Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the material, ideological and symbolic ways in which Kalymnian Greeks of Tarpon Springs, Florida, recreate and experience homeland and transmit their heritage to succeeding generations, by responding to real and 'imagined' needs, over the period of a century.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on fieldwork conducted in Tarpon Springs, Florida, home to a community of Greeks originating from the island of Kalymnos in the southeastern Aegean. Kalymnians first migrated to Tarpon Springs in 1905 to work as sponge divers in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then they have dominated the sponge industry and diversified into other economic activities over successive waves of migration.

I investigate the ways in which Kalymnians (re)create and experience home in Tarpon Springs at present. This requires that one examine how they perceive and discuss the continuities and differences between their American and their Greek homelands. The process of such home recreation oscillates between reality and imagination, and is the result of interaction between real needs, mostly economic, and qualities evoked by imagination, such as values and cultural representations of gender, history and myth. To explore such recreations of home, I examine Kalymnians in their long-term interaction with non-Kalymnian Greeks and with non-Greek Americans of Tarpon Springs, as well as with islander Kalymnians, since they move regularly between their island home and the U.S.A, mainly as the result of economic crises.

This diasporic group being established for a century in the U.S.A., I examine the impact of different historical generations upon the formation, negotiation, reconceptualization and transmission of Kalymnian heritage, tangible and intangible, as manifested in the realms of material culture, narrative, ritual practices and symbols, and ideologies.