[Book review] Tradition and modernity in the Mediterranean. The wedding as symbolic struggle

Abstract

The subject of weddings may appear as a ‘traditional’ area of social anthropology, but in the contemporary Mediterranean with weddings as important vehicles for social and cultural claims, they provide fascinating insights into cultural dynamics. Vassos Argyrou has produced a splendid book about symbolic domination in Cyprus through an analysis of weddings. Its major theme is how wedding celebrations are used by different classes as a means of differentiation. These celebrations evoke idioms of westernisation/modernisation and tradition-as-‘natural’ in a rhetorical opposition that become both a means of resistance and legitimation. In so doing Argyrou argues Cypriots do not just reify the West, but constitute themselves as Foucaultian subjects.