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The Unbearable Paradises of Milieux de

Memoire
Paul Sant Cassia

Department of Anthropology, University of Durham,

Published online: 25 Nov 2009.

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
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History and Anthropology,

Vol. 20, No. 4, December 2009, pp. 511519

Review Article

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The Unbearable Paradises of Milieux

de Memoire

Iron in the Soul. Displacement, Livelihood and Health in Cyprus.

PETER LOIZOS
Oxford, Berghahn Books, Studies in Forced Migration Series, Vol. 23, 2008
0paul.sant-cassia@durham.ac.uk
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History
10.1080/02757200903166046
GHAN_A_416777.sgm
0275-7206
Review
Taylor
42009
20
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(print)/1477-2612
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Anthropology (online)

From Anthropological Time to Historic Time

In 1975, Peter Loizos published The Greek Gift, a study of politics in a Greek Cypriot
village. In the interval between the completion of the manuscript and the time it was
published, the village he had studied in the late 1960s had disappearedor more
precisely had been overrun by the Turkish army, following the mainland Greekinspired coup in July 1974 and the subsequent Turkish invasionwith his villagers
facing a bleakly uncertain future. This was also Peter Loizoss fathers natal village, a
fact which Loizos could perhaps not have intuited then would be of added significance
as events unfolded. The front page of the book, added at the proofs stage, preannounced an impossible conundrum for the reader, but which is still relevant today:
if the community one is about to read about does not exist anymore, how should one
approach such a text? The readers relationship to the text becomes much more
complex than merely reading about a community which that reader would anticipate
is pretty much the same at the time of reading. If Events/History intervene so
fundamentally (as in this case), we read the book with that knowledge, and that creates
a new reading experience where the reader is in a different time than the subjects of
the book. As the hidden premise of most anthropological reading is an isomorphism
between the community and people depicted in the text and in the field, how should
the reader treat a text which appeared not so much allochronic (in a different time)
but also allotopic (in a different place), torn from the reality it had been composed
to depict? If the former is to a certain extent always anticipated by the reader, the latter
challenges both the purpose of reading and also what the reader anticipates ab initio,
prior to engagement with the text, what he or she could do with the insights gained
ISSN 02757206 print/ISSN 14772612 online/09/04051109 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/02757200903166046

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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

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History and Anthropology 513

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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P. Sant Cassia

differences and present a united front to Turkish occupation. Loizos is critically

concerned with a major problem: how did the refugees cope? The short answer is the
determination of individuals to adhere to their pre-dislocation life-goals (4). These
included primarily the provision for their children: a good education and the harnessing and focusing of effort to see them settled and stably married. Such goals sustained
all but a handful of men and women and kept them from despair and apathy, further
reinforcing the centrality of family and kinship in Greek Cypriot society. This might
well explain the differences between the Cypriot and Eastern European responses to
crises. In the former, the family had been sustained by that other major institution, the
Church, a factor that Loizos aptly calls a Default Mode emotional sustenance (160) .
In the latter, the Eastern European socialist societies, both the family and the Church,
had long been subjected to sustained assaults by socialist regimes. In addition, in most
but not all (for example, Poland) of these countries, collectivization had broken the
linkage between family and land. Cyprus, pre-1974, was primarily a family-farmed
agriculturally based society. The Turkish invasion catapulted it into a service economy
through the forceful uprooting of a third of its population into a mobile labour force
ruptured from the land. But as forcefully ejected farmers, they brought with them classical, traditional, peasant values: family, thrift, marriage, devoted provision for children and their education, and settlement. Had the invasion taken place at a different
stage of economic and social development, with fewer uniformities in world-views,
aspirations and values, the picture might have been very different. And there were some
costs. The understandable desire to present a united front against Turkey, the reluctance to delve too deeply into the 19701974 period, and a rough blindness by pragmatically minded bureaucrats to certain human sensitivities, manipulated the pains of
some of the states subjects, particularly the families and kinsmen and women of the
disappeared. But overall, Greek Cypriot society rebounded with a remarkable and
admirable resilience and self-confidence. And it is also possible to hypothesize that the
invasion may have strengthened the family as the only institution of certainty left (and
one which is undergoing some transformations, now that the immediate threat has
been removed and the island has modernized).
Iron in the Soul offers more history than Loizoss previous books. It is also much
more literary in style and has some wonderful touches. He traces how villages gradually
became unmixed, and the micro-history of incidents and interactions provides an
important corrective to grand-ethnic histories, as well as reinforcing the validity of
popular views which are so often ironically dismissed by grand theorists, international
politicians and planners. For example, he shows how, in 1964, the Argaki Turks were
dissuaded from leaving by some courageous Greek Cypriots, and how they were again
protected in 1974. Loizos is also keen, both as an ethnographer-author engaged in a
hypothetical dialogue with historians and as an individual who has much affection for
his villagers, to record things that did not happen (for example the protection of the
Turkish Cypriots by their Greek co-villagers), not because they did not just happen, but
rather because they did not happen due to human action and intervention. In short,
some things did not happen because ordinary people made strenuous efforts to ensure
thisand such non-events are likely to be glossed over by historians and politicians in

