1The adoption and expansion of specific, named concepts can only be the music to the ears of their authors. Such is certainly the case here. In providing my contribution to the exchange of intellectual gifts in the present collection of articles about “the body impolitic”, I will not attempt to answer each argument individually or try to encompass the whole range of original ideas emerging from their totality. I will instead reflect on how some apparent departures from the original framing of “the body impolitic” offer potential leads to further insights.

3Vereni has obligingly furnished a perceptive discussion of one-half of my central argument, the half that has been adopted as central by all the authors of the other papers. He effectively shows that the focus on bodies fits a Zeitgeist in the theoretical development of the social sciences, suggesting specific ways in which bodies symbolize – I was going to say “embody” – larger political tensions and relations. Like all the authors in this collection, however, he has chosen not to discuss at length the part of the original model that speaks explicitly to those larger entailments.

4Being impolitic means being tactless, disrespectful of norms, deliberately undiplomatic – forms of agency that Vereni’s argument acknowledges and that represent a type of unofficial political action. Despite Vereni’s own critical familiarity with the encompassing frames of state politics and ethnic identities (e.g., Vereni 1996), moreover, his reading of the English word “impolitic” as somehow suggesting an apolitical agent reproduces that normative definition of the political (and, ironically, introduces an ambiguity that is not present in the ordinary usage of the word). As he writes: “The term may suggest what is apolitical, anti-political, deprived of politics, or placed outside recognised politics”. I do not think, however, that this is how a native speaker of English would ever read the term. “The body impolitic” is unambiguous as a rather cheeky play on a common idiom (“the body politic”); that is how I intended it, reproducing in the moment of play the potential subversion that all such word-play creates, and reminding the reader that officialdom does not always set the terms of political contest.

5Moreover, Vereni’s own examples – and on this we are in full accord – show that in reality impolitic behavior can serve as a highly political tactic, and not only at the immediate level of the subaltern or marginalized individual human body. Greece, for example, has often been treated by its bigger and more powerful partners as an impolitic state. Would anyone seriously describe as apolitical the negotiations that Alexis Tsipras and Yanis Varoufakis conducted with the so-called “troika” in 2015? That their style of negotiation was viewed as undiplomatic (which is what “impolitic” means in such a context) is another matter altogether. The choice to be impolitic itself represented a highly political stance.

6There are indeed suggestive hints in the present papers that the bodies discussed therein were both involved in, and reflective of, larger political frameworks. For example, it is clear that both “Balkan” and “post-socialist” identities are linked to the subjectification of whole populations as somehow inferior; we see this in the management of itinerant bodies in the hyper-nationalistic wreckage of the former Yugoslavia, with its corresponding obsession with once internal geographical regions now rejigged as supposedly rigid and non-porous borders. Such concentricities may rearrange themselves as something more closely approximating Venn circles. The local “bodies impolitic” are playing in larger structures of inequality as well as the immediate, interactional ones. These complex entailments seem to beckon toward the capillary reproduction of power at multiple levels of socio-political collectivity.

7Anthropology’s own cultural and epistemic assumptions direct our thinking. Bodies are “in”; indeed, they have long been an object of empirically grounded anthropological reflection (e.g., Csordas 1990; Kleinman 1980). Structures, on the other hand, are currently somewhat out of fashion. So anthropologists tend to focus – often, to be sure, with interesting outcomes – on bodies and their treatment; they also tend, by contrast, to shy away from anything that looks too much like “structures”. This is certainly something of a caricature, but it does reflect a real and current taste. Anthropology is itself a complicated cultural universe in which theoretical fashion and a neoliberal style of competitive performance play a significant role today (see Dei 2017).

8One would not have to be an orthodox structuralist to see that some sense of structural consistency, even if we do not call it that, is what allows us to “scale up” (and down) in ways that show how different levels of inequality reinforce each other. The insidious power of homology, in short, is itself a neglected dimension of the exercise of power and the perpetuation of inequality. Yet these papers point helpfully in the direction of such considerations. Clearly, for example, the subordination of French Polynesian bodies to local military authority is mutually engaged with the continuing colonial status of Mā’ohi Nui under metropolitan French control. In a very different context, but in much the same way, the medical clinic reproduces the larger entailments of the medical profession and beyond it of the scientific establishment. The papers in this collection do not fully engage this encompassing dimension of “the body impolitic”, but they certainly beckon toward it.

9When I wrote about the master-apprentice relation on Crete, I did not view it as simply an example of localised power relations (although it was certainly that as well). Its very conventionality made it an effective vehicle for the reproduction of what inhabitants of the larger Cretan towns regard as Rethemnos’ provinciality. These inequalities become palpably concentric as we scale up to the ambivalent views many Athenians hold of Crete and that many Western Europeans hold – or at least held at that time -- of Greece. In each case, the “lower” category occupies the internally contradictory slot of the “noble savage”. Some very explicit historical causes for these inequalities do subsist as traces at each level, and such causes and traces often follow the same vertical vector of comparison. An anthropologist must to some extent be a historian, or at least engage with historians who have worked on relevant materials. Durable structures, often invisible in the relatively brief span of ethnographic fieldwork, come into view when the angle of vision acquires temporal depth.

