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.