ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a commonplace ethnographic dilemma, and treats it as an analytical issue. It is concerned with the way that Greeks 'read' Danish or French tourists, or the Germans and others among whom they have sojourned as migrant workers, than with the much more opaque processes through which they construct and reproduce the images of a collective self. Nationalistic discourse in Greece actually rejects the more intimate dimensions of Greek social and cultural life as being 'foreign' to its externally constituted form. The inhabitants of the Cretan town of Rethemnos and many other Greeks besides make a strong categorical opposition between the work of the hands and the work of the mind. Local stereotypes of the Greeks, some of them quite self-congratulatory, represent the ability to steal, especially from the wealthy, as a national capacity. Greek is full of evaluative concepts that English-speakers have difficulty translating precisely because they challenge assumptions about where the positive-negative line should be drawn.
