ABSTRACT
In Chapters four, five and six, I use the life stories from my fieldwork study with second-generation Greek-American return migrants to address questions of identity, home and belongingness. As I pointed out in Chapter two, I needed a methodology that would not just focus on events and factual analysis but that would become a useful tool in seeking to understand the participants’ relationships to their social worlds – the one they previously lived in and the one they have currently decided to live in – and their construction of self. This approach developed through the use of oral and written narratives that provided ways to access and then analyse the material about the returnees’ lives and a method of ‘throwing light’ on their interpretation of self in society (Chanfrault-Duchet 1991; Mann 1998). To address this aim, oral and written techniques vocalised the stories. In this respect, the storied life transforms into a catalyst that initiates the reassessment of a lived life in the exploration of meanings directed by constructions of culture, nation, ethnicity and place, in their words, where the ethnos meets the topos. All the stories were constructed around a perception of self, contextualised in past and present constructions of home and leading, in response, to a re-evaluation of the future. Despite the stories revealing a variety of different personal experiences, the majority of viewpoints were similar and shared a basic storyline: the ancestral return was a conscious decision to relocate to the homeland where participants could feel their ‘Greekness’ to its fullest extent, experience first-hand the ‘cultural stuff’ that makes up such an existence, and settle in the patrida (ancestral homeland), the ‘authentic’ topos of their identification process.
