The Place of Ethnic Identity: Migration, Performativity and Ethnicised Bodies

This book draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with Greek Albanian families to explore how ethnic identity is lived, embodied, and performed in everyday life. Inspired by performativity theory adapted to ethnic and migration studies, it reveals how belonging, difference, and social boundaries are continuously negotiated through ordinary everyday practices, relationships, and embodied experiences across Greece and Albania. This timely contribution to migration studies, anthropology, sociology, and ethnic studies illuminates the performative production of ethnic identity and offers a new perspective on ethnicity, embodiment, and identity as a relational process shaped by social norms, historical memory, migration, and transnational connections. Through rich ethnographic examples, it shows how ordinary practices, including greetings, celebrations, self presentation, language use, become meaningful acts through which individuals and families negotiate inclusion, exclusion, and cultural belonging in contemporary Europe.