ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the literalizing tendency, and suggests that treating national identity as an elaborate metaphor is much more useful as a distancing device. According to G. E. R. Lloyd, the psychologistic reasoning that permits us to divide the worlds cultures in so summary a fashion reflects our own prejudices more than it demonstrates observable regularities in non-Western societies in general. Nation-states spend enormous amounts of effort on denying the reality of each other's existence. The case of Cyprus is a tragically appropriate illustration of this process; that of Crete before it points up the character of the tragedy. The entire Muslim population of Crete was shipped off to Asia Minor in 1924, while the current hardening of ethnic lines between Greeks and Turks on Cyprus further illustrates the transformation of identities into ethnicity and thence into nationality a progression that has brought little but disruption and death. Metaphorical usages may also slip easily between very different levels of social inclusiveness.
