Bücher von Michael Herzfeld

Michael Herzfeld documents how marginalized groups use official discourses of national tradition against the authority of the bureaucratic nation-state state and violent repercussions that can often follow.

Argues that 'modern' bureaucratically regulated societies are no more 'rational' or less 'symbolic' than the societies traditionally studied by anthropologists. Drawing on the example of modern Greece and utilizing other European materials, the author suggests that we cannot understand national bureaucracies divorced from local-level ideas.

When this work - one that contributes to both the history and anthropology fields - first appeared in 1982, it was hailed as a landmark study of the role of folklore in nation-building.

This volume contains the majority of the papers presented at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, held in Lubbock, Texas, October 16-19, 1980. Hickerson (Texas Tech Universi ty), and our special thanks to Laurel Phipps of the School of Continuing Education at Texas Tech University.

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, this book examines questions confronting conservators and citizens.

Despite having emerged in the heyday of a dominant Europe, of which Ancient Greece is the hallowed spiritual and intellectual ancestor, anthropology has paradoxically shown relatively little interest in contemporary Greek culture. In this innovative and ambitious book, Michael Herzfeld moves Greek Ethnography from the margins to the centre of anthropological theory, revealing the theoretical insights that can be gained by so doing. He shows that the ideology that originally led to the creation of anthropology also played a large part in the growth of the modern Greek nation-state, and that Greek ethnography can therefore serve as a mirror for an ethnography of anthropology itself. He further demonstrates the role that scholarly fields, including anthropology, have played in the construction of contemporary Greek culture and Greek identity.

The description for this book, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village, will be forthcoming.