Review of 'Heritage and Nationalism' by Chiara Bonacchi

Review of Chiara Bonacchi, Heritage and Nationalism: Understanding Populism through Big Data (London: UCL Press, 2022), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 30 (3), September 2024, 837-8.

The politicization of the past has long been a key concern for archaeologists, historians, and heritage professionals. However, with the recent advent of social media and its vast swathes of data generated by organizations, politicians, and private individuals alike, new opportunities to research the resonance of distant pasts in populist rhetoric now abound – if such sources can be harnessed appropriately.

Chiara Bonacchi’s recent monograph, based on one strand of a major project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council entitled ‘Ancient Identities in Modern Britain’, represents one of the first large-scale attempts to fuse ‘big data’ quantitative research with qualitative methods inspired by the concept of ‘social heritage’.

By mining data related to certain specific keywords (or word stems) with a bearing on history from 800 BCE to 800 CE, encompassing prehistory, ancient history (particularly that of the Roman Empire), and the Middle Ages, Bonacchi and her team of researchers used the Twitter and Facebook pages and posts of a range of political parties and their leaders, media outlets, and individuals involved in ‘micro-activism’ in three specific national contexts.

Trump’s controversial 2016 election campaign, centred on the building of a border wall on the southern frontier of the United States, and associated comparisons with Hadrian’s Wall, forms a counterpoint to Bonacchi’s two main case studies, namely the campaigns and discourse surrounding the 2016 Brexit Referendum and the decade of Italian populist politics leading up to the 2018 general election.

While discourse relating to the distant past was more muted in the US context, being mainly the preserve of media outlets and commentators from the United Kingdom and Europe, references to ancient history, especially prehistorical periods and the Roman Empire, were found far more frequently on both sides of the Brexit debate and in recent Italian political discourse.

One of the study’s most telling findings here is precisely the fact that the more populist and right-leaning the political party, the more directly and virulently they and their supporters would invoke ancient exempla and the glories of an imagined (national or proto-national) golden past.

Thus, while CasaPound Italia, an unequivocally far-right party, made explicit appeals to restore the glories of Roman imperialism in the face of perceived cultural decline and immigrant ‘invasion’, more mainstream Italian parties such as Matteo Salvini’s Lega and Beppe Grillo’s Cinque Stelle movement were more broadbrush and circumspect in their engagement with the ancient past.

Similarly, the BNP in the United Kingdom were far more explicit in their focus on themes such as the Crusades, indigenous Briton greatness, and the decline and fall of Rome; mainstream engagements tended to be more limited to comparisons between the Roman Empire and the EU (whether positive or negative) and the insistent journalistic self-fashioning as a classicist commentator on current affairs of Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London.

Notable in particular are the ways in which past figures or events could have completely different valencies in different national contexts – Salvini might unironically be hailed as a Caesarean leader by his Italian supporters, whereas British critics of the EU might negatively characterize Jean-Claude Juncker as an authoritarian avatar of Caesar in the run-up to Brexit.

Of course, the methodologies associated with approaching such ‘big data’ online sources in a heritage studies context are still in their infancy, and one might question some of the methodological assumptions on which the study is founded. For instance, the idea that Facebook or Twitter posts present a more-or-less unmediated way of accessing what individuals ‘really think’ in private about heritage issues does not take account of the inherent ambivalence and unknowability of the internet: we can never in fact know if posters are who they purport to be; whether they are in earnest or merely trolling, expressing extreme opinions under a convenient veil of anonymity.

It is also sometimes hard to ascertain how representative individual social media posts discussed in the text might be of broader trends within the corpus of data as a whole, or how far the commercial third-party tools used to mine that data might be distorting the overall picture.

However, despite its limitations, Bonacchi and her team are to be commended for their pioneering approach in opening up new directions for further research, giving future scholars the opportunity to build upon their initial findings and methodological frameworks. Even if the connections with broader right-wing extremist talking points and subcultural referents are rarely made explicit, the project’s findings also grant us valuable insights into populist mindsets, and the ways in which perceptions of the distant past can dangerously influence political attitudes and actions in the present.