Cultural Intimacy

Cultural Intimacy reveals that every nation-state has its own 'dirty laundry'. In this book, the author looks at what constitutes 'dirty laundry' and what makes it 'dirty'. Drawing on his own extensive fieldwork in Greece, as well as a wide range of comparisons from the United States, Africa, Western Europe and elsewhere, he ranges from sheep-thieves to flight attendants, from the banality of polite chit-chat to the divine vengeance invoked against perjury, and from the personal styles of coffee house and bar-room to the politics of academia and of national pride.