Tradition in the Frame: Photography, Power, and Imagination in Sfakia, Crete

By Konstantinos Kalantzis

An ethnographic study of a Greek island community’s culture in the face of modern times.

Sfakians on the island of Crete are known for their distinctive dress and appearance, fierce ruggedness, and devotion to traditional ways. Konstantinos Kalantzis explores how Sfakians live with the burdens and pleasures of maintaining these expectations of exoticism for themselves, for their fellow Greeks, and for tourists. Sfakian performance of masculine tradition has become even more meaningful for Greeks looking to reimagine their nation’s global standing in the wake of stringent financial regulation, and for non-Greek tourists yearning for rootedness and escape from the post-industrial north. Through fine-grained ethnography that pays special attention to photography, Tradition in the Frame explores the ambivalence of a society expected to conform to outsiders’ perception of the traditional even as it strives to enact its own vision of tradition. From the bodily reenactment of historical photographs to the unpredictable, emotionally-charged uses of postcards and commercial labels, the book unpacks the question of power and asymmetry but also uncovers other political possibilities that are nested in visual culture and experiences of tradition and the past. Kalantzis explores the crossroads of cultural performance and social imagination where the frame is both empowerment and subjection.

“In this original, beautifully written, and often moving monograph, Konstantinos Kalantzis has produced a lasting contribution to the anthropological study of contemporary Europe. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Tradition in the Frame explores with exquisite detail a number of timely themes—the social life of photographs, conflicting tourist and local images of Crete, the performance of gender stereotypes, and the complex tension between tradition and modernity. The author’s ability to view the world through the eyes of natives and foreigners, and to deconstruct visual signs and symbols, is nothing short of stunning. For anyone interested in Europe and the Mediterranean world today, this richly documented and theoretically sophisticated volume is a must read.” —Stanley Brandes

“Tradition in the Frame is a richly innovative ethnography focusing on the visual dimensions of modern Cretan mythmaking, and especially on the material reproduction and negotiation of time-honored stereotypes of warrior masculinity. Writing of a society that has largely shifted its economy from shepherding to tourism, Kalantzis incisively demonstrates how the realities of commercial exploitation and socio-political change re-frame familiar images of a society at once proudly central to the symbolism of national identity and yet also still reluctant to accept the merest hint of intrusive authority.” —Michael Herzfeld

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9780253037152

Book preview

TRADITION IN THE FRAME

NEW ANTHROPOLOGIES OF EUROPE

Michael Herzfeld, Melissa L. Caldwell, and Deborah Reed-Danahay, editors

TRADITION IN THE FRAME

Photography, Power, and Imagination in Sfakia, Crete

Konstantinos Kalantzis

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2019 by Konstantinos Kalantzis

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-253-03712-1 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-253-03713-8 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-253-03714-5 (ebook)

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Note about the cover image: A copy of a photograph taken around 1939 by professional photographer Nelly, working under commission from the Metaxas regime’s Under-Ministry for Press and Tourism, rests on an artisan’s workbench in highland Sfakia. This image was taken during one of many discussions I had with my interlocutors around archival photographs that I brought to the field. Such historical portraits are rare and are highly prized by Sfakians—especially the sitters’ descendants, though viewers often deconstruct the photographers’ staging of their forebears. Sfakians who examine such images are primarily concerned with identifying and naming the subjects, who tend to go unnamed in archives and published books, and they also comment on sitters’ life histories and local reputations. My interlocutors couldn’t identify the men in this particular historical image though they speculated about their names. Workbench photo by the author, 2012; historical photo by Nelly, ca. 1939, copyright Benaki Museum Photographic Archive.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Introduction

Part ISpatial and National Contexts

1Driving Up the Yellow Lines: Geography and Imagination

2Sfakians in the Nation-State

Part IIOn Power

3Mountain Men as Photographic Subjects and Spectators

4Performing the Stereotype: Between Containment and Recalcitrant Alterity

5The Experiential in the Fictive: A Film Shoot as Visceral History

6Who Is Imagining? The Encounter between Shepherds and Scientists

Part IIIModernity and Its Discontents

7Polluting Modernity, Disturbing Pasts: Photography and Montage Logic

8Sfakians and Tourists

Epilogue

References

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 0.1.Sfakians showing me photographs of their ancestors.

Figure 1.1.View from Xylodema.

