Fictional Setting

Fictional Space: The Emotional Geography of Northern Cyprus is based on an ethnographic study conducted by Yael Navaro in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus when the border was still closed (between 1998-2003). The term "fictional," which Navaro uses as an analytical category, refers not only to the space and country but also to its administration and material practices. Among the fundamental questions the book attempts to answer are: How is a fictional space created? What are its characteristics? Through what practices is it formed? What kind of feeling does it evoke?

This study, based on interviews with Turkish Cypriots, explains their lives and experiences within and outside Northern Cyprus from an ethnographic perspective and examines Northern Cyprus as an emotional geography; Northern Cyprus appears as a space where the ghostly becomes visible and tangible.

Fictional Space: The Emotional Geography of Northern Cyprus was selected as the best book in European anthropology in 2012 and won the William A. Douglass Prize from the Society for Europeanist Anthropology in 2013.

Yael Navaro is a faculty member in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University.