Demarcating the „Cypriot Core‟ : ideology and pluralistic Cyprocentric identification in the post-partitioned Republic of Cyprus

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Demarcating the „Cypriot Core‟

Ideology and Pluralistic Cyprocentric Identification in the

post-partitioned Republic of Cyprus

Antonis Pastellopoulos UvA ID: 11665238

apastellopoulos@gmail.com

MSc in Cultural and Social Anthropology Graduate School of Social Sciences

Supervisor: Dr. A.T. (Alex) Strating

Second Reader: Dr. O.G.A. (Oskar) Verkaaik Third Reader: Dr. B. (Barak) Kalir

Universiteit van Amsterdam 8th of June, 2018

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This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Cypriot sociologist Caesar Mavratsas,

who passed away in the autumn of 2017, and who had the courage, like so many

others, to engage in critical scholarship in a period when such scholarship was

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Declaration of Originality

I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy

[http://student.uva.nl/mcsa/az/item/plagiarism-and-fraud.html?f=plagiarism]. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper.

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Abstract

Key words: Cyprocentrism, Cypriot identity, Postcolonialism, Cyprus Problem, Ideology, Republic of Cyprus, de-ethnicization.

The present thesis investigates the ideological positions over Cypriot identity; expressed in the left-wing extra-parliamentary political networks of the city of Nicosia, in the post-partitioned Republic of Cyprus. Drawing its data primarily from participatory observation, interviewing, informal conversations and photographs, accumulated during a period of three months of ethnographic research, it aims to contribute to the critical understanding of the ideological formations located in the island of Cyprus, through the documentation of a previously

unexplored political ideological position. Most anthropological work on Cyprus has approached the island as a site of ethnic conflict, focusing on the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities as the starting point of analysis, often on a comparative basis. The present thesis offers a br eak with this approach, setting as its starting point of analysis ideology itself, arguing, on similar grounds as anthropologist Yael Navaro, that by approaching the Cypriot conflict from an ethnicizing gaze, its political dimensions become oversimplified and its complex, multilayered

socio-political sites of conflict, invisible.By interpreting the accumulated data through poststructuralist theories of ideology, Benedict Anderson‟s concept of the imagined community and the

theoretical insights of postcolonial theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, it is argued that the political position studied is characterized an imagined community distinctly different from the competing imagined communities dominating Cypriot institutional politics, characterized by symbolic processes of decolonization and anti-exclusionary political claims.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express here my appreciation for the Department of Anthropology of the

University of Amsterdam, and in particular for Oskar Verkaaik, Kristine Kraus, Yolanda van Ede and Thijs Schut, whose insightful teaching was fundamental in enabling me to acquire the skills necessary for the production of the present thesis. A special note of gratitude must be reserved here for Marieke Brand, who went out of her way multiple times to assist both myself and other fellow students in our various moments of need. The present thesis would had not been possible without the careful guidance and supervision provided by Alex Strating, whose insightful

comments, tolerant approach and supportive attitude; made the production of the present thesis in general a most enjoyable endeavor, as well as bearable in those frustrating and difficult moments that so often accompany the process of research and investigation.

A special note of gratitude must also be made here for my informants, the people with whom I spent a good three months of constant interaction, and without which the present thesis would had never materialized. It is an unfortunate contradiction that the acknowledgment of their role cannot be made here on a personal level, as this would destroy the preservation of anonymity that I have attempted to maintain throughout the text of the present thesis. I would also like to express here my appreciation for my parents Charis Pastellopoulos and Stalo Pastellopoulou, who have given me their unconditional support in what has been a most stressful and demanding academic year.

A most exceptional note of gratitude must however be here extended to Eduard ten Houten, who I had the good fortune to meet at the café of filmtheater Kriterion. Our shared conversations, exchange of ideas and infrequent encounters, as well the generosity, sharpness of intellect and kindness of his character, have contributed more than anything else in making these last three months in Amsterdam worth remembering.

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List of Abbreviations

AKEL Progressive Party of Working People

DIKO Democratic Party

DISY Democratic Rally

ELAM National Popular Front

EOKA National Organization of Cypriot Fighters

EOKA B National Organization of Cypriot Fighters B

HAD Hands Across the Divide

RoC / the Republic Republic of Cyprus

TMT Turkish Resistance Organization

TRNC Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus

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Today is my day without hope

no force can unite the United Nations

as long as nations exist

 Taken from the first three lines of the poem „UN‟ by Cypriot poet Neşe Yaşın.

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1. Introduction

The thesis hereby presented is the result of an ongoing personal concern for the documentation, analysis and exploration of the non-dominant, academically marginalized political positions in the island of Cyprus, my country of origin. If it is to be placed within a particular paradigm in the study of Cyprus, it falls in line with the increasing shift of focus, particularly by new scholars and academics, from the Cypriot conflict itself, which has so long dominated academic research, to an emphasis on those social dimensions that have remained largely unexplored – gender and sexuality, grass root radical politics, marginal political ideologies, the history of the Cypriot political left and the effects of militarism (Panayiotou 2006, Panayiotou 2012, Kamenou 2012, Siammas 2013, Efthymiou 2014, Achniotis 2016, Pastellopoulos 2017, Karathanasis 2017). The thesis has been produced in the knowledge that such a shift has been taking place, and aims to contribute to this recent accumulating scholarship not as a final verdict on its object of analysis, but as an invitation to a broader discussion over the way Cyprus is thought of, discursively produced and academically scrutinized.

The present thesis explores the ideas, perceptions and senses over Cypriot identity located in the left-wing, extra-parliamentary political networks of the city of Nicosia, in the post-partitioned Republic of Cyprus. It offers an analysis of the identified key elements of a distinct and previously unexplored ideological political position; that can be placed within the broader category of Cyprocentrism. The category has been employed within the literature to signify political positions that are diametrically opposed to the Turkish and Greek Cypriot ethnic nationalisms privileged in the ideological landscape of Cypriot politics, positions that are

fundamentally rooted in emphasizing the identification with a Cyprus divorced from the political notions of the Greek and the Turkish nation. The following research question has guided the process of the thesis‟ production from the period of fieldwork to the finalization of its writing:

What are the ideological elements comprising extra-parliamentary Cyprocentric ideology in the post-partitioned Republic of Cyprus, and in what ways does this Cyprocentric ideology pose a challenge to ethnic nationalism?

The present thesis argues that the Cyprocentric ideological perspective in question is

differentiated from ethnic nationalism and other forms of Cyprocentrism by its identification with a holistic, abstracted notion of Cyprus, redefining the signification and accompanied

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2 meaning of the existing division, while reclaiming the category of the „Cypriot‟ as an inclusive, internally heterogeneous demographic category. Through these reconfigurations of meaning, it is further argued that the present ideological position entails processes of decolonization, refusing to privilege any abstracted set of ethnicized and/or cultural groups, processes connected with the attempt to formulate an imagination of a Cyprus transcending the existing partition and the politics of exclusion that accompany it.

