The 28^TH MGSA SYMPOSIUM

28^th MGSA SYMPOSIUM KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Saturday, October 19^th, at 6 p.m. 

“On the Uses and Abuses of a History of Conflict: Context and Recursion in Cyprus, 2024”

By Elizabeth Davis

Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University

Abstract:

This year marks a complicated moment for reflection and commemoration in modern Greek studies. Fifty years have passed since two critical and interlinked events transformed the modern Greek world: the attempted coup and war in Cyprus that brought its enduring division, and the restoration of democracy after the fall of the dictatorship in Greece. Given the breadth and richness of modern Greek scholarship on these events, their conditions, and their impacts, it might be difficult – perhaps impossible – to say anything new about them today. This lecture will take as a point of departure the analytic and ethical challenges of reflecting on the meaning of these events from a distance of fifty years, focusing especially on the division of Cyprus and its complex afterlives. I will think with a number of Cypriot scholars and artists who wrestle with its radical instability as an event: forensic scientists, historians, poets, photographers, and filmmakers who show how the past is present and changing all the time, and how the effect of war—division—has become the cause of other things. 

Inspired by their work, in its many disciplines and registers, I will argue that the enduring division of Cyprus is an occasion for the recontextualization of much more recent and much more distant pasts, which are themselves changed in the process of that recontextualization. This is not to assert that the division has existed in Cyprus from the beginning of time; rather, it means that, given the situation as it stands today, any Cypriot past summoned up to explain the present contains the division as part of its story, and any emergent present also contains the division as part of its story. This recursivity of the division defies the temporal and ethical distancing that historical periodization can effect – dividing time into a “before” and “after” conflict, for example. The post-conflict present is not a novel situation, I will argue, but one that is ripe for the recombination, repurposing, and recontextualization of ideas, images, and stories that have been there all along. This accounts for the necessity and also the risks of commemorating the division, fifty years on. 

Bio:

Elizabeth Davis is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. She studied social anthropology at Harvard University, where she received her BA summa cum laude in 1997, and went on to get her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2005. Following a postdoctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, she taught at Duke University before joining the Princeton faculty in 2009. She has been a Member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as well as an ACLS/Frederick Burkhardt Fellow and research associate at the Institute’s School of Historical Studies. Among other honors, she is the recipient of the 2013 Gregory Bateson Book Prize and the 2023 Graduate Mentoring Award at Princeton. 

Davis’s work in psychological, political, and historical anthropology examines profound social divisions as well as experiments with pluralism in the post-Ottoman Greek-speaking world. She is author of three ethnographic books: Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece (2012), Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing (2023), and The Time of the Cannibals: On Conspiracy Theory and Context (2024). She has also written on economic crisis and suicide in Greece, body doubles and body politics, and identity play in documentary and ethnographic methodologies. She is currently studying orthodox and heterodox death practices in and beyond Greece, while making a documentary film addressing the public life of sacred bones in Cyprus. Davis has served two terms on the Executive Board of the Modern Greek Studies Association, and was Associate Editor for Social Sciences at the Journal of Modern Greek Studies from 2012 to 2019. At Princeton, she is affiliated with the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies and serves on the Executive Committee of the Program in Hellenic Studies.