Rebecca Bryant
Biographic Data
| ID | 3692523 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rebecca Bryant |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rebecca |
| FAMILY NAME | Bryant |
| SIGNATURE | BRYANT R |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE United Kingdom |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2753-3881 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 252 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Infrastructural Imperialism
In places as far-flung as Addis Ababa and Astana, Dakar and Dushanbe, high-speed railways and shiny new city centers promise to boost economies and give residents a better life, as well as boost a nation's position in geopolitical hierarchies. However, it is often ambitious powers such as China, Russia, and Turkey that fund and build these new futures, employing infrastructural largesse to showcase their own generosity and greatness. This review …
Theresa (Tessa) Fitzgerald Corkill, 1935 to 2024
Continental Encampment
During the past decade, Syria’s displacement crisis has made the Middle East one of the world’s premier refugee-hosting regions. The measures to prevent refugees and migrants from leaving the region, and returning those who do, has made the region a zone of containment where millions remain displaced. The volume explores responses to mass migration and traces the genealogy of humanitarian containment from the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of t…
Post-Ottoman Coexistence
In Southeast Europe, the Balkans, and Middle East, scholars often refer to the "peaceful coexistence" of various religious and ethnic groups under the Ottoman Empire before ethnonationalist conflicts dissolved that shared space and created legacies of division. Post-Ottoman Coexistence interrogates ways of living together and asks what practices enabled centuries of cooperation and sharing, as well as how and when such sharing was disrupted. Cont…
Expectations of the Gift
People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange-giving, taking, and returning-with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconside…
The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty
Around the world, border walls and nationalisms are on the rise as people express the desire to “take back” sovereignty. This book uses ethnographic research in disputed and exceptional places to study sovereignty claims from the ground up. While it might immediately seem that citizens desire a stronger state, the cases of compromised, contested, or failed sovereignty in this volume point instead to political imaginations beyond the state form. E…
Introduction
Performing Peace
The Cyprus conflict is usually described as one between a majority Greek Cypriot and minority Turkish Cypriot population, with their opposing visions of the island’s future. In that conflict, more than 200,000 Cypriots from both these communities were displaced between 1958 and 1974. Lost in this standard narrative, however, are the conflict’s other ‘Others’: the smaller Maronite, Armenian, Latin, and Roma populations, who also experienced displa…
Everyday Lives of Sovereignty
Around the world today, border walls and nationalisms are on the rise as people express desires to "take back" sovereignty. This collection uses ethnographic research in disputed and exceptional places to study sovereignty claims from the ground up. While it might immediately seem that citizens desire a stronger state, the cases of compromised, contested, or failed sovereignty in this volume point instead to political imaginations beyond the stat…
Sovereignty Suspended
Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay develop the concept of the aporetic state to describe an entity that acts like a state even as nonrecognition renders it unrealizable. They argue that only by rethinking the de facto state as a realm of practice will we be able to understand the longevity of such states and what it means to live in them.
Sovereignty Suspended
The Anthropology of the Future
Study of the future is an important new field in anthropology. Building on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger to Schatzki, this book presents the concept of 'orientations' as a way to study everyday life. It analyses six main orientations - anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, hope, and destiny - which represent different ways in which the future may affect our present. While orientations entail pl…
Sovereignty
In political philosophy and in general use, “sovereignty” refers to supreme political authority within a territory. This meaning is limited to state sovereignty, a usage that emerged with the modern state. Anthropology, however, has historically taken a wider view of sovereignty, in line with the discipline's more expansive understanding of the political. In line with constructivist political theory that views sovereignty as an everyday performan…
Post-Ottoman Coexistence
Dance Floor Democracy
On Critical Times
This article posits that the vernacular understanding of crisis as existing in a different sort of time needs to be mined for what it tells us about social perceptions of temporality. Using three ethnographic examples from Cyprus, I ask here what temporal features we may identify that lead our interlocutors to see certain periods as “times of crisis”. In particular, I propose a notion that I call the uncanny present to refer to a particular sense…
Unrecognized States
History's remainders
In the aftermath of war, those who remain must rebuild lives in spaces that bear the scars of conflict. This essay focuses on one such space, the unrecognized state in north Cyprus, which has experienced waves of displacement, ethnic cleansing, and the appropriation and redistribution of "enemy" property. Families raise children in plundered spaces; grandchildren play in gardens replanted after war; houses are furnished with the remains of others…
