Sergei GLEBOV: When you discuss your historical method and your vision of history, you draw upon the tradition of hermeneutics, structuralism, formalism, the postmodernist relativization of knowledge, and so forth. However, you don’t seem to suggest any impact of anthropology as a method or discipline. Did you experience this influence, or was it mediated through structuralist linguistics and the Annales version of history? An attempt to decipher the text of culture from Ansatzpunkte of a specific historical personage could as well be enunciated in the language of anthropology as a reconstruction of the web of meanings in culture. How do you evaluate your relationship with anthropology in general and contemporary cultural anthropology in particular?

Carlo GINZBURG: Well, I think of my involvement with anthropology as being quite intensive. I could mention two texts of mine and then I would like to make some comments on them. So, the texts would be my first book, The Night Battles,^[1] and then the later book, which is called Ecstasies. Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath,^[2] as well as the essay “Inquisitor as Anthropologist” included in the volume Clues.^[3] Let me make some comments on these. I think I have been exposed to two very different anthropological traditions. First of all, the Italian, quite peculiar, version of anthropology, which is in fact attached to the work of a single person, meaning Ernesto De Martino. He was very much influenced by Benedetto Croce, but also by Heidegger, and later on by Gramsci – a bizarre but quite interesting combination. De Martino’s work was deeply original. His most important book was Il mondo magico. Prolegomeni a una storia del magismo – it was translated into English.^[4] He published his book, if my recollection is correct, in 1947, and I read the book for the first time ten years later, when I was eighteen years old. It is a highly original book. It is sort of a theoretical book. De Martino was also involved in some ethnography – some ethnographic research in Southern Italy – but I think this was less original. His theoretical book was more original. It was in fact about the origins in nature of magical powers. I think that my early work was quite influenced by De Martino. But a few years later, let’s say, 1960, probably, 1959-1960, I read Levy-Strauss’s Anthropologie Structurale, and the dialogue with Levy-Strauss began, a metaphorical dialogue, although I met Levy-Strauss once and I had a conversation with him. This was especially important in my later book, Ecstasies, which was published in Italian in 1989,^[5] and a couple of years later in English. Now, let me explain why this sort of ongoing dialogue with Levy-Strauss was very important. I was deeply impressed by the ahistorical approach of Levy-Strauss. My approach was totally different. I was interested in history. I tried to locate beliefs recorded in inquisition trials in a specific time and place, but I regarded Levy-Strauss’s approach as a challenge. Just because it was so apparently ahistorical. I think that, let’s say, the question I was confronted with, when I was finishing my book The Night Battles was the following: I have been working on Friulian trials, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Friulian trials, in a specific region, Friuli, in northeastern Italy, on the northeastern border of the Italian peninsula, in a region in which you have a sort of convergence of different cultural layers: Italian, for the region itself was since the fifteenth century a part of the Venetian Republic, but you also have a Germanic layer, and a Slavic layer. I was just finishing my book, I was re-writing my book on those Friulian trials, and I came across a trial, a late seventeenth century trial, against a Livonian werewolf. The trial was published by Otto Hueffler, an Austrian, well, I would say, folklorist. He was also interested in literature. He became a Nazi, and published in 1934, if my memory is correct, a book on masculine associations in the Germanic domain.^[6] And he was, well – just because he was expressing a Germanic perspective, and also a racial and racist perspective on this Maennerbunde phenomenon – he was deeply embarrassed when he discovered the trial against the Livonian werewolf, which seemed to share some elements with the phenomena he was working on. I came across the trial, which had been published in a Baltic journal, I think, in the twenties. I was interested in it for different reasons. The trial itself presented the werewolves – according to traditional representation of this one old werewolf, Thiess – as people fighting for good, and this implied a strong resemblance with people I came across in the Friulian trials, those Friulian peasants, so called Benandanti, “walkers for good,” who claimed to have been fighting in dream, or in ecstasy, in futility, against the witches. So, there was a strong resemblance, and there were other convergent points. I was embarrassed myself, because I didn’t expect to find that kind of phenomenon outside of Friuli, I mean, in the Baltic region, and so I added a section to my book, in which I dealt with that trial. Then I was confronted with a possibility of working, in a comparative perspective. But in a sense I was unable to make sense of that resemblance, in a historical perspective at least. In other words, I had no evidence of ties, let’s say, between Friuli and Livonia. And this question triggered my latter project, in which I tried to make sense of the resemblance between the Benandante trials and the trial against Thiess, the old werewolf, in a larger perspective. I could not imagine how large it would become… I spent nearly fifteen years working on that project, and the result was the book Ecstasies. In Italian, it’s called Storia Noturna. I was unable to use the word “night” in the English translation because I had suggested The Night Battles as the translation for my first book. Ecstasies is a strange book, in a sense, because