The uncertain state of islands: national identity and the discourse of islands in nineteenth-century Britain and Greece
The uncertain state of islands: national identity and the discourse of islands in nineteenth-century Britain and Greece
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岛屿的不确定状态：十九世纪英国和希腊的国家认同和岛屿话语
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发表时间：
2003
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
R. Peckham
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作者：
R. Peckham
摘要本文探讨了在19世纪末和20世纪初，该岛被绘制成英国和希腊国家地图的一些方式。至少从17世纪开始，岛屿就像身体一样，成为知识组织的典范。该岛作为一个理想的政治体发挥作用，政治和文化边界是一致的，随时可以抵御入侵。在政治上和地理上分散的国家中，岛屿成为解决民族与国家之间、地方知识与民族团结之间问题关系的重要主题。在世纪，民族文化日益被视为独立于其他社区的自主、自我维持的岛屿空间。从世纪后半叶开始，人们也开始关注那些位于民族国家内部的真正的“岛屿”。在这个扩大的地形定义中，“岛”开始意味着一个可识别的不同，包含和稳定的栖息地。民族国家和岛屿内部这些不同空间之间的关系持续存在，因为它在地理学和进化著作中被描述为观察保存的生命形式和多样化的场所。例如，区域研究庆祝土著民族文化在地理上有限的小块地区的生存。新兴学科，如民俗学，试图保护这些空间免受威胁淹没它们的国际化现代性的冲击。从这个意义上说，岛屿是一个可以保留“本土”习俗的空间，同时也是一个可以控制并最终驯化潜在的破坏性、返祖性力量的空间。正是在这里，这个岛屿成为一个矛盾的、有问题的地方：既是一个避难所，又是一个监狱，一个天真的童年冒险和野兽侵略的地方。本文以英国和希腊为比较案例，探讨了这种对内部“岛屿”的关注如何被殖民地与“异国情调”岛屿文化的遭遇所影响。
Abstract This paper explores some of the ways in which the island was mapped into the British and Greek national imaginaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From at least the seventeenth century the island, like the body, served as a model for the organisation of knowledge. The island functioned as an ideal body politic, in which political and cultural boundaries were congruent and readily defensible from invasion. In politically and geographically fragmented states the island became an important topos for resolving the problematic relations between nation and state, and between local knowledge and national unity. During the nineteenth century, national cultures were increasingly construed as autonomous, self-sustaining island spaces set apart from other communities beyond. From the second half of the century attention was also paid to those authentic ‘islands’ located within the nation-state. In this expanded topographical definition, the ‘island’ came to signify an identifiably different, contained and stable habitat. A relationship was sustained between these distinct spaces within the nation-state and the island as it was represented in biogeographical and evolutionary writings as a site for observing preserved life forms and diversification. Regional studies, for example, celebrated the survival of an indigenous national culture in geographically confined pockets. Emerging disciplines, such as folklore, sought to protect these spaces from the onslaught of a cosmopolitan modernity that threatened to overwhelm them. The island in this sense was a space in which ‘native’ customs might be preserved and, at the same time, a space in which potentially destructive, atavistic forces might be controlled and ultimately domesticated. It is here that the island emerges as an ambivalent, problematic place: at once a refuge and a prison, a place of innocent childhood adventure and of beastly aggression. Focusing on Britain and Greece as comparative case studies, the paper explores how this concern for internal ‘islands’ fed into and was reciprocally influenced by colonial encounters with ‘exotic’ island cultures.