Beyond walls and cages
Cyprus and the Politics of Memory
The island of Cyprus has been bitterly divided for more than four decades. One of the most divisive elements of the Cyprus conflict is the writing of its history, a history called on by both communities to justify and explain their own notions of justice. While for Greek Cypriots the history of Cyprus begins with ancient Greece, for the Turkish Cypriot community the history of the island begins with the Ottoman conquest of 1571. The singular narr…
Bordering
Anders Linde-Laursen, BORDERING: IDENTITY PROCESSES BETWEEN THE NATIONAL AND THE PERSONAL, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010, ix + 314 pp., £65.00 (hardback) Although the reader perusing the preface of this bo
Partitions of Memory
The image has become an iconic one: five young men in dirty uniforms kneel in the middle of a dusty plain with their hands behind their heads. They squint in the blinding midday sun, their faces expressing anxiety and a measure of fear. A Turkish soldier leans to talk to one of them, appearing calm, even friendly. To one side another Turkish soldier whose face we do not see stands guard. This photograph has become one of the most famous images to…
Guns and guitars
We present an ethnographic examination of the Agambenian approach to sovereignty through the example of a particular "state of exception," namely, the militarized Turkish Cypriot enclaves of the 1963-74 period and their transformation into an unrecognized state structure. We argue that both the enclave administration and its subsequent variations have operated under a simulacrum of sovereignty, a claim to sovereignty that is both overproduced and…
The Past in Pieces
By examining oral history collected during two years of fieldwork, anthropologist Rebecca Bryant investigates why the 2003 opening of the ceasefire line dividing Cyprus has not led the country any closer to reunification, and how in many ways it has driven the two communities of the island farther apart
Betrayals of the past
The old woman insisted on going home, Birol tells me. We were all afraid, but she wanted to go home. Her sons were in the mountains fighting, and she came to the village alone. And of course the Gr
On Critical Times
This article posits that the vernacular understanding of crisis as existing in a different sort of time needs to be mined for what it tells us about social perceptions of temporality. Using three ethnographic examples from Cyprus, I ask here what temporal features we may identify that lead our interlocutors to see certain periods as “times of crisis”. In particular, I propose a notion that I call the uncanny present to refer to a particular sense…
History's remainders
In the aftermath of war, those who remain must rebuild lives in spaces that bear the scars of conflict. This essay focuses on one such space, the unrecognized state in north Cyprus, which has experienced waves of displacement, ethnic cleansing, and the appropriation and redistribution of "enemy" property. Families raise children in plundered spaces; grandchildren play in gardens replanted after war; houses are furnished with the remains of others…
The soul danced into the body
In this article, I examine the politics and practices of apprenticeship in the "traditions" of Turkish folk music through playing the bag ̆lama, or saz. The saz has become iconically representative of a folk music collected and preserved in the era of nationalism, and I examine the meaning of such a self-conscious and reflexive tradition's claims to traditionality. I outline the ways in which that tradition is acquired as an aesthetics of self, r…
The Purity of Spirit and the Power of Blood
This article argues that the kinship relations of the national 'family' are not simply a direct appropriation of 'natural' kinship relations but involve a transformation of those relations that also takes into account some gendered image of the land as a member of that family. Using comparative research in the Turkish and Greek communities of Cyprus, I propose that what is centrally important in images of national kinship is the common substance …
Partitions of Memory
The image has become an iconic one: five young men in dirty uniforms kneel in the middle of a dusty plain with their hands behind their heads. They squint in the blinding midday sun, their faces expressing anxiety and a measure of fear. A Turkish soldier leans to talk to one of them, appearing calm, even friendly. To one side another Turkish soldier whose face we do not see stands guard. This photograph has become one of the most famous images to…
Guns and guitars
We present an ethnographic examination of the Agambenian approach to sovereignty through the example of a particular "state of exception," namely, the militarized Turkish Cypriot enclaves of the 1963-74 period and their transformation into an unrecognized state structure. We argue that both the enclave administration and its subsequent variations have operated under a simulacrum of sovereignty, a claim to sovereignty that is both overproduced and…
Justice or respect? A comparative perspective on politics in Cyprus
This article argues that the anonymity of modern politics - usually seen as a requirement for good democracy - may in fact undermine cooperative politics in small-scale societies. For very many people in the world, this essay argues, it is not the pre-social, monadic individual of Western liberalism but an immanently social person who is or should be the possessor of the rights, responsibilities and freedoms of the polity. As a result, the princi…
