ABSTRACT
This book has set out to investigate Greek Cypriot children’s musical identities in relation to ethnicity, globalization, Westernization, Europeanization and modernization and their hegemonic impact on the cultural and musical context of the Republic of Cyprus during the historically important period just before, during and after Cyprus’s accession to the European Union in May 2004. In Part I I discussed the geographical, historical, national, political and cultural environment of the country, and its ambiguous, contradictory and fluid national, cultural and musical meanings. I revealed how different cultural dichotomies, authorities and struggles, along with symbolic consumption or resistance, were formulated up to recent times and how they accentuated their fluid, contextual and often contradictory qualities. As the findings show, these contradictions impact Greek Cypriot children’s musical enculturation in decisive ways. The most important of these dichotomies are between West and Orient, traditional and modern, urban and rural, and, more recently, local (Greek and Cypriot) and global. These dualisms are imbued with ‘low’ versus ‘high’ ideological meanings that respond to historical and national political circumstances, and to the social and cultural contexts of the country’s political problem. This problem demands an urgent solution to national insecurity and conflict, to allow the harmonious co-existence of East and West on the island, and thus Eastern and Western elements of Cypriot identity.