Figure 1.2.Road signs with bullet holes.

Figure 2.1.Poster at Athens International Airport.

Figure 2.2.Postcard stands in western Crete.

Figure 2.3.Differing visual approaches to Cretan pastoralism by professional photographers George Meis and Alexis Vallianos.

Figure 3.1.Photographs of Giorgis Valiris by Nelly.

Figure 3.2.Photograph of Manolis Nikoloudis by George Meis.

Figure 3.3.Postcard collage showing western Cretan landscapes and profile shot of Giorgis Valiris.

Figure 3.4.Postcard depicting a Sfakian man with church in background.

Figure 3.5.Olive oil label with image of Giorgis Valiris.

Figure 3.6.The visual motif of the Cretan man in formal attire.

Figure 3.7.Historical postcards in private Sfakian collections.

Figure 3.8.Decommercialized uses of Manolis Nikoloudis postcard image.

Figure 3.9.Display in a corner of a merchant’s office.

Figure 4.1.Images reflecting continuity between national articulation and local imagination.

Figure 4.2.Depictions of the man staring way motif.

Figure 4.3.Depictions of the hand-to-heart pose.

Figure 4.4.Photo of Greek kilted figure in museum-like interior.

Figure 4.5.Family photograph in a highland coffeehouse.

Figure 4.6.Newspaper photograph of an actor that a Sfakian has Cretanized.

Figure 5.1.Nineteenth-century Cretan fighters during a gathering in Tzitzifes.

Figure 5.2.Display on a wall in a Chaniot musician’s home.

Figure 5.3.Images showing visual continuity between past and present.

Figure 5.4.Accessing the past in the mountainous landscape.

Figure 6.1.Early twentieth-century imagery registering urban interest in rural production.

Figure 6.2.Photographs of kin on a senior couple’s living room wall.

Figure 6.3.Sfakian man with fez-like headwear photographed by Nelly.

Figure 6.4.Photograph of a Cretan man by Constantine Manos.

Figure 6.5.Sfakian man photographed by Nelly.

Figure 6.6.Sfakian men photographed by Nelly.

Figure 7.1.Postcard showing a contemporary Cretan man in traditional dress.

Figure 7.2.Sfakian men photographed by Nelly.

Figure 7.3.Sfakian men photographed by Nelly.

Figure 7.4.Photograph of Sfakian men by Voula Papaioannou

Figure 7.5.Abandoned stone houses.

Figure 8.1.Photographs taken by visitors to Sfakia.

Figure 8.2.Half-destroyed pages of visitor comment book left on a mountain peak.

Figure 8.3.Photographs taken by non-Greek visitors to Sfakia.

Figure 8.4.A group of local men around a table in the company of a female visitor.

Figure 8.5.Tourist mementoes in a mountain kiosk.

Figure 9.1.Display on a wall in a coastal restaurant.

LIST OF MAPS

Map 1.1.Map of Greece and surrounding area.

Map 1.2.Map of Crete.

Map 1.3.Map of the Municipality of Sfakia showing physiographic features.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK IS THE CULMINATION OF MORE THAN a decade of research in and on Sfakia, and many people have left their marks on its pages. I embarked on this work while pursuing my doctoral degree, during which time I benefited enormously from the guidance of Chris Pinney and Charles Stewart, my academic supervisors in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. I am deeply grateful to Chris for his tremendous inspiration and exhaustive support and to Charles for his meticulous and creative advice. I am also very thankful to the late Peter Loizos, Elizabeth Edwards, Renée Hirschon, Marcus Banks, Chris Tilley, Allen Abramson, and Martin Holbraad for constructive criticism and intellectual stimulation during that period. In Greece, my work profited from productive discussions during workshops for doctoral students at the University of the Aegean Department of Anthropology and at the University of Crete Department of History and Archaeology. I thank the organizers of and participants in those events, among others, Akis Papataxiarchis, Theodoros Paradellis, Panos Panopoulos, Venetia Kantza, Christos Hadjiiosif, Sokratis Petmezas, Efi Avdela, Giannis Kokkinakis, and Aglaia Kasdagli.

