Philhellenism as a Regime of Forgetting: The Norwegian Archaeologist Ingvald Undset and His Report from Greece

Abstract

Taking the work of the Norwegian archaeologist Ingvald Undset (1853–93) as a starting point, this essay invites us to rethink European philhellenism, and its concomitant neo-classicist tendencies, as a distinctive “regime of forgetting.” Discussing responses to Greece and Greek history from diverse contexts, it also explores how, in different cultural spheres, different “layers” of Greek history were forgotten, suggesting that, just like regimes of remembering, “regimes of forgetting” can be highly situation dependent.