there is the first part, which is strictly historical, about the origins of the mythical image of a conspiracy against society, which I located in medieval Europe. Especially there is a specific context, France, 1521. It alleged a conspiracy of Jews, lepers, and Muslims against society as a whole. And then I traced down the long history of this notion of conspiracy, which I connected to the mythical image of the witches’ Sabbath. But this is only one side of the story. In the second part of my book, I tried to look at the witches’ Sabbath stereotype, and especially at the symbolic configuration which I found in Friuli, in a very large, in fact, Eurasian, perspective. The question that I was trying to address was the strong resemblance which I had found between those Friulian benandanti and, let’s say, Siberian shamans. I tried to work on that connection in a purely morphological perspective. And so there was a disjunction in my book between the first part, which is strictly historical, even, in some way, it is histoire йvйnementielle, and then there is the second part, which is morphological and a-chronic. And then there is a third part, in which I tried to reconcile the two perspectives using morphology as a sort of a tool, in order to find these historical connections which are not readily available, or only indirectly available. So, I think that book was constructed as a sort of a dialogue between a historical and an ahistorical perspective. And I think that the embodiment of the ahistorical perspective was Levy-Strauss. And so there was this ongoing dialogue, intellectual dialogue with Levy-Strauss. But in the background there was also another dialogue, which is also acknowledged, with Vladimir Propp. Also because, in a way, I read Propp’s books in Italian translation, in a reverse order, so I started with The Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale,^[7] and then I read The Morphology of the Folk Tale.^[8] I was interested in the kind of a “split approach.” I was fascinated by Propp’s work, of course.
Then I tried to make sense of my own approach, in that essay “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” which was read by some Russian readers. In a minute I will tell you in which context I had a discussion with my Russian readers about that essay. In the essay I tried to, well, I started from an obvious comparison between the inquisitor and the anthropologist. Obviously, there are differences, of course, but I was interested in the convergences. So I tried to explain how, let’s say, how it was possible to extract from certain inquisitorial trials a sort of a dialogic dimension, which is not, well, in a way, it’s counter-intuitive. It certainly makes sense as an argument on the basis of my experience in the Friulian archives, because in that case the dialogic dimension was immediately evident, because the inquisitors and the defendants for a long time did not understand each other. So, my argument was that just because they were unable to understand each other, the two voices were quite distinct – although the document itself, meaning the trial, or the trials, had been flipped by a repressive institution, meaning the inquisition. So the idea of rescuing the dialogic dimension within those trials appealed to some of my Russian readers, who had read my article in English, and when I was in Moscow a few years ago, I had a discussion, a public discussion about this, with the Memorial group. That was quite unexpected and emotionally quite involving for me. I mean, obviously, the idea was to make a comparison – which I did not think about in my paper – between the inquisitorial trials and the political trials in the Stalinist era. And so the idea of rescuing voices, not only the voice of the judge but also the voice of the defendant, meaning some sort of a cultural voice, obviously, this notion of a dialogue has been explicitly inspired by Bakhtin – although I also made a reference to a striking remark by Jakobson, who, obviously, didn’t think about Bakhtin. I don’t think the relationship between them was particularly fruitful – or maybe there was no relationship at all. But Jakobson made a remark about the dialogic dimension of discourse, whenever we say… there is a dialogue. I read this essay in his paper published in a festschrift in honor of Alexandre Koyrй. I thought that that was a quite impressive suggestion, and so I was a little bit in this dialogic perspective… I mean, Bakhtin’s work on Dostoevsky had a big impact on me, and even earlier, I would say, the book on Rabelais, which I read in a French translation in 1960, I think…^[9]

SG: Actually, this is a very interesting dimension of our discussion, and I didn’t expect it to go that way, but in the contemporary American historiography of the Soviet Union, there is a new and distinct trend that looks at the linguistic aspect of the Soviet experience. In particular some work has been done on exactly the questioning by Stalin’s secret police of various arrested individuals. And an attempt was made to explore this as a dialogue, from a dialogic perspective…

CG: Oh, I see… I’d be interested in some references…

SG: Of course. However, I should say that this is extremely controversial, in particular because this approach is linked to an attempt to explore the process of construction of the so-called “Soviet subjectivity,” in which some people made a claim that the Stalinist period, well, the entire interwar period even, had an emancipatory potential, and Soviet citizens sort of appropriated this discourse offered by the Communist leadership and actively participated in it.^[10]

CG: I can certainly see how the argument can be regarded as ambiguous or as intrinsically ambiguous, but any interesting idea can be distorted, because only innocent, uninteresting ideas can be used in a poor perspective…

SG: Especially when historians tend to overlook the historical horizon, the entire range of texts that serve as the context for one particular dialogue.

