The Past in Pieces: Belonging in the New Cyprus

Contemporary Ethnography

by Rebecca Bryant

On April 23, 2003, to the surprise of much of the world, the ceasefire line that divides Cyprus opened. The line had partitioned the island since 1974, and so international media heralded the opening of the checkpoints as a historic event that echoed the fall of the Berlin Wall. As in the moment of the Wall's collapse, cameras captured the rush of Cypriots across the border to visit homes unwillingly abandoned three decades earlier. It was a euphoric moment, and one that led to expectations of reunification. But within a year Greek Cypriots overwhelmingly rejected at referendum a United Nations plan to reunite the island, despite their Turkish compatriots' support for the plan. In The Past in Pieces , anthropologist Rebecca Bryant explores why the momentous event of the opening has not led Cyprus any closer to reunification, and indeed in many ways has driven the two communities of the island further apart.

This chronicle of the "new Cyprus" tells the story of the opening through the voices and lives of the people of one town that has experienced conflict. Over the course of two years, Bryant studied a formerly mixed town in northern Cyprus in order to understand both experiences of life together before conflict and the ways in which the dissolution of that shared life is remembered today. Tales of violation and loss return from the past to shape meanings of the opening in daily life, redefining the ways in which Cypriots describe their own senses of belonging and expectations of the political future. By examining the ways the past is rewritten in the present, Bryant shows how even a momentous opening may lead not to reconciliation but instead to the discovery of new borders that may, in fact, be the real ones.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Ethnography

224 pages, Paperback

First published July 29, 2010

About the author

I am Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University and an anthropologist of politics and law. My work has focused on ethnic conflict and displacement, border practices, post-conflict reconciliation, and contested sovereignty on both sides of the Cyprus Green Line and in Turkey. I studied Philosophy (B.A.) and Cultural Anthropology (M.A., Ph.D.) at the University of Chicago and have since held teaching and research positions at the London School of Economics, George Mason University, and the American University in Cairo. I have also taught as a Fulbright fellow at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and as a visiting professor at Middle East Technical University's Cyprus campus. I hold affiliations as an Associate of the Peace Research Institute Oslo and a Senior Research Fellow in the European Institute of the London School of Economics.

Reviews

[Konrad Plechowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

All in all, a great read, a must-read almost for anyone interested in understanding what's really happening in Cyprus between the Greek and Turkish communities. I've read it as a background for my Cyprus holidays and was really thankful I did. Engaging anthropological research, telling stories of Cypriots and the story of an author intertwined in the place and people's stories. I found it deeply engaging, though there were quite some moments when I felt a bit lost, especially when author was leaving the story of the people and was moving into more theoretical thoughts of her own (theory of property, anyone?).