Department of Ethnology at Charles University invites to the lecture series The Balkans and Anthropological Imagination
Prof, Michael Herzfeld (Department of Anthropology, Harvard University)
State Modernism and Village Traditionalism: Conflict and Value in a Cretan Village
The speaker has intermittently conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a highland Cretan village for over four decades and has witnessed dramatic changes as well as continuities in the relationship between the local community and the state bureaucracy. Reflecting in part on his experience of fieldwork in other parts of the world (Italy, Thailand), he will analyze the most recent conflicts between the villagers and the state authorities, arguing that the state’s sometimes excessive reaction to local acts of illegality is grounded in fear of the villagers‘ adroit management of their self-image as a true repository of ancient values, and especially of the possibility that the villagers‘ persistent insubordination might infect other communities. At another level, however, he will suggest that the conflict itself demonstrates a deeper level of mutual understanding and recognition between state and community, and especially of a distinctive pattern of enacting reciprocity.
