Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction
Part 1 Spatial and National Contexts
1. Driving Up the Yellow Lines: Geography and Imagination
2. Sfakians in the Nation-State
Part 2 On Hegemony
3. Mountain Men as Photographic Subjects and Spectators
4. Performing the Stereotype: Between Containment and "Recalcitrant Alterity"
5. The Experiential in the Fictive: A Film Shoot as Visceral History
6. Who Is Imagining? The Encounter between Shepherds and Scientists
Part 3 Modernity and Its Discontents
7. Polluting Modernity, Disturbing Pasts: Photography and Montage Logic
8. Sfakians and Tourists
Epilogue
Biobliography
Index
Konstantinos Kalantzis is Research Associate in PhotoDemos, Department of Anthropology, University College London. He is director of the ethnographic film Dowsing the Past: Materialities of Civil War Memories.
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*
This rich account, of empirical depth and theoretical elegance,
gives us a fine-grained and nuanced exploration of the work of
photographs in a Cretan community. Focusing on
the temporal and spatial practices of photography, it gives a
cogent account of the visual culture through which questions of
identity, historical imagination, nostalgia, and constructions and
performances of tradition are negotiated by
'insider Sfakians'' and 'outsiders'. In demonstrating the
significance of the humble snapshot, postcard and poster within
networks of cultural negotiation, this book provides an
exemplary case study of the value of the visual as a prism through
which to consider broader questions. Bringing together, as it
does, questions of centre and periphery in relation to
nation, to tourism and to contemporary politics, it is in the
very best traditions of both ethnographies of Europe and of visual
anthropology.
*Elizabeth Edwards*
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*
Kalantzis' marvellous and wise book, the product of meticulous
ethnography and theoretically sophisticated analysis, documents
photographic practices in Sfakia that create stereotypes and also
undermine them. "Thinking through the frame" and moving
the debate on exoticism far beyond familiar binaries, this landmark
ethnography of photography is filled with compelling description
and powerful conceptual formulations that are both subtle and
clear. Offering the reader wonderful evocations of places and
people, this account of the fluid intersection of identity with
media practices, where "tradition is demanded", is a major
achievement by a key figure in Visual Anthropology.
*Christopher Pinney*
In the face of a long tradition of 'iconophobia' in anthropology,
Tradition in the Frame. Photography, Power, and Imagination in
Sfakia, Crete by Konstantinos Kalantzis highlights the
anthropological prospects opened up by the study of a society's
images and the study of a society through images. Taking an
insightful and critical ethnographic approach, the writer presents
the ways in which the external gaze of folklorists, photographers,
tourists etc who construct stereotypes and feed other people's
imaginings of 'Sfakia' and 'the Sfakians' engages in dialogue with
local perceptions of the self, national narratives and
international expectations. These local perceptions challenge
dominant idioms, suggest alternative interpretations and
significations of photographic representations, and foreground
'tiny sparks of contingency' as per Walter Benjamin which resist
any national, folklorist or urban imagination. The anonymous,
atemporal 'Cretan', 'the shepherd', 'the picturesque villager' is
recognized by the locals and transformed into a relative, a friend
with a name and a specific history, recalling the philosophical
political thesis of Ariella Azoulay on the revolutionary potential
of photography. Photographs themselves become objects of
reappropriation and they are activated through bodily performances
as they become points of reference and imitation for new
photographic portraits in the present, effectively connecting
contemporary with ancestral bodies. Sounds, scents, tastes,
memories, experiences of Sfakia are substantiated in images and the
critical writing of Kalantzis, thus allowing 'tradition' to escape
from 'the frame' and reminding readers that the visual is part and
parcel of our multi-sensory experience of the world, always in
dialogue with imagination, desire, and expectation in (and for) the
past, the present and the future.
*Eleana Yalouri*
Kalantzis has produced remarkably detailed and perceptive
ethnography (if that is a word that can still be used) of a very
particular society in southwestern Crete, aspects of which,
however, would be immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent
time anywhere in Greece and would also, I think, be found in very
many contemporary societies around the world: hence my graceless
intrusion of expatriate London Australians, or Irish or Texans in
this review. But good ethnographies always move us from a
consideration of the particular to its resonances in society in
general.
*Journal of the Anthroplogical Society of Oxford*
The valuable theory produced by the book's in-depth ethnography of
the complex milieu of tradition in Sfakia and the way it links to
the meanings, limits and creative subversions in visual frames, can
take many movements-directions as it joins together the
anthropological study of Crete, gender, exoticism, nationhood,
agency, and resistance.
*Entaglements*
Immediately upon reading Tradition in the Frame, the reader is
transported to the mountains of the Aegean Sea where Kalantzis
unfolds layer after layer of paradoxes and tensions and, as good
ethnography should, works to explain how they are resolved and
mitigated. . . . Those looking to explore how to incorporate visual
methods in unexpected ways will find this book particularly useful;
in fact, the dedication to the use of photography to explore the
myriad tensions between past/present, traditional/modern,
Crete/Greece, while situating this all within a larger framework of
Europeanization is a welcome model.
*Entaglements*
Based on fieldwork in Crete, Tradition in the Frame is an
ethnography that turns the seemingly facile observation that
tradition is important to Greeks into a fascinating exploration of
how visuality, and photography in particular, shapes dynamics of
power and people's understanding of themselves. . . . In its
breadth and sophistication this book is an invaluable contribution
to visual anthropology and to the study of modern Greece.
*Journal of Modern Greek Studies*
In Tradition in the Frame: Photography, Power, and Imagination in
Sfakia, Crete, Konstantinos Kalantzis explores the experiences of
Sfakians in Crete to reflect on how tradition is made meaningful
today and what this can tell us about the dynamics of localisation,
globalisation, modernity and belonging in our contemporary world.
This is a rich and enjoyable read that will be of interest to
scholars and students looking for new, generative approaches to
visual culture at the intersection of the local and the global,
*London School of Economics Review of Books*
The tools that Kalantzis generously lays out for his fellow
anthropologists will, no doubt, open up this conversation toward
new horizons for there is indeed much to be seen beyond the edges
of cultural convention.
*Visual Anthropology*
The study of tradition, along with that of power, remain colossal
concerns across the social sciences and humanities. Joining a
significant lineage on these topics is Konstantinos Kalantzis'
book, Tradition in the Frame: Photography, Power, and Imagination
in Sfakia, Crete, which offers an ethnographically precise and
broad-ranging analysis of the architectonics of power and tradition
in and in relation to Sfakia, a mountainous coastal region in
southwest Crete. . . . for its plethora of visual-ethnographic
examples, engaging storytelling, and depth of analytical insights,
Tradition in the Frame will be of great interest to students and
scholars working across anthropology, photography, visual culture,
and beyond.
*Ethnos*
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