Suchergebnisse

In this chapter I Cyprus' examine the events of 1974: the coup inspired by mainland Greeks against the legitimate government of Cyprus headed by Archbishop and President Makarios, and the subsequent Turkish invasion which divided the island. I concentrate on reactions to loss among Greek Cypriots, because with a few notorious exceptions that affected the Turkish Cypriots, most losses and disappearances were Greek Cypriot. ; peer-reviewed

This book is about how representations of the past continue to influence contemporary realities in Cyprus. It deals with the case of some 2000 disappeared people and the resulting traumas that have affected the lives of the relatives. Its main aim is to demonstrate how memory can be seen as both a political plan used by state authorities and political leaders, and as a political act on the personal and local level against the very authorities that have employed it. Its main theme is the political economy of memory: its production, consumption, distribution and exchange – for memories too are produced socially, traded, countered, and used to obtain or purchase other 'goods'. It deals with interrupted mourning, trauma, attitudes to loss of memory, the ineffectiveness of traditional religious symbols in dealing with massive social dislocation and personal traumas, and how a whole category of people – the disappeared – have come to represent the political fantasies, fears, and aspirations of social groups, and their representatives. ; peer-reviewed

In this chapter I examine how both groups have turned their missing into martyrs, though with significant differences. These differences are as much due to cultural symbolism as to the different political agendas of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot political leaderships. Briefly put, the Greek Cypriot missing have become metaphors or signifiers for the recapture of a past and a lost territory. As they possess an ambiguous liminal identity, being neither legally dead nor experientially alive, they share certain characteristics with saints or even with Christ. Turkish Cypriot missing persons are signifiers for a future for which they sacrificed their lives. They are therefore associated with the spilling of blood for land and security. There are political differences between the two groups in their attitudes towards the recovery of the bodies of the missing. This can be attributed to their different political agendas, as well as formal differences between Christianity and Islam in the theological significance of the body in the economy of salvation. Nevertheless I show that despite these differences between the political exploitation of the missing by their leaders, at the grassroots there are many similarities between Greek and Turkish Cypriot relatives towards the recovery of the bodies of their loved ones. ; peer-reviewed

The Turkish invasion and partitioned occupation of Cyprus was the single most cataclysmic event in modern Cypriot history. It was a collective trauma for Greek Cypriot society, though not for Turkish Cypriots – at least then. It shook the economy, family relations, politics, and forcefully uprooted a third of the population turning them into refugees. The economy collapsed, but subsequently made a remarkable recovery. In the long run the society became urbanised and Cyprus was transformed from a largely rural-based economy to a modern, thriving service economy with all its attendant problems. The invasion re-formed the actual space, the geography and the landscape of the island, inserting a dangerous no-go area between the two communities. It affected time: how Turkish and Greek Cypriots visualise their past, present, and future. Something similar seems to have occurred in Latvia. In her study of people's testimonies in Latvia, Skultans noted that the 1940 Soviet occupation of Latvia came to play a leading role in defining national identity. Cypriots similarly talk about the 1974 events as the central reference point of their history, space, and identity. Michel de Certeau has perhaps rather grandly claimed that the quest for historical meaning 'aims at calming the dead who still haunt the present, and at offering them scriptural tombs' (1988: 2) This statement is useful in setting the aims of this chapter: how the missing still haunt the present in Cyprus, and how they are used by the state and society as a means to talk about the past. This complements two approaches to memory: as a strategy to cope with the traumatic experiences of the past (Antze and Lambek, 1996), and as a means to deal with ancestors and with death (Battaglia, 1992; Davies, 1994; Taylor, 1993). In his study of responses to the trauma of the First World War, Winter concentrates on war memorials 'as foci of the rituals, rhetoric, and ceremonies of bereavement' (1995: 78). I shall be looking at the memorialisation of the missing by the state as well as by political representatives of their relatives as foci not so much of bereavement, but rather of attempted recovery. It is worthwhile to visualize this within the context of Antigone. We shall look at how modern Creon memorialises the body of Eteocles – except that the body of Eteocles is missing. The concern here is with the missing as presences, as a series of representations. In a subsequent chapter I examine the converse: how the state and individuals represent the missing as losses and as absences. ; peer-reviewed