1.1. Outline

A few points of clarification have to be made in relation to the structure and mode of

presentation of the thesis. The first chapter informs the reader of the broader context of Cyprus, the relationship of the present work to the academic literature surrounding it; and introduces the field and the people that the present thesis concerns itself with. The second chapter outlines the key theoretical concepts employed, as well as the employed methodology and epistemology, moving on to reflect on questions of ethics and positionality. Chapter three to five comprise the analytical section of this thesis. There is no concrete attempt at formulating an overall narrative, an approach that while having its merits, was deemed too time-consuming, textually

uneconomical and too artificial for the presentation of ideas and concepts; the schema that forms the core of the present thesis. Instead, the chapters and subchapters are organized thematically, as distinct long fragments that attempt to decipher the central elements of the Cyprocentric

ideological position in question, by presenting a thematically organized and carefully chosen set of data, slowly accumulating within the subchapters of each chapter. I do hope that this manner of presentation, while perhaps lacking the elegance of anthropological narration, will make the selected topic of inquiry more comprehensible and accessible to the reader unfamiliar with the context of Cyprus.

The third chapter thus deals with the ways my informants attempted to renegotiate the existing division by the formulation of new signifiers in relation to it, while the fourth chapter approaches three ways by which the dominant ethnic nationalist ideology imposes itself in the Republic of Cyprus, concluding with one particular instance in which it has been recently symbolically challenged. Although this may feel like a sidetrack from the main object of analysis, it was deemed necessary for its proper contextualization, as the subsequent chapter would not be

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3 comprehensible to the reader unfamiliar with the ideas, claims and general narration of Greek Cypriot ethnic nationalism. Chapter five discusses the claims of my informants in relation to Cypriot identity, explores their postcolonial dimension, particularly in relation to language; and argues that the centrality of this particular ideological expression of Cyprocentrism rests on the identification with the abstraction of Cyprus itself. It moves on to evaluate these findings in relation to Benedict Anderson‟s concept of the national imagined community, concluding the analysis with a discussion over the examined Cyprocentric position‟s support for the

establishment of a bi-communal federation. The analysis is followed by the conclusion,

discussing the thesis‟ relevance and implications in relation to the study of Cyprus, concluding with a critique and a general recommendation for a future anthropology of Cyprus.

1.2. A Note on the Employed Terminology

The language used in discursive representations of Cyprus, as well as its ongoing division and the description of its inhabitants, forms a central aspect of the symbolic struggles surrounding the historical, political and ethical claims of the opposing sides in the ongoing dispute commonly referred to as the „Cyprus Problem‟. The most visible example remains of how one speaks of the break-away self-declared state called the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (TRNC). As anthropologist Yael Navaro notes, the TRNC “is always placed in quotation marks in references outside northern Cyprus and Turkey to highlight its questionable legal status” (2012: 97). By this simple discursive act, the ongoing sovereignty of the “Republic of Cyprus” (the state

originally formed in 1960), over the whole geography of the island is symbolically reaffirmed in international relations (ibid). Other signifiers include the prefix “pseudo”, inputted in-front of any word suggesting the status of a state, most notably in media outlets, the statements of political parties and everyday speech. To pass this effect to the reader, anthropologist Yiannis Papadakis incorporated this linguistic aspect in his own; highly self-reflective ethnography: “I spoke to the pseudo-policemen, noting a small pseudoflag of their pseudo-state [the TRNC] on their uniforms” (2005a: 75).

Other signifiers yet include the “occupied territories”, or even “the Turkish areas (ta Turjika)”. In its reversed expression, discourses generated by the Republic of Turkey and the TRNC refer to the “Greek Cypriot administration” (Navaro 2012: 102), expressing their refusal to recognize the

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4 Republic of Cyprus as sovereign since the collapse of its bi-communal constitution in 1963, which saw the Turkish constitutional community losing all political representation within the functioning of the state. Although not as widely recognized, how one speaks of the inhabitants of Cyprus is also entangled within discourses of power; with the discursive representation of the local population shifting through the years, an aspect reflected in social and anthropological research itself. Thus anthropologist Peter Loizos and psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan talk of Cypriot Greeks and Turks (1979, 1975) in their published research of the 1970s, which was largely undertaken prior to the island‟s partition in 1974, while later researchers refer to Greek and Turkish Cypriots (Loizos 1981, Mavratsas 1998, Bryant 2004, Papadakis 2005a, Navaro 2012) – turning the subject compliment into the Subject of the discourse itself, expressing a commonality between the two abstracted groups.

The categories of the Turkish and the Greek Cypriot, although themselves often imprisoned in an endless binary, would had been sufficient for the terminology of this thesis, had in not been the case that it is precisely those very categories, among a number of others, that are disputed, negated and transformed by my informants and participants. To refer to them by the categories they themselves refuse to employ in their description of themselves would thus constitute an enormous misrepresentation, negating their claims at the very same moment that they are presented in textual form. Additionally, the aforementioned discursive and oral representations of political geography are almost completely rejected by my informants, replaced by terms particular to my research population. As much of this thesis revolves around self-definitions of identity, the re-negotiation of the representation of the island‟s division and the relation of those claims to the ongoing reality of partition, as well as to the dominance of ethnic nationalism, of which the aforementioned representations are an integral part, this thesis employs a differentiated terminology, standing outside the canonical representations of identity and political geography. Thankfully, such dilemmas are not new, allowing me to borrow terms from existing discourses. For the signification of the division, I will be using the terms „north of the line‟ and „south of the line‟ when not speaking of the states themselves, the line referring to the buffer zone that cuts across the island, commonly referred to as the Green Line. These terms have been borrowed from the terminology utilized by Hands Across the Divide (HAD), a grass-root peace resolution women‟s group that generated the terms in its internal organizational structure to avoid the

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5 reproduction of hegemonic discourses (Cockburn 2004: 166). The terms are utilized in the study produced by sociologist Cynthia Cockburn, from which they are borrowed (ibid). When referring to the opposing state mechanisms, I will be using the terms „TRNC‟ and „Republic of Cyprus‟ with no quotation marks, or any other additional features. Their role in the history of the ongoing dispute is covered sufficiently in the following subchapter.

However, I will not be using Cockburn‟s terms of “southerner” and “northerner” for the island‟s population, in order to avoid a complete negation of the cultural and positional characteristics of my informants. Instead, I will be using the terms „Greek-speaking‟ and „Turkish-speaking Cypriots‟, taken from the literary work of Sofronis Sofroniou (2015), who utilizes the terms in his novel Oi Protoplastoi (Οι Ππυηόπλαζηοι)1. I acknowledge that the terms outlined do not completely escape the political discourses surrounding the island; and that they themselves contain particular ideological connotations. They are however relatively autonomous from dominant signifiers, allowing for the latter‟s discursive de-naturalization, a necessary step if those discourses are to form part of the analysis without reinstating them to a hegemonic status throughout the presentation of this thesis.