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History and Anthropology 515

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

History and Anthropology 517

milieu de memoire, a real environment of memory consisting of inherited, ongoing

social relationships linking people, things and places together across time. However,
memory is, as Nora notes:

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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

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History and Anthropology 519

change, which Loizos correctly identifies, could perhaps be further nuanced by

suggesting that there was an inability to imagine a new society, for whichfollowing
Anderson (1991), who has long reminded us of the immense work involved in such
projectswe can sympathize with. A plan is no substitute for imaginings, and does not
offer any. It is merely a framework. The Greek Cypriot idealist pro-Annanists voted
yes both because they were deeply disenchanted with national imaginings and
because they substituted it by the equally teleological seductions of a Eurocentric
cosmopolitanism, which the mass of Greek Cypriots considered a forbidden fruit.
I make these points to reinforce Loizoss concentration on the epiphanic significance of the opening of the border. The opening of the border and the subsequent
revelations and experiences moved the society from the Past-Present to the PresentPresent. From that point on, it was not so much the past that both groups had to come
to terms with (clearly with some difficulties, but transcendable), but the present and
the future and what they can make out of it. This may appear as either obvious or trite,
but for the last thirty to forty years, it has been the past that has dominated in Cyprus
and the direction has always been Present-Past (that is, looking at the present as an
aberrant and correctable deviation from the past; for example, Pernousame kala me tous
tourkous). Increasingly it is not the past that has to be transcended in Cyprus but the
presentand that is how it should be.
In conclusion, this is a classic showcase for the strengths of British socio-cultural
anthropology: well-constructed, clearly expressed (without the perhaps unnecessary
complexity expressed by this author of this review article), accessible to the reader,
written with great humanity, perceptive and acute. It is a model of writing and analysis,
and a rich contribution to Cypriot anthropology and anthropology generally.
PAUL SANT CASSIA
Department of Anthropology
University of Durham
References
Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities, Verso, London.
Auge, M. (1995), Non-Places, Verso, London.
Bataille, G. (1988), Essential Writings, ed. Michael Richardson, Sage, London.
Fernandez, J. (1986), Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture, University of
Indiana Press, Bloomington, IN.
Kosellek, R. (1985), Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA;
London.
Loizos, P. (1975), The Greek Gift. Politics in a Cypriot Village, Blackwell, Oxford.
Loizos, P. (1981), The Heart Grown Bitter. A Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Loizos, P. (2003), Grace in Exile, Moufflon Publications, Nicosia.
Nora, P. (1989), Between memory and history: les lieux de mmoire, Representations, Special Issue:
Memory and Counter-Memory, no. 26, pp. 724.