An Autobiography Of Contesting Expressions Of Balkan Ethnic Identities: An Anthropological Approach To Understanding Ethnic Identity

Abstract

In this paper I explore how political histories of the Greek civil war and nationalist ideologies and policies of contemporary Balkan nation-states (Macedonia and Greece), on the one hand, and the postsocialist transformations in Eastern Europe, on the other hand, create complexities in the process of the construction of ethnic and national identity at the individual level. I explore these issues by focusing on the Greek political refugees of the Greek civil war (1946)(1947)(1948)(1949) who have mixed Macedonian and Greek origins and live today in Greece. In particular, by focusing on my family history, I wish to examine how historical and political determinants in the Balkan region influence individuals across three family generations to choose a specific ethnic identity when more than one possibility is available to them. My goals appear ambitious. I intend to achieve them by using what could be called a form of autoethnography, which can be defined as an autobiographical genre of writing and research that connects the personal to the cultural, social and political, and "places the self within a social context" (Reed-Danahay 1997, 9). I choose autoethnography in order to understand the contingent and context-specific ways in which my personal identity and difference are being constructed. I believe that questions of personal identity can serve to highlight larger insights about past and present mixed Balkan identities affected by the Greek civil war and the unresolved Macedonian issue, which refers to the dispute over the 'ownership of history' and the possession of the name Macedonia. Finally, autoethnography has the power to display the complexity of emotions -largely neglected in the discourse of the formation of ethnic identity in the Balkans -and the role of individual agency in the process of identity formation.