Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State

Hans Beck

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226711515
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Much like our own time, the ancient Greek world was constantly expanding and becoming more connected to global networks. The landscape was shaped by an ecology of city-states, local formations that were stitched into the wider Mediterranean world. While the local is often seen as less significant than the global stage of politics, religion, and culture, localism, argues historian Hans Beck has had a pervasive influence on communal experience in a world of fast-paced change. Far from existing as outliers, citizens in these communities were deeply concerned with maintaining local identity, commercial freedom, distinct religious cults, and much more. Beyond these cultural identifiers, there lay a deeper concept of the local that guided polis societies in their contact with a rapidly expanding world.Drawing on a staggering range of materials­­—including texts by both known and obscure writers, numismatics, pottery analysis, and archeological records—Beck develops fine-grained case studies that illustrate the significance of the local experience. Localism and the Ancient Greek City-State builds bridges across disciplines and ideas within the humanities and shows how looking back at the history of Greek localism is important not only in the archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, but also in today's conversations about globalism, networks, and migration.

1

Localism and the Local in Ancient Greece

Language is a curious thing. Take the harmless word local. In its most common usage, local appears in an attributive sense, as in local cuisines, local elites, or local weather. The word has hidden connotations of tininess. Local insinuates confinement in place and relevance; effectively, it suggests an implicit relation to something of greater exposure. This is even clearer with the noun, when the plural locals is used in a patronizing sense, referring to people with a limited understanding of prevailing complexities and a worldview that is characterized as parochial—another harmless word. All the while, local also triggers a different intervention. As early as 1983, the acclaimed film Local Hero captured the desire for deceleration and secludedness in times of rapid change. In the movie, both are found in fictional Ferness, a village along the remote shores of Scotland’s North Atlantic coast. As the plot unfolds, Ferness becomes emblematic of a plain, authentic lifestyle. Although variously connected with the outside world by land and sea, the magnetic force of place ties the lead characters to the local horizon: its natural environment, social practices, and patterns of reasoning. The small town gradually reveals itself as Gegenwelt to global networks and faceless corporations, yet this innate quality of the local is understood only if and when translated into an embodied experience.

The movie played at a time when an all-new era of connectivity was only just beginning to loom on the horizon. As globalization turned from fiction to reality, the local became the live wire that grounded its critics, providing them with a robust alternative to the advancement of global capitalism. Prioritization of local governance, culture, and production soon inspired a towering wave of localism. Today, advocacy for the local might often be a commercial cliché or a slogan in support of frontline politics. But it can also be a potent response to the seismic shifts of globalization.

The charged semantics of the term local bear heavily on conversations about one of the most basic traits of ancient Greek history and culture: that is, that the city-states of Aegean Greece were through and through local formations. The typical Greek polis was a notoriously small enterprise, with a limited territory and a modest population size. Scholars estimate an average figure of less than ten thousand inhabitants, which puts the casual city-state in the range of a face-to-face society. Everything happened in a small environment. From storytelling to learned discourses in philosophy, from the creation of material styles to self-subsistent economic activities, and from the conduct of politics to the exercise of religion: the local world was the place where relevant conversations took place and related practices played out. It was a stage that was as real as it was inspirational, a rich source of meaning and orientation to all. This is of course not to deny the obvious, that ancient Greece, from the Archaic period on, was a world on its feet. A high degree of mobility and economic entanglement, powered by the adventurous spirit of heroic travelers and their desire for distant shores, induced all sorts of fluid connections near and far that energized Hellenic culture. But there was a notorious flipside, a subtle dialectic that tied those global exchanges to, and grounded them in, the local horizon.1

This book takes stock of the local part of the dialectic. The local, or epichoric, horizon of ancient Greece is both the subject and the scope of our investigation. Rather than projecting reductionist images of social slow motion or seclusion, the local lens captures a world of immediacy. As we shall see, the local was not merely subject to the call for self-governance (autonomia), articulated by a body of citizens whose political status was typically connected with landholding. Reference to the corresponding social ambience of a farmer’s life, itself frequently associated with the tenets of a primitivist economy, doesn’t suffice either to unravel the threads of local attachment. Instead, the local was fueled by charged ideas of belonging and intricate ways of knowing; it was an outlet of cultural creativity and competition; bristling with excitement and sensation; home to ambition and the celebration of sweet success; and the place where the community suffered from, and lived through, calamity and cataclysm. In this sense, the local canvas of ancient Greece was as rich and diverse as the human experience itself.