I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the University College London Research Project Fund, and the University of London Central Research Fund for financially assisting me in my research. I also gratefully acknowledge a 2011–2012 Mary Seeger O’Boyle Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University for providing support for writing and thinking through the issues this book explores. Special thanks go to Dimitri Gondicas and other members of the center’s staff for creating a hospitable and stimulating environment. At Princeton, I also benefited from insightful feedback from and discussions with Carol Greenhouse, John Borneman, and Lisa Davis. For support during manuscript preparation, I am also grateful to the PhotoDemos project, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 695283).

I was able to think through some of the ideas presented in these pages while teaching at San Francisco State University and the University of Bern. I am particularly grateful for thoughtful comments from and discussions with students, colleagues Alexandra Pappas, David Leitao, Michaela Schäuble, and Stanley Brandes, and interlocutors at public talks I gave in spring 2016 and winter 2017.

Throughout the years, I have received fruitful feedback while presenting my research in various venues, and I would like to thank convenors and commentators, including Eleana Yalouri, Vangelis Calotychos, Alexandra Bakalaki, Elsa Amanatidou, Aimee Places, Elpida Rikou, Othon Alexandrakis, Heath Cabot, Noelle Molé, Neni Panourgiá, Dimitra Madianou, Vassiliki Yiakoumaki, Kerstin Poehls, Ritsa Deltsou, Foteini Tsimpiridou, Sissy Theodosiou, and Elia Vardaki. I have also had the opportunity to rework some of my ideas through collaboration with the editors of a number of scholarly publications. For their valuable advice, I thank Gustaaf Houtman, Angelique Haugerud, Yannis Hamilakis, Eleni Papargyriou, Philip Carabott, Andrew Shryock, David Akin, Jenny Chio, and Mark Westmoreland. I am grateful to my UCL colleagues Chris Pinney, Naluwembe Binaisa, Ileana Selejan, Vindhya Buthpitiya, and Sokphea Young, collaborators in the PhotoDemos project, for facilitating a realm of exciting explorations of photography and the social.

Many friends and colleagues in Athens and Crete have offered intellectual support and stimulation as well as warm friendship. I am particularly thankful to Meni Galeridi, Alexandra Bakalaki, Giannis and Stefanos Vamiedakis, Panos Panopoulos, Rania Astrinaki, Vassiliki Yiakoumaki, Iris Tzachili, Eleana Yalouri, Giorgis Nikolakakis, Kostas Gounis, Stamos and Kostas Sinioris, Kostas Chritis, Kostas Spiggos, Leo Seelig, Kostas Strevlos, Leonidas Papafotiou, Giorgos Papachristos, Giorgos Samantas, Dimitris Lykakis, Agis Metaxopoulos, Iosif Tsiamoglou, Nikos Meidanis, Pafsanias Karathanasis, Andreas Anastasiou, Kostis Kornetis, Pavlos Vassilopoulos, Anastasia Ntini, and Zaharias Sifakis. For recommendations, advice, and other help either with fieldwork or during manuscript preparation I am grateful to Eftihis Tzirtzilakis, Giorgos Patroudakis, Zacharenia Simandiraki, Katerina Zacharia, and Mylene Hengen. Kostas Chritis deserves special mention for designing the book’s maps and creating the image collages, following our long conversation and collaboration. I owe an everlasting debt to Nikos Katsanevas, who acted with immense courage to help me through a serious accident I suffered in 2007.

Special thanks go to Michael Herzfeld for his deeply insightful and critical reading of my previous written work on Sfakia as well as for his warm interest in this project and his help and generosity throughout. For enabling access to the Benaki Museum Photographic Archive and graciously fielding my inquiries about it, I am indebted to Aliki Tsirgialou and other members of the archive staff. Jennika Baines at Indiana University Press oversaw production of the book and offered valuable advice throughout the process. The work benefited from rich commentary offered by two anonymous readers, to whom I am grateful. Linda Forman’s sharp and meticulous copyediting helped create a better manuscript, for which I am thankful. Kate Schramm at IUP kindly helped me with issues related to the use of images in the book. Segments of chapter 2 rework material from my 2012 article Crete as Warriorhood: Visual Explorations of Social Imaginaries in ‘Crisis,’ Anthropology Today 28 (3): 7–11. Some material in chapters 3 and 4 appeared in my 2014 article On Ambivalent Nativism: Hegemony, Photography, and ‘Recalcitrant Alterity’ in Sphakia, Crete, American Ethnologist 41 (1): 56–75. Some material from chapter 6 is reprinted from Shepherds as Images, Shepherds with Images: Photographic (Re)engagements in Sfakia, Crete, in Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities, edited by Philip Carabott, Yannis Hamilakis, and Eleni Papargyriou (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 313–335. One visual discussion in chapter 8 draws on my 2016 article Proxy Brigands and Tourists: Visualizing the Greek-German Front in the Debt Crisis, Visual Anthropology Review 32 (1): 24–37.

