Shepherds as Images, Shepherds with Images: Photographic Re-engagements in Sfakia, Crete

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© Copyrighted Material

© Copyrighted Material313

From Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities, eds Philip Carabott, Yannis Hamilakis and Eleni Papargyriou. Copyright © 2015 by the Centre for Hellenic Studies. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey, GU9 7PT, Great Britain.

15

Shepherds as Images, Shepherds with Images: Photographic (Re)engagements in

Sfakia, Crete1

Konstantinos Kalantzis

Such are the two ways of the Photograph (…): to subject its spectacle to the civilised code of perfect illusions, or to confront in it, the wakening of the intractable reality.

Roland Barthes2

This chapter re-engages photography at two levels. First, it looks at how people in a rural peripheral society, which has been excessively photographed throughout the twentieth century, negotiate and (re)engage their own visual representation. Second, it examines photographs as a means of re-thinking and re-envisioning the social relationship between locals and (urban) cultural producers. The chapter focuses on photographs and their social lives, arguing about the centrality of the visual in both the national articulation of Cretan-ness and the various indigenous engagements with ‘tradition’ and notions of social worth. The visual is approached as encompassing a wide field of social practices and also as a rich platform capturing multiple dynamics that may rupture the formal frameworks of production.

1 I am grateful to Yannis Hamilakis, Philip Carabott and Eleni Papargyriou for the invitation to contribute to this volume and the conference upon which it is based. The essay benefited from many insights expressed by colleagues during the conference as well as the very helpful remarks made by the editors, the reviewers and the copyeditors. I am greatly indebted to Sfakians for engaging with me since 2006. My original fieldwork in Sfakia (2006–07) was financially supported by the AHRC, the UCL Research Project Fund and the University of London Central Research Fund for which I am grateful. Finally, I am grateful for the intellectual guidance –provided by Chris Pinney and Charles Stewart at UCL, as well as the supportive and critical commentary offered by Elizabeth Edwards and the late Peter Loizos. I am indebted for the support offered by the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, where I had the chance to work on many of these ideas, as a Mary Seeger O’Boyle fellow (2011–12).

2 Barthes (2000: 119).

© 2015From Philip Carabott, Yannis Hamilakis and Eleni Papargyriou (eds), Camera Graeca: Photographs,

Narratives, Materialities, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472424761

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CAMERA GRAECA: PHOTOGRAPHS, NARRATIVES, MATERIALITIES314

I take photography to be analytically telling not only at the level of its semantic content or institutional framing but mostly at the level of people’s continuous re-engagement and re-possession, which extends or undoes the initial inscriptions, making images culturally salient objects.3 I am also drawing on an analytical tradition that recognises the ability of photography to capture and preserve a multiplicity of poignant details, many of which may even destabilise the photographer’s original intentions.4 It is the camera’s ‘inclusive randomness’ (Edwards 2001: 6) in capturing whatever occurred in front of the lens that guarantees an excess of things and dynamics preserved in the frame (Pinney 2011: 86). This excess produces multiple, often unpredictable significations and embodied experiences by future viewers.

Visuality and Cretan-ness

In the current context, where various commercial and other agents represent Crete as a sphere that may offer the fascinations, but also aversions, of ‘tradition’, the mountainous region of Sfakia is continuously assigned to a series of imaginary positions within the national framework. Drawing on a range of motifs that became prominent in the nineteenth century, regarding geographical isolation (the idea of a mountainous ‘enclave’ within the island, cf. Peckham 2003: 89) and masculine ruggedness, the Cretan and particularly the Sfakian (seen often as Crete’s most excessive version) emerges, at present, as an evocative male figure who is invested with notions of authenticity, ‘tradition’, ruggedness, cultural idiosyncrasy and combative resistance to different forms of perceived (past and present) domination (Kalantzis 2012; 2014; see also Damer 1989: 1–2; Malaby 2003: 47). Importantly, this articulation features the visual as an ‘absolute necessity’ (Taussig’s term, 1993: 254), framing Cretan-ness as a visible category. This becomes condensed in the male figure with a full, often distinctively shaped, moustache, beard, a black shirt and potentially folk-attire (such as a headscarf, breeches or its older version of salivaria). There is an incredible proliferation of this figure in contexts ranging from commercial products to traditionalist practices within Crete.

In national imagination, the notion of visual recognisability, even without the use of folk ‘traditional attire’, pertains uniquely to Crete. Crete is conceived as featuring visually discernible men, particularly in its rural hinterland; the place seen as preserving ‘tradition’. Such a concept of recognisability serves divergent agendas, while triggering various cultural investments. One may thus find the visible ‘Cretan’ in local traditionalist enactments, televisual parodies and, most recently, protests against the austerity measures in Athens which evoke notions of rugged nativism against the political order (Kalantzis 2012). The condition of visual recognisability renders those Cretan subjects who embody the archetypical

3 See Appadurai 1986; Thomas 1991; Pinney 1997, 2003; Edwards 2001.4 See Benjamin 1999: 510; Barthes 2000: 27, 40–45; Edwards 2001: 1; Pinney 2011: 80, 89.

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SHEPHERDS AS IMAGES, SHEPHERDS WITH IMAGES 315

visual form classifiable/reducible within national typology, but also opens up possibilities for them in exercising forms of agency (for example, in encounters with guests) (Kalantzis 2014).