CG: I agree. Let me also stress that actually the comparison with the Soviet experience has not been suggested by me. When I was dealing with inquisitorial trials, the dialogical dimension is part of a deeply asymmetrical relationship, so I would stress the asymmetry. And then there is something paradoxical in the fact that even within the archives of repression, a dialogic dimension can be found, sometimes. But certainly as far as the inquisitorial trials were concerned, there was not only asymmetry but also the possibility of torture, physical torture, which sometimes was used, and also psychological and cultural oppression. Now, this could be used to reinforce the analogy, of course.

SG: In the article “Latitude, Slaves, and the Bible: An Experiment in Microhistory,”^[11] you begin to introduce the concept of micro-history from the question “How can a philologist from a single cultural tradition approach a world in which so many languages and so many cultural traditions interact?” This question is decisive for the region which our journal focuses on. As historians studying first of all the imperial past of that region, we came to the conclusion that the only adequate way to write a history of the Russian Empire (and empires in general) is to write a history of “languages of self-description” of various groups and actors operating within the heterogeneous cultural, social, and political space of the imperial polity. Having explored the functioning of these languages in historical perspective (the development and transformations of self-descriptions by estates, confessions, ethnic groups), we now came to a point when we are searching for the agent and the “micro-context” of these languages. Therefore, we began to focus on anthropological perspectives on the languages of self-description.
Did you ever encounter a question of how to explore “a world in which there are so many languages and so many cultural traditions” within one single polity? Alternatively, does your vision of social and political history and your search for a hermeneutical exploration of a single historical person presuppose focusing on this problem of linguistic diversity?

CG: I think I would like to start with what I was saying before about the inquisitorial trials. As you can understand, from the point of view of my own experience, this idea of languages of self-description is at the same time appealing and perplexing. I think it’s appealing because what I found in those inquisitorial trials was in fact a self-description by Friulian peasants or other people of their own experiences, including, let’s say, dream experiences. Something extremely intense and intimate. On the other hand, well, we have a self-description but under constraint. And I think this should not be forgotten. At least in my case, it’s not a spontaneous self-description: we are still within the domain of the archives of repression, there is still a threat of repression, the pressure coming from the judge, there is cultural asymmetry, and also, in some cases in Friuli, because Friulian is a quite distinctive language, we have literally, I think I found at least two cases, two interpreters – in other words, the inquisitor was here in that sense comparable to an anthropologist because he came from outside, (usually he was a functionary coming from a different region). So, I came across a couple of cases in which the inquisitor came from central Italy, from Orvieto, I think, asked for an interpreter, because he was unable to understand the Friulian dialogue. In other cases the peasants were able to speak a language that was a kind of Venetian, more understandable even to an outsider. But the fact that sometimes the inquisitor needed an interpreter implies that the self-description is mediated by so many intermediaries, which is also the case with anthropology, of course. And I think that a concern for the context in which self-description occurs should also be kept in mind in other cases in which, let’s say, the pressure is not so evident.

SG: Can you actually say that in your family history (given its roots in Odessa) there is a trace of that multilingual (in an anthropological sense) experience, an experience of a diverse imperial space? If there is, how is it interpreted, as an experience of the past in the Russian Empire in general or as a particular experience as a Jew in the Russian Empire? To build on your Russian connection, is your interest in Jakobson, Shklovsky, and Propp something that is inherited as part of your family history or else developed independently?

