The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value

Voorkant
University of Chicago Press, 2004 - 269 pagina's
The Body Impolitic is a critical study of tradition, not merely as an ornament of local and national heritage, but also as a millstone around the necks of those who are condemned to produce it.

Michael Herzfeld takes us inside a rich variety of small-town Cretan artisans' workshops to show how apprentices are systematically thwarted into learning by stealth and guile. This harsh training reinforces a stereotype of artisans as rude and uncultured. Moreover, the same stereotypes that marginalize artisans locally also operate to marginalize Cretans within the Greek nation and Greece itself within the international community. What Herzfeld identifies as "the global hierarchy of value" thus frames the nation's ancient monuments and traditional handicrafts as evidence of incurable "backwardness."

Herzfeld's sensitive observations offer an intimately grounded way of understanding the effects of globalization and of one of its most visible offshoots, the heritage industry, on the lives of ordinary people in many parts of the world today.
 

Geselecteerde pagina's

Inhoudsopgave

1 The Pedestal and the Tethering Post
1
2 Schooling the Body
37
3 Hostility and Cooperation
61
4 Engendered States
90
5 Boredom and Stealth
113
6 Associative States
139
7 Artisans in the State and the Nation
168
8 Embodying Value
193
Notes
211
Bibliography
239
Index
253
Copyright

Overige edities - Alles bekijken

Veelvoorkomende woorden en zinsdelen

Over de auteur (2004)

Michael Herzfeld is a professor of anthropology at Harvard University. He is the author, most recently, of Portrait of a Greek Imagination: An Ethnographic Biography of Andreas Nenedakis, published by the University of Chicago Press, and Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Society and Culture.

Bibliografische gegevens