An Ethnography of Place Attachment Communication Varosha Narratives as Mnemonic Resistance

ABSTRACT: Varosha, the derelict southern quarter of the coastal city Famagusta in Cyprus stayed unpeopled under the Turkish military captivity after involuntarily abandoned by its approximately 40,000 Greek Cypriot inhabitants during 1974 war. Seen as the political bargaining chip for the peace negotiations, the city has been fenced off to its abruptly displaced people except the recent openings to public visits of the beachfront in October 2020. The emerging culture created by the enforced displacement and prohibited home returning for decades had remained unexplored and this 3-year ethnographic study (2018-2021) problematized the neglected voice of the displaced Varosiotes, the people of Varosha. Grounded in Walter Fisher’s (1984, 1985, 1989) Narrative Paradigm theory of communication arguing human beings as natural homo narrans, storytellers and narrative as symbolic actions, meaningful ‘words and deeds’ for those who generate them, this present study focused on place attachment as a discursive practice claiming people-place bond through story telling. This ethnographic study of place attachment communication addressing the lack of exploration in the context of desired home returning pursued two research questions; how the involuntarily displaced people of Varosha narrate place attachment in the context of conflict and how these narratives function as a means of communication and a story telling performance. To address the undeveloped area of contextualized narrative analysis alongside the content, I followed the people and their memory - ‘postmemory’ patterns of the place. Demanded by the features of the field (military, unpeopled, forbidden, etc.), I employed multi-sited ethnography covering spectral (barbed wire fences of the deserted city and later on opened beachfront and streets), digital (social networking virtual place on Facebook) and futural (Varosha’s future revival as an imagined place) sites of my fieldwork Varosha. Recruiting 45 displaced Varosiotes (35 pre 1974, 10 post-1974) for active interviews and participating their narrative performances, I collected two kinds of narratives; from paper and digital archives since 1974 and from the interviews conducted and verbatim transcribed afterwards. Through the thematic narrative iterative analysis, I discovered a narrative typology of place attachment: narrative of loss, narrative of threshold, narrative of transformation and narrative of future. The function of these place attachment narratives revealed as mnemonic resistance to oblivion and to oppression. This study concluded with theoretical, methodological and practical implications for further research in the studies of narrative, place attachment, peace communication, memory and contemporary ethnography. Keywords: Narrative, place attachment, mnemonic resistance, media and memory, postmemory, peace communication, multi-sited ethnography, qualitative research