The question of national recognisability becomes complicated, as visuality is of immense importance in western highland Crete. I am referring to the significance attributed locally both to the embodied act of gazing, and to appearance as a parameter of social worth. Thus, Sfakians describe their area as a realm of surveillance exercised by their co-villagers. This is a practice about which they often express exasperation, but also one in which they themselves engage daily, when carefully observing the movements in space of co-villagers and visitors. This gazing skill is often presented as a continuation of hunting and shepherding practices, tacitly placing the object of gaze in the position of prey. At the same time, certain male characteristics such as moustache thickness, height and blondness are associated with the worth of agnatic kin groups and admired by both men and women, even in people whom the interlocutors otherwise dislike and openly oppose. Appearance is also of special pertinence in contemporary traditionalist practices. Sfakians often describe, in awe, the transformative effect that ‘traditional attire’ has on people, rendering them ‘demigods’ or ‘giants’. Interestingly, many of the visual idioms employed in male traditionalism are, at the same time, anxiously questioned. The use of traditional attire is often described as incongruous with the contemporary social practices and bodily traits of the present-day users, while other idioms, such as the black shirt, worn widely as a marker of Cretan descent, is presented as a re-invention that violates the Cretan mourning ethos, because it was supposedly only worn by the bereaved in the past.

In this social context photography is seen as the way to monumentalise desirable versions of the self, particularly in traditionalist engagements. For instance, a local friend in his late twenties, not willing to proceed with our hiking expedition to the high mountains without bringing a camera, had us spend considerable time in order to travel back and get my own camera at the expense of losing daylight; a prospect against which he had otherwise starkly warned me. This is related to the role ascribed to the mountains in those embodied processes of approaching an idealised past, an issue that deserves further attention.

The use as well as ownership of cameras has been extremely limited for Sfakians for the greater part of the twentieth century. This points to an inequality within the Greek ‘visual economy’ (Poole 1997; cf. Tagg 1988: 16) whereby Sfakians filled the self-representational void by resorting either to Cretan professional photographers, the tourist market (postcards), photo-books about past and present Crete or imagery sent to them by passing tourists, travellers, botanists and archaeologists. In Sfakia, there is certain scarcity, but also immense desire for images of one’s ancestors, which results in locals enthusiastically searching for photographs from various sources, which are then taken to professional urban studios for ‘correction’ and reproduction. These digital ‘corrections’ draw on previous iconographic practices. Prior to digital photography, professional studio photographers were commissioned by Sfakians to undertake visual syntheses,



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such as the (re)assembly of deceased kin from dispersed images in a new single frame. Such images can be found today in contexts such as home walls, domestic photo-albums and tombs.

The photographic scarcity partly accounts for the fact that Sfakians exhibit great solemnity when looking at the early twentieth-century archival images of their ancestors that I brought to the field. The practice of using others’ representations to explore and envision the self has partly subsided, however, owing to the recent use of (digital) cameras and mobile phones to record locally important social occasions (hunting or feasting, for example), even if professional photographs still carry greater value in terms of pictorial clarity and skill.

Sfakians with images

Sfakians’ ascribed role in the dominant national and international realm of representation particularly draws on their portrayal in the eighteenth and nineteenth century as highland warriors, fighting against the Ottomans. Within the twentieth century, specific Sfakian men were used in diverse photographic platforms, ranging from postcards to imagery used as decoration in public spaces. Interestingly, the same men were repeatedly photographed throughout the twentieth century by commercial photographers who visited the area. In addition, the same commercial/professional photographs of these men have been often re-used by various agents in an array of contexts within the twentieth century. One may thus encounter a picture of an old man originally taken by a professional photographer in the late 1980s in the following locations: on the home-wall of members of his patriline, on the shelves of the studio owned by the photographers, and finally on the label of a food product, marketed as produced by rural labour in the Cretan hinterland and sold in urban markets. In the discussion that follows, I explore the performative social engagements that occur around, about and inside these images, while considering the questions of power that are intrinsic to this photographic process.

Photographic enframing

Figure 15.1 displays a postcard produced in the 1980s by a professional photographer based in Athens, as shown to me by the sitter’s son. He is, in fact, demonstrating a re-coloured and magnified version of the original. The postcard depicts a now-deceased Sfakian man from a highland Sfakian village, called Giorgis Karkanis and locally nicknamed Geraki (for the meaning of this see below). The original postcard gives no textual information about the man, enframing him within the national aesthetics of desirable rurality.5

5 On the Heideggerian concept of ‘enframing’ and its analytical usefulness in studies of colonialism and the role of the visual modality, see Mitchell 1988 and Pinney 2008: 387.



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He is sitting at an outdoor coffeehouse, wearing black clothes and a headscarf that contrast with his white beard, while holding a komboloi, the beads that are associated in folk-art and literature with Greek male performances of the self in public space. The formal staging of the sitter, along with the fact that the picture is sold on various postcard stands throughout tourist markets in Crete, attests to the power dynamics at the level of pictorial composition/production. One can interpret this image as orientalist (Said 1978); an essentialist representation that frames a(n) (anonymous) sitter, unaware of the future commercial uses of his image, as a representative of a version of rurality that appeals to the bourgeois imaginary, with its absence of modern visual ‘noise’ (cf. Fabian 1983: 31). The image is replete with ideologies regarding the rural man as rooted-in-place. It simultaneously monumentalises and mutes the subject by representing him as a type, serving notions of palatable and ‘photographically-gentrified’ ‘tradition’ (Grundberg’s term 1999: 74).

