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entrepreneurs—themselves the financial beneficiaries of a trade that sometimes brings
only meager profits back to the actual producers—for the disposal of their produc-
tion, make much simpler “Greek bags,” often with designs that are not recognizably
Cretan at all (Herzfeld, 1992: 99). The older bags were woven by a bride-to-be as
gifts for her husband’s closest agnatic kin, to whom they were presented for display in
the dance before the church right after the completion of the religious wedding rite.
They were thus an affirmation of the bride’s self-subjection to a kinship arrangement
that many Greeks today regard as old-fashioned, misogynistic and resistant to demo-
cratic practices and values, and their makers took enormous pride in the amount of
time they took to complete and the hard work that went into them. In the villages,
the clan system has not appreciably weakened, but its symbolization in the production
and display of hunting bags has begun to fade, although the occasional vourya will be
sold to a more prosperous tourist (or perhaps an anthropologist). At the same time,
the productive labor that generates large numbers of much simpler bags, with infinitely
less intricate designs and therefore suitable for fast production, brings significant infu-
sions of cash. For some women, this is a liberating measure; for others, I suspect, it
means significantly more work (see Collier, 1997: 201 on a comparable dilemma in
Spain). Simplistic moralizing therefore does not resolve any issues; commercialization
both encourages and feeds on simplification, but it also brings new economic and
social opportunities as well as new threats to long-cherished identities and more risks
of exploitation.
The present-day production of craft items also illustrates how globalization not
only may undermine existing aesthetic norms and manufacturing practices, but may
also inadvertently reinforce national self-images and the nationalistic ideologies that
generate them. In the woven goods of Crete, for example, the designs may include
maps of the island, sometimes even with an explanatory label (Kriti, “Crete”), or
Minoan themes; while these appear to reflect national concerns with continuity with
the ancient past, they are not typical of the pre-tourism styles. Their frequency does,
however, seem to confirm the success of the nationalist ideology in persuading
foreigners to view such connections with antiquity as a matter of common sense and
received wisdom; they confirm, through mass tourism, the goals that intellectuals and
politicians set for their cultural management of Greece in the early years of the coun-
try’s Western-dominated existence. Today, relatively few of those who visit Greece or
Italy have the classical training that motivated young aristocrats to take the Grand
Tour in the eighteenth century or that underlay the emergence of a Western-
dominated local elite imbued with neo-classical intellectual ideals in the nineteenth.
Ideas about continuity with the ancient past, still in flux at the eastern end of the
Mediterranean, are only now being seriously challenged by local intellectuals and
political activists in the old classical lands (see Plantzos, 2012)—but it does not seem
far-fetched to suppose that for the vast majority of the tourists those continuities are
established facts and a strong motivation for their own travel and consumption
patterns. In short, tourism contributes to the erasure of a critical understanding at
precisely the time that local intellectuals feel more free to express and develop it.
When craft production escapes current local and national debates about the content
of culture, it can hardly be said to contribute to international cultural understanding,
and in fact it may bolster a type of nationalist conservatism that then draws new
sustenance from the global economy and reinforces the global hierarchy of value.