The differential embodiment of Home: Refugees under revision
This study shows refugeeness is a social product under constant revision that cannot be understood outside the framework in which is produced and reproduced.
The present study has been conducted in the context of the Mediterranean Voices project which is under the coordination of London Metropolitan University and is funded by Euromed, and on which I work as a full-time empirical researcher. The data gathered was contextualized in a sociological framework and used to write a Master of Arts in Sociology dissertation.
The area of Tahtakallas where a small refugee estate has been constructed was included in the area chosen to be under exploration for the Mediterranean Voices project. While initially the attempt was to interview a few people and present their experiences the striking experiences and attitudes by some residents inspired me to interview younger residents as well and go in more depth undertaking a study that took six months to complete and write-up the results.
Interestingly, this study has shown that refugeeness is not a fixed term that is understood similarly by different people but a contextualized experience in both social and historical terms. While some scholars who have written extensively on Greek-Cypriot refugees like Loizos (1977, 1981, 2000) have stressed the importance of the fluidity of the term others have speculated on it as a static, uncontextualized and thus fetishized term that can be embodied and transferred from generation to generation (Hadjiyanni, 2002; Zetter, 1998). In other words, refugeeness is a social product under constant revision that cannot be understood outside the framework in which is produced and reproduced.
The literature review on Greek-Cypriot refugees shows that previous studies have not focused on an in-depth exploration and contextualization of the variety of refugeenesses and the strictly associated term of ‘home’. As analyzed in this study, varied experiences of ‘home’, its embodiment and more importantly its re-embodiment shape and reshape the framework of understanding dislocation and the need for relocation.
Download PDF or PowerPoint
