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To cite this article: Paul Sant Cassia (2009) The Unbearable Paradises of Milieux de Memoire ,
History and Anthropology, 20:4, 511-519, DOI: 10.1080/02757200903166046
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757200903166046
Review Article
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from that reading. The book itself was well written and composed (and was to me, a
post-graduate student then just about to commence my own Cyprus fieldwork, an
inspiration in the way Loizos managed to marry process and structure), but the book
as text (rather than its content) had to struggle against the hopeless truism that the
world changes faster than any authors ability to describe it.
The community (then called Kalo) thus depicted in The Greek Gift became a
quadruple representation: a representation of the world villagers had lost; a representation to the author of the vitiated efforts he invested into building such an account
a text-community for the author; a representation to the reader that anthropologys
attempts at fixity are contingent on the shifting sands of events; and lastly a representation (half-way between the text and the reader) of an imaginary village, regularized
and patterned at one point in time and dissolved within a few days. To a certain extent,
this problem holds true for all world-descriptive writing, but it is perhaps particularly
acute for anthropology, because anthropologists (especially in the 1960s and 70s) are
(were) dealing with communities in terms of people, places and their interactions in
ordered relationships. In a way not envisaged by Loizos (or indeed any of us writing
texts), his text had become cruelly historicized.
Iron in the Soul traces Peter Loizoss attempts to follow the lives of his refugees and
to examine how they have coped with exile. But it may be more than that. For we can
also see the anthropologist as a metaphorical refugee from the community-as-text he
had initially, and at the beginning of his career as a professional anthropologist,
studied, described, analysed and representedand therefore an attempt to recapture
that very same community. This is not to suggest that Loizos is literally a refugee: he
was born and bred in London, and is a professor, now emeritus, at the London School
of Economics (LSE). But few anthropologists are forced to become refugees from
their text-communitiesthat is, not able to return to their fieldwork-site-as-textand
Loizos is one of them. Indeed, most (though not all, for he has written extensively and
stimulatingly on gender and sexuality, conceiving persons, and above all on ethnographic film) of his major booksThe Heart Grown Bitter: A Chronicle of Cypriot War
Refugees (1981), and Grace in Exile (2003)can be seen as attempts to recover that
text-community, to give it an ontology that was so cruelly taken away. They are also at
the same time an attempt by Loizos to understand his peoplepeople he discovered
with the passage of time and effort as his own. Paradoxically, just as his villagers were
challenged by a larger world outside the selves they could never have anticipated,
Loizos was discovering a smaller one within himselfalthough smaller is perhaps
a misrepresentation, for what is involved here is an increasing understanding and
sympathy for a whole generation of villagers who have, together with the anthropologist, matured. The result is that although each monograph can be approached independently, to do so would miss the much larger picture. We thus have to approach Loizoss
four major Cyprus texts (Greek Gift, Heart Grown Bitter, Grace in Exile and Iron in the
Soul) together; as a progressive discovery not just to commemorate a community and
a people, but also to reconstitute them in adversity. His books are therefore much more
than an anthropologists attempts to describe and analyse; they are also in a very real
sense a struggle with events, history and change. Few anthropologists do thisat most
they merely attempt to describe and explain events and change. Loizos, by contrast,
was challenged by this in a profound way that, together with his villagers, he could never
have anticipated, and he has done so as gracefully as the people he has always so sympathetically depicted.
By 1981, the year of publication of The Heart Grown Bitter, Loizos had moved the
villagers from anthropological time into historical time: he now identified the community and pseudonyms disappeared. The documentary element and the taste of ethnographic things in his work becomes almost as important as the theory, or more precisely
are integrated in new ways. To begin with, Loizos introduces specific individuals whose
life histories, experiences and predicaments the author employs to build up a general
picture. They are not ethnographic characters, individuals conjured up by the anthropologist to make a general theoretical point and whom the author then disappears from
his text. Rather they appear again and again in his books. Increasingly, one reads an
ethnography through people. This move is paralleled by Loizos in the films he shot. His
first film, Life Chances (1975), in black and white, presents four families and their life
chancesit is a classic anthropological teaching documentary with long distance shots.
