A Place in History Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town / Michael Herzfeld.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Herzfeld, Michael, 1947-

Contributor:

American Council of Learned Societies.

Series:

ACLS Humanities E-Book.

Princeton studies in culture/power/history

Princeton modern Greek studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History--Philosophy.

History.

Greece--Rethymnon.

Greece.

Greece--Crete.

Crete (Greece)--History.

Crete (Greece).

Rethymnon (Greece)--History.

Rethymnon (Greece).

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvi, 305 p. ) ill. ;

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1991.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Michael Herzfeld describes what happens when a bureaucracy charged with historic conservation clashes with a local populace hostile to the state and suspicious of tourism. Focusing on the Cretan town of Rethemnos, once a center of learning under Venetian rule and later inhabited by the Turks, he examines major questions confronting conservators and citizens as they negotiate the "ownership" of history: Who defines the past? To whom does the past belong? What is "traditional" and how is this determined? Exploring the meanings of the built environment for Rethemnos's inhabitants, Herzfeld finds that their interest in it has more to do with personal histories and the immediate social context than with the formal history that attracts the conservators. He also investigates the inhabitants' social practices from the standpoints of household and kin group, political association, neighborhood, gender ideology, and the effects of these on attitudes toward home ownership. In the face of modernity, where tradition is an object of both reverence and commercialism, Rethemnos emerges as an important ethnographic window onto the ambiguous cultural fortunes of Greece.

Contents:

CHAPTER ONE: The Town of the Tale

CHAPTER TWO: Histories in Conflict

CHAPTER THREE: Hosts, Neighbors, and Rivals

CHAPTER FOUR: Home Spaces

CHAPTER FIVE: Gamblers and Usurers

CHAPTER SIX: Impatience on a Monument

CHAPTER SEVEN: Histories in Their Places

Appendix

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [279]-285) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781400843312

1400843316

OCLC:

1273306570