The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village
The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village By Michael Herzfeld
Publisher: Princeton University Press 1988 | 336 Pages | ISBN: 0691102449 | PDF | 16 MB
Publisher: Princeton University Press 1988 | 336 Pages | ISBN: 0691102449 | PDF | 16 MB
"The Cretan mountain-dwellers are in particular famous for their sustained resistance to Turkish rule and then to German occupation. Their values, well-expressed in the motto of the Cretan writer Kazantzakis--`I hope for nothing; I fear nothing; I am free'--made them heroes at times when such qualities were positively endorsed in a Greece fighting to escape foreign domination. Today inevitably they are frowned on; Cretan shepherds are now caricatured as `goat thieves and knife pullers', a survival of primitivism outrageous in a modern state. Herzfeld's excellent and sensitive ethnography of the pseudonymous village and inhabitants of Glendi, a mountain village in central Crete, is concerned with just these attributes, the ways they are lived and reproduced among Glendiots."--Olivia Harris, Times Higher Education Supplement