Figure 15.1 Konstantinos Kalantzis, Nikos Karkanis showing me a framed, magnified picture of his father that was gifted to him by a kinsman, following the sitter’s death

Source: The author



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My own first encounter with this same image at a Greek restaurant in a middle-class suburb of Athens some five years before the commencement of my fieldwork in Sfakia supports the above Saidean interpretation. The image was mounted on the wall alongside other commercial, recognisable images of Greece. Interestingly, it was only Crete that was represented as a human figure (Yiorgis Karkanis standing for the archetypical bearded man), while the other localities were depicted as inviting landscapes. Even more, during this encounter with the image, a Greek friend in his early 20s jokingly pointed to the man and identified him with a kind of savagery that is often playfully associated with Crete at the national level, especially following recent clashes between Cretan shepherds and the police, in central highland Crete. The anonymity of the picture not only lent the man to dominant ideas about locality as a fully knowable category that fits an apolitical vision of homogeneous nationhood, but even rendered him usable within a playful idiom of mockery.6 Both the man’s conflation with central Cretan shepherds and the idiom of bravado that my friend spoke about violated the sitter’s own self-image, as this was narrated and performed to me some five years later by his own sons, daughters and co-villagers.

Poetics of recognition

In light of my original impressions of this picture, I was thus immensely surprised when, early on in my visual ethnography, I presented this postcard to my Sfakian informants (without knowing who the man was and whether he was from the Sfakia region) and observed an outburst of enthusiastic responses that identified the sitter as a subject of personal affect and memory. The sitter’s granddaughters (between seven and 14 years old at that time) exclaimed repeatedly ‘(this is) Granpa!’ while other stories about the man’s life and death emerged in the affective space that the display of photographs produces (cf. Binney and Chaplin 2003; Poignant 1996). Some months later, I would hear the same enthusiastic exclamation (‘Granpa!’) by a septuagenarian expatriate Sfakian whom I showed a 1930s archival photograph of a man in breeches. Such exclamation, even in the peripheral context of a public photographic viewing, partly breaks with the silence and anonymous typology imposed by the original photographic and archival practice. In the case of Geraki, from an anonymous ‘type’ of rural Cretan, the discussed eruption of visual recognition rendered the man a specific subject with a name (Giorgis Karkanis), a nickname (Geraki), and personal properties that were recollected during the viewing.

While handing out to Sfakians postcards I had bought throughout Crete, but also images taken in the mid-twentieth century (from the Benaki Museum archive), I soon discovered that the performative act of recognition carried

6 On the incorporation of the local into Greek national ideology see also Herzfeld 1982, 2003; Stewart 1989; Peckham 2001; and in relation to Crete in particular, where an argument for an ‘ambivalent incorporation’ is made, see Hamilakis 2006.



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tremendous significance. A local friend labelled the inability to recognise (especially now-deceased) sitters a ‘crime’, while another middle-aged man was repeatedly castigated for his inability to recognise his own father in a picture that depicted the man in his youth. The ability to recognise past sitters carried certain cultural capital, which enhanced or destabilised assessments about the beholder’s already-established status in the village.

Discussions and recognitions around images in public spheres, such as the coffeehouse, also brought about unexpected revelations and triggered dynamics that demanded careful negotiation. While viewing the archival pictures I had brought to the field, my informants occasionally mentioned stories that were incongruous with the images’ formal nationalised aesthetics. Among other, these stories would relate to jocular facets (for example, pranks and embarrassing moments) or aspects of the sitters’ sexuality; a topic that was otherwise rather absent in Sfakian public discussions. Following a visual encounter with an archival image, an interlocutor hesitantly narrated a certain scene featuring a sitter that he had accidentally witnessed as a child. The scene totally opposed the sitter’s formal photographic framing as a serene and solemn shepherd.7 My interlocutor emphatically noted that he had never before said this to anyone. His comment highlights photography as a field that opens up things otherwise forgotten, negated or concealed in more official discursive realms (cf. Pinney 2004: 8).

Similar dynamics pertained to the viewing of a late-1930s portfolio that I presented to locals, by one of the professional photographers who visited Sfakia. The initial comments about a certain sitter’s visual valour (made by his descendants) were followed by silences and cautious references, in a gentle tone, to his entanglement in a blood feud that had been officially resolved, having left slight traces today, hardly noticeable to an outsider. While the sitter’s descendants were present, the image triggered another kind of recognition characterised by silence, as well as careful negotiations among the beholders so as not to insult the sitter’s present kin. I realised this following a viewing session at the coffeehouse, when I observed a man being furtively, though acutely, castigated for having asked the sitter’s son if he recognised another photographed Sfakian, who proved to have been an opponent of the sitter. The original photographer had encountered both men before the eruption of the feud, yet the contemporary viewing of the sitters enacted charged dynamics informed by later historical processes. In its nationalised official logic, the archive stores and places together men who may have clashed later in their lives. These clashes emerged now as ‘other histories’ (Pinney and Peterson 2003; see also Binney and Chaplin 2003). In a similar fashion, a commercial postcard producer had digitally pasted together two Sfakian men over a coffeehouse backdrop, as part of his creating-a-palatable-folkland agenda. I was unaware of such montage, until my informants humorously pointed out that these men did not speak to each other and could have only been reassembled in an edited

7 Here, as in certain other parts of the paper, I do not extensively write about specific information in order to protect my interlocutors’ privacy and sensibilities, as well as avoid their identification.