I am deeply indebted to all the Sfakians who have accepted me into their lives throughout the years, kindly accommodating my concerns and engaging with me on innumerable issues as well as offering generous support and commentary. I am also very thankful to people in Tzitzifes and elsewhere in Crete for their generosity and conversations. The most valuable aspect of this research has been the many friendships and conversations I have enjoyed with interlocutors since 2006. As my aim throughout this book has been to protect people’s privacy and respect the sensitivity of certain ethnographic material, here I cannot thank individual friends and interlocutors by name.

This book would not have been possible without the unstinting support of Rosa Alchanati, who created a space with me where thinking, writing, and dwelling were possible.

Finally, I am indebted to my parents, Mirella Arvanitopoulou and Alexandros Kalantzis. They have supported and encouraged me throughout my life and the life of this project. This work is dedicated to them.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

SIMPLIFYING AND ESCHEWING THE COMPLEX POLITICAL AND PHILOLOGICAL landscape of Greek transliteration, I simultaneously use two systems to render Greek terms in this book. In the main text, I transliterate most terms and expressions that play a role in the ethnographic plot with emphasis on their phonetic quality, thus often violating their orthography. In the textual references to public figures and places, published works and films, people’s names, and so on, as well as in the references and figure captions, I try to remain as faithful as possible to the original Greek spellings, preserving their most recognizable forms, partly to enable identification of the terms in various English-language contexts (e.g., on the internet). Unless otherwise noted, I am responsible for all translations of Greek texts in the book.

TRADITION IN THE FRAME

INTRODUCTION

The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.

—Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

The search for identity through the many circuits of mimesis and alterity ends at this point in our history with the conclusion that, finally, although there is no such thing as identity in any grand sense—just chimeras of possible longings lounging in the interstices of quaint necessities—nevertheless the masks of appearance do more than suffice. They are an absolute necessity.

—Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity

Looking and Longing

One afternoon in the early 2000s, years before I started thinking about doing research in Sfakia, I was having lunch with a close friend at a small restaurant in Athens that was frequented mostly by university students and professionals from nearby hospitals.¹ A group of men and women entered and with some bustle sat at the table next to ours. They were all wearing black; the younger men had dark whiskers, the older men white beards. I immediately recognized them as Cretans, probably residents of some rural part of the island. Their identity would have been obvious to any Greek, decipherable through a materiality of body and attire that holds a central place in the Greek national imaginary. Their solemn, intimate commensality led me to speculate that they were family members visiting a sick relative at a nearby clinic. In fact, the thought that they were united by the rupture of illness enhanced the sense of complicit unity I read into their gestures. Already absorbed by my own concerns with rootedness and the home, I was drawn to this image of familial belonging and solidarity projected through embodied performance. I was also struck by the choreographing of material culture that, in the middle of a contemporary city, signaled rural descent and did so in a way that seemed to escape the staged aesthetics of official celebrations of Greek rurality. My fascination with this total form of belonging was fed by my experiences as a national subject (including exposure to official pedagogies of locality and culture that I have since partly repressed) and by having observed myriad media representations of Crete, from comedy shows to TV news spots reporting incidents purported to be indicative of violence and illegality (e.g., gun possession and blood feuds), that inform one aspect of highland Crete’s stereotype in the national imaginary. We might say these representations constitute a mythology (see chap. 2), which I was just beginning to glimpse at the time as an undergraduate student living in a Cretan town.