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6 1.3. Historical and Contemporary Context

Figure 1: Location of Cyprus with added geographical names for contextualization. Source: Contributed by User

Vardion, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LocationCyprus.svg [Accessed: 08/04/18].

The island of Cyprus, located in the eastern Mediterranean and formally a part of the Ottoman Empire and later on of the British Empire, has had an admittedly troubling history. In contrast to other colonial people, the dominant ethnic identity which emerged in Cyprus in the late 19th century was Euro-centric, re-imagining Cyprus as a Greek island and its Orthodox Christian population as ethnic Greeks, while the largest minority saw a shift in its identity from Islamic to Turkish (Varnava 2012: 159). These transformations; intrinsically connected with the achieved hegemony of ethnic nationalism within each religious community, in turn determined the Cypriot anti-colonial struggle, which became dominated by Greek-speaking Cypriot ethnic nationalist ideals. Instead of independence, the anti-colonial struggle became dominated by the demand for Enosis,2 the annexation of the island by the Greek state, signifying, within Greek nationalist imagination, the return of Cyprus to its Hellenic origin (Hatay & Papadakis 2012: 28). In its turn, Turkish-speaking Cypriot ethnic nationalism responded with the demand for Taksim,3 the

partition of the island on ethnic grounds (ibid). The two ethnic nationalisms symbolized and

2

The word translates to „Union‟.

3

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7 projected Greece and Turkey as their corresponding motherlands, symbolically locating Cyprus as their natural and historical extension (Bryant 2002: 509). AKEL, the left-wing party which has grown to dominate leftist politics since the 1940s, eventually sided with the Enosis cause,

although its political predecessor, the Communist Party of Cyprus, had been the strongest supporter for independence (Katsourides 2014: 468).4

Figure 2: 1960 Demographic Map of Cyprus by color intensity. Blue indicates Greek-speaking Cypriots, red

indicates Turkish-speaking Cypriots and green and orange indicate Maronite Cypriots. Source: Contributed by User

Alexander-Michael Hadjilyra, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Cyprus#/media/File:Ethnographic_ distribution_in_Cyprus_1960.jpg [Accessed: 21/11/17].

After five years (1955-59) of anti-colonial pro-Enosis guerrilla warfare by the Greek-speaking ethnic nationalist group EOKA, a warfare that had deteriorated into inter-communal violence by 1958,5 Cyprus was granted independence in 1960, with Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom guaranteeing its territorial and constitutional integrity in the Treaty of Guarantee (Ladisch 2007:

4

AKEL succeeded the Communist Party of Cyprus as the Marxist-Leninist political party south of the line. Since the 1990s it has evolved into a moderate anti-nationalist social democratic party (Charalambous 2012: 158).

5

In response to EOKA, Turkish-speaking ethnic nationalists formed the pro-Taksim paramilitary group TMT. Part of the violence of 1958 also involved attacks, murders and general harassment of the Cypriot political left, with each nationalist group attacking leftists internal to their own community (Arslan 2012: 127).

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8 92).6 The constitution was primarily drawn up by representatives of the Greek and Turkish governments and was signed by archbishop Makarios III and doctor Fazil Kucuk, as the representatives of the two communities (Morgan 2010: 254). The newly formed Republic of Cyprus was constitutionally founded on the principle of bi-communality (Navaro 2012: 7). The Cypriot population was separated into the Greek and Turkish constitutional communities, entitled to equal participation in the sharing of state power and the decision making process, irrespectively of the population of each community (Ker-Lindsay 2011: 26). Special

constitutional provisions banned the promotion and materialization of both Enosis and Taksim, while the smaller minorities, the Maronite, Armenian and Catholic Cypriot communities, were recognized only as „religious groups‟; and were forced to collectively choose between the Greek and the Turkish constitutional categories, with all three joining the former (Iacovou 1994: 43). By 1963 however, the bi-communality of the constitutional order collapsed, after president Archbishop Makarios III promoted 13 constitutional amendments which aimed at the

abolishment of the bi-communal character of the state; as a first step towards the achievement of Enosis (Milios & Kyprianidis: 114). The breakdown of the constitutional order was followed by intense inter-communal violence driven by paramilitary ethnic nationalist groups, resulting in hundreds of civilian deaths, the complete loss of political representation for Turkish-speaking Cypriots, the de-facto abolishment of bi-communalism and the separation of the Turkish-speaking Cypriot population into enclaves, surrounded by Greek -Turkish-speaking Cypriot military and paramilitary forces (Dodd 1993: 7). By 1964, United Nations Forces had been deployed on the island to pacify the conflict, in correlation with inter-communal negotiations aiming for a

consensual agreement on its resolution. The presence of the United Nations in Cyprus, as well as its sponsored negotiations, have been a continuous element of Cypriot life ever since.

The inter-communal conflict reached its peak in the summer of 1974, when EOKA B, an ethnic nationalist Greek-speaking paramilitary group; in collaboration with the Greek military units stationed in Cyprus and the Greek military dictatorship controlling the Greek state since 1967, staged a coup overthrowing president Makarios, aiming to achieve Enosis by force (Papadakis 2005b: 85). The coup triggered the military invasion of the island by Turkish forces, with Turkey

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The Treaty gave the right of intervention to each state for the purpose of re-establishing constitutional order, if the independence, territorial integrity or security of the Republic of Cyprus was under threat.

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9 arguing for its right to do so under the Treaty of Guarantee (Ker-Lindsay 2011: 45). The events of 1974 resulted in the occupation of 38% of the island by the Turkish military, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Cypriots, numerous acts of mass murdering of Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking civilians and the de-facto ethnic and geographical partition of the island, with a United Nations-administered buffer zone (the infamous Green Line), separating the two

opposing military forces (Kliot, & Mansfield 1998: 503-4). By 1975, internal displacement had resulted in two de-facto separated areas, with Turkish-speaking Cypriots on one side, and Greek-speaking Cypriots on the other.7 In 1984 the area under the control of the Turkish forces

declared itself an independent Turkish Cypriot state under the name „The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus‟ (TRNC), but gained recognition only by the Republic of Turkey, remaining to this day an unrecognized state (ibid). The rest of the island remains under the control of the internationally recognized „Republic of Cyprus‟ (RoC), itself controlled only by the Greek constitutional community, but remaining recognized as the only sovereign state over the whole island (Alemdar 1993: 91). The constitutional provisions of bi-communality, frozen since 1963, remain unenforced until today.

Since 1977, UN-backed inter-communal negotiations have been taking place between the elected presidents north and south of the line, in order to reunify the island under a bi-communal federal structure through a new constitutional arrangement (Papadakis 2005b: 94). Theoretically this entails the formation of a federation consisting of a central bi-communal federal state; and two autonomous constituent states under the control of each community. The geographical area corresponding to the Turkish-speaking constituent state (which is expected to be less than the area currently north of the line), the bi-communal provisions of the federal level of government, the abolishment or not of the Treaty of Guarantee, as well as the number of Greek-speaking Cypriot refugees that would be allowed to return to their original homes, form a significant part of the central points under negotiation.

