Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus

by Rebecca Bryant

This book argues that two conflicting styles of nationalist imagination led to the violent rending of Cyprus in 1974 and sustained that division over decades. Based on research in both southern and northern Cyprus, the work demonstrates how the conflict emerged through the Cypriot's encounters with modernity under British colonialism, and through a consequent re-imagining of the body politic in a new world in which Cypriots were defined as part of a European periphery. Rebecca Bryant demonstrates how Muslims and Christians were transformed into Turks and Greeks, and what it meant epistemologically, ontollogically and politically when they were.

320 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2004

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

[Nicholas Whyte]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1173275...[return][return]Rebecca Bryant's Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus was strongly recommended to me by a senior Cypriot contact (who admitted however not having read it himself). I will recommend to him that he should give it another try. [return][return]Bryant has dug down through the historical records to find the roots of how Christian and Muslim Cypriots came to define themselves as Greeks and Turks, and comes up with a couple of pithy phrases for the present day situation - Greek Cypriots speak of their own 'spirit' and seek 'justice'; Turkish Cypriots talk of 'blood' and demand 'respect'. Part of the comfortable myth that Greek Cypriots have of their own history is that intercommunal tensions were created by the British in the 1950s as part of a divide-and-rule strategy; Bryant shows that, at most, the British gave legal form seventy years earlier to a division that was happening anyway. [return][return]I was especially interested by her account of education on the island under British rule, where the modernising projects of the colonisers and the colonised collided. The Greek education system in particular prepared children for enosis rather than for sharing the island with their Turkish Cypriot neighbours, and that was an ideology choice which the British rather ineffectually tried to avert. 'Where the British sought to create citizens who understood what was right, Cypriots of both communities sought to train their children to know what was true.' (It is a criticism I still pick up from Cypriot commentators today.) [return][return]Things are shifting now on Cyprus, but Bryant shows how far there is to travel.

[Theo Pipis]

One of the best history books on Cyprus