[MGSA-L] Princeton Hellenic Studies Lecture: April 16, 2013

[Dimitri H. Gondicas]

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

Lecture


Visualizing "The Missing" in Cyprus:  Forensic and Documentary Evidence

Elizabeth A. Davis
Anthropology


This paper draws from my field research with the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP), a bi-communal Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot agency established under UN auspices to determine the location and identity of the bodies of combatants and civilians who went missing during the violence of 1963-64 and 1974. Since 2004, the CMP's forensic teams of archeologists, osteologists, and physical anthropologists have conducted exhumations and analyses of human remains found throughout Cyprus. Despite a history of secrecy surrounding the fate of the missing, the CMP's activities have received substantial press and television coverage in Cyprus in recent years, while relatives of the missing and the CMP itself have featured in numerous documentary films. Images of forensic scientists working with bones have become as commonplace as those of grief-stricken relatives in representations of Cyprus violent history. In this paper, I examine these visual representations, considering how they distinctly frame evidence about violent events whose veridical details are in question. I highlight the role of visual media in shaping the affective investments of Cypriots in the forensic process, by eliciting and materializing their emotions about death and political violence. I explore from the dynamics of secrecy and revelation that animate forensic science and visual documentary, transforming suspicion into evidence. I consider how these forms of knowledge reinforce, supplement, or undermine each another; the different conceptions of knowledge ownership and transparency to which they are tied; and the routes by which they come to inform larger discussions about Cypriot history and politics, especially efforts toward reunification and open, democratic society.



Elizabeth Davis is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, in association with Hellenic Studies. She holds a Richard Stockton Bicentennial Preceptorship for 2012-15. She is affiliated with the Program in Global Health and Health Policy and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Davis received her PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from Berkeley. She held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, and then taught in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University before joining the Princeton faculty in 2009. Her work in Greece and Cyprus addresses the psyche and the body, their implication in social conflict and in the ties that bind people to communities and states. Her first book, Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece, Published in 2012 by Duke University Press, explores humanitarian psychiatric reform in the borderland between Greece and Turkey. She is currently writing a new book on secrecy, transparency, and post-conflict statecraft in Cyprus, focusing on knowledge production about the violence of the 1960s-70s in the domains of forensic science, conspiracy theory, and documentary film.


Tuesday, April 16, 2013
4:30 p.m.
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Reception to follow

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