Place-Identity and Boundedness in a Connected World

It has often been remarked that the world of ancient Greece was shaped by fragmentation. Josiah Ober speaks of an “ecology of city-states” (2015, 21), implying that Classical Greece comprised countless poleis that were both united under a shared culture and segregated at the same time, similar to one another, yet different. Multiple circles of identity tied the city to the local, regional, and universal Panhellenic horizon. The pervasive study of these identities in literary traditions and material evidence is at the heart of our discipline. As the conversation continues, we are repeatedly reminded of the methodological challenges and conceptual caveats that permeate the debate. Modifiers of identity—for instance, ethnic identity, cultural identity, gender identity, or micro-identity—have been found as a convenient way out of the dilemma, but here too, scholarship warns us that these branches cannot easily be separated from one another. Where modified strands of identity appear, the isolation is heuristic rather than real, formulated in response to practical needs in the organization of scholarship. What figures as a modified register of identity in research, in real life was, and always is, inextricably intertwined with other circles of identity.2

The rise of place as a conceptual paradigm in the human and social sciences, while remarkable in itself, has resuscitated yet another identity in scholarship. In the words of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, there is a staggering new interest in the study of places with a “distinctive identity derived from the set of available opportunities and the particular interplay of human responses to them” (2000, 80). Spurred by extensive and exciting conversations about the social constructions of space, the study of definite place has been brought to the scholarly agenda with full force. The trend is further supported by the creative application of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) in the human sciences to collect, sort, and visualize spatial data, which empowers research on the question of how location determines a community’s place in the world. With the arrival of a wealth of new conceptual and technological advances, inquiries into place and identity have gained an all-new momentum both in and across a variety of disciplines, including history and historical geography, sociology, anthropology, and the neurosciences. Along the way, the notion of an identity of place has joined the canon of modified identities.

The study of place-based identity targets the linkage between people and the world around them—for instance, how people develop attitudes about urban designs, landscapes, environments, and ecosystems. The resulting spatial psychologies all feed off of place in one way or another. Place provides the real or imagined frame of reference for the identity that is associated with it: for politicized forms of identity, such a local point of reference appears quintessential (Ulf 2009, 224). Unlike a local identity, commonly understood as a sentiment of belonging to a locally confined group of people, the identity of place is energized by place itself. It is filled with meaning that relates to and derives from locality. This is also why identities of place and their expression in custom and culture have the capacity to cut across groups that are otherwise often segregated or marginalized. The identity of place blurs social divisions and hierarchies, although it obviously doesn’t discard them altogether. Shaping images—real and of the mind—of local distinctiveness, the identity of place reverberates across different segments of society. Beyond the group(s) within, it also informs the way in which people from outside (travelers, visitors) experience a particular place. Couched in a discrete locality, it inspires a local discourse environment (below) that is discernable from other such environments.3

The interplay between place and identity is both obvious and complicated. In the study of ancient Greece, the alliance is undercut by the dynamics of two powerful movements. The first is the issue of displacement. It is easy to see how the enforced displacement of individuals, groups of people, or entire societies disrupts sentiments of belonging to and association with place. For the world of Classical Greece, it has been argued that migration, displacement, and mass relocation, voluntary or enforced, were not only central to the survival and viability of Hellenic culture but key to its success. Exile and diaspora were prominent features in Greek society—so prominent that they qualify as landmarks in the formulation of a Greek migrant identity (another modified identity).4 All the while, it is worth recalling that the majority of all Greek city-states, though they experienced the anguish of war, natural catastrophe, or violent civil strife and the displacement that came with these horrors, were settlements with a remarkable continuity in place, many of them throughout Graeco-Roman antiquity.

For the age of the so-called Great Colonization, from the eighth century BCE to the end of the sixth, several cities exported sizeable proportions of their inhabitants overseas. It is debatable just how sizeable the number of emigrants was. The Stanford Polis Project has calculated that only 8 percent of all known poleis (eighty-one in total) embraced the role of a mother-city—that is, they sent out colonies or piggybacked onto another city’s colonizing activities. Ancient Greece has been labeled a wandering culture, but throughout the long duration of their history, many cities had only limited or no bonds with diaspora populations on the remote shores of the Mediterranean or the Black Sea from previous acts of displacement.5

