The Place of Ethnic Identity

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with Greek Albanian families, this book explores how ethnic identity is lived, embodied, and performed in everyday life. Building on performativity theory and adapting it to the study of ethnicity and migration, it reveals how belonging, difference, and social boundaries are continually negotiated through everyday practices, relationships, and embodied experiences across Greece and Albania.

This timely contribution to migration studies, anthropology, sociology, and ethnic studies sheds new light on the performative production of ethnic identity. It offers a distinctive perspective on ethnicity, embodiment, and belonging as relational processes shaped by social norms, historical memory, migration, and transnational connections. Through rich ethnographic material, the book demonstrates how seemingly ordinary practices including greetings, celebrations, self-presentation, and language use become meaningful acts through which migrants and their families negotiate inclusion, exclusion, and cultural belonging in contemporary Europe.