Trad nationalist a/effects

Abstract

At a time of heightened focus on nationalisms across the globe, including hybrid formations uniting various social institutions with political factions, Michael Herzfeld’s Subversive archaism: Troubling traditionalists and the politics of national heritage provides a lens shift through which to capture the dynamic intersecting aspects of tradition, heritage, and state authority. The focal length of Herzfeld’s theoretical lens offers a clear perspective on conceptions of belonging and political tension that does not compress issues of marginality, civility, and bureaucracy; rather it brings them into sharp focus through portraits of communities who question and subvert the status quo forms of political authority they live with and in daily. In providing these richmultisited ethnographic observations, combined with archival interventions, about the embodied and lived experiences of nationalisms and heritage negotiation, Herzfeld unapologetically offers us a masterful comparative anthropological reframing in the ongoing study of nation-states. Herzfeld draws us into a tale of an adaptive structure of political change and possibility, one akin, in some respects, to what I have encountered in a far different political climate and context in the United States among the Reactive Orthodox Christian movement (Riccardi-Swartz 2022). I reflect upon Herzfeld’s book as an anthropologist of religion and politics who works on globally connected networks of Orthodox Christianity and religio-political nationalism in the United States. My goal here is not to recapitulate Herzfeld’s theories and ideas, but rather