The groundbreaking and now-classic study by Michael Herzfeld on the customs, practices, and daily life of a traditional mountain community in Crete, which today, three decades later, is at the center of a controversial spotlight. "It is about time that the 'Glenitians' can read what I have written about their village, their lives, and the values that govern their daily existence in their own language (if not - for obvious reasons - in the rich dialect that remains an important bearer of their perceptions).

Equally important is that Greeks who do not know the mountain-dwelling Cretans, except through the distortions and prejudices that have unfortunately colored how they are presented in the mass media, will now be able to draw a completely different impression... The village I describe in these pages has been at the center of a storm of accusations and misunderstandings for the past few years, to the extent that it has become a symbol and a metaphor for crime and violence... Anyone who knows, even superficially, the specific case could easily arrive at a rather correct conclusion regarding the village's identity. But the purpose of a scientific book on ethnography is not to uncover scandals and crimes for the sake of defamation or mere entertainment. On the contrary, it aims to highlight the principles and conditions that regulate the daily lives of people whose perception of justice and rightness is a historically rooted adaptation to their space and its political and cultural particularities.

Michael Herzfeld (from the preface to the Greek edition) "Cretan mountain dwellers are particularly renowned for their staunch resistance to Turkish rule and, later, to the German Occupation. Their values, beautifully expressed in Kazantzakis’ saying 'I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free,' made them heroes in times when such virtues were extolled in a Greece struggling to escape foreign dominance. Today, they inevitably meet the furrowed brow of their critics. Cretan shepherds are ridiculed as 'goat thieves and knife-wielders,' remnants of a primitive existence scandalous for a modern state.

Herzfeld's brilliant, sensitive ethnographic study of the fictional village of Glenti, a mountain community in central Crete, deals precisely with these characteristics and the ways they are experienced and reproduced by its inhabitants." (Olivia Harris, Times Higher Education Supplement) "An important book, not only for those specifically interested in Greece and the Mediterranean… Scholars of gender studies, narrative, space, semiotics, folklore - will find great interest here." (William G. Lockwood, Journal of Modern Greek Studies) "This solid and stylistically gifted study deeply understands the ways in which Cretan shepherds confer dignity on their lives in a country where their social status is low." (Peter Loizos, The Times Literary Supplement) "Some of the most captivating descriptions adorn the pages of anthropology..." (Wendy A. Weiss, Anthropological Quarterly)