Years later, while I was engaged in anthropological training in northern Europe, Crete’s complex mythology returned to mind, this time as motivation to explore how it worked in a place taken to exemplify the extreme of nativity: Sfakia, in the rocky southwest part of the island. It also returned in response to my longing for a landscape that contrasted with what I was experiencing stereotypically as the cold, misty, and flat topography of the North. My desire to study Sfakia and to connect to its rurality was instrumental to my later grasping what Crete does for visitors from the North: how it may operate metonymically (evoking for visitors their own ancestors and the notion of old lifeways) but also through the sensual specificity of place. Visitor interaction with Crete and its people is only one of my interests, however, as the primary stage for the playing out of notions such as rootedness and ruggedness is arguably the national one, and in that domain the Sfakian is an extremely sought-after figure in a broad array of contexts. The plasticity of this figure, simultaneously troubling and flattering to Sfakians themselves, is evident in public representations in which stereotypical Cretan—and, more particularly, Sfakian—attributes are key to social engagements around diverse phenomena, from political hopes tied to nativism to food commercials and comedic performances and from protests against austerity measures to public critiques of anti-austerity politics. Visual modalities are absolutely central to these phenomena (the Sfakian is primarily a visible figure), and this further complicates and is complicated by the essential role that the visual—both images and negotiations around appearance—plays in Sfakians’ own pursuit of self-image. The investments I am referring to here concern what people call tradition²—the experiences, artifacts, and evaluations I unravel in this book.

On Exoticism

Both the mythology surrounding Crete and the fantasies of rootedness, nativity, and tradition that bind North to South, reflect aspects of othering that anthropology began to address especially after the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). The book in hand engages this crucial discussion anew by examining how representation may be a reflection but also a tool of colonization, reducing, objectifying, and dehumanizing Others and legitimizing a certain mastery over them. But herein lies a problem, as Orientalism and kindred terms (e.g., exoticism) are often implicated in an endeavor that can be both moral(izing) and normalizing (assuming there is a proper interest in alterity), concerned merely with condemning certain representations as wrong or evil (see also Bhabha 2004a, 95–96). This development is partly a result of the 1980s critique of anthropology’s complicity with objectivist conceits and colonialism, which, according to one recent assessment, nearly rendered ethnographic description irrelevant and contributed to the rise of the suffering subject as anthropology’s focus of concern (Robbins 2013, 449, 453). One problem with this moral exorcism, arguably motivated by sanguine alliance with the oppressed and otherwise productive of a valuable political critique, is its assumption that Orientalism always operates in the negative (denying, diminishing, ridiculing), even though there is much evidence that desire and fascination may also inform representations of (noble) savages.

In fact, as I argue in this book, positivity, negativity, and both veneration and rejection of difference ambivalently coexist in exoticism. Of course, desire and positivity (e.g., tourist enthusiasm) does not guarantee that representations are exempt from asymmetry and problematic political assumptions, as in recurring primitivisms that extoll the native’s voice but never grant the native the privileges reserved for oneself. I tackle such questions of power by shifting the stakes and asking what kinds of demands exoticism places on its subjects. I am especially interested in understanding the experiences made possible in a context where mythologies of rugged savagery inform all aspects of daily life. I focus on what stereotypes unleash, on what exoticism does and what experiences it makes possible. How does it feel to inhabit Sfakian indigeneity when one is bombarded daily by representations of one’s rugged distinctiveness? What is it like to be demarcated as traditional, subject to the gaze of thousands of tourists, outside observers, and cultural producers who engage with, define, or ridicule one’s tradition, and to simultaneously hold tradition to be the most crucial aspect of one’s life? More generally, what does tradition do for people in Greece or, for that matter, people elsewhere? In examining such questions and contemplating what Sfakian agency might look like, I think beyond the assumption that (bad) power is teleologically countered by some form of (good) resistance. Sfakians’ articulation of themselves as rugged warriors is the product of a complex history of constant embeddedness in social dynamics that exceed the before- and after-power schema. This history gives me the opportunity to reconstruct the encounter between rural subjects and educated cultural producers with as much emphasis on interplay and continuity as on disdain and conflict.

Thinking through the Frame

Shifting the problematic of Orientalism explains why I have titled this book Tradition in the Frame. The image of the frame helps us grasp the most poignant aspect of exoticism: the placement of subjects in particular positions and the expectation that they perform in them as expected. The frame here is a metaphor for containment and subject production, taking us back to the Foucauldian root of Orientalism but without assuming total mastery of the frame’s producers over those depicted within its borders. It helps us explore how Sfakians engage the demands of agents in more powerful positions than they (e.g., folklorists) in laying claim to the rural world and defining tradition. This book critically converses here with the influential anthropological assumption that a stereotype of tradition or rugged authenticity is instrumental in efforts by centers to dominate their peripheries and consequently that rural people’s traditionalism is destined to succumb to an all-encompassing urban, market-driven system.