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photographic frame. In bringing these pictures to the village, I also encountered the different versions of what caused and constituted the discussed feuds, based on my interlocutors’ kin and political relationship to the sitter.

In contrast to the Sfakian man who was unable to recognise his father-as-a-young-man, another informant whom I gave an early twentieth-century picture of his grandfather milking sheep (depicted at roughly the same age as the beholder) experienced intense identification. He thus verbally mixed the subjects, at first by accident and then purposefully, amusedly claiming that it was himself that was represented in the image. Photography, here, facilitated pride and desire to merge with the patriline (cf. Herzfeld 1990). These dynamics were also evident in the local requests that I reproduce and hand archival images to people. In these requests one also observes partial questioning of the archive’s legitimacy in storing and financially managing material, which featured my interlocutors’ own kin and co-villagers.

The Sfakian man who meticulously stared at his grandfather’s image further speculated about the time of the photographic shooting based on the length of the sheep’s fleece (that is, the extent to which it had been trimmed). Such speculation on time was a recurring Sfakian response to imagery and further revealed to me the importance of beard-growing (that manifests mourning) as a temporal marker.

Figure 15.2 Konstantinos Kalantzis, At a corner of the living room. Note the re-framed postcard on the right

Source: The author



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Based on the length of the sitters’ beard my informants placed male photographic subjects in certain phases of their lives (before or after major deaths), putting the picture in its historical context.

The kinds of indigenous readings that I emphasise above are even more apparent in the Sfakian uses of different postcards depicting Geraki; uses that eschew and bypass the original commercial character of the pictures. I located the same postcard I discuss above, displayed as a familial photograph both at a corner dedicated to the remembrance of the dead (Fig. 15.2) and the wall of the bedroom, in the house where two of the sitter’s sons reside. The sitter’s daughter had similarly placed other postcards depicting the man on the fridge of her Sfakian (summer) house.8

One of Geraki’s co-villagers and friends, a Sfakian artisan, had placed that same postcard on the wall of his workshop (Fig. 15.3). In this case, we observe a cultural investment in photography as a means of preserving the presence of the dead which partly stands against the grain of rationalist rhetoric on death (cf. Pinney 2011: 12, 142–5; Stewart 1989). The placement of Geraki’s image across the postcard of another (now-deceased) Sfakian man who was kin related and a

8 For a detailed analysis of such practices (that re-use commercial pictures) and particularly of their potential in negotiating the power dynamics of the original framing, see Kalantzis 2014.

Figure 15.3 Konstantinos Kalantzis, Two postcards placed on the wall by a friend of the sitters

Source: The author



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friend of the sitter, seems to be enacting a continuation of both deceased men’s dialogue. Hence the artisan said that he placed ‘them together’ (not clarifying whether he referred to the pictures or the sitters themselves), owing to their close friendship. The muteness of photography has been supplemented anew here with a possibility that these men are in a way continuing their social engagement after their death, having been ascribed a space of their own on their friend’s wall. The staging of this dialogue among the sitters is also related to the role of sound in indigenous photographic viewings. Often, the (mute) images furnish lively performances by Sfakian viewers, who mimic the voices of the deceased sitters in high-pitched tones, comically transferring their presence to the present, while underlining the playfulness of the sitters’ character.

The employment of imagery in practices that negotiate death is not necessarily to be associated with the famous Barthesian preoccupation with photography and loss (Barthes 2000: 14–15, 31, 90, 92, 96). Sfakians do invoke stories about dying when encountering deceased photographic sitters. Many of these stories speak of the sitter’s defiance in the face of death, as in the refusal to undergo medical treatment. In some ways, the emphasis on such defiance tacitly counterbalances the widespread Sfakian idea that photographic sitters were complicitly passive in having their picture taken. As with the iconographic motifs themselves, such narratives lend themselves to national(ised) conceptions of Crete (for example in stories about the sitters dancing before dying or risking execution by the occupying Nazis during the 1940s, in order to save their kin), but also reflect local sensibilities about death (cf. Malaby 2003: 137–47). Nevertheless, the Sfakian veneration of photographs of their ancestors also occurs in the context of young men re-embodying ‘tradition’ (see also Kalantzis 2014). Such employment of photography can therefore be about reclaiming and revival of history, rather than a lapse into passive idealisation of the past or lament for its loss (Clifford 1987: 126; Edwards 2001: 11).

It is worth asking why this particular postcard (Fig. 15.1) has been chosen by so many people as a means of remembering Geraki. At a broader level, postcards are chosen, among other things, for their availability on the market. People can thus avoid asking the family for pictures, a request which may entail undesirable structures of obligation. The unexpected possibilities opening up in a market context are evident in the enthusiastic invitations of a middle-aged Sfakian woman who called her kin in the USA, urging them to buy bottles of raki (liquor) which featured the image of a deceased kinsman. The woman did critique the commercial photographers for having used a photograph of her uncle without consent, yet was lured to the possibility that émigré kin may possess the sitter through his appearance on a commodity.

