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Bezeten van vroeger. Erfgoed, identiteit en musealisering
mer to indicate the discrete individuality which sets one apart from the rest of the world, the latter to indicate the persistence with which that individuality is maintained from moment to moment and which implies, for instance, that the ‘I’ at this moment is still bound by promises and actions undertaken by ‘me’ in the past. Mêmeté and ipséité, ‘selfhood’ and ‘sameness’: these two aspects of identity, its synchronic and diachronic dimensions, are linked indissolubly; a proper discussion of identity seems possible only if both aspects are taken into account. In discussions of cultural identity the notion of selfhood is often emphasized over that of sameness. Identity tends to be described or evoked in terms that are synchronically descriptive and timeless: as sets of values, behavioural patterns, the way people ‘are’, in a timeless, anthropological present tense. This is part of the essentialism which is so often subliminally present in these discussions: the assumption that identity is a fixity inherent, like a platonic idea, in the culture or society, and in turn makes ‘the’ society or ‘the’ culture a natural category of observation. That does not mean that the aspect of ‘sameness’ of a given cultural identity is ignored; but it is usually couched in the phraseology of tradition or heritage. Cultural tradition and cultural identity are a joint pair of concepts which are tightly linked. Indeed, since people have become a little more wary of essentialist overtones in the notion of identity, the term ‘tradition’ seems to be used increasingly as a euphemistic alternative, a near-synonym. Nowadays, one does not speak of ‘a literature’ or ‘a culture’, let alone ‘a national literature’ or ‘a national culture’, quite so easily as used to be the case until a few decades ago: such hypostasized units beg questions. Instead, the terminology of ‘a literary tradition’ or ‘a cultural heritage’ has gained in usage. That phraseology seems less totalizing, less rigidly taxonomical. It is time for a critical scrutiny of tradition as an identity-concept in literary history 3 and literary praxis. My starting-point is the insight as reached by imagology, among other literary disciplines, that what counts as a cultural identity is really a matter of projection and reputation, a way of seeing a given culture: identity is not what you are, but what you are perceived to be or how you perceive yourself to be, image and selfimage. It is only by thus locating the topic of national or cultural identity in the subjective domain, by describing cultural identity as a subjective perception and a construct rather than as an objective condition, that a meta-discussion can steer clear of speculative or ideological contamination, maintain a certain antiseptic distance vis-à-vis its subject matter, and attain a certain degree of scholarly reliability. There is, admittedly, a tenacious tradition of naive essentialism in the empirical social sciences: certain social psychologists appear to believe that the beliefs and commonplaces concerning national characters, as registered by empirical research, must therefore reflect an empirical and objective existence of such characters. In such cases, an overdose of Weberian relativism ultimately becomes interchangeable with an endorsement of essentialist assumptions: if something is held to be factual by a certain group, so the argument goes, then it operates as fact; and the scholar will