The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village

Ever since I became interested in Greece I have been reading books that I would not otherwise have bothered with and some of them have widened my horizons and deepened my understanding (of things in general) to an extent I would not have expected. This book by Herzfeld is one such work. Its rather peculiar title contains a number of words whose meaning has to be worked out early on. Poetics has nothing to do with poetry. It refers to the way people work out value and meaning in their everyday lives. Contest, etymologically, has a connection to male reproductive organs and therefore to the ways males relate to each other, which is usually by fighting -- at least in traditional or primitive societies. Yeah, heroism, bravery, cunning, violence, ruthlessness and all those qualities held in such high esteem by the writer of the Homeric poems. The name Glendi (the village in Crete where the author carried out the field work on which the book is based) is a fictional invention of the author himself but the rest is real-life data and careful scientific analysis. Most of the data is concerned with animal thievery and the rhetoric that accompanies it after the fact. The rhetoric shows how the Glendiot men structure meaning. Meaning is the way people constellate mental images relative to each other in the collective consciousness, and value is the relative measure of psychic energy it takes to keep an image constellated. A poetics shows how people map their values onto their everyday activities. In the present case this involves the activities, verbal and non-verbal, one carries out in the process of identifying himself as a man. (I hope I am not over-simplifying.) This is not any easy book by any means. The reader has to do a little work. But the rewards are enormous. A first-rate study.