“The Island of Love”

Abstract

During the past three decades, the Republic of Cyprus has imposed itself in the Mediterranean as a main venue for the celebration of civil marriages of foreign nationals. Lebanese and Israeli men and women find themselves particularly concerned by the phenomenon of wedding mobility, as it represents the means for otherwise “impossible” marriages to unfold.This article sheds a light on the “unconventional sociability” that emerges in marriage rituals in Cyprus. It first explores how discourses about civil marriage as a social practice circulate in both Lebanon and Israel. It then makes the link between those discourses and the shaping of a wedding mobility toward Cyprus, which carries strong symbolic and political meaning. In Cyprus, the specific modality of addressing to be‑spouses and integrating them into an economic and touristic circuit of marriage is through the idiom of love and trueness. An ethnographic gaze is adopted to understand how this language is mobilized to shape a peculiar narrative of the self and the other in a context of political tensions. The interactions occurring between celebrants and spouses and the creative combination of a symbolic repertoire during rituals constitute significant moments in the rising of a moral dimension of “love marriages”.