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CYberspace/Cyberpast/ Cybernation: Constructing Hellenism in Hyperreality

Department of Archaeology, University of Wales, Lampeter

This paper looks at representations of antiquity in cyberspace and discusses their meaning and position in global discourses on nationalism and identities. After a critical review of some recent discussions of globalization and the informational society, it adopts the concepts of ethnoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes in examining the deployments of representations from antiquity in the web pages constructed by the Greek state, private organizations, and mostly Greek diasporic communities and individuals. It is suggested that organizations and individual social actors construct in cyberspace the national topos of Hellenism. In this process, representations from antiquity play a central and crucial role. Many social actors, mostly away from the 'homeland', form modern Hellenic ethnoscapes by projecting the national narrative and constructing an imaginative heterotopia where the personal becomes national and vice versa. These representations act as the currency of the symbolic capital of antiquity, a crucial resource in the foundation of the imagined community of the Hellenic nation. At the same time, they become an effective weapon in the ritual battles and contestations around the polarity between Greece and the West. Finally, representations from antiquity become a device which contributes to the 'domestication' of the cyberspace, its transformation from space to place, and its 'materialization' through the materiality that the representations of antiquity allude to.

Key Words: archaeology and nationalism • cyberspace • diasporas • Hellenism • modern Greece

European Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 3, No. 2, 241-264 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/146195710000300205


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