Performative Anchoring Practices and the Making of Belonging in Diaspora

This article examines how Greekness is constructed and negotiated by a member of the Greek second generation in Italy, a population largely absent from contemporary diaspora scholarship. Through a biographical and socio-anthropological approach grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the study shows how belonging emerges not as inherited essence but as an ongoing, practice-based process. To capture this dynamic, the article introduces the concept of performative anchoring practices, referring to the embodied, affective, relational and symbolic actions through which individuals stabilise identity within conditions of hybridity and partial cultural recognition. Findings reveal how family memory, linguistic socialisation, mobility, dance, intimate relationships and everyday urban routines in Athens interact with ambivalent relations to formal diaspora institutions. By tracing these multilayered practices across the life course, the article illuminates the shifting infrastructures of Greek diasporic belonging in Italy and contributes new insights into second-generation identification within contemporary socio-anthropological research.