It may transgress convention to compare Mikis Theodorakis, better known for his songs than for his operatic work, with the Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi. Both, however, in very different national contexts, were engaged in political activity through their music – which often faced severe censorship – and their parliamentary activity. Both drew on popular traditions and utilised strong rhythms in their earlier works, experimenting later with freer forms. The differences between them meanwhile serve to highlight important differences between two countries often viewed within the shared frame of assumed Mediterranean commonalities and of ancient cultural origins, and help us to understand the role music plays in linking lived time to recorded history.

The present parochialism of Thai studies, although partial, suggests parallels with the situation of Modern Greek studies in the early 1970s. The cultural and political conditions attendant on both in the respective time periods—especially the prudery, emphasis on bourgeois notions of respectability, and restrictions on the scope and content of scholarship—suggest that a comparative framework, already emergent, would benefit both Thailand and Thai studies today. Thailand and Greece both represent conditions of “crypto-colonialism,” in which the combination of adulation and resentment of powerful Western nations produces a distinctive set of attitudes. Important cultural and political consequences flow from this shared condition, as is also contrastively demonstrated by the two countries’ very different recent histories. For example, censorship, once deeply intrusive but now virtually nonexistent in Greece, was instantiated by absent voices and official surveillance at the Thai studies conference at which this article was originally presented. A defensive posture, such censorship exposes an underlying sense of political weakness and cultural embarrassment.

A sign of anthropology's Greek coming-of-age is the inevitability of omitting significant contributions from this account. In the 1970s, omission would have been perceived as an insult. Today it is the happy effect of a proliferation that makes it impossible to represent the entire spectrum in one short overview. Anthropology's most substantive contributions to Greek studies, then as now, were detailed ethnographies, providing a counterweight to the generalizations of more top-down, model-building social sciences while constituting an important bridge between social-science and humanities disciplines. There has been less interest in meeting the challenge of the discipline's own commitment to cross-cultural comparison, although Danforth's comparison of firewalking rituals in Greece and the United States1 was an early exception – subverted, as Bakalaki points out, by his Greek publisher's omission of the American material.2 Internal comparison was present as soon as anthropologists themselves began to proliferate,3 but few initially questioned the presupposition of a reified common national culture.

Thai political life is caught in a tension, sometimes temporally rendered as an oscillation, between extremes of democracy and egalitarianism on the one hand and authoritarian relics of older structures on the other. The confrontation between Red and Yellow Shirts leading up to the 2014 coup might seem to suggest a binary model of Thai political ideology, but the internal complexities of both groups belie a simplistic model of two parties with diametrically opposed views and homogeneous composition. In this article, I argue that it is more productive to approach these tendencies in terms of political performances by politicians representing mutually overlapping and often strikingly convergent ideological tendencies. With the benefit of hindsight, I analyse the 2004 Bangkok gubernatorial election – and in particular one key rally held at Thammasat University ten days before polling day – as a case study in the value of an approach from what I have called ‘social poetics’ for understanding the dynamics of electoral performance, showing how the relevant social actors play more or less creatively with established norms of electoral conduct.

Odermatts's discussion of the changing responses of the Abbasantesi to the fate of the local nuragic monuments adds important new insights to the emergent literature on the politics of national and regional heritage. I intend my remarks as suggestions for expanding the argument – and perhaps the research – beyond the promising start made here. This timely topic and Odermatts's refreshingly critical perspective deserve no less.

Archaeologists have ‘discovered’ memory, drawing on historical and anthropological insights into commemoration and interrogating the contexts of archaeological exploration in ways that sometimes produce evidence of specific understandings of the past by ancient populations. Analogy is sometimes suggestive, as, notably, when archaeology's own historical emergence provides interesting parallels with ancient antiquarianism. Difficulties arise, however, from the heavily psychological cast of much work on memory, which displaces the older archaeological interest in ‘influence’ without always preserving the accompanying focus on patterns of cultural imitation and absorption. The best work on prehistory appears to focus on patterns of co-occurrence but, in the absence of textual evidence, methods often lack rigour and ideologically sensitive reflexivity; especially problematic are the frequent attributions of intentionality. Claims that memory (or its obliteration) was itself the focus of acts recorded in the archaeological record thus underscore both the temptations and the limits of the current concern with this topic.

The object of this article is to explore a familiar paradox of folklore studies: the promotion of powerfully localist readings in the service of an inclusive national entity. In the logic of European nationalism, this might seem an irresolvable paradox. The object of the nation-state is to unify all potentially divergent cultural and social entities within a single framework, so that localist sentiment ceases to represent the threat of political separatism. In some nation-states, the most harmonious symbiosis of localism with nationalism appears in those regions that are stereotypically regarded as culturally and politically marginal and are consequently subjected to the double-edged opprobrium of being both “simple” and yet also corrupted by a vast range of allegedly foreign elements both culturally and “racially.” A study of these tension-laden matters must dodge among several levels in order to go beyond the limitations both of purely local ethnography and of national-level historiography. If the former too easily occludes the effects of larger events on local perceptions, the latter can, and often does, fail to account for the success of nationalist ideologies in securing loyalty unto death even—or perhaps especially?—from populations that are notoriously unwilling to accept state rule in more mundane matters of law and order.

Questions of ontology are socially as consequential as gossip. In saying this, I do not mean to belittle them but, on the contrary, to emphasize their pervasive ubiquity and importance. Paradoxically, however, it is that ubiquity that all too often reduces them to a banal and unthinking obviousness: the relationship between experienced reality and the discourses that render it palpable have often--like gossip--escaped critical attention, filtered out of anthropologistsÕ awareness by the singularly unrewarding opposition between “symbolic” and “materialist” approaches to the study of culture and society.