Post-Ottoman Coexistence
In Southeast Europe, the Balkans, and Middle East, scholars often refer to the "peaceful coexistence" of various religious and ethnic groups under the Ottoman Empire before ethnonationalist conflicts dissolved that shared space and created legacies of division. Post-Ottoman Coexistence interrogates ways of living together and asks what practices enabled centuries of cooperation and sharing, as well as how and when such sharing was disrupted. Cont…
Bandits and “Bad Characters”
In the handbook for Cypriot police officers published in 1896 by the island's British colonial administration, there is a passage that appears at first innocuous but that had important resonances for the development of legal and political statuses in Cyprus of the period. Under the section “Police Duties” and the subheading “Constables,” the handbook notes that “[c]onstables are expected to possess such knowledge of the inhabitants of their Distr…
Beyond walls and cages
Personal States
Personal States: Making Connections between People and Bureaucracy in Turkey Catherine Alexander (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002
Continental Encampment
During the past decade, Syria’s displacement crisis has made the Middle East one of the world’s premier refugee-hosting regions. The measures to prevent refugees and migrants from leaving the region, and returning those who do, has made the region a zone of containment where millions remain displaced. The volume explores responses to mass migration and traces the genealogy of humanitarian containment from the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of t…
Performing Peace
The Cyprus conflict is usually described as one between a majority Greek Cypriot and minority Turkish Cypriot population, with their opposing visions of the island’s future. In that conflict, more than 200,000 Cypriots from both these communities were displaced between 1958 and 1974. Lost in this standard narrative, however, are the conflict’s other ‘Others’: the smaller Maronite, Armenian, Latin, and Roma populations, who also experienced displa…
Expectations of the Gift
People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange-giving, taking, and returning-with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconside…
Bordering
Anders Linde-Laursen, BORDERING: IDENTITY PROCESSES BETWEEN THE NATIONAL AND THE PERSONAL, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010, ix + 314 pp., £65.00 (hardback) Although the reader perusing the preface of this bo
Implicit Religion and Inter-faith Dialogue
.
Pashas and Protests
This article takes the case of Derviş Paşa, an important Cypriot notable, as a starting point for examining controversies about knowledge in the late Ottoman Empire. In particular, the article argues that much of the controversy in Cyprus around Derviş centered around the role of the 'enlightened'-individual, who was the representative of 'truth' or orthodoxy, and who was able to make truth claims on the basis of his behavior or comportment. This…
Justice or respect? A comparative perspective on politics in Cyprus
This article argues that the anonymity of modern politics - usually seen as a requirement for good democracy - may in fact undermine cooperative politics in small-scale societies. For very many people in the world, this essay argues, it is not the pre-social, monadic individual of Western liberalism but an immanently social person who is or should be the possessor of the rights, responsibilities and freedoms of the polity. As a result, the princi…
Shaking Things Up
Dancing was one of most popular American pastimes during 1910s and 1920s, and a multitude of new social dances developed, especially during 1910s. One of most talked-about dances of time was the shimmy. Developed from African American roots, shimmy was not really a dance in sense of having specific steps. Instead, it was defined by a rapid horizontal shaking of upper body, especially shoulders. Movements sometimes also included shaking of torso a…
The Purity of Spirit and the Power of Blood
This article argues that the kinship relations of the national 'family' are not simply a direct appropriation of 'natural' kinship relations but involve a transformation of those relations that also takes into account some gendered image of the land as a member of that family. Using comparative research in the Turkish and Greek communities of Cyprus, I propose that what is centrally important in images of national kinship is the common substance …
Bandits and “Bad Characters”
In the handbook for Cypriot police officers published in 1896 by the island's British colonial administration, there is a passage that appears at first innocuous but that had important resonances for the development of legal and political statuses in Cyprus of the period. Under the section “Police Duties” and the subheading “Constables,” the handbook notes that “[c]onstables are expected to possess such knowledge of the inhabitants of their Distr…
Imagining the Modern
This book argues that two conflicting styles of nationalist imagination led to the violent rending of Cyprus in 1974 and sustained that division over decades. Based on research in both southern and northern Cyprus, the work demonstrates how the conflict emerged through the Cypriot's encounters with modernity under British colonialism, and through a consequent re-imagining of the body politic in a new world in which Cypriots were defined as part o…
Personal States
Personal States: Making Connections between People and Bureaucracy in Turkey Catherine Alexander (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002
A Dangerous Trend in Cyprus
