Making a home: symbolic representations of domestic space among the christian orthodox antiocheans in Istanbul

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1606892 (Table of Contents)

This research examines instances of everyday life experience, and the process of home-making of a group of Antiochean migrants in the city of Istanbul, Turkey. It focuses on processes of spatial negotiation and transformation, through practices of consumption and production involved in the home-making experience. Furthermore, it explores the element of ‘affect' within the context of the political economy and materiality of home-making. The families studied, have been living in houses that belong to the Greek Minority of Istanbul, allocated to them, under the obligation to tend for the adjoined buildings, mainly churches, schools and cemeteries. Inhabiting these conditionally private spaces is therefore interwoven with taking care of a communal/public space. These residences constitute a network of households that link migrant Antiocheans in Istanbul, embedding them at the same time as nodes in an expanding, global matrix, including southeast Turkey, Istanbul, Athens, Berlin. However the historicity of these spaces turns them in much more than simply residence, they are defined by power-relations, inclusion opportunities, spatial hierarchies and encounters, and constitute for the Antiocheans both living and working places. This structure creates a canvas where simultaneous, multilayer, processes and performances play out. All of these are invested with symbolic and material meaning that constantly renegotiates the boundaries of self and other and along the way redefines both.