The Nomads of Mykonos Performing Liminalities in a 'Queer' Space [Paperback]

This is the ethnography of theMykoniots d?lection, 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. TheNomads of Mykonoskeep 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 theMykoniots d?lectionis their permanent stopover; their regular comings and goings discursively project onto Mykonos space an allegorical (discordant) notion of home.

Pola Bousiouwas 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.

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 othernlƒF