Book reviews

Sant Cassia’s book is the most comprehensive and analytically sophisticated study of a topic that has occupied center stage in the Greek Cypriot popular imagination since the 1974 Turkish invasion of the island, namely, the issue of the missing persons. The research community’s relative silence regarding the issue of missing persons in Cyprus attests perhaps to Sant Cassia’s observation that for many years, and until recently, the topic itself was too sensitive to allow for an open and in-depth investigation. In this book Sant Cassia is concerned with exploring memory and, more precisely, with the political economy of memory, by which he means how memories are produced and consumed, distributed, and exchanged (p. 2). The author uses metaphors from Greek tragedy, primarily the characters of Antigone and Creon, to discuss, on the one hand, the respective roles of the relatives of the missing (both Greek and Turkish Cypriot) and, on the other hand, the political authorities or the State. Sant Cassia’s argument is that Creon, by claiming to speak on behalf of his Antigone, managed to maintain his rule by fabricating stories that served his own respective political agendas. For the Republic of Cyprus this has meant the fabrication of the story of the missing persons, the agnooumeni, who are missing and potentially recoverable; for the Turkish Cypriot authorities, it has meant that the disappeared ones, the kayipler, were constructed not as missing but as sacrificial victims, as dead or lost and hence beyond recovery. In this way both communities have advanced their political ideologies and strategies: for the Greek Cypriots, the recovery of the lost territories, and for Turkish Cypriots, the clear message to the rest of the world is that Greek and Turkish Cypriots cannot live together and that the establishment of their own state, the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus,” is therefore justified. Sant Cassia is at his best when he draws upon art and ethnography to illustrate the utility of explicating one through the other. Rather than becoming reductionist, the use of art to interpret the ethnographic evidence becomes empowering and revealing of the underlying significance of the reconstructed past; though it is pieced together from the individual stories of those involved, the narrative of the missing is always larger and requires creative imagination on the part of the ethnographer, much like that of the artist.