Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Home
Hostname: page-component-564cf476b6-scc96 Total loading time: 0.266 Render date: 2021-06-18T19:20:40.558Z Has data issue: true Feature Flags: { "shouldUseShareProductTool": true, "shouldUseHypothesis": true, "isUnsiloEnabled": true, "metricsAbstractViews": false, "figures": true, "newCiteModal": false, "newCitedByModal": true, "newEcommerce": true }
EnglishFrançais
Comparative Studies in Society and History Comparative Studies in Society and History

Article contents

Partitions of Memory: Wounds and Witnessing in Cyprus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2012

Rebecca Bryant
Rebecca Bryant
Affiliation:
London School of Economics
Corresponding
E-mail address:
r.e.bryant@lse.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions[Opens in a new window]

Extract

The image has become an iconic one: five young men in dirty uniforms kneel in the middle of a dusty plain with their hands behind their heads. They squint in the blinding midday sun, their faces expressing anxiety and a measure of fear. A Turkish soldier leans to talk to one of them, appearing calm, even friendly. To one side another Turkish soldier whose face we do not see stands guard. This photograph has become one of the most famous images to come out of the Cyprus conflict. The men's kneeling posture, the fright in their eyes, and the apparent calm of the soldiers all evoke a vulnerability to violence. And like the bloody photo of a woman and her children murdered in their Nicosia home that was used for decades by the Turkish Cypriot administration, or like certain photographs of distraught women crying for losses that we can only imagine, the image of these five young men has been reprinted in pamphlets and brochures, newspapers and books, in ways that take for granted its power to evoke their uncertain fate.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 332 - 360
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below.

