Michael Herzfeld – författare

Modern Rome is a city rife with contradictions. Once the seat of ancient glory, it is now often the object of national contempt. It plays a significant part on the world stage, but the concerns of its residents are often deeply parochial. And while they live in the seat of a world religion, Romans can be vehemently anticlerical. These tensions between the past and the present, the global and the local, make Rome fertile ground to study urban social life, the construction of the past, the role of religion in daily life, and how a capital city relates to the rest of the nation.

Michael Herzfeld focuses on Rome’s historic Monti district and the wrenching dislocation caused by rapid economical, political, and social change. Evicted from Eternity tells the story of the gentrification of Monti—once the architecturally stunning home of a community of artisans and shopkeepers now displaced by an invasion of rapacious real estate speculators, corrupt officials, dithering politicians, deceptive clerics, and shady thugs. As Herzfeld picks apart the messy story of Monti’s transformation, he ranges widely over many aspects of life there and in the rest of the city, richly depicting the uniquely local landscape of globalization in Rome.

The description for this book, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village, will be forthcoming.

In the third edition of this important and influential book, Michael Herzfeld revisits the idea of ‘cultural intimacy’. The chapters examine a range of topics touching on the relationship between state and citizen, and the notion of ‘national character’. Herzfeld provides a developed theoretical framework and additional clarification of core concepts such as disemia, social poetics and structural nostalgia. The text has been fully updated in light of recent scholarship and events, including comment on Greece and the European Union. There is new material drawn from regions such as Thailand and China, and further consideration of religious intimacy and its impact on cities. The book improves our understanding of how states, societies and institutions function and illustrates the relevance of anthropology to contemporary issues such as globalization, censorship, ethnic conflict and nationalism.

In the third edition of this important and influential book, Michael Herzfeld revisits the idea of ‘cultural intimacy’. The chapters examine a range of topics touching on the relationship between state and citizen, and the notion of ‘national character’. Herzfeld provides a developed theoretical framework and additional clarification of core concepts such as disemia, social poetics and structural nostalgia. The text has been fully updated in light of recent scholarship and events, including comment on Greece and the European Union. There is new material drawn from regions such as Thailand and China, and further consideration of religious intimacy and its impact on cities. The book improves our understanding of how states, societies and institutions function and illustrates the relevance of anthropology to contemporary issues such as globalization, censorship, ethnic conflict and nationalism.

Michael Herzfeld describes what happens when a bureaucracy charged with historic conservation clashes with a local populace hostile to the state and suspicious of tourism. Focusing on the Cretan town of Rethemnos, once a center of learning under Venetian rule and later inhabited by the Turks, he examines major questions confronting conservators and citizens as they negotiate the "ownership" of history: Who defines the past? To whom does the past belong? What is "traditional" and how is this determined? Exploring the meanings of the built environment for Rethemnos''s inhabitants, Herzfeld finds that their interest in it has more to do with personal histories and the immediate social context than with the formal history that attracts the conservators. He also investigates the inhabitants'' social practices from the standpoints of household and kin group, political association, neighborhood, gender ideology, and the effects of these on attitudes toward home ownership. In the face of modernity, where tradition is an object of both reverence and commercialism, Rethemnos emerges as an important ethnographic window onto the ambiguous cultural fortunes of Greece.