The 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 Supplement