But the frame is crucial to my exploration for another reason as well. The historical articulation of Sfakians as subjects is entangled in visual imagery, especially photographs. From my earliest online searches connected with this project, the public images and stories I collected consistently articulated Cretanness in terms of visible attributes associated with a male figure. What I did not initially know, however, was that commercial images of traditional Cretan men (e.g., on tourist postcards) were almost exclusively of Sfakians and that Sfakians were immensely proud of and interested in appearance as indicative of social worth and in photography as a technique for engaging tradition. The frame, for them, was something tangible but also aspirational. It was, among other things, about capturing their own nativist self-image, itself in conversation with the millions of frames produced by powerful outsiders, some of which ended up on local living-room walls, on posters, and in photo albums.

Consider this dynamic in relation to the two photographs juxtaposed in figure 0.1. The upper photo shows my friend Giannis near his home in a highland Sfakian village, a place with a predominantly pastoral and farming economy. In it, he is showing me a photograph of a photograph of his grandfather that he took with his mobile phone. Iterating a locally cherished narrative of discovery, Giannis said that his uncle had recently found the image inside a neglected drawer at an elderly kinsman’s house. The picture had been taken at a studio in urban Crete in the early twentieth century, and it depicted the grandfather wearing formal attire—a version of which is currently worn by locals, mostly in festivities, as a signifier of tradition. The uncle had had the image reprinted at a studio in the town of Chania and had hung it on his living-room wall. Intrigued by the picture, Giannis had recorded it with his mobile phone, technology that allows Sfakians to avoid the obligation they would incur by asking image owners to lend them photos. He intended to take his image to a studio, so he could obtain a hard copy for himself. This episode dates to the period just before the proliferation of smartphones that have since expanded practices of self-representation. I relate it here because it reveals how intent Sfakians are on capturing iconography that is important to them, using whatever means they have at hand.

Giannis’s daily presentation of the self, to quote Erving Goffman ([1959] 1971; see also Herzfeld 1985), is captured in my photo of him. His erect posture, whiskers, and black shirt speak of an attempt to embody his patriline, as reflected in his grandfather’s picture and in dozens of other photographs of his ancestors and other Sfakian men, photos that have been reprinted in thousands of formats locally, nationally, and internationally. The desire to embody history and tradition and to present oneself as a worthy Sfakian man encounters obstacles, however. In fact, almost all of the details I interpreted that afternoon in the restaurant in Athens as straightforwardly flagging descent proved to be sharply contested idioms. Locals are strongly drawn to the notion of a unique Sfakian tradition, an idea that relies on appearance, yet they seriously question people’s ability to embody it. The black shirt, for instance, worn in recent years as a sign of Cretan descent, is regarded with some ambivalence. While many locals claim pride in wearing it, they also wonder if doing so is a perversion of custom, a violation of past (mourning) ethos.

Fig. 0.1. Two Sfakian men show me photographs of their ancestors...

Fig. 0.1. Two Sfakian men show me photographs of their ancestors. Upper: Giannis Athitis displays a photograph of a photograph of his grandfather on his mobile phone. He took the picture with the aim of digitally preserving the original photo and printing a hard copy for himself. Lower: Manousos Ntourountous contemplates the image of his deceased father Giannis that appears on a poster publicizing a photographic exhibition. Sfakians searching for photos of their ancestors often buy and frame postcards or other commercial images depicting these men. Photos by the author (2006, 2007).

The stone wall in the background of my image of Giannis also deserves attention. A marginal technique until recently, stone construction, although costly, is increasingly preferred by Sfakians. It materializes at the intersection of local desire for the traditional and a resignification of locality occurring through tourism. While building with stone is a generally endorsed way of approaching the past and tradition, people simultaneously see it as a half measure, because, they say, it does not represent the real technique of the past. The wall is another site of ambivalent cultural investment, another object of conflict. It is partly pleasing and partly troubling, attesting to the impossibility of being traditional in the present.