The question, nevertheless, why Sfakians chose the particular photograph, rather than any other, as a means of remembering Geraki may be more difficult to approach verbally, partly because Sfakians do not use the kind of vocabulary found in academic image-analysis. This picture-use may have more to do with the ‘habituated physiognomic knowing’ that Walter Benjamin talks about



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(Taussig 1994: 209), rather than reasoning based on semantics. Looking at that image may combine affective memories of the sitter with a certain ‘braiding of the senses’ that points towards the multi-sensory experience of viewing itself (Mitchell 2005: 265). These reflections were particularly prompted when I observed the response of a middle-aged Sfakian woman who was looking at the postcard under discussion, which was placed on the shelves of the office where she worked. After a long and silent stare, the woman brought up the thick and beautiful texture of the sitter’s hair and recalled the one time when she had had a glimpse of his hair unhindered by the headscarf during an unannounced visit to his house.

Incidentally, upon closer inspection (Figs 15.1, 15.2 and 15.3) one observes a tuft of the man’s hair protruding from the headscarf (a possible accident? a personal motif of self-display?). Such poignant detail evokes a ‘sense of presence’ ‘of fingers that had tied’ the headscarf ‘in other times’, to borrow Edwards’s words regarding a nineteenth-century photograph depicting a bamboo palisade in the Solomon Islands (2001: 1). It may have been this specific detail, or the way Geraki held his komboloi, or his playful look as captured by the camera that attracted the users of this postcard and triggered their complex, synaesthetic experience of viewing, which Taussig calls ‘tactility of vision’ (1994: 209). Such evocation of embodied memories was also at play in other photo-viewing sessions, as when a shoemaker recalled the admirable width of a deceased postcard sitter’s calf. The lock of hair, escaping the tight arrangement of Geraki’s headscarf can also be seen as a metaphor of photography’s explosive exposure of that ‘inexplicable point of incisive clarity’ (Edwards 2001:1) that Barthes called the punctum (Barthes 2000: 44). The unruly element which ‘fills the image’(ibid.) rendering it usable in personal spaces beyond the original commercial framework.

Complicating the encounter through photography

Despite the productivity of local cultural investments in commercial photography, it is important not to lose sight of the power dynamics at play here. Besides, Sfakians mostly end up resorting to professional imagery, which they partly recognise as superior to amateur pictures. Of course, as I have argued, their approaches to photographs are informed by indigenous sensibilities. For instance, in showing some of my informants a postcard depicting a deceased co-villager, they all recognised in his (bearded) appearance the fact that ‘he had regrettably lost his mind’ because of a familial loss. The same postcard was very differently signified by a Haniot folklorist, who saw the man as remaining ‘exactly like his village wanted him to be’; ‘a man of the land whose hands smell of sweat and toil’. There is an obvious discrepancy between the former local response and the latter generic reading, infused with folklore-studies ideology. Though it is tempting to see Sfakian responses as distinct/different from national ideology, however, it is also important to keep in mind that they are also subject to national pedagogy.



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Whose pose is it?

The entanglement of local responses with wider ideological forces is poignantly illustrated in the case of a Sfakian interlocutor who excitedly spotted his father in one of the photographic corpuses I brought to the field. After exclaiming ‘my father!’, the man explained to me the reason for the sitter’s beard (a recent death), remembered certain bodily traits, clothing habits as well as his skills in the mountains, explicated his nickname and finally mentioned that he was among the ‘few people whom Poulianos found to be purely Sfakian’.

Poulianos was a biologist/anthropologist who visited the Sfakia region in the 1960s, as part of a grander project of proving the organic continuity between ancient and modern Cretans. His biological determinism underscores most nineteenth-century European travellers’ accounts and Greek widespread nationalist ideas about continuity with antiquity. He is also one of the figures most often mentioned by Sfakians in their discussions about Sfakian uniqueness. His authority is invoked to prove that Sfakians are of Doric descent (something that allegedly differentiates them from other Cretans; Poulianos 2004: 305). Even more, all locals narrate a story in which the scholar was able to discern a man (of non-Cretan descent) as not being a Sfakian, merely by looking at him.

Together with Poulianos, locals refer to European travellers (especially Robert Pashley) to speak about and verify (past) Sfakian valour; a gesture which is also repeated in local folklore-studies books (see, for example, Geronymakis 1993: 11). But even the first treatise ever written by a Sfakian (abbot Papadopetrakis) about Sfakia in the late nineteenth century notes at the outset that we ought to turn to foreign visitors in order to understand the Sfakian distinctiveness (1971: 14). Sfakian self-presentations today are also replete with references to the allegedly fascinated utterances that passing ‘linguists’, ‘photographers’, ‘historians’ and other non-local figures have expressed during their visits to Sfakia. While browsing, together with the proprietor, at a corner of a Sfakian coffeehouse, I found Poulianos’ book, inside which the septuagenarian owner had stored a photograph of himself, which had been taken and sent by a French tourist. In this display format we encounter the fundamental condition of Sfakian aesthetic economy, in which claims as well as visuals about the self hinge on external cultural producers.

It is important to ask, nevertheless, what is it that takes place in such encounters between locals and external producers? Are locals merely repeating what others have made of them? Is this a case of internalisation of cultural modalities constructed by the elites, manifesting an ontological and political imprisonment in bourgeois schemata (Herzfeld 1997: 158, 2003; Argyrou 2002: 23)? I have elsewhere critically commented on aspects of this view from the perspective of indigenous critique, photographic repossession and traditionalist performance (Kalantzis 2014). Here, I want to investigate how we can use the visual as a means of rethinking what happens in the meeting between Sfakian shepherds and bourgeois producers.



