Summary
Michael Herzfeld: Cultural Intimacy
Michel Herzfeld is a professor of anthropology at Harvard University. He researches in the fields of Southern Europe and Southeast Asia. He is the president of the Modern Greek Studies Association and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe. In recent years, he has been researching the ways in which the past is constructed and social and cultural values are instilled, as well as the social foundations of knowledge. Some of Herzfeld's recent works: A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town (1991); The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (1992); Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (1997); and Portrait of a Greek Imagination: An Ethnographic Biography of Andreas Nenedakis (1997). The book contains a preface to the Serbian edition and the following chapters: 1. What is cultural intimacy, 2. About definitions and boundaries, 3. Convincing similarity, 4. Why metaphors are dangerous: from turbulent waters to boiling blood, 5. Cultural intimacy and the meaning of Europe, 6. Structural nostalgia: time and oath in the mountain villages of Crete, 7. Social poetics in theory and practice: regular guys and irregular actions, 8. The practice of stereotypes and Afterword: Towards the middle of the field?
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