T Kyriakides
Biographic Data
| ID | 36605 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T Kyriakides |
| GIVEN NAMES | T |
| FAMILY NAME | Kyriakides |
| SIGNATURE | KYRIAKIDES T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8862-5096 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Flood narratives, emotional plateaus and the in-betweenness of disaster in Cyprus
Purpose This paper explores the intersection of governmental disaster management practices and the lived experiences of flood-affected communities in the Republic of Cyprus, with an analytic emphasis on emotions and narratives tied to incidents, memories and expectations of disaster. It examines how these emotional states and narratives acquire a political afterlife, shaping interactions between citizens and the Cypriot state. Design/methodology/…
Daimons in and of the Anthropocene: From the Greeks to Latour and Back
This article puts archaic Greek perceptions of nature in dialogue with Bruno Latour's work on Gaia. I begin by summarizing Greek narratives of the archaic period that highlighted nature as a vital, wild, and daimonic terrain that existed outside but also penetrated and sustained Greek society and subjectivity. My central argument is that this daimonic realm of nature historically shaped modern understandings of society and culture, and is becomin…
Evil, Cosmological Capture, and Magical Disorder in Cyprus
The magical idiom of evil occupies an important position in numerous Christian societies. Cosmological capture refers to a historicized process through which Christian narratives and institutions attempt to integrate evil into dualist and oppositional cosmological schemas. This article begins by addressing the way that biblical stories of defeated magicians contribute to modern dynamics of cosmological capture. It then proceeds to address the rol…
Epidemic Strangeness and the Need for Myth in the Anthropocene
In this essay I attempt to draw some crucial theoretical parallelisms between ancient Greek cosmology and the Anthropocene. Taking inspiration from Marcel Detienne and Timothy Morton’s work, I deploy the figure of Dionysos as a conceptual persona which can help us think of strangeness as a non-human mode of relationality Anthropocene societies must urgently engage with. Events such as the ongoing Covid-19 epidemic, through which non-humans are br…
Not-Knowing Magic: Magical Memory and Ineffability in Contemporary Cyprus and Orkney
Our research explores the modern status of magic in two different European island settings: Cyprus and Orkney. By historically and ethnographically addressing the gradual dissolution of magical traditions in our respective fieldsites, our aim is to explore the means and instances by which magic continues to manifest in narratives and everyday practices. By exploring the current epistemological and social standing attributed to magic in Cyprus and…
The Formation of the Cypriot Thalassaemia Prevention System: The 'Slow' Assembly and Construction of a Problem (1944-1984)
Thalassaemia is one of the most widespread recessive blood disorders in the world. This article focuses the historical trajectory by which the Cypriot thalassaemia prevention system, one of the most successful of its kind, achieved full prevention rate. By tracing the history of decision-making of medical practitioners central to the construction of the prevention system, my objective is to further elucidate underlying logics of policy-making and…
Just Out of Reach: An Ethnographic Theory of Magic and Rationalisation
Perceived in their ideal forms, rationalisation and magic might seem to oppose one another. In this paper, however, rather than placing these forces in sterile opposition, we instead explore the social and relational dynamics through which rationalisation-the dominant epistemological force of modernity-in certain cases provides the conditions of doubt, opacity, and unknowability that makes magical thinking manifest in the everyday mundane. We exp…
Tactics as ethnographic and conceptual objects: Introduction to special section
This special section proposes that an ethnographic and conceptual emphasis on tactics can contribute to anthropological understandings of thinking, acting and being in the world. Although they can be perceived as intrinsic tenets of human sociality and subjectivity, tactical thinking and doing are becoming important parts of socio‐political landscapes around the world. Approaching the notion of tactics ethnographically demands highlighting how an…
Tactics of association
This essay puts Michel de Certeau's work on tactics in conversation with the work of F. G. Bailey on tactical subjects and Roy Wagner's work on alliance. In doing so, my objective is to introduce the notion of the association as an essential aspect of a contemporary anthropological theory of tactics. I approach the notion of association from three angles: as an ethnographic object and political entity, as an anthropological analytical tool and as…
