Bloch, Maurice. 1998. How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.
- Chapter 8. 1974–2007: After History
- » Epitaph
Chapter 8. 1974–2007: After History
Epitaph
You died and you, too, became: the good one.
The brilliant human being, the family man, the patriot.
Thirty-six wreaths accompanied you, three homilies by vice presidents,
Seven resolutions on the wonderful services that you have rendered.
Ah, Lavrenti, only I knew what scum you were,
What counterfeit, your whole life a lie.
Sleep in peace, I will not disturb your serenity.
(I, living a whole life of silence will pay
a king's ransom for it, not the price of your sorry skin.)
Sleep in peace. As you always were in life: the good,
The brilliant human being, the family man, the patriot.
You won't be the first or the last.
—Manolis Anagnostakis
Understanding the past in the present, Maurice Bloch has argued, means always acknowledging that the past is not simply a matter of transmitted “oral history” but equally a matter of “episodic memory” (events that are not narrated by the narrator, that are either excised or forgotten or both). Thus, Bloch argues 1998: 39), the past and its history are not a matter of “collective memory” but should include ad hoc memory, small-aside knowledge. Memory, then, even (or especially) collective memory and “oral history” cannot, do not, or (as Anagnostakis makes clear in the poem above) ought not to subjugate to their hegemony the knowledge of one by one, even if such knowledge remains private, undisclosed, and unspoken. Public knowledge of what a person or an event is or was ought not to obliterate the (possibly contradictory) private knowledge of the same.
One evening, in the summer of 2006, I was talking with my father about my uncle, the chief of Special Security after the junta, an uncle whom I loved and respected for many reasons. (He had served in the division against trafficking of antiquities in the years preceding the junta, had been fired by the junta, was gentle and kind, and inquired after me on the night of the Polytechnic.)
Just as I was asking after him, my mother's voice came from the other room. “Junta,” she said, meaning that he was the embodiment of the junta.
“Junta?” I asked.
“Junta, junta,” my mother responded, explaining to me, for the first time, that my uncle (her cousin) had not been fired by the junta because he was democratically minded but because he thought that the junta was not effective enough and that it had veered away from the monarchy.
Dumbfounded, I looked at my father for comment.
He nodded, “Yes.”
Why had they kept up this charade all these years? “It's kinship,” an anthropologist friend surmised, as I was telling the story.
But my parents had a different explanation. “It's not good to tell things like that,” they said. “Forget about it now; everyone thought that he was engaged in passive resistance.”
After the junta he was brought back to the police and promoted to the second-highest rank before he retired, his reputation not only intact but greatly enhanced.
How can such intimate information be turned into anthropological knowledge? Information that is of heuristic value, that cannot contribute to the development of a theory of patterns, trends, cannot produce a definitive theory of culture. Writing in this crevice, between knowledge and information, is an endeavor that finds itself faced with two risks: to naturalize one's intimate and personal experience and reproduce it as universal, and to naturalize one's familiarity with the ethical landscape and reproduce it as unproblematic. But it is an endeavor that, in recognizing its own risks and the possibilities of its own failures, engages in the production of an oblique theory of anthropological knowledge, coming at it from an angle, the angle where one recognizes the ethnographer's multiplicity of positions (nothing new in this), the subject's multiplicity of positions (nothing new in this, either), and the impossibility of any stability in any of these positions as they interrogate each other. The trenchant question of the proximity of the ethnographer to her ethnos has thus far organized the question of the ethos of ethnography. And it is precisely the ethos of ethnography that is at the heart of the question posited here: What sort of anthropological knowledge is produced with the intimate information of the “native” ethnographer? One could ask for Dan Sperber's solution of divorcing ethnography from anthropology as a heuristic tool to find out how one operates in the absence of the other. I think, however, that such a solution is rather like the judgment of Solomon: separating anthropology from ethnography would result in the death of both. I prefer to remain with the “uncomfortable combination” that Bloch sees in Robert Herz's ethnography in the desire to engage with and produce both a “generalizing” work and an understanding “from the inside” (Bloch 1998: 39). I want to explode the question of naturalizing the familiar.
The door to the censorship office in the Yáros prison building. The label on the door means “censorship.” Photograph by Apostolos Papageorgiou, used with permission.