Identity Crisis

Today I spent all day at school. Mondays and Wednesdays I’m at ACT from 11 in the morning until 830 at night. It’s so tiring, and I have a three and a half hour break between two of my classes. I actually hate it, because it’s not enough time to go home or go downtown; you’re just stuck on campus, either in the library or in the cafeteria. I did all my work and studied and everything, and still had two hours. I pretty much just tooled around on the internet, played Sporcle for endless hours. It’s very boring. Plus, it was cold and wet without actually raining today, so I couldn’t even sit outside.

However, I’m really enjoying the classes themselves. Every class I’m taking is related to Greece in some capacity, but currently they are all related in that every class is discussing the need/quest for a cultural identity in Greece. I find it so fascinating, since cultural identity isn’t something I usually think about. We have a fairly strong cultural identity in America, even if we don’t always think about it in those terms, so it seems so foreign to not only have questions over a national identity, but to create one by potentially bending history in order to unify a country. In my Modern Greek Politics class, we’ve been talking about how when Greece won their independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s, they needed a way to unify the newborn country. They did so by claiming ancestry to the ancient Greeks, and supported this claim using folklore and folktales. Some Europeans argued that after hundreds of years of Ottoman rule modern Greeks couldn’t possibly claim relation to the Greeks of a thousand years ago, but anthropologists and folklorists were used as a political tool to give the new nation an identity to stand behind. This is where my folklore class comes in; by using the stories of the common people as indicators of their past, they linked the modern Greece to the ancient.

What’s more, in ancient Macedonia in the years before Alexander (here comes my Life of Alexander class), there were questions among ancient Greeks as to whether Macedonians and those in Northern Greece could really be called Greeks and not barbarians, as they lived a much different lifestyle and lived in a very multi-ethnic environment. There is, however, all sorts of evidence that points to them speaking Greek, ancient historians referring to them as Greek, etc. In the original Olympic games, all participants had to be Greek. Alexander I, king of Macedonia, wanted to participate and after heated debate was allowed in the games, winning first place in his event and cementing the Macedonian people as a Greek people.

However, the above story is completely false. The Macedonian royalty made that story up and an ancient historian printed it in order to convince the rest of the Greeks that they were actually descendants of the Argives (which we now know is true, but they didn’t then!). This brings into question the whole point of historian as someone who is objective and how often they bend history for their own purposes, relating back again to the anthropologists of modern Greece who may have withheld certain information and published others in order to give the Greeks a shared and noble history.

What’s more, until a few years ago, the Serbians, who today occupy part of the land that was ancient Macedonia, claimed ancestry to Alexander the Great in their own attempts to formulate a national identity, and the Greeks hated it, since that was their heritage and the Serbians are a Slavic nation. (Now for the past two years the Serbs have claimed relation to a different tribe that inhabited Macedonia at the same time as the Alexander, and the Greeks have calmed down.) This whole thing about cultural identity and forging one for the purpose of national unity and political propaganda fascinates me, especially since it seems to have been going on for centuries.

What’s more, apparently modern Greeks have some sort of superiority-inferiority complex from the national identity they’ve chosen; they feel superior to everyone else since their ancestors invented so many wonderful things that completely changed the Western world, but at the same time they feel inferior to their claimed ancestors, because really, who in modern Greece can you call the next Aristotle, Sophocles?

The whole thing is dizzying and fascinating, even though I’ve probably bored you all with my lengthy description of “what I’ve been learning in school”. At any rate, this is what I’ve been up to, and even though I may not have explained it well, it’s really very interesting, and feel free to ask me about it. Or, if you got bored and skimmed, that’s OK too.