Directing the Future of Gene Therapy in Cyprus: Breakthroughs, Subjunctivities, and the Pragmatics of Narrative
Gene therapy is a technology that involves the introduction of therapeutic genes into humans for the replacement of mutations causing disorders. This article stems from research conducted with a thalassemia patients' association in Cyprus and explores how political and epistemic uncertainty surrounding the promise of breakthrough in gene therapy is harnessed to particular objectives and narratives for the future. Anthropologists who survey the fu…
Introduction: Anthropology and the Politics of Engagement
Tactics as Empirical and Conceptual Objects: Patient Activism and the Politics of Thalassaemia in Cyprus
This article explores tactics as political technologies in the context of health and patient activism. It does so by exploring how the PanCyprian Thalassaemia Association––a thalassaemia patients association situated in Cyprus––opposed a medical rationing scheme imposed by the Cypriot government and managed to overturn the decision. I make the case that “tactics,” for patient associations, are practices capable of rendering the political problema…
Jeanne Favret-Saada's Minimal Ontology: Belief and Disbelief of Mystical Forces, Perilous Conditions, and the Opacity of Being
This article explores mystical belief and disbelief in Jeanne Favret-Saada's ethnography of Bocage witchcraft in relation to the ontological turn in anthropology. The ethnographic archive provides numerous examples in which natives display seemingly contradictory practices of belief and disbelief when it comes to mystical forces. A common way by which anthropologists deal with such contradictions is to attempt to explicate their social function a…
Stillness as a Form of Imaginative Labour
This essay connects the practice of stillness to David Graeber's concepts of imaginative labour and immanent imagination. It makes the proposition that stillness should not be evaluated as lack of activity or movement, but rather attended to in its pragmatic and productive dimensions. The essay thus explores stillness as a potential mode of production of imagination and means of political transformation: in order for it to be meaningful, we need …
Nondualism is philosophy, not ethnography: A review of the 2011 GDAT debate
The motion for the 2011 Group Debate in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) which took place at the University of Manchester (on November 12, 2011) was "Nondualism is philosophy, not ethnography." Nondualism as a philosophical term entails continuity between body and mind, rather than a separation thereof. Such an ontological claim is increasingly gaining momentum in ethnographic thought and practice. This blooming relation between ethnography and nond…
Directing the Future of Gene Therapy in Cyprus: Breakthroughs, Subjunctivities, and the Pragmatics of Narrative
Gene therapy is a technology that involves the introduction of therapeutic genes into humans for the replacement of mutations causing disorders. This article stems from research conducted with a thalassemia patients' association in Cyprus and explores how political and epistemic uncertainty surrounding the promise of breakthrough in gene therapy is harnessed to particular objectives and narratives for the future. Anthropologists who survey the fu…
Just Out of Reach: An Ethnographic Theory of Magic and Rationalisation
Perceived in their ideal forms, rationalisation and magic might seem to oppose one another. In this paper, however, rather than placing these forces in sterile opposition, we instead explore the social and relational dynamics through which rationalisation-the dominant epistemological force of modernity-in certain cases provides the conditions of doubt, opacity, and unknowability that makes magical thinking manifest in the everyday mundane. We exp…
Jeanne Favret-Saada's Minimal Ontology: Belief and Disbelief of Mystical Forces, Perilous Conditions, and the Opacity of Being
This article explores mystical belief and disbelief in Jeanne Favret-Saada's ethnography of Bocage witchcraft in relation to the ontological turn in anthropology. The ethnographic archive provides numerous examples in which natives display seemingly contradictory practices of belief and disbelief when it comes to mystical forces. A common way by which anthropologists deal with such contradictions is to attempt to explicate their social function a…
Not-Knowing Magic: Magical Memory and Ineffability in Contemporary Cyprus and Orkney
Our research explores the modern status of magic in two different European island settings: Cyprus and Orkney. By historically and ethnographically addressing the gradual dissolution of magical traditions in our respective fieldsites, our aim is to explore the means and instances by which magic continues to manifest in narratives and everyday practices. By exploring the current epistemological and social standing attributed to magic in Cyprus and…
