cspdf, Job 181 - University of Kent

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ack, to the past, gather the pieces of debris that fly around him and ‘make whole what has been smashed’ (1992: 249), or follow the Edenic storm that propels him toward the future. This metaphor beautifully captures modern Greek associations of ‘progress’ with Hellenic history. This paper aims to explore such associations through the rhetoric that various Greek actors employed to discuss the Olympiad of 2004. This rhetoric, I argue, is genealogically linked to the hegemonisation of modern Greek culture by Western narratives that identified Hellenic civilisation with modernity, and denigrated modern Greeks for failing to live up to their illustrious ancestry. The Greek state did not simply comply with such narratives, on the contrary, it used them to contest the power relationship that the narrative itself perpetuates. In the context of Athens 2004 official Greek counter-hegemonic discourse negotiates the nature of the Greek-West relationship and reconstructs its rationale. According to the official Greek line of argumentation, the Olympic Games are a value that ought to circulate in a closed-circuit system of reciprocity between Greece and an imaginary ‘West’ – a West that is metonymically linked to a fictional ‘Europe’, or even to humanity as a whole. This argument guarantees the recognition of modern Greece as a benefactor of humanity, and as a country that is culturally and politically equal to those powerful ones that constantly criticise it for its ‘backwardness’. It is this narrative that equates (Bourdieu, 1984; Stewart, 1991)) political and economic with cultural capital. The paper has been divided into two parts. In Part I, I discuss the implications of Greece’s cultural and economic hegemonisation by the West –
that is, the impact of Western ideas in the process of Greek nation building. The debate is related to the genealogy and institution of the Olympic Games as a transnational value and their re-emergence in the context of Athens 2004. Part II examines closely the response that Greek state agents proffer to past and contemporary Western accusations of backwardness and inefficiency by prioritising Hellenic cultural over Western economic capital. I deconstruct the symbolic value that Greeks attribute to the Olympics by looking at the cultural logic underpinning their attempt to equate different types of capital. The unequal relationship between Greece and the West is contested through the presentation of modern Greeks as heirs of the ancient Hellenes, the alleged cultural benefactors of humanity to whom Western civilisation ‘owes’ its existence. I: HEGEMONY AND IDENTITY Contextualised Orientalisms: The Case of Greece The trajectory of those hegemonic discourses that represent modern Greece as a European ‘pariah’ is suggestive and pertinent, as they comprise a significant, though neglected, variant of what Edward Said (1978) famously termed ‘Orientalism’. According to Said, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a de-hypostasised, homogenous ‘Orient’ emerged in Western textual networks. The characteristics of this ‘Orient’ acquired meaning as the binary opposites of a series of essentialised Western qualities. So, if the West was rational, civilised and governed by ‘order’, the ‘Orient’ was irrational, uncivilised and characterised by disorder. Such binarisms were inherent in
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Page 37 and 38: Cultural Olympiad, http://www.cultu
Page 39 and 40: Herzfeld, M. (2002b) The Absent Pre
Page 41: Young, D.C. (1996) The Modern Olymp

cspdf, Job 181 - University of Kent

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