The Politics of Dance: : The Incorporation of the Pontic Refugees in Modern Greek Culture through the Manipulation of Dancing Practices in a Northern Greek Village

The present paper is concerned with the analysis and contextualisation of ‘Pontian’ dance performances in Northern Greece as highly politicised sites for the articulation of identities, histories and ideological narratives of belonging. Following the argument that dance is an embodied discourse intimately related to the construction of identity, the paper explores collective, hegemonic representations of inclusion and exclusion, Sameness and Otherness as these are negotiated in time and space. The protagonists of this ethnography, confronted with the grand narrative of Hellenism, reflexively engage in a struggle to remain a distinct and yet central part of modern Greek culture by carefully and reflexively meditating in the politics of the dance, tradition, Pontianness and Greekness in Aegean Macedonia.