I n late April 200oo4, voters in Cyprus went to the polls to pass judgment on a plan offered by the United Nations that held out the hope of ending over 30 years of conflict. The plan, bearing the name of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, would have reunified the island that has been divided since 1974, when a Greek-sponsored coup aimed at uniting the island with Greece provoked Turkish military intervention. The breakaway Turkish administration decl…
The soul danced into the body
In this article, I examine the politics and practices of apprenticeship in the "traditions" of Turkish folk music through playing the bag ̆lama, or saz. The saz has become iconically representative of a folk music collected and preserved in the era of nationalism, and I examine the meaning of such a self-conscious and reflexive tradition's claims to traditionality. I outline the ways in which that tradition is acquired as an aesthetics of self, r…
Betrayals of the past
The old woman insisted on going home, Birol tells me. We were all afraid, but she wanted to go home. Her sons were in the mountains fighting, and she came to the village alone. And of course the Gr
The Past in Pieces
By examining oral history collected during two years of fieldwork, anthropologist Rebecca Bryant investigates why the 2003 opening of the ceasefire line dividing Cyprus has not led the country any closer to reunification, and how in many ways it has driven the two communities of the island farther apart
Guns and guitars
We present an ethnographic examination of the Agambenian approach to sovereignty through the example of a particular "state of exception," namely, the militarized Turkish Cypriot enclaves of the 1963-74 period and their transformation into an unrecognized state structure. We argue that both the enclave administration and its subsequent variations have operated under a simulacrum of sovereignty, a claim to sovereignty that is both overproduced and…
Cyprus and the Politics of Memory
The island of Cyprus has been bitterly divided for more than four decades. One of the most divisive elements of the Cyprus conflict is the writing of its history, a history called on by both communities to justify and explain their own notions of justice. While for Greek Cypriots the history of Cyprus begins with ancient Greece, for the Turkish Cypriot community the history of the island begins with the Ottoman conquest of 1571. The singular narr…
Bordering
Anders Linde-Laursen, BORDERING: IDENTITY PROCESSES BETWEEN THE NATIONAL AND THE PERSONAL, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010, ix + 314 pp., £65.00 (hardback) Although the reader perusing the preface of this bo
Partitions of Memory
The image has become an iconic one: five young men in dirty uniforms kneel in the middle of a dusty plain with their hands behind their heads. They squint in the blinding midday sun, their faces expressing anxiety and a measure of fear. A Turkish soldier leans to talk to one of them, appearing calm, even friendly. To one side another Turkish soldier whose face we do not see stands guard. This photograph has become one of the most famous images to…
Unrecognized States
History's remainders
In the aftermath of war, those who remain must rebuild lives in spaces that bear the scars of conflict. This essay focuses on one such space, the unrecognized state in north Cyprus, which has experienced waves of displacement, ethnic cleansing, and the appropriation and redistribution of "enemy" property. Families raise children in plundered spaces; grandchildren play in gardens replanted after war; houses are furnished with the remains of others…
Beyond walls and cages
Post-Ottoman Coexistence
Dance Floor Democracy
On Critical Times
This article posits that the vernacular understanding of crisis as existing in a different sort of time needs to be mined for what it tells us about social perceptions of temporality. Using three ethnographic examples from Cyprus, I ask here what temporal features we may identify that lead our interlocutors to see certain periods as “times of crisis”. In particular, I propose a notion that I call the uncanny present to refer to a particular sense…
Sovereignty
In political philosophy and in general use, “sovereignty” refers to supreme political authority within a territory. This meaning is limited to state sovereignty, a usage that emerged with the modern state. Anthropology, however, has historically taken a wider view of sovereignty, in line with the discipline's more expansive understanding of the political. In line with constructivist political theory that views sovereignty as an everyday performan…
The Anthropology of the Future
Study of the future is an important new field in anthropology. Building on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger to Schatzki, this book presents the concept of 'orientations' as a way to study everyday life. It analyses six main orientations - anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, hope, and destiny - which represent different ways in which the future may affect our present. While orientations entail pl…
Sovereignty Suspended
Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay develop the concept of the aporetic state to describe an entity that acts like a state even as nonrecognition renders it unrealizable. They argue that only by rethinking the de facto state as a realm of practice will we be able to understand the longevity of such states and what it means to live in them.
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (21 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · History (14 works) · Art (13 works) · Cyprus History, Politics, Society (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Geography (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works)