The Nomads of Mykonos : : Performing Liminalities in a 'Queer' Space / / Pola Bousiou.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Bousiou, Pola,
• Place / Publishing House: New York ;, Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2008]; ©2008
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Language: English
• Series: New Directions in Anthropology ; 29
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (322 p.)

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’.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -- NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION -- INTRODUCTION -- 1 MYKONOS: THE BUILDING OF A LIMINAL SPACE-MYTH -- 2 NARRATIVES OF BELONGING: THE MYTH OF AN ‘INDIGENOUS’ OTHERNESS -- 3 NARRATIVES OF THE SELF: AN ECCENTRIC MYTH OF OTHERNESS -- 4 NARRATIVES OF PLACE: A SPATIAL MYTH OF OTHERNESS -- 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