10The articulating principle of these inequalities is the “global hierarchy of value” of the book’s subtitle. This term is often misconstrued as a global hierarchy of values, an error that with one single letter shifts the emphasis, as I have recently argued (Herzfeld 2025), from a ranking of countries to a ranking of values. By the correct term, I intend the cultural successor to colonialism in the strict sense of the latter term: a system that treats different countries as having higher or lower culture. Claudio Sopranzetti (2022: 718) has persuasively argued for a pluralisation, not of values, but of hierarchies. Given Greece’s paradoxical treatment by many Western European critics as both the putative source of European civilisation and its greatest failure – their attitude is itself a clear illustration of the crypto-colonial dynamic – the original formulation seemed appropriate to the Greek case. I suspect that it might lead us to the discovery of similarly concentric inequalities in the ethnographic cases discussed here.

12These consequences of a global cultural hierarchy illustrate a persistent structure within which insubordination often takes the form of creatively parodic uses of legal norms and cultural conventions (see Little and Panella 2021). A particular version of this tactical style is what I call “subversive archaism” (Herzfeld 2022). Communities regarded as dangerous or degenerate by the state – communities whose bodies are often marked by specific ornamentation (tattoos, for example) or dress as well as gesture and posture – lay claim to a more chthonic association with the origins of the nation than they are willing to attribute to the bureaucrats of city and state. Here, too, we can discern some measure of scaling up and down. The ability to engage in such scaling can also be an effective tactic for marginalised individuals and groups to exploit the slithery steps of international inequalities to their own tactical advantage.

13Observing these processes over time also allows one to see that the correspondences are not always stable. In this context, Sopranzetti’s call for the recognition of more than one global hierarchy of value makes particularly good sense: different scales of valuation – religious, aesthetic, security-based, economic – may pull the neat linearity of hierarchy out of alignment or splinter it into multiple, competing hierarchies, or, again, create swellings at the points of contact between Venn circles. One could describe the breakdown of humanitarian aid and its replacement with state-controlled incarceration in terms of all three of these possible trajectories. The role of Islam in the Bosnian context is especially interesting here. Is the fear of jihadism a reflection of local realities, or of state-manipulated public discourses? If there was such an influence, did it first appear in managerial changes at the mosque?

14These ruminations lead me to reflect on Dimitris Antoniou’s (2025) multifaceted analysis treatise on “the mosque that was never built” in a suburb of the Greek capital. Athens. There was no lack of interest in such a project. The tepid and vacillating support of the central state did not offset infrastructural and political resistance, which reflected nationalistic rejection of the Ottoman past and a pervasive fear of Islam-inspired terrorism. Here, then, a Western hierarchy of value formed part of a subterranean set of pressures to oppose the construction of the mosque, distorting and partially belying a rhetoric of tolerance that claims an Enlightenment pedigree. Perhaps we should go even further than Sopranzetti by replacing the concept of multiple hierarchies of value with that of multiple refractions of value hierarchy – a formulation that still raises empirical questions of what exactly is refracted in each specific case. Historical nuance is crucial here, as is the realization that bodies entrapped in such intractable hierarchies must always be politically significant in some sense. What goes for works of art and craft (Salemink et al. 2023) must also be true of the embodied creativity that inspired and produced them.

15In this process, as we follow the vicissitudes of bodies impolitic at every level, we confront the problem of civil disability. In the case of the state, that disability becomes manifest as corruption, authoritarianism and discrimination, In citizens and their bodies, it appears as a lack of civility – as uncouthness, whether of physical appearance or of speech, or simply of status. I am building here on a commentary on the philosophy of Giambattista Vico by Nancy Struever (1976), who sees Vico’s central contribution as tracing trajectories of “civil disability” through the history of language. We may understand civil disability as the inability of a polity to deal with its internal contradictions; the evident failure of modern democracy faced with democratically participating opponents of the very idea of democracy, as manifested in the current situation in the U.S., is a particularly resonant case in point. That disability also appears in the state’s marginalisation and ill-treatment of the very individuals it marks, as we learn in these articles, as unfit for true citizenship.

16From some concerned full citizens’ perspective, therefore, the civic order may itself be uncivil. In Italian, those who are civili are not necessarily following a “civic” order at all. They may, for example, hide undocumented immigrants or they may suppress their personal preferences for conformity with the law when the larger group – a condominium association, for example – finds that sotto banco (“under the counter” – that is, surreptitious) arrangements are more palatable to the group as a whole (Herzfeld 2009: 182). Often, these gestures entail a social humanity far more valuable to refugees and other suffering populations than organized humanitarianism (which, as we read here and elsewhere, often comes across as decidedly uncivil). Such are the “norms within the margins” (Little and Panella 2021). They are the essence of what Thiranagama (2018) acknowledges as the socially responsive, non-oppressive form of civility. In that sense, civil disability would seem to be the underlying flaw of the state fallen into the hands of crooked entrepreneurs or racist demagogues. That state has slithered into “ethnonational” exclusivism (Connors 1993; Tambiah 1989) and commits unspeakable cruelties against an Other imagined as the inevitable corollary of well-defined territories and identities and discovered in the bodies of those who do not conform to the official order.