The lower photograph in figure 0.1 further illuminates the power issues involved in embodying Sfakianness. In it, Manousos, a businessman from a Sfakian coastal village, is contemplating an image of his deceased father that appears on the poster publicizing a photographic exhibition that took place some years ago in a Cretan city. The father’s photograph was displayed at that exhibition but was accompanied by no personal information on the sitter, describing him only generically (the Sfakian shepherd type). The poster has the potential to evoke fascination for as well as aversion to or derision of the man’s ruggedness (as ruggedness in Greece can also have connotations of uncouth savagery). The son’s proud contemplation of his shepherd father reflects the asymmetry whereby Sfakians look at themselves and their past in images produced by those who possess the cultural and economic capital necessary to represent them and their landscape. Sfakians are aware of the scarcity of historical images and are eager to locate photographs of their ancestors and blend with them in iconographic lineages. What is it that they see in such pictures, and how does it correlate with national ideas regarding tradition?

Ambivalence and the Visual

This book investigates the juncture of cultural experiences relating to tradition, ruggedness, and the past, both of members of a rural society who are expected to appear traditional and of their visitors and observers. Among these experiences are intense struggles that I particularly locate in visual culture. Coined by art historian Michael Baxandall, the term visual culture was later popularized by Svetlana Alpers to designate a repertoire of expectation and potentiality around vision (Pinney 2006, 131). We could also think about visual culture more generally in connection with a domain of appearances, strategically leaving it open to encompass various practices and inscriptions—from sketches on scrap paper to photography—though attention must be paid to the distinctive social dynamics and textures these visual forms and processes entail. This domain asks for interpretation of signs but also for phenomenological consideration of sensory efficacy (the visual as actual, tangible practice), a proposition whose weight becomes clearer by looking at how anthropology has approached the visual at various times. The discipline’s history vis-à-vis the visual encompasses nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the scientific promise of the camera and subsequent aversion to photography’s ambiguity (Pinney 2011), film’s putative kinship with entertainment (MacDougall 2006, 228), and, more generally, the fetishism associated with engaging objects (Miller 1998b, 9). This change in attitude came with professionalized anthropology’s shift in interest toward the abstract and invisible structures of social life and with late twentieth-century critiques charging cameras and the visual with ethnographic thinness, complicity with objectivist, quasi-colonial pursuits, and even corruption of the native’s point of view through an embedded Western perspective (Pinney 2011; MacDougall 2006, 228; Miller 1998b, 9; Morphy and Banks 1997, 9; Kalantzis 2012a, 2015c; see Clifford and Marcus 1986; Houtman 1988; Weiner 1997).

The asymmetry in the picture that Manousos is contemplating in figure 0.1 speaks to a property of the frame as defined by an influential scholarly tradition that draws on Michel Foucault and considers photography to have been a key tool for political regimes engaged in the historical restructuring of the social body through regulative techniques of representation and documentation (e.g., Tagg 1988; see also Alloula 1987). John Tagg in particular has argued that photography possesses no particular properties guaranteeing an existential link between referent and image (the so-called realist position advocated, e.g., by Barthes in Camera Lucida) but that its reception and operation are entirely determined by the practices, processes and institutions (1988, 4) through which it enacts meanings and effects. For anthropology, typically interested in social signification—as in the social-life-of-things approach (roughly contemporaneous with Tagg’s critique) emphasizing that the value and meaning of material objects are created through their consumption and circulation (Appadurai 1986)—this can be a tenable position. It is undoubtedly necessary to examine how photography produces subjects as well as to explore the asymmetries and conflicts that shape what Deborah Poole (1997), in the Andean context, calls a visual economy (less inclusive than visual culture). Yet I also argue in this book that photography’s framing entails ruptures and may involve unpredictable dynamics that defy the dominant inscription. The recovery of such defiance owes much to my treatment of the visual as a primary realm of struggle rather than a superstructure of secondary importance (Pinney 2004, 8; see Morphy and Banks 1997, 5) as well as to the centrality I accord ambivalence as an analytical category, necessary to account for Sfakians’ vacillating attitude toward their most cherished idioms (Bhabha 2004a; Freud 1957, 131–133, 138–139). I therefore mount a certain challenge to long-standing anthropological priorities that have tended to gloss over the particularities of the visual and to treat visuals as mere reflections of social dynamics already known from other sources or as straightforward illustrations of the political conditions and institutions that produced them (Pinney 2005, 265; see also Miller 1998b, 9; MacDougall 2006, 238, 268).