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On fascination

Let us return to the photograph displayed in Figure 15.1 and particularly the sitter’s nickname Geraki; a word which in standard Greek means ‘hawk’ and is often used in Sfakia in conjunction with valorised male properties. Geraki in Giorgis Karkanis’ case, however, means the son of the ‘old-man’ (Geros). The ‘old-man’ was the nickname of his own father who was allegedly considered so serious and wise since his childhood that he was given this nickname. Interestingly, Giorgis Karkanis’s iconicity in a series of visual formats is a continuation of his father’s legacy. We encounter textual references to and images of his father in an array of representations produced by folklorists, photographers and other professional practitioners. In one relevant case, the musicologist Aglaia Agioutandi, who visited the Sfakia region in 1953 as part of a folksong-recording project led by the Swiss ethnomusicologist Samuel Baud-Bovy, claims in her diary/report to have been ‘affectively moved’ and enormously impressed while listening to him sing (Agioutandi 2006: 57). Her published travelogue also features a photograph of the man. In addition, the ‘old-man’ is featured in many of Nelly’s photographs from her journey in Crete in the late 1930s, commissioned by the Metaxas regime (cf. Stathatos and Zacharia, this volume). His recurrence in Nelly’s body of visual work leads one to speculate about her own potential attraction to his manners and skills, in ways comparable to Agioutandi’s impressions.

These visits to Sfakia by official agents who handled notions of ‘tradition’ at the national and international level form important moments of exchange between locals and external cultural producers. Nelly’s and Agioutandi’s stance towards ‘the old man’ is a sign of the dynamics of lure and fascination, occurring in highland Crete between urban visitors who are interested in the region and locals who treat them as guests. The consideration of the observers’ attraction is useful in grasping the dynamics of desire and admiration in such encounters that destabilise conceptions of travel merely as an exploitative procession (cf. Bhabha 2004: 102). In the long tradition of enthused representations produced by urban visitors, one can begin to explore the effect that rural Cretans have in shaping these representations, even from the position of the observed subject.9 Enthusiastic does not mean, of course, entirely exempt from forms of hierarchical understanding, as is testified in certain popular conceptions that place contemporary Crete in Europe’s cultural past. Such conceptions were present in some of my non-local interlocutors’ utterances and even in some of the, otherwise celebratory, books about Crete. But let us look more closely at the question of the locals’ effect and agency from a visual perspective.

While discussing with one of Geraki’s sons about a postcard that features a close-up portrait of his father, the man claimed that Geraki ‘played with the lens’; a statement which in this context means that he was able to manipulate the photographer and lure him into a self-idealising dynamic. The discussed portrait depicts Geraki embodying what we could describe as a pensively

9 See, for example, Ivanovas n.d.; Outerbridge and Thayer 1979: 106–29; MacNeil Doren 2003.



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mellow expression; his eyes slightly turned away from the viewer, his neatly tied black headscarf contrasting with his white beard.10 Careful observation of the man’s posture and stare would support the idea that such an image is only possible as a result of a complex encounter between the photographer and the subject. Such an encounter potentially includes a certain closeness between the two parties, the producer’s sympathy and the sitter’s openness to being photographed as well as his capacity for embodied display of selfhood, experienced in positive terms. The son’s emphasis on the sitter’s agency could also be seen as a partial defence against the potential suspicion (widespread in this social context) that his father was exploited by the photographers. The son was also, however, indicating that inside the space of photographic encounter, Sfakian sitters are able to compel outsiders and perform their social being in ways that fit their own conceptions.

Amalgamations

A similar dynamic is at play in Nelly’s photographic corpus, which monumentalises different Sfakians. When discussing her work in Sfakia, I encountered many positive responses by people, even though locals often scrutinised her staging of certain pictures as in a photograph of a milking scene that is set in a position which is normally impossible to milk in, probably in order to use the available light and the specific backdrop. Such comments critically denaturalised her images and exposed aspects of her aesthetic and political agenda. Figure 15.4 depicts a man whom my informants recognised as Dourountous Yiorgis (nicknamed Katsoulogiorgis, owing to his cat-like eye-colour), further providing a story in which his defiance of danger during WWII led to his execution by German soldiers. Nelly was certainly imbued with her own (and the regime’s) political agenda of visualising a certain version of rural folk; an issue deserving exploration in its own right (cf. Zacharia, this volume). Yet, such a photograph would have been impossible unless the subject already had his own sensibilities about male appearance and posing. This image reflects then a point of meeting between an external Romantic signification and a local ideology and habitus. The latter have possibly been solidified by the presence of photographers demanding such photographs, and further by images of this kind, when available to locals in the absence of their own produced imagery. This is a case of what we could call cyclical synergy.

10 I was unfortunately unable to reproduce this image here because the postcard producer and copyright holder did not grant me the relevant permission. His stance could well inspire a different essay altogether. This is a complex matter involving various legal and other parameters. In any case, amidst increasing discontent among the sitters’ ancestors about the putative exploitation of their kin, Greek postcard producers seem growingly reluctant to let their work be re-published and scrutinised in academic or other venues.



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When seeing another sitter that Nelly had emblematised in her work, many of my interlocutors remembered his excessive attention to his appearance. This hints at the fact that his own self-image collided (and may have been further inflated) with Nelly’s attempt to locate picturesque local men, suitable for her expositions and photo-editions (some of which served notions of continuity from antiquity). Similarly, one of Geraki’s sons noted that his grandfather ‘drew people’ due to his attractive and hospitable manners, as well as singing capacities. In this comment he pointed to the entanglement of local notions of worth with the attention that men received by external producers. Importantly, the son’s comment points to the fact that certain idioms have existed before the visits, and might have shaped the form of interaction between the two parties.