The internal status quo was only altered in 2003, with the unexpected permanent opening of checkpoints by the TRNC following mass political mobilizations north of the line, calling for a

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Notable exceptions to this include the Greek-speaking Cypriots who stayed in Rizokarpaso village, as well as the Maronites who remained in the Kormakitis and Karpashia villages north of the line, Potamia, a mixed village located south of the line and Pyla, a mixed village which has found itself located in the buffer zone since 1974, and has largely been administered by the United Nations ever since.

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10 federal solution and the reunification of the island (Rooksby 2012: 93). The opening of

checkpoints allowed freedom of movement for citizens of the Republic of Cyprus throughout the whole island for the first time since 1974. A year later the Annan Plan, a proposed federal

solution to the Cyprus Problem that was under negotiation and supported by the United Nations, was put on binding, parallel referendums on each side of the line. It was rejected by 75% of the citizens of the Republic and approved by 65% of the citizens of the TRNC (Papadakis & Peristianis & Welz 2006: 4). Following the referendums, the Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union with the island remaining partitioned, with any changes to the regulations over the management of the checkpoints falling under the jurisdiction of the European Commission (European Council 2004: 9).

Figure 3: Post-Partitioned District Map of Cyprus. Source: Contributed by User Golbez,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyprus_districts_named.png [Accessed: 20/11/17].

Following the failure of the Annan Plan, new rounds of negotiations commenced in 2008, following the election of the AKEL leader Demetris Christofias to the presidency south of the line. The negotiations continued after the election of right-wing Nikos Anastasiadis in 2013, the only leader of a political party who had openly supported a Yes vote for the Annan Plan south of the line. The negotiations gained an increasing intensity with the election of pro-federation Mustafa Akıncı to the presidency north of the line. They reached their climax with the hosting of

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11 an international conference in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, in July of 2017, accompanied by expectations that a final negotiated agreement was in sight (Smith 2017). The conference, which at its peak involved the leaders of each constitutional community, the foreign ministers of

Turkey, Greece and the United Kingdom, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, as well as a representative of the European Union, eventually collapsed, resulting in the termination of official negotiations until the writing of the present thesis (ibid).

1.4. Situating the Research in the Literature

With such a complex history of conflict, the reader will find it quite expectable that much of the anthropological and social research on Cyprus falls within what Joel Robbins has described as the “suffering slot” (2013) of anthropology. Psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan explored the conflict early on from a psychoanalytic lens in his work Cyprus - War and Adaptation (1979), while Peter Loizos, one of the earliest and undoubtedly most influential non-colonial anthropologists to study Cyprus, produced two ethnographic studies and one ethnographic film on the experiences of his fellow Greek-speaking co-villager Cypriot refugees (1981, 1985, 2008). The anthropology of memory was explored by Yiannis Papadakis in his Echoes from the Dead Zone (2005), a detailed narrative account exploring and contrasting the collective memories of the two

communities, a topic of research enriched further by anthropologist Rebecca Bryant in her work The Past in Pieces (2012). Anthropologist Yael Navaro, in the The Make-Believe Space (2012), explored the experiences of Turkish-speaking Cypriots living under a non-recognized state prior to the opening of the checkpoints, while anthropologist Lisa Dikomitis explored and contrasted the feelings, experiences and attachments of Greek and Turkish-speaking Cypriot refugees over the same village located north of the line, in her work Cyprus and Its Places of Desire (2012). The relationship of this thesis to the above paradigm of research is two-fold. On a first level, this thesis continues with a focus on the conflict, particularly in its intersection with notions of

identity and the contestation over its discursive and symbolic representation. However, this thesis also presents in part a break with the above paradigm; and in particular with some of the implicit assumptions that are often uncritically reproduced with it. As Yael Navaro noted in her own research north of the line:

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12 In the discourses of international organizations as well as in much academic scholarship, there are two sides to conflict in Cyprus, “the Turkish side” and “the Greek side”… Although international discourses (including those of international organizations and states and in academic scholarship) construct and imagine “a Turkish side” to what is conventionally called “ethnic conflict in Cyprus,” in opposition to “a Greek side”, such an essential side does not exist. Those who have been discursively categorized as members of the same “ethnic” or “national group”…do not perceive or experience themselves as such (2006: 95).

As it will become evident in the following chapters, my informants do not view the ongoing division of the island as an ethnic conflict, do not accept; but protest against their given ethnic identities, replacing them with different ones, do not view their enemy or political antagonist in another ethnic group; and do not accept given narratives or symbols, but reclaim and reformulate them, generating new discourses and imagined communities. Yael Navaro‟s approach of “de-ethnicizing” (ibid: 84) the anthropology of Cyprus is thus taken unapologetically as the starting point of this thesis. As Navaro notes, “The intention is to focus our analytical lenses on political as opposed to “ethnic” conflict. There is a conflict to be studied…but it is not “ethnic” and it is not just between “Turks and Greeks,” the rubric that has so dominated imaginaries of Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey.” (ibid: 96) This approach opens not merely new ways of thinking and writing anthropologically about the Cyprus Dispute, but also new objects of analysis for the anthropology of Cyprus, objects which necessarily evade the binary of ethnic conflict, discursive ethnic identities and the subsumption of informants and participants under categories of identity given by institutional and structural centers of power. Whether this is in fact achieved in the present thesis remains to the judgment of the reader. The task at least, has been attempted. As anthropologist Yiannis Papadakis notes in his analysis of Greek-speaking Cypriot narratives of collective identity, “[i]f anything unites Greek Cypriots in a community, it is their

participation in a debate about what constitutes the nation, not some shared conception of "the nation” (1998: 162). The two prominent ideological positions surrounding this debate have been described by sociologist Andreas Panayitou as Hellenocentric and Cyprocentric (2012: 81-82). Hellenocentric positions prioritize Greece as the starting point of ideological discursive

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13 Cyprus, articulating claims over „Cypriot identity‟ in opposition to Hellenocentric discourses (ibid). Sociologist Caesar Mavratsas (1997, 1998), employing the same analytical terminology, explored the on-going ideological contestation between ethnic nationalism and bi-communal civic nationalism (Cypriotism) south of the line, a contestation rooted in conflictual imagined communities (Anderson 2006: 6). Ethnic nationalism is shown to prioritize the Greek nation, locating Cyprus as merely its marginal extension in the eastern Mediterranean, with Cypriotism emphasizing the two communities of the island as a sui generis meta-ethnic community,

separating them from the „national centres‟ of Greece and Turkey (Mavratsas 1997: 721). As Mavratsas points out, ethnic nationalism has two parallel formulations, the Enosist formulation, which has officially been abandoned since 1974; and the hegemonic non-Enosist formulation, claiming the Republic of Cyprus as a mono-communal state for Greek-speaking Cypriots (ibid: 728). Right-wing institutional politics became associated with non-Enosist ethnic nationalism, while left-wing politics became associated with Cypriotism (Papadakis 2005a: 161).8

Figure 4: Reconstruction of the political ideological spectrum south of the line, based on the work of Andreas

Panayiotou (2012), Caesar Mavratas (1997) and Yiannis Papadakis (1998). The spider diagram is founded on notions of collective identity. Arrows indicate political oppositional relations; solid circle lines indicate conditional relations.