References

Baran, Sevim. 1993. İki Halkın Hikayesi. Nicosia: TRNC Ministry of Education and Culture.Google Scholar
Bromley, David G. 1997. Constructing Apocalypticism: Social and Cultural Elements of Radical Organization. In Robbins, Thomas and Palmer, Susan J., eds., Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements. London: Routledge, 31–46.Google Scholar
Bryant, Rebecca. 2004. Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus. London: I. B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Bryant, Rebecca. 2010a. The Past in Pieces: Belonging in the New Cyprus. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bryant, Rebecca. 2010b. The State of Cypriot Silences. Cyprus Review 22, 2: 113–22.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso.Google Scholar
Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Certeau, Michel de. 1988. The Writing of History. Conley, Tom, trans. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Christou, Miranda. 2006. A Double Imagination: Memory and Education in Cyprus, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 24: 285–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Stanley. 2001. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Constantelos, Demetrios J. 2004. Altruistic Suicide or Altruistic Martyrdom? Christian Greek Orthodox Neo-Martyrs: A Case Study. Archives of Suicide Research 8: 57–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dalsheim, Joyce. 2004. Settler Nationalism, Collective Memories of Violence and the ‘Uncanny Other.’ Social Identities 10, 2: 151–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Aporias. Dutoit, Thomas, trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Fokaidhis, Fokas. 1982. Lapithos: Istoria kai Paradhosis. Nicosia: Kyrenia Municipality.Google Scholar
Galatariotou, Catia. 2008. From Psychosocial Equilibrium to Catastrophic Breakdown: Cyprus 1955–1974. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89: 845–66.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Galatariotou, Catia. 2012. Time, Memory and the Cypriot Journey towards a New Past. In Bryant, R. and Papadakis, Y., eds., Cyprus and the Politics of Memory: History, Community and Conflict. London: I. B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Hadjipavlou-Trigeorgis, Maria. 1998. Different Relationships to the Land: Personal Narratives, Political Implications and Future Possibilities. In Calotychos, V., ed., Cyprus and Its People: Nation, Identity, and Experience in an Unimaginable Community, 1955–1997. Boulder: Westview Press, 251–76.Google Scholar
Hatay, Mete. 2007. Is the Turkish Cypriot Population Shrinking? An Overview of the Ethno-Demography of Cyprus in the Light of the Preliminary Results of the 2006 Turkish-Cypriot Census. PRIO Report 2/2007., Oslo: International Peace Research Institute.Google Scholar
Hatay, Mete and Bryant, Rebecca. 2008. The Jasmine Scent of Nicosia: On Returns, Revolutions, and the Longing for Forbidden Pasts. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 26, 2: 423–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. 1962. Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. Oakeshott, Michael, ed. New York: Collier Books.Google Scholar
Ioannides, P. Christos. 1991. In Turkey's Image: The Transformation of Occupied Cyprus into a Turkish Province. New York: Aristide D. Caratsas.Google Scholar
Jeganathan, Pradeep. 2000. On the Anticipation of Violence: Modernity and Identity in Southern Sri Lanka. In Arce, Alberto and Long, Norman, eds., Anthropology, Development and Modernities: Exploring Discourses, Counter-Tendencies, and Violence. New York: Routledge, 111–26.Google Scholar
King, Russell, and Ladbury, Sarah. 1982. The Cultural Construction of Political Reality: Greek and Turkish Cyprus since 1974. Anthropological Quarterly 55, 1: 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kovras, Iosif. 2008. Unearthing the Truth: The Politics of Exhumations in Cyprus and Spain. History and Anthropology 19, 4: 371–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kravel-Tovi, Michal, and Bilu, Yoram. 2008. The Work of the Present: Constructing Messianic Temporality in the Wake of Failed Prophecy among Chabad Hasidim. American Ethnologist 35, 1: 64–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LaCapra, Dominick. 2000. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Lingis, Alphonso, trans. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.Google Scholar
Lloyd, David. 2003. Ruination: Partition and the Expectation of Violence (on Allan deSouza's Irish Photography). Social Identities 9, 4: 475–509.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lubkemann, Stephen C. 2008. Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mazower, Mark. 2004. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Municipality of Lapithos. 2001. Imepoessa Lapithos: 3000 Chronia. Nicosia: Municipality of Lapithos.Google Scholar
Pandey, Gyanendra. 2006. Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul. 1965. The Political Paradox. In History and Truth. Kelbey, Charles A., trans. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul. 1988. Time and Narrative. Vol. 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Blamey, Kathleen and Pellauer, David, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robbins, Thomas, and Palmer, Susan J.. 1997. Introduction: Patterns of Contemporary Apocalypticism. In Robbins, Thomas and Palmer, Susan J., eds., Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem. London: Routledge, 1–30.Google Scholar
Roudometof, Victor and Christou, Miranda. 2011. 1974 and Greek Cypriot Identity: The Division of Cyprus as Cultural Trauma. In Eyerman, Ron, Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Breese, Elizabeth Butler, eds., Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 163–88.Google Scholar
Sant Cassia, Paul. 1998–1999. Missing Persons in Cyprus as Ethnomartyres. Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 14/15: 261–84.Google Scholar
Sant Cassia, Paul. 1999. Piercing Transformations: Representations of Suffering in Cyprus. Visual Anthropology 13: 23–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sant Cassia, Paul. 2005. Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus. Oxford: Berghan Books.Google Scholar
Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Slyomovics, Susan. 1998. The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Uludağ, Sevgül. 2005. İncisini Kaybeden İstiridyeler: Kıbrıs'ta kayıplar, toplu mezarlar, ölümün kıyısından dönenler. Nicosia: Cassoulides and Sons.Google Scholar
Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. 2000. Witnesses for Christ: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period, 1437–1860. New York: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press.Google Scholar
Yakinthou, Christalla. 2008. The Quiet Deflation of Den Xehno? Changes in the Greek-Cypriot Communal Narrative on the Missing Persons in Cyprus. Cyprus Review 20, 1: 15–34.Google Scholar
Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1991. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Zizek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.Google Scholar
15
Cited by

Send article to Kindle

To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle.

Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Partitions of Memory: Wounds and Witnessing in Cyprus
Available formats
×

Send article to Dropbox

To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox.

Partitions of Memory: Wounds and Witnessing in Cyprus
Available formats
×

Send article to Google Drive

To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive.

Partitions of Memory: Wounds and Witnessing in Cyprus
Available formats
×
×

Reply to: Submit a response

Please enter your response.

Your details

Please enter a valid email address.

Conflicting interests

Do you have any conflicting interests? *