CG: Well, my father was born in Odessa. His name was Leone, he died in 1944, when I was five years old. He was bilingual, I mean, he spoke Russian with his mother, his sister and others. He came to Italy through Berlin. He had previous connections with Italy, so later on he came to Italy, and he became an Italian citizen. Now, this was very important for my father, because he was actively involved in underground anti-Fascist activity, but he refused to involve himself in that activity before acquiring Italian citizenship. He was arrested – well, first, he started a university career, he taught Russian literature – you can see this double allegiance, I don’t like the word “identity” but he on the one hand thought of himself as an Italian, he had become an Italian, and a Russian on the other hand. He wrote on Russian literature, he translated Russian great novels, including Anna Karenina, Gogol’s Taras Bulba. He worked as a translator and taught Russian literature but he left the university because he refused to refused to swear the oath of allegiance which was required under the Fascist regime. In 1934 he refused to do it and left the university. Immediately thereafter he was arrested because he was caught by the Italian police. He spent two years in jail, and then he was involved in a different kind of intellectual activity because he was unable to teach. He became the driving force in founding the Enaldi publishing house, which was the most important publishing house even later, after the war, and after my father died, on the intellectual Italian scene. In 1940 my father was deprived of his Italian citizenship, and both as a Jew and an anti-Fascist was sent to a sort of exile, in southern Italy, and the family followed him, so we spent three years in a village in Abruzzi, and then when the Mussolini regime collapsed, in 1943, my father went to Rome, he started again under the German occupation in underground activity. He was the director of a newspaper and he was arrested, recognized, because he had a file as a former anti-Fascist prisoner, and so he was sent to the German section and he died in jail in 1944.
As I tried to explain in my little introduction that I wrote for the Russian translation of my essay collection Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method,^[12] I tried to describe my connection with Russian culture, which unfortunately, something which I deeply regret, does not imply knowledge of Russian. I can describe different layers – on the one hand, there was my reading of Russian novels, which is obviously a widespread experience, but I think in my case there was also an additional emotional element, because, for instance, I read War and Peace in a translation which had been thoroughly revised by my father, around 1940. He also wrote an introduction which he was unable to sign, and so I read the book in that edition, with his introduction. Tolstoy was one of the really formative experiences for me. Probably it would have been the same had my father not been involved in that revised translation, but it was an additional element, and I think the same could be said about Dostoevsky, and so on. This was the first layer, which was very, very important. Then there was another layer, which involved both Russian movies and Russian Formalists. Before watching Eisenstein’s movies, I read, as a child, strangely enough, his theoretical works on cinema, which had been translated into Italian. Actually – well, I missed a lot, I was a child – but for some reason I was deeply impressed by those texts. And so I started dreaming about films which I hadn’t seen, and which I saw much later on, films like Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, and so on. I think that some elements of the Russian Formalist tradition came to me through Eisenstein’s texts on cinema. And then came the films, which had a great impact on me, and then another layer, which was already related to Russian scholarship: Shklovsky, Propp, Jakobson, and so on. You can see how all these elements in a way interacted, meaning Tolstoy, Shklovsky.
As I said before, this would have worked anyway, but there was an additional emotional element, which was related to my father. He died when I was so young, and he was so important in my life anyway.

SG: Given the importance of the need to describe the diversity of Russian imperial space in the shaping of the structuralist rhetoric of Jakobson and Trubetskoi in the interwar years, should we question the ideological assumptions of structuralism?

CG: Well, I never got into that project of Eurasia by Trubetskoi and others, I think my notion of Eurasia is much larger than the Russian Empire, because it goes all the way to the Atlantic. It’s not only, as de Gaulle used to say, de l’Atlantique aux Ourals, but, well, to Vladivostok. But let me make a little comment not directly relating to your specific remark but about something much more general. I think that scientific projects very often and maybe always have some ideological roots, meaning not only ideological implications in the way in which they get used, but also in the emergence of them. Now, it seems to me that in no case, the ideological roots, or the extra-scientific roots of a scientific project, immediately affect the scientific nature of that project, because if I would think the opposite, I should posit the possibility of a purely scientific project, with no connections whatsoever to extra-scientific aspects, which seems to me, probably, impossible, because, after all, a scientist including, let’s say, a geometer, Euclid, lives in a specific society, and therefore the universal dimensions of Euclidian geometry are not affected by the fact that probably geometry emerged in a context in which it was important to measure the size of fields for specific interests, and so on and so forth. I don’t know whether my argument is clear enough…

SG: Oh, it’s certainly very clear, and I think it’s very convincing as well. I was just wondering what do you think about the need to – and it’s a very general question, of course, and it concerns all scholars who work in humanities and social sciences – to reflect on our own genealogical roots, so to speak, and to recognize connections. Let me give you just one example. Many of us, and myself as well, are drawn to Shklovsky’s aesthetic theory, I think you drew on it as well in your work – the notion of art as estrangement (and return to authenticity as an inseparable part of the aesthetic process). It seems to me that Shklovsky in this particular theory comes very close to the same neo-Romantic longing for wholeness that characterized Jakobson’s thought in the 1920s. And I wonder if we always need to keep in mind these contexts of our own methodological theories, for they bring with them a certain baggage, of connections, of possible paths for the development of these very theories.

