Reconfiguring Paradise in Cyprus

Abstract

With the current restructuring of Mediterranean tourism, rural peripheries are being incorporated into a global market as niche products offering local culture and living tradition 'lost' to the rest of the (modern) world. Yet the reproduction and representation of tradition and local identity are themselves embedded in often­ contradictory globalised relations of production.

These contradictory trends have been further compounded by the effects of division in Cyprus - one island geographically, but two different political spaces, integrated into the global system in very different ways. The south has been subject to the full force of globalisation, engaging with the major international tour operators and the positive and negative impacts of mass tourism. The image of the north, on the other hand - closed off from the major global tourism players, but with its border wide open to Turkey- is that of bearer of tradition for the island as a whole; whilst 'within' the north, this role has been largely assumed by Turkish settlers, as Turkish Cypriots pursue more urban and 'modern' lifestyles.

Focusing in particular on developments in the north, the paper explores the contradictions inherent in the hierarchy of globalisation and representation in Cyprus, and the ways in which tourism refracts the political spaces of the island and mediates their relationship_ with the world at large.