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It should be noted here that there is also a growing liberal Cypriotist faction, concentrated primarily within the centre-right wing DISY party.

Cyprocentrism Ethnic Nationalism Enosist Nationalism Non-Enosist Nationalism Civic Nationalism Cypriotism (Bi-communal Civic Nationalism) Hellenocentrism

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14 The aforementioned framework offers elaborate descriptive tools for the conceptual organization of ideological claims in the study of Cyprus. Its emphasis however on institutional politics has limited our understanding to the dominant political sphere. The present thesis, by focusing on the micro level of grass root, rather than institutional Cyprocentric positions, acts as an expansion of the contemporary understanding of identitarian claims in Cyprus, by exploring a Cyprocentric position which refuses to fit within the Cypriotist, civic nationalistic conceptualization of Cyprocentrism.9

1.5. The Field and the People

What constitutes the field is widely recognized as being abstracted and constructed after the period of data gathering has come to an end (Ingold 2014: 386). In other words, the field is not experienced as a distinct; identifiable geographical space while research takes place and the individual anthropologist is absorbed in the mundane and stimulating aspects of the everyday life of her informants. The field is rather a useful analytical abstraction, isolating and unifying in retrospect the places, moments and geographical spaces most characteristic of the research population encountered by the individual anthropologist.

There were thus two distinct field sites I can here account for. The first and central field site was social space Karaolos10 in the capital city of Nicosia,11 the city located in the center of the island and partitioned since the inter-communal violence of 1963. The social space opened its doors in 2015 and has been organized based on the principles of self-management and direct democracy, with a set of individuals, many of which are members of grass-root political groups, acting as its collective assembly, meeting once a month to make consensual decisions on the events that will be hosted in the space, the work that has to be carried out and any other issue that might be

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It should be noted here that in the Greek language, the word „Ethnos (Έθνος)‟, which is the root of the English word „Ethnicity‟, is also the Greek word for „Nation‟. The meaning of „Nation‟ is therefore always associated with an ethnic group within the Greek language, as there is no Greek word that adequately describes a non-ethnic nation. Subsequently, supporters of civic nationalism generally do not perceive themselves as nationalists, but in fact as anti-nationalists, as nationalism (ethnikismos, εθνικιζμόρ) is always correlated with an Ethnos, an ethnic group.

10

This is a pseudoname, literally meaning „snail‟ in the Cypriot Greek dialect. It is a reference to the Karaolos internment camp, which was used in Cyprus during British colonial rule for the detention of Jewish war refugees in the 1940s.

11

The city is the capital of both the TRNC and the Republic of Cyprus. It also has three different names. It is called Lefkosia (Λεσκωζία) in Greek, Lefkoşa in Turkish and Nicosia in English.

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15 brought up in the assembly. There were regular events taking place at Karaolos throughout the duration of my research. Every Friday Karaolos opened up as a café/bar, there were film screenings twice a month and every Saturday „collective kitchens‟ were organized, where a couple of individuals cooked vegan and vegetarian food; with people gathering to eat together in the midday. The food was provided with the expectation of a small donation, collected to pay for the rent and other everyday costs that had to be covered to keep the space open. Additionally, more irregular events included presentations on pre-specified social, political or economic topics, usually by a single individual, as well as presentations by political groups active within Karaolos. It has not been uncommon for the social space to be utilized for other purposes, such as hosting poetry nights, although no such event was organized while I was carrying out my fieldwork. The social space acted as the central field site during the data collection period. It is there that my informants, as well as relevant political documents, could always be found, with informal political discussions often taking place. I therefore spent as much time as I possibly could at Karaolos, attending every event and being present whenever the social space was open.

Karaolos is however not a mere social space organizing events, but acts as the physical, tangible expression of what my informants call „Horos (Χώρος)‟ in political lingo, literally translating to „Space‟ in English. There is no direct English translation that could capture the meaning of the word Horos. The closest at hand is the word „Milieu‟, which can denote a particular social and/or cultural environment; however, this still does not adequately capture the meaning of the word within the context that was utilized. As Panos Achniotis observes, “the so-called „space‟ includes generally all those organizations and persons that are on the left of AKEL and aspire for a more radical and revolutionary political programme” (2016: 30). The „Space‟ represents the far-left of Cypriot politics south of the line, but it is not itself a political party, a particular grass root group or a collective with specific, easily identifiable membership. Perhaps the most direct way of describing the „Space‟, is by describing Karaolos itself on a busy day:

Spending my time at yet another collective kitchen at Karaolos, it is becoming evident that Saturdays are the most popular days of the social space. The building, located within a historic Nicosian neighborhood, consists of a large wooden door that gives way to a large, roughly rectangular room, its walls and windows decorated with political posters and stickers of past political actions, resembling in a way a displayed set of political

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16 memorabilia. A small kitchen area is located at the right far-end, with a banner over it reading “States watch over borders of class”, and an even smaller storage room at the left far-end, where an archive of magazines and leaflets of past political groups and initiatives can be found. Newer leaflets, brochures and magazines are on display just in front of the storage room, for anyone who wishes to grab a copy. The latest issues of Entropia, the magazine produced regularly by Syspirosi Atakton,12 one of the two anti-authoritarian political groups that are active within Karaolos, are placed on a small wooden table next to the entrance door. On top of them are placed the brochures of Antifa Lefkoşa,13 the other political group active within the social space. There is a relatively large and wide bookshelf near the kitchen area, where books on topics ranging from anarchist and socialist thought to the history of Cyprus, anti-capitalist economics, veganism and spirituality can be found. Two doors on the far end of each side of the room give way to two unisex toilets. The room is filled with small metal tables and plastic and wooden chairs for people to sit and enjoy their meal, after they have picked and filled their plates, located on a large plastic table in front of the bookshelf, alongside the cooked food. Collective kitchens gather up approximately 25 to 65 people, most of which are

politically active in some form or another, or have been so in the past. Environmental and anti-militarist activists, self-declared anarchists and feminists, members of the

bi-communal pro-federation teachers‟ platform, members of past anarchist,

extra-parliamentary leftist and grass root pressure groups and members of Syspirosi Atakton and Antifa Lefkoşa are regular visitors at Karaolos on Saturdays. Most individuals know each other on at least a casual level and consist of different generations, ranging from young to middle aged adults, with the former being the dominant age group. Beyond „politicized‟ individuals, the social space further attracts their friends and acquaintances, as well as the occasional unaffiliated visitor that may pass by a collective kitchen or a political presentation out of genuine interest or mere curiosity.