CG: I think you remark is very interesting. However, it seems to me that in the case of structuralism – because you mentioned the rhetoric of structuralism – there was some sort of re-invention of structuralism, in other words, there was, of course, the continuity, from the 1920s, but then there has been a re-invention. And also a possible re-use of “structuralism” in different perspectives. It seems you made a general remark, which is very challenging, and I would like to also answer on a very general level. It seems to me, what we said about – because there is apparently some agreement – the long-term perspective, in which one can see the emergence and the spread of a scientific theory, can be also related to a long-term perspective in which we may look at a work of art. I am thinking about Karl Marx’s remark about Greek tragedy. If you remember, he said that the world in which the Greek tragedies emerged is very far from us. This was a totally different kind of society. So how is it possible that Greek tragedies still speak to us so powerfully? Now, it seems to me that this question is very relevant, although I am not particularly happy with Marx’s answer, because as you remember he said that this was the childhood of humankind – a kind of a Hegelian perspective. It seems to me that here there is a problem which is related to the re-use of cultural productions at large. In other words, they emerge in a specific time and in a specific context, but then they can be re-used, to a certain extent, the problem is to understand what it means – “to a certain extent” – in each specific case, they can be re-used in a different context. And also for different purposes. Now, you are right when you say it’s important to be aware of a genealogy, but again, I think that somebody could say that a genealogy is a sort of a stain that is going to affect a project, which in my view is not exactly the case. It can be, but not in that sense. In other words, we have to check the specific value of a work of art, or a scientific theory.

SG: Do you see a possibility to translate your own “anthropological” method of historical analysis into the studies of the modern period, when not only the relationship between the learned and the popular cultures change but the very number of cultures grows; cultures compete and reflect upon themselves? You see the emergence of professionals who study and re-interpret these cultures.
What if in a larger scale of things the “cultural world” of a turn of the 19^[13] century person is a very marginal phenomenon which can tell us very little about how society functioned (at the level of texts of culture)?

CG: First of all, just a comment on the word “method.” I quoted once a sentence by Marcel Granet, a French sinologist, quoted by George Dumйzil, and Granet said: “The method is the way after we went through it.” And it was a pun on the maybe fictitious, maybe authentic etymology of the Greek word “methodos.” Only after may we speak of a method, after having gone through a specific kind of research, which means that I wouldn’t like to speak so much about my own method, although there is, of course, a sort of compulsion to repeat… certain research strategies, which is something I tried to counteract by shifting to different research topics. But I understand that there is such a constraint. I wonder if this compulsion can be described as a method. I don’t know whether I personally have a method. And I wonder what I could do with a research project dealing with, let’s say, the contemporary world.
It’s true, I wrote a book on a sixteenth century miller, on that man, Purry. The protagonist of that paper on latitude and slaves, actually, the Purry project was supposed to become a book, which it hasn’t so far, and I was interested in the idea of using a specific text in order to reflect on biography as a genre, because it seems to me that biographies are potentially very interesting, but there is also a kind of laziness concerning the way in which a biography can be constructed. So I was playing with the idea of making experiments with biography. In that sense, I think one can use a marginal individual at the end of the nineteenth century in order to explore, certainly not the history of the world – this was not the case even with my Friulian miller or Purry – but trying to look at something larger, so using the individual as a way of approaching something bigger. I think that here I am confronted with a problem which fascinates me. It’s been something on which I have been reflecting for many, many years: historical generalizations. How are they possible? For a long time, historians took for granted the possibility of generalizing their findings. It seems to me that this is certainly not the case. So, I am interested in historical generalizations as an open question. I am not sure that in order to understand something about the late nineteenth century I would necessarily choose an individual. Maybe not. But I would not dismiss the possibility of looking at an individual in order to find something larger, because I think that an individual in isolation is an artificial construction.
Now, the complexity of the modern world… well, the sixteenth century world was also extremely complex…

SG: But I don’t think we have the self-reflection on that world to the extent we have in late nineteenth or twentieth centuries? The emergence of various professional discourses, about the world, society, and so forth…

CG: Yes. But you know, it would be interesting to, at least potentially, compare, let’s say, the self-perception of the world in an individual’s case, with the objective involvement of the same person in a specific world, whose boundaries are far from evident, because I think this is the problem. In other words, just because the world became so complex does not mean that the individual reflects that complexity and translates it in a personal perception.
I wouldn’t like to find myself with the idea that focusing on an individual is the best strategy for all kinds of societies. I don’t think that.

