Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean
The Wedding as Symbolic Struggle

Argyrou examines modernisation, reflected in the changing nature of wedding celebrations in Cyprus over two generations.

Vassos Argyrou (Author)

9780521619844, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 17 February 2005

224 pages, 12 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.34 kg

"The book will engage you....It is a book that should provoke some welcomed debate and a fresh perspective on otherwise tired issues. I have used this book in the classroom and received extremely positive feedback from students, who appreciate Argyrou's lucid expositions of theory and rich ethnographic descriptions. I recommend it highly." David Sutton, H-Net Reviews

The subject of Vassos Argyrou's study is modernisation, as reflected in the changing nature of wedding celebrations in Cyprus over two generations from the 1930s to the present day. He argues that modernisation is not a secular, progressive process, that remodels the life of a society, ironing out local differences. Rather, it is a legitimising discourse. It is an idiom which Greek Cypriots employ to represent, and contest, relationships between social classes, old and young, men and women, city folk and villagers. At the same time, by involving modernisation, they are submitting to foreign standards, and accepting the symbolic domination of Europe.

Introduction
l. The island of Aphrodite
2. Nationalism and the poverty of imagination
3. The weddings of the l930s
4. The meaning of change
5. Distinction and symbolic class struggle
6. Anthropology and the specter of 'monoculture'
7. The dialectics of symbolic domination.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]