The Outrageous Comparisons of Michael Herzfeld

Sylvia and Aaron interview Professor Michael Herzfeld about his latest book, Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022 .

We begin with Dr. Herzfeld's penchant for comparing seemingly disparate cultural settings, settings that, as he argues, share parallel histories of "crypto-colonialism."  To take his latest example, we discuss how mountain dwellers in Greece and urbanites in Bangkok make similar subversive claims against their states by positioning themselves as the authentic protagonists of their nations' celebrated traditions. We fit this discussion into Dr. Herzfeld's larger body of work, especially his arguments about the embarrassing forms of "cultural intimacy" (the fellowship of the flawed) that lie at the core of national solidarity. 

That brings us to corruption, which Dr. Herzfeld understands as a sort of "political incest" (2018), and to the dirty secret that patronage plays in facilitating national solidarities (and then taking the blame when things go wrong).  Our discussion leads us to corruption in the US and Wester Europe, the need for performative competence when ordering off the menu in Dutch restaurants, and to a brief debate about the validity of "corruption" as an analytic category. 
 
We conclude with a question of fieldwork ethics. Dr. Herzfeld shares his critique of the way Internal Review Boards in the US prevent ethnographers from pressing for answers to hard questions.