Tourism as an Agent of Social Change in a Rural Cretan Community.

Abstract

The expansion of international mass tourism during the post-war period meant rapid changes for the host, underdeveloped regions. In Greece, among these regions, belongs the Cretan village of Drethia. In studying social change a modified Schneider, Schneider and Hansen approach was proposed whereby three paths of change due to economic growth are identified: modernization, development and autonomy, each resulting from a different balance between increasing contact with centers of power, and increasing local control of capital. The thesis tested the proposition that tourism is a case of modernization in the rural community of Drethia by analyzing a variety of issues for the pre-tourism (1950-64), early tourism (1965-72), and full-scale tourism (1973-82) phases. In addition, although speculative, implicit comparisons were made to similar communities undergoing dissimilar transformations. The data shows that the growth of tourism in Drethia led to dependence on centers of power and decrease in local control of capital; unlike autonomy where the opposite occurs. Consequently, even though inequality and proletarianization are not unique to tourism, the old vertical divisions in the pre-tourism phase were replaced by horizontal ones by the 1980's, while fewer people maintained control over the sources of economic activity. Unlike communities with different growth, emigration from Drethia decreased significantly, while high levels of immigration, including repatriation, occurred. Tourism took the jobs away from the primary and secondary sectors and placed them in the tertiary one. In contrast to cash-crop and manufacturing communities, seasonal instability and the growth of the tertiary sector size were evident in Drethia. Simultaneously, tourism led to high increases in exogamy and social contacts with outsiders. Also, kin control of marriage and vertical kin ties did not lose their importance, as they do under manufacturing, especially for business owning families. Finally, increases in the male-female marital age gap, although present in alternative communities, occurred in Drethia for different reasons. Overall, the findings support the argument that Drethia has experienced modernization, and not development, as the neo-evolutionists describe it, during the past two decades.