Poetics of Manhood Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village

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 SupplementHerzfeld, Michael is the author of 'Poetics of Manhood Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village' with ISBN 9780691094106 and ISBN 0691094101.