12

The name is untranslatable, losing much of its contextual meaning in English. An attempted translation would be „Cluster of the Disobedient‟.

13

The actual spelling of the group‟s name is „antifa λεσkoşa‟, which combines both Greek and Turkish letters, a political statement in-itself.

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17 The composition of the „Space‟ is thus ideologically heterodox, irreducible to a particular

political group, a particular age group or even a strictly specific form of politics. It is rather better understood as a decentralized network of individuals and political collectivities, held together through the intersection of inter-personal relationships and progressive and left-wing ideological views. It is thus not surprising that no clear definition or universal understanding of what is included in the „Space‟ actually exists. Informants often talked of the „Space‟ in the general, the “Limassol Space” (social circles of far-left groups and individuals located in the city of Limassol); “our Space” when wanting to distinguish the political and social circles around Karaolos from other far-left political groups; and “the broader Space”, which usually included all aforementioned „Spaces‟ as well as more moderate past and present political initiatives, such as the bi-communal rapprochement movement, which aims to bring Turkish-speaking and Greek-speaking Cypriots together through personal, social and less politically charged activities. For the purposes of this thesis, the term „Space‟ is utilized to denote the groups, individuals and social circles in and around social space Karaolos.

As is implicitly noted in the above vignette, there are different population groups identifiable within Karaolos. These can be abstracted into three broad categories: Individuals who are currently politically active within the „Space‟; individuals who have been active in the past but are currently inactive; and individuals who are, and have been apolitical in relation to the „Space‟. My informants consist of individuals primarily from the first group. All were young adults living in Nicosia south of the line and were citizens of the Republic of Cyprus; born after the partition of the island. They were all regular visitors at Karaolos throughout the fieldwork period, knew each other fairly well; and most were also members of the Karaolos assembly and/or one of the two active political groups. All of my informants were supporters of the reunification of Cyprus based on a bi-communal federal structure; and had a generally high standard of tertiary education, with most holding or studying towards an undergraduate university degree and many holding or pursuing university education on the PhD level. This „kernel‟ group consisted of approximately 20 individuals during my stay in Nicosia, from which 7 were further interviewed.

The second field site was the walled city of Nicosia, south of the line – the oldest part of the capital city of Nicosia, located approximately 15 minutes from the social space by car, the

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18 dominant mode of transportation in the island. The walled city is surrounded by the Venetian walls; built as military fortifications in the 16th century, and contains two of the three

checkpoints located within Nicosia, where travelling from one side of the line to the other becomes possible with the showing of official identification documents to the stationed police officers of the TRNC and the Republic of Cyprus. Due to its ongoing partition, as well as the presence of two checkpoints, the walled city has acquired a certain symbolic significance – it has come to represent the division of the island as a whole and has also been used repeatedly as a geographical space for political protests, rallies and acts of symbolic violence (graffiti, political posters etc.). This is not merely due to the walled city‟s symbolic significance in relation to the island‟s ongoing partition – after 1974 the walled city south of the line came to be used as a geographical space for grass root political actions (Iliopoulou & Karathanasis 2014: 170). As anthropologist Pafsanias Karathanasis has explored in his PhD thesis, the opening of the checkpoints in 2003 transformed the walled city‟s spatial position from the margin of the two sides of Nicosia; to “an in-between area, a threshold…its marginal character…changed into a borderline and therefore into a transitional character” (2017: 408). This previous marginal character had been explored by Papadakis in his own work, carried out before the checkpoints were opened – the walled city of Papadakis is a deteriorated space, forgotten at the a margin of a developing new city, where the elderly Greek-speaking residents lived “in the company of

ghosts” alongside “many destitute people” (2005a: 147). Karathanasis explored and documented in great detail the persistence of grass root political initiatives in the walled city from the opening of the checkpoints in 2003 until 2011, most of which were driven by the far-left politics of the „Space‟: the opening of Kardaş;14

the first independent bi-communal social center, the

emergence of a politicized youth subculture centered around Faneromeni square, the opening of squats and the activity of the Occupy Buffer Zone movement,15 where the street and later on the building located in the buffer zone between the police booths of the Ledras checkpoint were

14

The word is Turkish and translates to „Brother‟.

15

For the purposes of clarifying my positionality, I would like to state here that as a native Nicosian politically active from a young age, I was part of the Faneromeni youth subculture and was also present during the activities of the Occupy Buffer Zone movement. I therefore had an established connection with a number of my informants prior to entering the field. The dimensions of this are discussed in subchapter 2.5, which deals with questions of

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19 occupied for several months by protestors, until they were forcibly evicted in April of 2012 (Karathanasis 2017: 417, Ilician 2013: 74, Ioannou 2016: 25).

Figure 5: Isolated map of the walled city of Nicosia. Black indicates the buffer zone (limited here to the walled

city), Red indicates Ledras Street, the main commercial street within the walled city; and Yellow the Ledra Street checkpoint. The Pink and Green circles are my own additions, indicating Faneromeni square and the approximate position of the Ledra Palace checkpoint, in relation to the Republic‟s police position south of the line. The Ledra Palace is also the headquarters of the United Nations Forces in Cyprus (UNFICYP). Source: Eirini Iliopoulou

(2016: 59).

While the walled city is still central in the politics of the „Space‟, as well as to the rapprochement movement, particularly in relation to the ongoing division, the area has been substantially

gentrified since 2012, with Faneromeni square and its surrounding streets, described by

Karathanasis as the central point of the politics of the walled city, having been transformed into a commoditized space packed with modern cafés, bars and restaurants. Much of my time was spent

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20 in the walled city, especially when Karaolos was closed; and specifically at a coffee shop16

located near Faneromeni square, which has been a regular hang around area of my informants, as well as of marginal political groups, before and after the gentrification of the walled city (ibid: 227). There I had the convenience of continuing my research when Karaolos remained closed, but also the chance to observe and explore the contradictory official and unofficial symbols that characterize and surround the walled city south of the line.

16

In contrast to cafés, Cypriot coffee shops (kafenio) serve primarily traditional alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages and do not serve espresso-based coffee. Within the walled city south of the line, modern versions of the coffee shop have been connected with alternative lifestyles shaped in large part in opposition to the dominant consumerist lifestyles of the city (Karathanasis 2017: 228).

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21

2. Theoretical, Methodological and Ethical Considerations

2.1. The Poststructuralist Analysis of Ideology

In his contributions to the theory of ideology, Louis Althusser defined ideology as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (2008: 36). This relationship was for Althusser primarily determined by institutional structures interpellating (addressing) the subject, resulting in the internalization of the dominant ideological values by the subject itself (2008: 17). Althusser‟s structural understanding of ideology and the process of interpellation was faced with two intrinsic limitations. Firstly, the emphasis on structure downplayed the significance of non-institutional ideologies in influencing political action, leaving them outside of the scope of analysis. Secondly, the process of interpellation was never adequately theorized on the micro level, resulting in a theoretical framework unable to

adequately explain how subjects internalize a particular ideology and more importantly, how they are able to shift from one ideological position to another (Zizek 2009: 27-28).

