Disemia and segmentation: the relativity of social knowledge

Disemia operates between official discourse and social knowledge. We can put this in another way: that it pits the fixity of official rules and regulations against the shifting implications of anything people say or do in actual social life. So far, we have considered the tension between these two poles mainly as it occurs at the level of national stereotypes, examining the ways in which national culture and nationalist scholarship contend with insubordinate corrosion by daily social experience.

But the fixing of orthodoxy at the national level is itself an orthodoxy, formed in response to the dominant ideology of European nationalism. In practice, even people who talk as though they fully endorsed and agreed upon the ideals of national unity do not necessarily mean the same things by it. Rhetorically, national values are the yardstick to which all more localized orthodoxies must be calibrated, and they provide a rich source of metaphors - invariably represented as literal truths - whereby strategies officialize themselves. But this does not mean that the speakers are good statists, even if they so present themselves. “Every man is a state,” a Pefkiot villager told me, articulating in that simple proposition both the legitimizing power of the state as a metaphor for all subordinate entities from the region down to the single actor and, by a paradoxical converse, the independently minded individual's disdain for either state or social control. The state can fight for its national self-aggrandizement (eghoismos); true men of self-regard (eghoistes) can gird themselves with all the accoutrements of official rhetoric.