Paul Sant Cassia. Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus.

Paul Sant Cassia. Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus. (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005) ISBN 1571816461. 246 pp. Hardcover. US $67,50.

Paul Sant Cassia's new study of the discourses surrounding "missing persons" in Cyprus is one of the most valuable contributions of the last decade to the literature on the Cyprus problem; and, given the current state of affairs on the island, timely. Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005; 246 pages), is a self-conscious analysis of the ideological formations underlying the language used by the various players in the drama of Cyprus, specifically in scenes depicting the "dead" and the "missing." This language includes the personal expressions of relatives of the absent, official statements and propaganda, photographs, monuments, and examples of popular art. There has long been a need for a sustained analysis and deconstruction of the ways in which the various aspects of this seemingly endless conflict have been represented in the popular imagination, everyday conversation, visual images and officialese, and Sant Cassia's work represents a major step towards responding to this need.

This is a scholarly, anthropologically-oriented book, but written in a refreshingly clear style which is accessible to the educated general reader; it is also broadly interdisciplinary in its approach, and makes use of a wide range of theoretical frames, from literary criticism, semiotics and deconstruction (Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, Kristeva, Sontag) to historioraphy (de Certeau, LaCapra), to studies of ritual and mourning (Girard, Gorer), to psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan). Sant Cassia's explanation of these frames is lucid and quite jargon-free; only on one or two rare occasions do they result in opaque passages. There is no doubt that if Bodies of Evidence is read (hopefully it will appear in Greek and Turkish translation to reach a wider audience) and understood by the principal actors in this drama and the general public, it will achieve considerably more than its author's stated aim of contributing "in a small and modest way [towards] assist[ing] the relatives on both sides [of the island] to claim what is fundamentally theirs, and oblige the new nation state builders to pay renewed and responsible attention to the concerns of all their subjects, free from the corrosive virulence of nationalism" (p. x).

The book is divided into nine chapters, each of which seems to have been written almost as a discrete essay and can therefore be read out of sequence. This makes for some repetition both between and within chapters as Sant Cassia provides contextual background for a complex network of interwoven theses; however, the repetition is not reductive, serving to remind the reader constantly of the larger implications of each argument.

The first chapter, "Heirs of Antigone"--the themes of which are taken up again in the final chapters, "[8] Antigone's Doubt, Creon's Dilemma" and "[9] Power, Complicity, and Public Secrecy"--sets the stage and introduces, in a literary context, some of the terminology that Sant Cassia will use to analyze the ambivalent ways in which the cultural and kinship relations between individuals in Cyprus are manipulated by or come into conflict with the official agendas of state authorities and political representatives. Although this chapter may prove frustrating to an impatient reader wondering what a discussion of a classical Greek tragedy (Sophocles' Antigone) and the interpretations it has generated have to do with the realities of Cyprus, it serves to lay the groundwork for Sant Cassia's theses at the intersections of literary and anthropological study: "A ... reason for the plurality of Antigones is that literature (as theme, as predicament, and as symbol of ethnic identity) lives in people" (p. 5). The argument also works in reverse: "The people and societies we study nowadays exist in our time not 'other time'..., and they operate in a literate and historic environment" (Ibid.).

This seemingly paradoxical contention--that literature lives in us and that we live in literature--is the foundation of the analyses that will follow; for what Sant Cassia is indicating here is the inseparability of cultural formations, whether interiorized in the mind or experienced as external circumstances, from language and discursive constructs. His study of the cultural logic surrounding "the missing" is thus a study of the discourses of memory and memorialization that continue to circumscribe absences and foreground them--for psychological reasons (from the perspective of relatives of the missing) or political reasons (from the perspective of state or government authorities)--as presences.

In the following chapters, Sant Cassia describes and performs some brilliant, detailed analyses of discursive representations of those counted as "dead," "abducted," "held hostage," 'refugees," "missing" or "enclaved," based on testimonies and photographs from relatives or eyewitnesses, and the official statements and propaganda photographs of both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot authorities. In this context a caveat is in order: the research and writing for Bodies of Evidence appear to have been completed three years ago, before border crossings were opened to allow relatively free movement between the north and the south of the island. Thus the appended "Selective Chronology of Modern Cypriot History" ends in 2002, which is also the publication date of the most recent source listed in the bibliography; the acknowledgments are dated "Summer 2003"; and the author informs us that he "conducted fieldwork on both sides of the 'Green Line,' but for practical reasons concentrated more on the Greek Cypriot missing" (p. x). As a result, Sant Cassia's analyses of the "missing" and related categories among the Turkish Cypriots are relatively limited in depth and scope--the chapter on the therapeutic value of popular art ("[7] Painting Absences, Describing Losses"), and the case study taken up in "[8] Antigone's Doubt, Creon's Dilemma," for example, deal almost entirely with Greek Cypriot representations.

That said, these limitations do not detract from the value of the book, as Sant Cassia does not take a stand as an apologist for either the Greek Cypriots or the Turkish Cypriots; Bodies of Evidence is a keen and balanced account of the dynamics of power as it is played out ultimately in the relation between the individual and the state(s) in Cyprus, and the analyses of this relation in the Greek Cypriot context are frequently counterpointed with incisive and suggestive insights into the alternative dynamics of the Turkish Cypriot context.

From the three central chapters in particular ("[4] The Missing as a Set of Representations"; "[5] The Martyrdom of the Missing"; and "[6] L'image juste, or juste une image?"), what emerges is a sensitive understanding of how the cultural forces of religion and deeply felt relations of kinship have shaped the psychological states and behavior patterns of relatives of the missing, and an extremely well researched and convincing series of arguments as to how state authorities have manipulated and exploited these individuals' experiences of trauma and intervened in the process of mourning to further their political agendas in their respective populations, so that "the Greek Cypriot missing have become metaphors or signifiers for the recapture of a past and a lost territory. [and] being neither legally dead nor experientially alive they share certain characteristics with saints or even with Christ" while "Turkish Cypriot missing persons are signifiers for a future for which they sacrificed their lives. [and] are therefore associated with the spilling of blood for land and security" (94).

The implications of Sant Cassia's elaborate analyses--to which a brief quotation such as this does not do justice--thus reach well beyond the question of missing persons in Cyprus. Bodies of Evidence provides valuable insight into the cultural and political ideologies underlying the emotionally charged conversations and political-legal discussions concerning the return of refugees to their homes, compensation for appropriated land, the restoration of monuments, the language of place-names, and the rewriting of history textbooks, that are currently taking place on either side of and across the border in Cyprus as well as in European fora. Sant Cassia's account of the Kafkaesque relations between the individual and the state in Cyprus may also be taken as a micro-allegory of the ongoing quest of the parties in conflict in Cyprus for legal or political recognition of their rights within the context of the European Union. This should be required reading, not only for academics, but for diplomats, government officials, the general public, and anyone concerned with understanding the current complexities of Cyprus.

Johann Pillai

Eastern Mediterranean University