Figure 15.4 Nelly, ‘Man from Sfakia 1939’Source: © Benaki Museum Photographic Archive



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The visitors’ fascination predates photography, as is testified by European travellers’ textual accounts that emphasise Sfakian appearance (see, for example, Pashley 1989: 178, 253). This is also evident in certain pre-photographic depictions of Sfakian men, including a drawing portraying Geraki’s own father (‘the old-man’), most of which were composed by passing urbanites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of these pictures are employed in Sfakian decorative practices, something that attests again to the appropriation of externally produced iconography for one’s own self-envisioning. The iconographic motifs found in drawings and sketches are in some cases strikingly similar to images, taken some decades later, by professional photographers. Certain poses and themes pre-exist thus and become entangled in processes of dissemination and reproduction, especially enabled by photography.

In a similar fashion, a Sfakian émigré had mounted a marble plaque displaying himself alongside his father on his house’s external wall. The plaque was made at a workshop that produces tomb memorials (a reminder of photography’s entanglement in Cretan practices of remembrance). The plaque’s content was based on two separate photographs that the émigré Sfakian had provided to the artisan. The picture stresses a motif that I also located in other images, often found in Sfakian households. In these pictures representatives from two generations of agnates stand next to each other, stressing their temporal distance, yet social affinity/solidarity, through the use of specific attire, moustache and beard. While, thus, in the plaque, the father appears bearded with a headscarf and ‘traditional attire’, the son is wearing a conventional shirt and has a moustache (appearing more contemporary than his father). In light of the house-owner’s contentious relationship to other co-villagers, that is related to the man’s émigré status, I interpret his display of aesthetic lineage with a ‘traditional’ old-man as a form of claiming rootedness in place. Similar flagging of rootedness and ‘tradition’ is observable among urban Cretan politicians, but also returning émigrés, who often bring along, in their campaigns or visits to rural areas, a male (most often bearded) agnate in ‘traditional’ attire to legitimise their relationship to rural Crete. This commonly engenders critical remarks by local spectators, who may deny these returning town-dwellers continuity with place, an issue I cannot explore here.

Importantly, the Sfakian marble plaque was strikingly similar to an image taken by Nelly in the 1930s during one of her trips to Sfakia (Fig. 15.5).11 There are many things taking place in that picture, including the right-side sitter’s blurred hand, which presents the sort of accidental detail that Benjamin calls ‘tiny spark of contingency’ (1999: 510). It reveals, in this case, that the man may have been manifesting an objection to the photographic act (or that particular photographic moment) by shaking his index finger.

11 In this picture, the aesthetic difference between the sitters is also manifested in their attire. While the right-side sitter is wearing the older version of the vraka, the sitter on the left is wearing a suit and breeches (gilotes), which allegedly came to Crete in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.



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What I want to ask here is, whose is this visual motif of co-existing kinsmen? Is it strictly the photographer’s or does it reflect a staging recommended by locals? What is this picture’s relationship to the plaque and other Sfakian photographs depicting male agnates in a similar pose? In responding to these questions, it might be useful to turn to a series of utterances I recorded in Sfakia when enquiring about photographic portraits of old Sfakian men. These pictures had been taken by non-local, often non-Greek photographers (including passing tourists) who later sent them back to the subjects. Different female and male interlocutors would point to the elements that made the pictures attractive by fusing their own criteria with those of the photographers. My interlocutors were explaining the outsiders’ attraction to the photographic subjects and, at the same time, were also explicating a form of indigenous aesthetic that valued

Figure 15.5 Nelly, ‘Men from Sfakia 1939’Source: © Benaki Museum Photographic Archive



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those same traits. Here, there is certain fusion of voices and embodied aesthetics. Though it is important to always remember the power flows at play (who owns cameras, who has the economic and cultural capital in representing and publicising rurality), the discussed images and social engagements around them point to processes of production, appropriation and inflation in which locals are not merely the mute, observed objects.

These processes are particularly expressed in Poulianos’s visit to Sphakia, in which he reworked and authenticated popular notions regarding Doric descent that nevertheless preceded his arrival in the area. His appropriation of local classificatory schemata is particularly apparent in his reproduction of the Sfakian distinction between kaloseira and kakoseira sogia (respectively, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ patrilines) (Poulianos 2004: 27, 65). These pre-existing ideas were complicated further through being publicised in his book.

Such external interest, which, through its representations but also its actual presence in the area, inflates and extends local traits and perceptions, pertains to the general condition of the Sfakian imagination economy. The visit to Sfakia by figures such as Poulianos or Robert Pashley should be seen as decisive moments where the presence of external agents with their own political and aesthetic agendas affected indigenous notions about the self and locality. This can be seen as a dialogical process rather than a one-way imposition.

