ABSTRACT
In commencing this discussion on identification, I cannot resist indulging into the imagery of a recent film, released a few years ago, in 2002, which has been quite successful in both the United States and Europe, not to mention Greece. The film could be none other than My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the one that all my participants exclaimed in the midst of complete awe: ‘You haven’t seen it yet?!!!’; the one which I eventually got round to viewing accompanied by my field notes. I must admit that at the end I was the one in complete awe when listening to the dialogues or monologues and watching the wealth of other cultural communicative devices; I was convinced that my fieldwork had taken shape on the big screen! A common reaction when something said or written is so complex and incomprehensible is for Americans (and British) to say: ‘It’s all Greek to me!’. After all, the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding is ‘all Greek’ to any viewer. However, since visual methodologies are not at the centre of the study, I will refrain from referencing the entire film 1 in this chapter, but let me mention one phrase to initiate the discussion on ideologies of self and geographies of identities: ‘Don’t make the past dictate who you are but let it make a part of who you will become’. This is what Toula, the protagonist in the film, is told by her brother Nick in the midst of her personal turmoil in trying to bring a xeno into the family as her future husband. But how much does the past dictate the ‘self’? To what extent is the ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ of migrants tied to their cultural backgrounds? To what degree are those cultural dimensions symbolic, emotional, imaginary, social and political? In fact, they may all be threads of the fabric of everyday life and aspects of a daily routine that may be taken for granted.