Ever since the critiques levelled at a Mediterranean anthropology by anthropologists in the late 1980s and early 1990s (e.g., Pina Cabral 1989; Herzfeld 1980, 1984, 1987), it has almost been politically incorrect for anthropologists working in Mediterranean countries to contemplate pan-Mediterraneanisms. This has certainly not been a problem for historians. Horden's and Purcell's recent book The Corrupting Sea, subtitled A Study of Mediterranean History (2000), attempts with some degree of elan to produce a synthesis of some three millennia of Mediterranean history. It is therefore encouraging that French anthropology has not been sufficiently overawed by the new orthodoxy to attempt some degree of critical appraisal of the concept, history and potential of an anthropology of the Mediterranean. In 1966, a dozen anthropologists working in the Mediterranean met at Aix-en-Provence to discuss their findings. Some thirty years later, in 1997, the University of Aix (Marseilles) convened a large conference bringing together scholars from Europe, North Africa and the United States to discuss whether an anthropology of the Mediterranean was still a viable prospect. To be sure, French interest in the anthropology of the Mediterranean is not independent of contemporary geo-political concerns. For example, the French Government is worried that the eastward expansion of the European Union may detract from its Western and Southern European dimensions. A new museum of Europe and the Mediterranean is to be established in Marseilles. This will involve the relocation and expansion of the old Parisbased Musee des Arts et Traditions Populaires established in 1937 to collect the customs of La France Profonde. ; peer-reviewed

This paper is about the presentation and manipulation of the exchange of goods and services in Southern Tunisian marriages. It is also an attempt to explain the rationality of such presentations by reference to the transmission of property and to domestic politics. Most discussions on marriages among the Arabs have noted that the size of marriage payments are no necessary reliable guide to the social position of the contracting parties (Comaroff, 1980; Peters, 1980) as seems to occur in the European Mediterranean, although ethnographies on Tunisia (e.g. Cuisenier, 1976; Abu Zahra, 1982) are silent on this point. Tapper (1981) has even suggested that direct exchanges and brideprice are 'alternative forms' of marriage, the former egalitarian the latter hierarchical. Even where brideprice is exchanged, 'the complicated system of gifts and countergifts allows of great variations, so that it is extremely difficult for an outsider to know how great are the expenses which a bridegroom in any one case really has for his bride when everything is taken into account' (Granqvist, 1931:126). ; peer-reviewed

This paper examines the relationship between religion, ethnicity and politics in Cyprus during the Turkocratia (1571–1878), the period of Ottoman rule. Its major thesis is that in the pre-industrial framework of Ottoman rule in Cyprus neither religion nor ethnicity were major sources of conflict in a society composed of two ethnic groups (Greeks and Turks) and following two monotheistic faiths(Christianity and Islam) in marked contrast to the recent history of Cyprus. In broad outline it closely parallels Gellner's thesis (1983) that nationalism is a by-product of industrialization, extensive education literacy and geographical and social mobility, and it seeks to show that the major cleavages in Cyprus were mainly intraethnic rather than interethnic. ; peer-reviewed

This paper has two purposes. First, it summarises the various papers presented at a Pluridisciplinary Conference on the Mediterranean treating the region from a variety of perspectives, a selection of which are published in this issue of History and Anthropology. Second, it attempts to explore some of the tensions between historians and anthropologists, and political scientists and geographers, in the treatment of the region. ; peer-reviewed

Our human evolution and cultural variability is manifest and realized through our bodies. From an evolutionary perspective we are the tool wielding, hairless, 'naked ape' who developed clothing as an adaptive device enabling us colonize the whole globe from our African origins. From a cultural perspective our bodies are decorated and clothed to communicate signs and properties: of gender, age, sexual attractiveness, status, and wealth. Of all the species, humans have made their bodies as a result of evolutionary processes, cultural decisions, and applied techniques. Both 'naked' and even more so 'the nude' are specifically human cultural constructs. Strictly speaking, other animals are neither naked', and even less so 'nude' – only humans are. And within our western Judeo-Christian tradition (though not for the Greeks) 'naked' is something 'minus'; 'nude' is something 'plus' – which helps explain why the Renaissance, which drew upon ancient Greco-Roman models, re-discovered the nude attaching the definitive article 'the' to the condition of nakedness and thus re-creating 'the nude' as an object of aesthetic contemplation. In so doing, a long-standing tension was initiated with the guardians of morality, the holders of ecclesiastical and political power, and the displayed representation of the naked body became both a vehicle through which, and a territory over which, socio-political and ideological battles were fought – indeed over the 'nature' of human beings and of what is 'proper to' humans. If nakedness is culturally variable; 'the nude' is a culturally specific aesthetic construct. ; N/A