The Nomads of Mykonos

Performing Liminalities in a 'Queer' Space
1. Auflage 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84545-466-1
Verlag: Berghahn Books

Buch, Englisch, Band 29, 322 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 471 g

Reihe: New Directions in Anthropology

This is the ethnography of the Mykoniots d’élection, a ‘gang’ of romantic adventurers who have been visiting the island of Mykonos for the last thirty-five years and have formed a community of dispersed friends. Their constant return to and insistence on working, acting and creating in a tourist space, offers them an extreme identity, which in turn is aesthetically marked by the transient cultural properties of Mykonos. Drawing semiotically from its ancient counterpart Delos, whose myth of emergence entails a spatial restlessness, contemporary Mykonos also acquires an idiosyncratic fluidity. In mythology Delos, the island of Apollo, was condemned by the gods to be an island in constant movement. Mykonos, as a signifier of a new form of ontological nomadism, semiotically shares such assumptions. The Nomads of Mykonos keep returning to a series of alternative affective groups largely in order to heal a split: between their desire for autonomy, rebellion and aloneness and their need to affectively belong to a collectivity. Mykonos for the Mykoniots d’élection is their permanent ‘stopover’; their regular comings and goings discursively project onto Mykonos’ space an allegorical (discordant) notion of ‘home’.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bousiou, Pola

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Sport | Tourismus | Freizeit Tourismus & Reise Reise & Urlaub: Führer, Landkarten, Pläne
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

Note on transliteration

Introduction

Chapter 1. Mykonos: the building of a liminal space-myth

Chapter 2. Narratives of belonging: the myth of an ‘indigenous’ otherness

Chapter 3. Narratives of the self: an eccentric myth of otherness

Chapter 4. Narratives of place: a spatial myth of otherness

Chapter 5. Narratives of difference: an aesthetic myth of otherness

Conclusion

Epilogue: A beach farewell

Appendix I: The problem of agency in the Greek ethnographic subject

Appendix II: The emergence of the sensual post-tourist: consuming ‘cultures’, multisubjective selves and (trans)local spaces

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Bousiou, Pola
Pola Bousiou was born and educated in Thessaloniki, Greece, and later at the London School of Economics where she received her PhD in social anthropology. Subsequently she has turned to film-making; in her current research she is exploring the relationship between anthropology and film by deconstructing her auto-ethnographic text into an experimental film narrative.