Later, he will shoot Eventual Lives: Sophias People (1985); here, there are more closeups, the film is more dialogic, there is no voice-over, and Loizos concentrates on one
character and on the almost therapeutic value of baking bread for an elderly woman who
has lost everything. Later, with hindsight and after reading Iron in the Soul, we can understand the bleak significance of this period in her life at the early stages of exile, as well
as the self-comforting role of her singing with which Loizos closes the film.
Coping with Exile
The stated aim of Iron in the Soul is both to show how forced migration hurts by tracing
the fortunes of a particular community across time, and to show how the reactions of
such villagers to dislocation have been shaped by their age and position in the life cycle.
In addition, Loizos is interested in exploring the effects of such dislocation on the
health of individuals, and he compares these dislocated villagers with others who have
not been so affected. The results are interesting, partly predictable, partly not. In 1974,
as a result of the Turkish invasion, some 200,000 people were displaced from their
villages, 40% of the islands total Greek population; some 35% of the land was under
occupation, and the society had lost its main productive resources (tourist development areas and industrial zones), quite apart from severe loss of life and destruction.
The society was traumatized. Yet, compared to other European societies that have
experienced severe shocks to the social fabric (such as Eastern European post-socialist
states between 1989 and 1995), Cyprus and the Greek Cypriots managed a remarkable
recovery, often called The Cyprus Miracle. There were various reasons for this:
economic externalities (such as the Lebanese civil war and new employment and development opportunities in the Gulf States, Libya, etc.), enlightened state planning, new
economic opportunities, a re-investment in tourism, but also the resilience of individuals, ethnic solidarity and the consensus forged by the political elite (initiated by
Makarios but subsequently followed by all politicians) to suspend internal political
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their concentration of the negativity of action. In 1974, because everything was abnormal, even the normal had to be abnormally wrested out of the abnormal. The book
is also very good on reconstructing the immediate post-invasion experiences. It is not
easy for any ethnographer, or indeed any author, to reconstruct the immediate
reactions and responses to a traumatic event (an invasion or, for example, the Twin
Towers attack), because such events are, in the words of J. Fernandez, inchoate.
Apart from the erasure of time, there is also self-erasure (for various complex reasons),
the subsequent fabrication of direction and the de-routinization of time, place and
environment. Every social grouping has its own horizon of expectations (Kosellek
1985); de- and re-aggregate those social groupings, dislocate them to alien, unfamiliar
and profoundly uncomfortable surroundings, remove them from the scaffolding
framework of information-through-sociality, and you have individual or very small
group (for example, family clusters) attempts at the recreation of community.
Although Iron in the Soul is partly presented in terms of an attempt to tackle a medical anthropological problem, in the sense that it addresses the effects of displacement
on peoples health and morbidity patterns, it is equally also about how such displaced
persons coped with their exile. Clearly, to a certain extent, one leads to the other.
Through an extensive two-village study (comparing Argaki villagers with a similar
neighbouring village that was not occupied), Loizos shows that although the refugees
had roughly twice the rate of cardiovascular illnesses and somewhat more depressive
illnesses, their mortality patterns were no different to those in the non-displaced
community. This is an interesting conclusion, and to a certain extent counterintuitivecertainly from the perspective of the refugees themselves. However, one
could also argue that the overriding necessity to work and to provide for their families,
including the new necessity for women to work outside the home, may also have had
therapeutic value.
Why Milieux de Memoire Can Never be Recovered
Those keys gave me a headache. I dont know where to put them. Im afraid to touch them
or move them, to clean them; perhaps better to put them away with all my memories.