Various studies on technologies of rule in South Asia offer interesting parallels to this discussion by arguing, among other things, that colonial classificatory schemata may end up partially constituting the indigenous conditions and categories they sought to describe (Fox 1985; cf. Cohn 1990; Inden 1990; Dirks 2001; Pinney 2008: 384). Caste, or notions of ‘martial races’, are among those categories that emerge at the interstices of the indigenous and the colonial, as they may have been products of inflation of pre-existing native conceptions and practices (Fox 1985; Dirks 2001; Pinney 2008: 384). Poulianos’s or the folklorists’ representations differ, in many ways, from the British Raj. The above studies of colonial rule are useful, nevertheless, in exploring questions of efficacy and circularity in classificatory projects that organise notions of nationality, ethnicity, and so on. Poulianos’s approach could be seen as a form of positive orientalism, in that the epistemology of the colonial archive is used in proving not the inferiority of the population measured, but the integrity and continuity of the national body with its glorified ancestors. Studies of Indian colonialism also prompt important questions regarding ambivalence in the agendas of those who represent and classify populations (cf. Bhabha 2004). The Cretan parallel here would concern not only the folklorists’ and photographers’ attraction to local aesthetics, but also the Greek state’s contradictory attempts to impose control on idioms such as blood-feuds and gun-use. These attempts have been destabilised by political practices (mostly at the local level, often involving politicians who mediate between the national and the local) that opposed centralised attempts at mastery (Astrinaki 2013).



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Conclusion

This chapter has been partly concerned with the implications of using photography in ethnographic research (cf. Geffroy 1990; Banks 2001; Binney and Chaplin 2003; Hamilakis et al. 2009). I have shown, for instance, the kinds of unexpected things that open up, when my Sfakian interlocutors suddenly encountered the faces of their ancestors in imagery. I was thus able to hear and realise local approaches to clashes I would probably not have encountered. Through photographic engagements, I also realised, early in my research, the importance of local concepts such as that of kin (particularly agnatic) resemblance (owing to common characteristics known as sousoumia), evident in my informants’ speculations about the sitters’ identity. The ethnographic employment of photography did not only reveal things about Sfakia, however. Through the exercise of their poignant gaze, Sfakians pointed out things relating to the photographic process that I had not previously uncovered. These included comments about how photographers such as Nelly staged certain pictures so as to suit their own aesthetic-ideological agenda. My informants also made intriguing comments about the class element in the choice of sitters (related to the ownership of ‘traditional’ attire) or even questioned their own admiration of the sitters’ appearance, attributing the depicted aura to the power of the photographic medium itself. This occurred in moments that undercut the otherwise dominant veneration of the ancestors, reflecting an oscillation between idealisation and a more deconstructive stance.

On many occasions, Sfakians used the archival images of their ancestors that I brought to the field, against the grain of official (local and national) narratives. But, apart from revealing new issues in images, they also viewed photographs in light of what they already knew. For instance, they assumed that an obese sitter was from ‘the lowlands’ (since these areas were, to the disdain of Sfakians, more prosperous) or argued that a sitter who looked ‘angry’ (manismenos) came from a village with a reputation for blood-feuds. This oscillation between these two kinds of engagements nicely highlights Carlo Ginzburg’s ‘physiognomic problem’: the question of whether the historian learns novel things from the visual or ascribes to it information retrieved from other sources, which Pinney has emphasised as a central question for visual anthropology (Pinney 2008: 388). Sfakians debate this question, even though not in scholarly terms, as when they discussed a certain image taken by an early twentieth-century photographer, in which one of the sitters is not facing the camera. An old artisan attributed this to the fact that the sitter was mourning for the death of his son, and thus purposefully avoided the lens. Against this imposition of extra-visual information on the image, other Sfakians argued that the sitter’s pose may have to do with the man’s demeanour, a moment of disdain or even simply chance.

Among their responses, Sfakians were particularly keen on excluding sitters as ‘not being Sfakian’. This takes us to the other issue that this essay has explored, the question of synergy between local traits and the interventions of urban



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cultural producers. It will be recalled that Poulianos was fondly remembered for excluding a man as not being (visibly) Sfakian. The fact that this story was ubiquitously heard in the region is indicative of how Poulianos’s own attitude may have positively collided with certain indigenous sensibilities, inflating them further and adding official legitimisation. In a similar way, the question of distinct visual characteristics itself became central as part of a Romantic European privileging of visual taxonomy (cf. Gilman 1985) which merged with an indigenous preoccupation with appearance as a sign of social worth.

The desire to pinpoint the non-Sfakian sitters also relates to Sfakians’ ‘exclusive possessivism’ (Said in O’Hanlon and Washbrook 1992: 157); a stance that locals perform whenever they experience something they see as theirs used by putatively illegitimate agents (see also Kalantzis 2012: 11). Thus, two different interlocutors (a man in his 30s and a man in his 80s) expressed the desire to tear up images of Geraki found in a restaurant in eastern Crete (which is seen as not producing men of comparable [visible] worth) because these pictures made it possible for eastern Cretans to claim Geraki as their own.

As regards the question of synergy, my attempt has been to show that photography may serve as a fruitful means of complicating what one ‘already knows’ or assumes about ideological imposition and national hegemony (cf. Pinney 2008: 388). Imagery, as well as the performative engagements around it, offer ways to re-think the complex dynamics that emerge in the encounter between powerful outsiders and rural subjects. Of course, this encounter occurs within an unequal economy of power, and it is important to keep in mind that certain agents play a more decisive role than others in shaping images and aesthetics. Yet photographic representations, but also more widely projects of aesthetic and ideological pedagogy, are hardly products of a one-way unproblematic inscription. The producers’ fascination and the locals’ agency are important parameters, which we can disentangle by exploring the multiple engagements around and inside the visual.

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Thomas, N. (1991), Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.





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Shepherds as Images, Shepherds with Images: Photographic Re-engagements in Sfakia, Crete