The Tourists Gaze, The Cretans Glance (Heritage, Tourism, and Community)

by Philip Duke

As researchers bring their analytic skills to bear on contemporary archaeological tourism, they find that it is as much about the present as the past. Philip Duke’s study of tourists gazing at the remains of Bronze Age Crete highlights this nexus between past and present, between exotic and mundane. Using personal diaries, ethnographic interviews, site guidebooks, and tourist brochures, Duke helps us understand the impact that archaeological sites, museums and the constructed past have on tourists’ view of their own culture, how it legitimizes class inequality at home as well as on the island of Crete, both Minoan and modern.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction

156 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2007

About the author

I read archaeology at Cambridge University and then went to Canada (University of Calgary) for my M.A. and Ph.D.

From 1980 until 2009 I was a professor of Anthropology at a liberal arts college in Colorado.

For five years my wife and I lived on the island of Crete in the southern Aegean before returning to the states in 2015. Now we live just south of the beautiful little town of Durango in southwest Colorado with our two lovely dogs, Lexi and Missy P. We rescued both of them - or is it the other way around?