Epic Memory: Tactical performance - *** THIS FORUM IS ARCHIVED ***

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The museum, for example, is a typical facet of “European cultural expression” (Pearce 1992, 2) and constitutes a classic site of past production—material archive. Still, we know Hatzidakis’ museum to have peculiarities which do not operate within traditional parameters of the modern institution. Like museum collections oral poetics and even memory constitute produced forms of heritage. Many of the more knowledgeable of individuals we interviewed owned copies of volumes recording most of these songs—poetical archives. On several different occasions we encountered individuals who felt that the record of a particular song in written or aural forms provides an acceptable context for forgetting—a classic example of materialization as a form of preservation. Indeed this was part of the appeal for Georgios Hatzidakis in allowing us to record these songs on video. Books and other media including television are arenas of production. Other contexts are community sanctioned and many of the key figures associated with reminiscence are either in positions of power—the local priest in charge of the area churches and the head of the village Konstogerako—or they have contributed directly to these materialized forms (books or other media). Just as the work of folklorist James A. Notopoulos two generations ago was part of the materialization of these songs and poetics so too our fieldwork is part of this process.

The past, locality, and tradition are produced. In the course of everyday life people are constantly bombarded with images of the past whether it be in newspapers, television, or through the Internet. Indeed, contemporary Greece is a “heritage” state. The past, locality, and tradition saturate every facet of the present and have become central commodities fueling a tourist industry. In a separate vein these materializations of memory, these archives, are also produced out of anxieties about the meaning of the past combined with feelings of loss and decay associated with the passing of the last vestiges of once common practice. Ironically, preservation displaces memory. In its place rises history. Authority is now situated in relation to archive. For Pierre Nora, “the passage from memory to history has required every social group to redefine its identity through the revitalization of its own history. The task of remembering makes everyone his own historian” (Nora 1995, 638). The communities of Sphakia have emphasized their own idiosyncratic forms of identity and commemoration. Theirs is a heroic memory-history, one emblematic of the hardness of character that has helped to see these communities through periods of trial and tribulation. These materialized memories are reconfigured and presented as a continuous chain representative of tradition binding past to present as in The Song of Daskaloyannis, in the portrait of Vachlos and in the person of Gorgios Hatzidakis.

Nietzsche discusses this form of history, of which Nora describes as counter to memory (1995) and C. Nadia Seremetakis calls “American nostalgia” (1994), in Untimely Meditations as “antiquarian history.” Antiquarian history searches for continuities of place, identity, and language in which the present is rooted (see Foucault 1974). Concerning this modality of history Nietzsche warns:

"sufficient dangers remain should antiquarian history grow too mighty and overpower the other modes of regarding the past. For it knows only how to preserve life, not how to engender it… Thus it hinders any firm resolve to attempt something new, thus it paralyses the man of action, as one who acts, will and must offend some piety or other" (1984, 75).

We can say that such certainly applies to strategy, but what of tactic? Returning to de Certeau, the term “consumers” is a euphemism for the seemingly passive majority. Still, he maintains that there is a secondary production to be found in the process of utilization (de Certeau 1984). This secondary production of meaning occurs during tactical performance.

Archive need not be one-sided. Tactical performance is part of the larger process of how individuals recollect archived memories. It breathes life back into these seemingly static forms. Secondary production occurs and new meanings and memories are born out of such archives. This bottom-up approach is largely missing from the Nietzsche’s treatment of antiquarian history and Nora’s writings on its relationship to memory. Epic memory is about these textures of everyday life.

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