There is perhaps something utopic in wanting to prioritize images and objects rather than their cultural context or in claiming that something in their properties exceeds social signification. The desire recalls Christopher Pinney’s proposal to examine certain visual forms within Jean-François Lyotard’s category of the figure, a realm where intensities are felt (2006, 135), rather than treat visuals as transparent documents suitable for linguistic-style decoding. The utopianism is apparent when I unavoidably return to wider semantics as a means of understanding how pictures work. I am reminded of W. J. T. Mitchell’s (2005, 32, 46) admission that despite his provocation to consider the desires of images—to treat them as subalterns not reducible to linguistic analysis and against the cliché that they possess social power—he frequently ended up considering their meaning, thus showing that semiotics and hermeneutics can hardly be eliminated. Yet the challenge of such an approach is worth tackling, for attention to images and their tangible social uses—their materiality and the materiality of their context (Banks 2001, 51)—often reveals dynamics that can destabilize certainties stemming from discursive registers and analyses of social structure.

Photography holds particular promise here. At the level of content, photographs may include elements that exceed their producers’ intention, a potential I explore through Walter Benjamin’s notion of contingency and Roland Barthes’s notion of the punctum and one that is key to understanding Sfakian uses of pictures even against photographers’ ideological agendas. It is this property of photography that other anthropologists have seized on in illuminating how even the most closed, dehumanizing photographs (those exemplifying Foucault’s focus on governmentality via surveillance) sometimes present us with details that help us rethink slippages even of the colonial encounter itself, as in, say, the subtly visible performance of cultural cohesiveness by Samoan captives aboard a nineteenth-century European ship (Edwards 2001, 119). A related challenge is to ethnographically show how precisely representation is linked to power rather than assume that vision and its technologies are synonymous with commanding surveillance, subjugation, and the cold objectification of the world, the message often drawn from the works of Martin Heidegger ([1935] 1977), Guy Debord ([1967] 2004), Jean Baudrillard ([1981] 1994), and Martin Jay (1988; see also Mitchell 2005, 32; Pinney 2008, 388).

My attention to Sfakian everyday uses of photography also reflects my approach to visual culture as a study of dynamics that exceed ocular apprehension and involve other sensory and communication modes, for example, the oralities woven around the sharing of images (Edwards 2005, 27, 38). Relevant arguments about the position of the visual in the sensorium stress that aesthetics involves embodied perception (Buck-Morss 1992, 6), that knowledge of one’s surroundings proves vision’s tactility (Taussig 1994, 209), and that film spectatorship involves sensing people’s corporeal experience of the world (MacDougall 2006, 270). On this basis, visual anthropology can be seen as a venture surpassing purely textualist or semiotic approaches rather than one exclusively preoccupied with visuality (Pinney 2002, 85).

In this book I explore and deploy photography in multiple ways. I consider the dynamics triggered whenever I took a camera out in the presence of my interlocutors. I analyze how images contributed to people’s experience of the past and the future and the role photographs played in my relationships with locals—revealed in our often-charged viewings of albums and in my reproduction of archival images for them. I also use photography as a vehicle for theorizing indigenous aesthetics, exploring, for instance, Sfakian engagements with modernity by examining the exclusion and inclusion of objects in the (photographic) frame.

Mention of indigenous aesthetics prompts me to consider the extent to which an ethnography of visual and material practices may reveal local perspectives that are irreducible to Western cultural theory or even incompatible with its visual apparatuses (as in Weiner 1997; see also Latour’s [1993] focus on networks of entities as a means of avoiding the Western distinction between subject and object). The ontological proposition in particular argues for a radical break from interpretative approaches to things and for an emphasis on the fundamentally Other ontologies that things may dictate (not as representations of concepts but as concepts themselves; see Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007, 7–12). This approach is a potent reminder of how a cultural relativism that sees local concepts simply as representations of a single reality may end up erasing the actual worlds conceived by locals (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007, 7–12). However, among the factors complicating the search for absolute alterity, I would include most Greeks’ claims to participation in Western discourse and theory and, most importantly, the fact that many Sfakian idioms have remained in continuous (if asymmetrical) dialogue with the West and Western observers. This collision of the local with the more-than-local is key to this book’s destabilization of center-periphery models and its revelation of the mutual constitution of the local and the more-than-local through and by each other.

In many ways, Sfakians’ own interest in photography and their historical articulation as visible subjects through that medium direct sharp attention to the visual. And there is another point to consider here. In his discussion of the relation between knowledge and aesthetics, David MacDougall (1998, 140–142)