Preliminaries

This book is about a fashionable topic – symbolic domination. My reason for writing about it is simple. I wanted to understand how a small, and at one point largely self-contained, self-sustained, and overwhelmingly rural society that had embarked on a journey of socioeconomic transformation quite accidentally, has ended up sixty years later and despite itself being a prisoner of its own devices. I wanted to understand this process of self-victimization largely because for half of this time I was on board travelling along.

This is the story of Greek Cypriot society and its journey to a destination variably called locally “modernity,” “Europe,” or “the West.” In more general terms, it is an attempt to explore how societies, like individuals, become subjects in Foucault's (1982) sense of the term, that is, how they tie themselves to a particular identity and submit in this way to other, more powerful societies. In what follows, I explore these issues by focusing on the foremost Cypriot cultural celebration: the wedding. What have the major changes in wedding celebrations been since the early 1930s, the point of departure of this study, and how did they come about? How are weddings celebrated today? To what extent are they differentiated, and along what lines? What do they signify about Greek Cypriot culture itself, its internal dynamics, tensions, and contradictions, and the dilemmas that it is currently facing?

These questions may seem the parochial concerns of an obscure little island in the Eastern Mediterranean.