Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios. Troubles with Turtles: Cultural Understandings of the Environment on a Greek Island. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003.
The people of Vassilikos, farmers and tourist entrepreneurs on the Greek island of Zakynthos, are involved in a bitter environmental dispute concerning the conservation of sea turtles. Against the environmentalists’ practices and ideals they set their own culture of relating to the land, cultivation, wild and domestic animals. Written from an anthropological perspective, this book puts forward the idea that a thorough study of indigenous cultures is a fundamental step to understanding conflicts over the environment. For this purpose, the book offers a detailed account of the cultural depth and richness of the human environmental relationship in Vassilikos, focusing on the engagement of its inhabitants with diverse aspects of the local environment, such as animal care, agriculture, tourism and hunting. (Text from Berghahn Books)
Twentieth-century migration, modernization, technology, tourism, and global communication have had dynamic effects on group identities, social values and conceptions of space, place, and politics. The book series New Directions in Anthropology features new and innovative ethnographic studies concerned with these processes of change.