(Loizos Pipis, quoted by Loizos 2008: 174)
There are two other general responses that Loizos explores in this book: the responses
of the refugees to the opening up of the border and the response of Greek Cypriots to
the Annan Plan and the 2004 re-unification referendum (which was, unexpectedly,
rejected by the Greek Cypriots but accepted by the Turkish Cypriots). There is a connection between the two, insofar as refugees were concerned, although other factors came
into play. For the first, he notes the most elusive matter is to know in exactly what state
of mind most people made their first visit (2008: 70). Nevertheless, Loizos did visit
Argaki with refugees from the village, and provides a rich account of their interactions
with the Turkish Cypriot inhabitants, as well as their subsequent reflections. He makes
an interesting observation regarding how individuals cognitively and perceptually react
to a place: Present-Present, where everything is thoroughly normal; and Past-Present,
which is when a place is approached through eyes that last saw it thirty or forty years
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ago; so now looks wrong, not like how it was remembered. This indeed is what
happened to many refugees. The present reality of the village could not match their
recollections. And the visiting refugees soon discovered a vocabulary of justification to
explain it: whilst they felt warmth and sympathy for individual Turkish Cypriots, most
of the actual residents of the village were people whom they did not know. The Greek
Cypriot refugees could slip easily into a generalizing mode about the general backwardness of the Turks, etc, in having turned the village from a thriving, verdant, fruitproducing village into a dry, untidy, livestock-rearing mandra (animal pen, which can
also mean a mess). Loizos, of course, notes that this is a nationalist perception, not a
specific Greek Cypriot perception, and one for which nationalism has much to answer
for. (The recent debate over the rewriting of Cypriot history school books shows that
the issue is still virulent and enters folk discourse.)
How can we approach and understand such responses? One hint comes from Proust:
Les vrais paradis sont les paradis quon a perdus (The true paradises are the paradises
we have lost) (A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Vol II, ch. 3). There is something richly
paradoxical about this sentence. Proust is not just saying loss creates paradise, a
lament which most Greek Cypriot refugees would agree with. He is also warning: any
attempt at recovery of that which is lost destroys that image (of paradise); it is imagoclastic. This caution was not one that many who have experienced such substantial
losses as refugees could bring themselves to fully heedalthough perhaps some
intuited it by refusing to return. Indeed, many searched for, and cherished, linking
objects to the villagethemes that Freud and post-Freudian psychoanalysis has
devoted much attention to, especially in connection with mourning and melancholia.
And the mansion of their memories was bound to disappoint them. Loizos notes that
many villagers thought that the village looked smaller in reality than in their memories.
But their world had become bigger, and the village was Turkish to them
There may also be something more than the mere (and certainly paradoxical)
relationship between memory, desire and the lost object, complex as it is. For one has
to take actual historical change into account, and the social frameworks of memory.
Pierre Nora (1989) has observed there are lieux de memoire, sites of memory, because
there are no longer milieux de memoire, real environments of memory. Nora is
interested inamongst other thingshow contemporary society tends to create sites
of memory (monuments, etc.) because the sources of collective memory (such as peasant culture) have largely disappeared. His argument is rather complex, because it also
deals with how history has been changed and the relationship between history and
memory. And I think its significance is strengthened when we take into account
another insight, this time by Marc Auge (1995), that modernity tends to produce nonplaces (shopping malls, airports, etc., places of movement: places that people neither
identify with nor have any social memories of). In the contemporary world, both lieux
de memoire and non-places define and mutually produce each other. The inexorable
production of non-places in modernity necessitates the societal production of lieux de
memoire (places created by the state, the conservation and heritage industry, etc.) to
embody and monumentalize memory, something that is increasingly happening in
Cyprus too, with its conservation zones, etc. Argaki, like most villages, was a genuine
life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open
to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations,
vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic, of what is no longer. (Nora 1989: 16, my emphasis)
The return to the village merely revived the personal linkage between individuals and
places, unmediated and un-sustained by the social relationships that made the place. It
is not surprising, therefore, that the villagers could never recover that which they had
lost. And the picture become more complex because the villagers had, throughout all
their years of exile, been engaged in what Sartre had called a project, which both
made the village and made them. For some thirty years, they had sustained and
nurtured it as an image; it was also an imaginary (not in the sense of false but rather
as an example of mental work), and a representationand representations are always
richer than reality. Indeed, one could argue that what was at stake here was the construction of sacrality. As Bataille (1998: 70) observed, sacred things are constituted through
a process of loss, (especially true for Judeo-Christianity). And the hiatus between that
imaginary and the raw material is even greater when that reality is transformed (as
occurred with the settlement of Turks and Turkish Cypriots in Argaki). Argaki villagers
returned to their village to recapture their memories. Instead, they found history. They
went to install remembrance within the sacred. Instead, they discovered the profane.
