It is May 1991. The flight from London Heathrow to Larnaca airport takes just over four hours. I am sitting in one of Cyprus Airways's “sunjets” going home. Home also happens to be “the field,” the site that I have chosen to conduct my research. Anthropologists do not usually study their own culture. The concern is that they already know too much about it practically to be able to achieve the distance required to reconstruct it theoretically. Put in another way, “native” anthropologists are themselves situated in the sociocultural universe they intend to study. And like any other social actor, they have invested in the game and are implicated in the struggles that it entails – or so the received wisdom postulates. Yet sociologists study their own societies as a matter of course, which goes to show that detachment does not have to be objectively part of one's relation with one's object of study. It can be achieved.

Larnaca airport, the major port of entry into the government-controlled area, is still very much a “refugee” airport. It was constructed in haste after the Turkish invasion of 1974 when it became apparent that the main airport on the island in Nicosia could no longer be operated, as it was now lying in the demilitarized buffer zone – euphemistically called the “Green Line” – separating the Turkish-occupied north from the rest of the country and was, therefore, out of bounds.