Ch. 5. Writing Culture: Historiography, Hybridity, and the Shaping of Collective Memory

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between early historiographical enquiry and identity, using theoretical frameworks developed by Homi K. Bhabha and Stuart Hall. In doing so it argues that historiographical enquiry formed part of an ongoing process that was constitutive of identity. ‘Culture work’ of this nature needs to be fully integrated into scholarly consideration of both the manner and the means by which a sense of Hellenic self-consciousness and, by extension, collective memory came into being. The enquiries of the fragmentary Greek Historians are shown to be intimately bound up in wider discourses of identity and difference: coins, elegiac poetry, painted pottery, epigraphy, sculpture and historiographical prose were equally tied up in the ‘making’ of Greek identity. Published in C. Constantakopoulou and M. Fragoulaki, ed., Shaping Memory in Ancient Greece (HISTOS Supplement 11), p. 189-234.