The second jeopardy relates to the first, yet it weighs more heavily. It is the notion of connectedness in general, which significantly complicates the twin concept of place and identity. It has become a truism to note that everything is connected to everything else (see “Linked,” Albert-László Barabási’s popular study on the science of networks [2002]). Networks adhere, argues Barabási, to relatively simple laws and structures; in fact, this simplicity explains why they are so pervasive. As the network expands horizontally, it doesn’t just imprint upon its local nodes (societies, economies, groups of friends, etc.), it alters the morphology of their being. Among the most eminent consequences of this is the transformation of the time and space continuum into which local nodes are typically nested. Time is felt differently, simply because of the high volume and speed of communication. Place, too, forfeits its physicality. For network participants, location, distance, and physical boundaries no longer play a critical role in many relationships, as these are overcome by new modes of communication and a sense of proximity, for good or for ill.

Social media users will immediately attest to the force at stake, as will those of us upon whom the social media communications of others (e.g., tweets) are forced via more traditional news channels. Network societies, in the description of Manuel Castells, adhere to a grammar of loosely structured, horizontal connections that marginalize more conventional categories such as “top and bottom” or “center and periphery.” In a network society, the new benchmark is one of belonging to the network as such. Effectively, the development of a connected mindset is not only determined by a new degree of linkages and information flow, but by the tacit consent of participants to adhere to the recalibration of time and space as dictated by the network.6

Such a formative quality of the network is certainly also true for its most extensive manifestation, that is, in the global context. Approaches to the history of premodern societies through the lens of global network science have become immensely influential. In the study of the ancient (Greek) Mediterranean, the notion of globalization has become a salient paradigm.7 Recent research has demonstrated how, from the Archaic period, shifting horizons of engagement created a new kind of Hellenic convergence in the Mediterranean basin. In this approach, the Mediterranean figures both as an analytic unit of and backdrop for the investigation, which has given rise to the label Mediterraneanization—an awkward term, to be sure, but the emphasis on process rather than timeless Mediterraneanism is important. Mediterraneanization thinks through the obvious: that is, that locally encoded, bounded cultures are never pristine but are energized by connections near and far. Material evidence casts a spotlight on those connections and their resonance in everyday practices: for instance, in securing raw materials, developing crafts, trading objects, and the conspicuous consumption of imported goods. Drawing on advanced readings of materiality and its entanglement with human practice as it transpires from cultural theory, Mediterraneanization studies shed new light on how people in Graeco-Roman antiquity experienced the world and how this experience was shaped by networking activities across the sea.8

Local boundedness was an important part of the mix. Indeed, Mediterraneanization suggests that the interrelations between bounded cultures were so deeply entangled that this altered the conventional binary of local and global. Each end of the binary infiltrated the other; both were intertwined, and the relation was exposed to accelerated adaptation and change over time. This is how, and why, the word glocal has entered the debate, which has become so prominent in recent humanities and social sciences research. According to the conventional cycle of cross-fertilization between the local and the global, globalization triggers an increasing sense of disconnection from the local, or delocalization. This fuels a new need of locality; beyond its casual meaning of having a location, the term denotes the long-standing patterns that emerge from the association with the local, including all expressions of local culture, knowledge production, and communal conviction, each one in relation to the local horizon that inspires it. In its most immediate variant, this need of locality inspires the sentiment of localism: that is, a mindset that prioritizes the sum of these local expressions and experiences over alternative sources of meaning from outside the community. Localism, in turn, challenges the basic tenets of globalization. Glocal indicates that the rotations in this cycle happen all at once, signaling a hybridization of the ways in which existing sociocultural practices are recombined with new forms and in new practices.9

In a study that is nothing short of ingenious, Irad Malkin has made these tenets fruitful for the scholarly exploration of ancient Greece. His recent book on connectivity in the Greek Mediterranean (2011) examines the multiple networks of colonization, commerce, and religion that allowed Hellenes near and far to interact with increasing frequency. This “small Greek world,” Malkin argues, witnessed a persistent increase in its connectedness. The necessary prerequisites in infrastructure and technology behind this are easy to pin down: improved navigation at sea and developing road networks on land; increasing volume of trade in response to the rising demands of urban societies; advanced security of travel, and so forth. Yet Malkin’s analysis extends beyond such material improvements. Drawing on network theories that are inspired by social media communication on the internet, he explains how networks constitute a particular type of social morphology. We just noted how networks are prone to trigger a shift in the mindsets of those who engage in them, and how they undermine the juxtaposition of near and far. In the concrete terms of ancient Greece, and according to Malkin: despite the vast distances betwee...