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.
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