Poststructuralist theoretical frameworks have expanded our understanding by utilizing the Lacanian concepts of the Symbolic and the Real in addressing the limitation of Althusserian theory. For Lacan, the Symbolic is the social sphere situated within language, mediated through the interrelation of signifiers in an ongoing process of the representation of the world

(Stavrakakis 1999: 20). Language however does not stand outside of ideological Symbolic orders or forms an independent social sphere from them, but is itself already located within them (bid). As philosopher Slavoj Zizek points out, the process of ideological signification is itself

conditioned through the interplay between floating signifiers and master signifiers (2009: 95). Floating signifiers are signifiers which hold no particularized meaning in-themselves, entailing a specified meaning only in reference to a master signifier, while a master signifier remains self-referential within a Symbolic order, conditioning meaning while mediating its own meaning as self-evident (ibid). An example internal to Cyprus is the relationship between the master signifier „the nation‟ and floating signifiers such as „freedom‟ in ethnic nationalism, where „the nation‟ becomes a self-referential tautology, conditioning the meaning of „freedom‟ to mean the freedom of „the nation‟, restricting the freedom of the individual if it is perceived to threaten the integrity of „the nation‟ itself (Kitromilides 1979: 24). The crystallization of the meaning of floating

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22 signifiers by differential master signification therefore results in the mediation of contradictory and antagonistic notions attached to the same floating signifier. The recognition of a master signifier becomes possible with a close critical engagement with the particular ideological Symbolic order itself, through the identification of referential signifiers upheld as self-evident tautologies in a specified ideological context.

The identification of the Subject with a particular signifier produces "the necessary illusion of a fixed meaning" (Evans 1996: 149), a meaning situated within, and connected to, a particular ideological Symbolic order and its corresponding internal structure of master signification. The Symbolic sphere is however unable to capture and represent the totality of human experience, a failure whose effect entails the impossibility of a permanent, fixated identification of the subject to the signifier. As political theorist Yiannis Stavrakakis points out, “[w]hat we have then…is not identities but identifications, a series of failed identifications or rather a play between identification and its failure” (1999: 29). That remainder of experience which resists Symbolic representation is termed in Lacanian theory the Real (the term does not denote actual reality). In the Zizekian formulation, the Real acts as a disturbance to the smooth function of the Symbolic (2009: 192). An encounter with the Real is a traumatic experience which destabilizes the overall process of signification, decentering the subject in its relation with the signifier and its

corresponding Symbolic order, an experience which becomes re-symbolized within an

alternative order of signification (2009: 192). As it has been argued elsewhere (Pastellopoulos 2017: 20), the events of 1974 constitute a social traumatic event which constitutes the encounter with the Real in Cypriot political and everyday life, an experience which becomes re-symbolized through new ideological Symbolic orders reinterpreting the events and effects of the war, with Cyprocentrism and non-Enosist ethnic nationalism being the clearer ideological expressions of this process (Loizos 1981: 132).

2.2. Imagined Communities and the Postcolonial Condition

In his analysis of the historicity and emergence of nationalism, Benedict Anderson coined the concept of the “imagined community” (2006: 7). The term aimed to describe a community characterized by the imagined connection of its claimed members, even though those very members would never be able to meet all of their corresponding co-members in their lifetimes

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23 (ibid: 7). As Anderson explained, a community is imagined “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion […] In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined.

Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (ibid: 6). While the term has been utilized primarily for the description of national communities, imagined to inhabit a particular geographical area, which may or may not be currently under the control of an existing nation state, Anderson used the term to describe communities beyond the nationalist imagination, such as “the imagined community of Christendom” (ibid: 42), where the community of believers formed an imagined community transcending continents, state borders and localized cultures, producing a distinct holistic imagined community that did not correspond to the nationalist imagination characterizing so much of the politics of the 19th and 20th centuries – a politics which is seeing a reemergence through the demands of independence raised from Scotland and Catalonia; to the unofficial independence referendum in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (Flamini 2013: 53, Guibernau 2014: 21, Meintjes 2018: 1).

For Anderson, the form of imagination is what separates nationalist imagined communities from their competing equivalents, in that the nation is imagined as “limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (2006: 7). The nation is therefore always imagined as finite, limited to a specific geographical area, an area which corresponds to either an existing, or a desired potential nation state. The nation, as an imagined community, defines its current and potential membership in relation to an imagined limit, and therefore nationalism, even in its most liberal formulations, is characterized by a fundamental point of exclusion – nationalism is

antithetical to humanism, precisely because it defines itself in opposition to an external or internal Other (Yack 1996: 208).

Anderson‟s concept may remain a simple one, but it is ever relevant in the discussion of the politics of collective identity, which are largely characterized by claims over the definition or collective values of a particular imagined community, its geographical and demographic

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24 case still characterizing to a large extend the political ideological lines of contemporary Cypriot politics (Papadakis 2005a: 161, Navaro 2006: 95, Mavratsas 1997: 721). But in contrast to the imagined communities of the European continent, or even the postcolonial world, Cyprus

presents itself as a peculiar case, in that the hegemonic imagined communities which emerged in the first half of the 20th century claimed Cyprus as a part of nation states external to it, nation states which failed however to annex the island and incorporate it as part of their sovereign territory. Yet Cyprus has seldom been approached from a postcolonial lens. This is paradoxical, as the history of the island is burdened by expansionist claims and violent interventions by the British, Greek and Turkish states, the permanent stationing of Greek and Turkish military troops,17 as well as internal conflicts and contestations over the identity of its inhabitants and its positioning in historical narrations (Panayiotou 2006: 269, Ker-Lindsey 2011: 15, Varnava 3012: 179). South of the line, these contestations extend from claims over the status of Cypriot Greek in relation to Demotic (Modern) Greek (Christofides 2010: 436),18 to conflicts between

Cyprocentric and Hellenocentric imaginations/narrations of identity and history (Panayiotou 2012: 75), to bi-communal initiatives against ethnic nationalism (Papadakis 2005b: 90), as well as postcolonial political positions tracing back to the 1980s (Pastellopoulos 2017: 28).

Much of what I encountered in the field in informal conversations, interviews and documents, becomes comprehensible and apparent when perceived through a postcolonial perspective. Postcolonial theory is therefore employed as a supplement to Anderson‟s theoretical insights, particularly Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o‟s work on the cultural hierarchies characterizing colonial and postcolonial societies in relation to the status and role of language (2005: 15). I have also made use of the concept of the „Cypriot surplus‟, a concept developed by Andreas Panayiotou in his analysis of Cypriot consciousness, to describe those elements of the Cypriot experience that resist their subsumption and homogenization by ethnic nationalism (Panayiotou 2005). The critical insights of Étienne Balibar (1991), Eric Hobsbawm (1991) and Frantz Fanon (2008),

17

One cannot avoid stressing the point here, by including the fact that the position of Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard, the highest military position in the military force of the Republic of Cyprus, is always held by a Greek citizen, rather than a citizen of the Republic.

