cretan Reflections

Extract

The object of this article is to explore a familiar paradox of folklore studies: the promotion of powerfully localist readings in the service of an inclusive national entity. In the logic of European nationalism, this might seem an irresolvable paradox. The object of the nation-state is to unify all potentially divergent cultural and social entities within a single framework, so that localist sentiment ceases to represent the threat of political separatism. In some nation-states, the most harmonious symbiosis of localism with nationalism appears in those regions that are stereotypically regarded as culturally and politically marginal and are consequently subjected to the double-edged opprobrium of being both “simple” and yet also corrupted by a vast range of allegedly foreign elements both culturally and “racially.” A study of these tension-laden matters must dodge among several levels in order to go beyond the limitations both of purely local ethnography and of national-level historiography. If the former too easily occludes the effects of larger events on local perceptions, the latter can, and often does, fail to account for the success of nationalist ideologies in securing loyalty unto death even—or perhaps especially?—from populations that are notoriously unwilling to accept state rule in more mundane matters of law and order.