This may perhaps explain why Famagusta refugees may have a different view and
response to their loss and possible return, because the object of their desire is different.
The Turkish Cypriot leadership has retained Famagusta as a ghost town as a possible
bargaining counter for an eventual settlement. To the Famagusta refugees (and indeed
to everyone else), the town is a ruin, but it is not a palimpsest of different (human) remodellings that intervene between, and obscure, the relationship between the
memory-producing individual and the object of his recovery. It is therefore a town as
pure ruin, pure abandonment to time, and therefore an open demand for care from its
original owners. Famagusta-as-Ruin/Ghost-Town can much more effectively sustain
memory as a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present.
Argaki, by contrast, has become history: a representation of the past (Nora 1989).
Paradoxically, Famagusta may thus represent a more genuine Proustian paradise. Its
refugees are fortunate in that they can imagine it as they want to, and they can
continue doing so even if it were levelled to the ground and rebuilt. For the Argaki
refugees, by contrast, they discovered that their dreams had been trespassed by others.
They lost their paradis to others, who may have others
And Why the Present is the Most Difficult to Imagine
Loizos devotes some effort towards explaining why the Annan Plan for Cypruss reunification was rejected by the Greek Cypriots. He distinguishes between predisposing
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and immediate factors. For the former, he includes Greek Cypriot views that Cyprus
had been a Greek island for thousands of years, the indivisibility of Greek space, and
the fact that a large part of the electorateborn after 1974did not have a direct
experience at first hand either of Turkish Cypriots or of Turkey: which meant that for
a substantial proportion of Greek Cypriots, a vote yes was not to recover a past but
rather a leap into an (obscure and potentially dangerous) future. To Loizos, this represented a reluctance to contemplate major change (90). For the Turkish Cypriots, by
contrast, the vote in favour of the Annan Plan was not so much to recover a past
(which nationalist propaganda had long tried to drum into them was impossible and
oppressive) but to capture a future because their present was so awful. Other eliciting
factors among Greek Cypriots included their traditional faith in their political leaders
who were against the plan, the fact that an unequivocal right to return was not guaranteed, and deep apprehensions about the future (including a long-term stationing of
the Turkish army, the complexity of arrangements, etc.). Paphian villagers (non-refugees) whom I interviewed also feared the shift in economic investment towards the
North and the consequent loss of their tourism centrality. But not having lost anything
personally, they could not see why they should vote yes and store up trouble for
themselves in the future: better that they stay on their side, and we on ours, they
said. For the Argaki refugees, there were added complications: the older generation
were heavily engaged with the lives of their children in the South. But Loizos suggests
that his Argaki refugees did not merely vote against the plan out of caution, prudence
and force majeure. Rather, they voted no almost as a self-assertive act. He notes a
sense of pride in transcending displacement: saying no became an assertion of selfrespect (90).
Self-respect, certainly. But perhaps something more was involved, and my suggestions here merely follow that to which Loizos is pointing. For the sudden and unexpected opening of the border may have played a part, exposing to the Greek Cypriots
what they had lost (and the value of what they had in the here and now), and exposing to the Turkish Cypriots to what they could gain (and the poverty of what they had
in the here and now). If, in the words of Loizos, they looked at a place-representation
in the Past-Present, the direction/revelation was two-way: both groups re-evaluated
not just what they had sustained in their memories (village as Arcadia for the Greeks/
Turkish identity in Turkish Republic of North Cyprus (TRNC) as escape-from-hell for
the Turkish Cypriots), and found it lacking, but they also re-valorized their present/s.
This is not to say that the referendum result offers a de-facto solution. It clearly does
not, and the voting result is important not (solely) because no solution was reached (a
conclusion reachable by political scientists and historians), but rather because of what
it indicated as the impediments to the solutionand here I am not talking about externalities such as the stationing of Turkish troops, etc, which are perhaps symptoms.
Rather, it is to point to something else. The opening of the border removed the illusions
of the past for both groups but it did not, and could not, address the contradictions of
the present. On the contrary, it brought the problems of the Present-Future to the fore,
and both groups were in effect voting for a completely different society for which the
past offered no guidelines but merely warnings. The reluctance to contemplate major