Dr. Rebecca Bryant, George Mason University

When the ceasefire line that divides the island of Cyprus opened in April 2003, many Cypriots soon found that this new mobility had resulted in considerable ambiguity regarding the past, as refugees returned to homes and villages that were not the ones of memory and that could no longer be called “their own.” This paper argues that one of the primary ambiguities was a fragmentation of a past that had for three decades been imagined as whole. The paper, then, examines the ways in which Cypriots, in the act of return, were confronted not with a prelapsarian wholeness but rather with material reminders of the incompleteness of the past. This fragmentation was most visibly present through material reminders of the violations of the past both those committed by one’s own community and those of which one was a victim. The paper demonstrates how violations of the past continue to shape the landscape of the present, creating visible and tangible reminders of a past that remains incomplete.

Dr. Rebecca Bryant is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, George Mason University. Bryant is a cultural anthropologist whose work primarily focuses on the anthropology of politics and law. She has done extensive ethnographic and archival research in both the Greek and Turkish communities of Cyprus, and has begun research in Turkey. Her research and writings are concerned with the anthropology of modernity, democratic politics, and liberalism; everyday forms of state power; law as a form of anthropological practice; citizenship and personhood; the relationship of institutions and memory; narratives of violence; and most recently, gender and music.

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