SG: How would you define the phenomenon of empire, of a classic empire and of empire as an “atavism” of modern history? How could you define the phenomenon of a person in empire understood as a web of competing, clashing, interacting texts?
We want to think that our “anthropology of languages of self-description” is in part derived from your hermeneutics of personality (and we can treat the subjects of language as a “collective personality” that shares the common cultural text). Would you agree with that interpretation?

CG: Well, first of all, I think that this idea of empire as an “atavism” in modern history, it’s interesting, but as far as I am concerned, I’d prefer to say that maybe the national states are in parentheses. We don’t know. On the other hand, this idea of anthropology of languages of self-description is appealing but only with some qualifications. First of all, qualifications which are related to what I was saying before about, let’s say, the contexts in which self-description may occur. I mean, I am familiar with situations in which the self-description is related to constraint, self-describing oneself under a constraint, which can be more direct, as in the case of a trial, or less direct. But think about the connection between autobiography and confession. As a genre, I think that self-description is often related to some kind of constraint. It may be a psychological constraint, feeling of guilt, or a need to justify oneself – well, to whom, it’s also an open question – so this is a general caveat, I would say.
And then there is a relation between self-description and the overarching description of the empire, meaning the power relationships in which self-description may occur. I think this is the basic problem, because otherwise there would be some sort of idealization of self-description vis-а-vis a distant power. Now, it seems to me, at the very core of empire, starting from maybe the Roman Empire, there is this idea of eliciting, or using constraint in order to elicit, a sort of cooperation between marginal agencies or agencies which are not at the top of the hierarchy, cooperating with the central power. This seems to be part of empire as a structure. It’s always like this. In other words, this implies some qualifications about a project focusing on self-description. It’s self-description, but sometimes – usually – at different echelons of the hierarchical ladder.

SG: A self-description within a hierarchical structure?

CG: I was reminded of this when we discussed that the dialogic dimensions of the Soviet political trials have been used to argue that there was cooperation, and so on. This can be used in a purely ideological perspective. But I would not deny that there was cooperation, cooperation under constraint, so I would not ignore the constraint, but cooperation – why not? This is something that happened in all kind of empires and also in all kind of regimes. I remember a long time ago there was a discussion about consensus in fascist Italy. And somebody objected to it. But certainly, there were pockets of resistance, very small pockets, but there was consensus, and there was constraint as well. So I would not use consensus against constraint. The problem is to see how they could interact in the same political structure. I think that the same argument could be put forward about the Soviet Union. Because otherwise we would be caught in a sort of an ideological trap, saying no, there was no cooperation at all, only constraint. But this is often not the case. And I would say that in the case of empires, it’s usually not the case.

SG: I’d like, by way of a conclusion, to offer one remark and solicit your comments on it. In our effort to shape a new imperial history of Russia – meaning the larger historical region and not the Russian national state – we proceeded from the assumption that empires, unlike the nation states, are not normative concepts. Nation states emerged, as we know, in the past three centuries, and they imply the notion of political participation through citizenship and some sort of cultural homogeneity. Partly because they emerged in the period when modern humanities and social sciences were born, they appear as natural building blocks of humanity, brushing aside historical experiences of empires, which are always treated as domestically repressive and externally aggressive, based on sheer violence, and always doomed to dissolution as atavisms of history. It seems that this is one of the historical myths we will come to debunk, without any apology for empires, of course, for there were different kinds of imperial polities, such as, say, the Habsburg empire, for a long time based on negotiation rather than mere repression…

CG: Yes, I fully agree. And I think that your remark about the normative status of nation states is absolutely important. I think the problem is to go beyond a kind of ideological perspective, in which, let’s say, empires as realities, also very very different realities in history, should be approached. No nostalgia, no apology, no et cetera. Certainly it’s a phenomenon which should be looked at more closely. I liked – well, I read your journal’s interview with Benedict Anderson, whose work I admire, and I think he made that remark that we study empires as we study dinosaurs. I, well, I am skeptical.

SG: In what sense?

CG: I think we are going to see those dinosaurs for a long time… They’ll be around for a long time. But, probably, none of us will be able to check.