18

Cypriot Greek refers to the vernacular dialect spoken by Greek-speaking Cypriots, which is commonly non-comprehensible to the speaker of Modern Greek. Turkish-speaking Cypriots speak their own dialect of Turkish, which is also largely incomprehensible to a Turkish speaker from mainland Turkey. While Cypriot Greek acted as the lingua franca of the inhabitants of Cyprus prior to 1974, today this function has been taken on by English, as the knowledge of Cypriot Greek by Turkish-speaking Cypriots has largely depreciated after almost 50 years of partition.

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25 which all fall within the social constructivist framework adopted by Anderson, have also been employed when deemed useful in the initiation or clarification of a particular argument. The inclusion of postcolonial theory is perhaps the most significant theoretical aspect of the present thesis, as its utilization offers not merely a casual explanation of the phenomena encountered in the field, but contributes on a theoretical level to the de- ethnicization of the anthropology of Cyprus.

2.3. Epistemology and Methodology

Methodological considerations remain of central importance in the undertaking of

anthropological and social scientific research. The consistency, manner and employed methods by which data are collected and organized; form the empirical basis upon which an

anthropological analysis can develop, expand and conceptualize its object of analysis in a meaningful and transferable manner (Emerson & Fretz & Shaw 1995: 170). More importantly, however, the epistemological nature of the accumulated data should first be briefly discussed, as epistemology, in critically evaluating how knowledge is produced and established, is located at the foundation of how data itself is to be understood (Wilson 2004: 14).

Social scientific epistemology has been largely shaped by Immanuel Kant‟s sharp distinction between phenomena and noumena – the first signifying the external appearance of the object in question, while the latter indicating the object in-itself, in its unapproachable essence, divorced from our direct perception (1998: 347). For Kant, the phenomena are the observable dimension of particular noumena, but the noumenon itself is incomprehensible, remaining outside of the field of observation and therefore of analysis – for the thing-in-itself is unapproachable, located outside of our perception and therefore outside of our capacity to understand it, and therefore to produce a knowledge of it (Guyer & Wood 1998: 38). Transferring this distinction from

epistemological philosophy to the field of anthropology, one can state that what is encountered in a particular field is neither the essence nor the universal elements of the unified whole of the anthropological object in question, but a plethora of observable phenomena, divorced from any innate essence, corresponding to the recorded, accumulated and potential data that the

anthropologist takes as her empirical basis for her anthropological endeavors. Phenomena, in being unable to offer us access to their corresponding noumena, entail the necessity of their

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26 scrutinization and interpretation – they do not speak to us in-themselves, but have to be

deciphered through the employment of abstract reasoning that can produce a sense of meaning to an otherwise untranslatable accumulation (Weber 1964: 88). The present thesis is fundamentally rooted in this epistemological position, and approaches the employed data as phenomena that become comprehensible only through their theoretical interpretation and therefore, though a conscious process of abstraction.

Full time ethnographic research was undertaken from the 22nd of December, 2017, until the 29th of March, 2018. During this period, multiple methods were employed for the collection and accumulation of data. The primary research method was that of participatory observation, which entailed an ongoing, expanding engagement with my informants and the political and casual activities within which they were involved in, ranging from political actions, social gatherings and structured meetings, to informal conversations, casual encounters and everyday

socialization. Participatory observation was undertaken in its most intense expression at Karaolos, but also at the regular hangout places of my informants, primarily within the walled city south of the line. I kept a journal for the whole duration of the research, and regularly wrote down ethnographic notes, particularly of informal conversations, key events; thick descriptions and of my theoretical interpretations. From the above, informal conversations were the most rewarding in terms of relevance, as they more directly addressed the perspectives and beliefs held by my informants.

As part of participatory observation, I also spent a substantial amount of time walking through the walled city of Nicosia south of the line, taking photographs of symbols (graffiti, flags, monuments, stickers and checkpoints), particularly if they related to notions of identity and the ongoing division of the island. I undertook three pre-arranged such „expeditions‟, each time changing my walking route to cover as much of the walled city as possible. In total, 404 photographs were taken. The collection of political documents formed another layer of data. Documents were primarily collected from Karaolos, within which most political texts of extra-parliamentary Cyprocentrism could be found. The documents collected consisted both of the documents distributed to the visitors of Karaolos, as well as of documents found in the Karaolos archive. In total, 12 magazine issues, 46 leaflets and 8 brochures were collected.

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27 As noted above, I carried one-on-one interviews with 7 of my informants, all of which were part of the „kernel‟ group of the „Space‟. All interviews were carried out in Cypriot Greek, with the exception of one interviewee, who felt more comfortable expressing his/her thoughts in English. All interviews were in an informal setting (either Karaolos or a coffee shop) and were semi-structured, focusing primarily on the themes of self-identification, the terms employed regarding the island‟s division, the existence (or not) of a common Cypriot identity and the interviewee‟s perspective of who is to be considered a Cypriot. I preferred to carry out interviews around themes, rather than to employ a fixed set of pre-designed questions, in order to allow my informants the possibility of expressing and expanding their answers however they felt fit, minimizing my control of the discussion. I carried all interviews in March, as I considered it necessary to first become closely familiar with my informants through participatory observation, prior to the formulation of the themes of the interviews. Although this approach entailed the risk of failing to carry out all interviews, particularly in the case of an informant‟s repeated

re-scheduling of the interview date, I consider this decision justified, as the themes employed in the interviews would had not been identified without the preceding two months of participatory observation. Carrying out interviews early on in the fieldwork period entailed the greater risk of focusing on themes irrelevant to my informants‟ claims, as well as to the context within which they are formulated. All interviews were fully transcribed, with interviews in Cypriot Greek transcribed in Greeklish, the unofficial writing of Greek with Latin characters, as the phonetics of Cypriot Greek cannot be adequately expressed in the Greek alphabet. Although an unorthodox approach, transcribing the interviews in Greeklish also made transcribing less time-consuming, reducing significantly the time gap between transcription and analysis. All interview extracts, with the exception of the one carried out in English, as well as all extracts from documents, unless otherwise stated, were translated by me. I do not disclose the pseudoname of the interviewee who gave an interview in English, to avoid the possibility of identifying that particular individual.

The close familiarization with the accumulated data was followed by thematic coding, establishing common themes found in all data sets through a repeating scrutinization of their interrelation. The established themes determined which data were deemed relevant and which were to be disregarded, an unfortunate decision that is however necessary given the limited available space and the enormous amount of data collected in the field. The establishment of

Demarcating the „Cypriot Core‟ : ideology and pluralistic Cyprocentric identification in the post-partitioned Republic of Cyprus