Introduction: Anthropology and the Politics of Engagement
Nondualism is philosophy, not ethnography: A review of the 2011 GDAT debate
The motion for the 2011 Group Debate in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) which took place at the University of Manchester (on November 12, 2011) was "Nondualism is philosophy, not ethnography." Nondualism as a philosophical term entails continuity between body and mind, rather than a separation thereof. Such an ontological claim is increasingly gaining momentum in ethnographic thought and practice. This blooming relation between ethnography and nond…
Stillness as a Form of Imaginative Labour
This essay connects the practice of stillness to David Graeber's concepts of imaginative labour and immanent imagination. It makes the proposition that stillness should not be evaluated as lack of activity or movement, but rather attended to in its pragmatic and productive dimensions. The essay thus explores stillness as a potential mode of production of imagination and means of political transformation: in order for it to be meaningful, we need …
Tactics as Empirical and Conceptual Objects: Patient Activism and the Politics of Thalassaemia in Cyprus
This article explores tactics as political technologies in the context of health and patient activism. It does so by exploring how the PanCyprian Thalassaemia Association––a thalassaemia patients association situated in Cyprus––opposed a medical rationing scheme imposed by the Cypriot government and managed to overturn the decision. I make the case that “tactics,” for patient associations, are practices capable of rendering the political problema…
Jeanne Favret-Saada's Minimal Ontology: Belief and Disbelief of Mystical Forces, Perilous Conditions, and the Opacity of Being
This article explores mystical belief and disbelief in Jeanne Favret-Saada's ethnography of Bocage witchcraft in relation to the ontological turn in anthropology. The ethnographic archive provides numerous examples in which natives display seemingly contradictory practices of belief and disbelief when it comes to mystical forces. A common way by which anthropologists deal with such contradictions is to attempt to explicate their social function a…
Introduction: Anthropology and the Politics of Engagement
Tactics as ethnographic and conceptual objects: Introduction to special section
This special section proposes that an ethnographic and conceptual emphasis on tactics can contribute to anthropological understandings of thinking, acting and being in the world. Although they can be perceived as intrinsic tenets of human sociality and subjectivity, tactical thinking and doing are becoming important parts of socio‐political landscapes around the world. Approaching the notion of tactics ethnographically demands highlighting how an…
Tactics of association
This essay puts Michel de Certeau's work on tactics in conversation with the work of F. G. Bailey on tactical subjects and Roy Wagner's work on alliance. In doing so, my objective is to introduce the notion of the association as an essential aspect of a contemporary anthropological theory of tactics. I approach the notion of association from three angles: as an ethnographic object and political entity, as an anthropological analytical tool and as…
Directing the Future of Gene Therapy in Cyprus: Breakthroughs, Subjunctivities, and the Pragmatics of Narrative
Gene therapy is a technology that involves the introduction of therapeutic genes into humans for the replacement of mutations causing disorders. This article stems from research conducted with a thalassemia patients' association in Cyprus and explores how political and epistemic uncertainty surrounding the promise of breakthrough in gene therapy is harnessed to particular objectives and narratives for the future. Anthropologists who survey the fu…
Just Out of Reach: An Ethnographic Theory of Magic and Rationalisation
Perceived in their ideal forms, rationalisation and magic might seem to oppose one another. In this paper, however, rather than placing these forces in sterile opposition, we instead explore the social and relational dynamics through which rationalisation-the dominant epistemological force of modernity-in certain cases provides the conditions of doubt, opacity, and unknowability that makes magical thinking manifest in the everyday mundane. We exp…
The Formation of the Cypriot Thalassaemia Prevention System: The 'Slow' Assembly and Construction of a Problem (1944-1984)
Thalassaemia is one of the most widespread recessive blood disorders in the world. This article focuses the historical trajectory by which the Cypriot thalassaemia prevention system, one of the most successful of its kind, achieved full prevention rate. By tracing the history of decision-making of medical practitioners central to the construction of the prevention system, my objective is to further elucidate underlying logics of policy-making and…
Not-Knowing Magic: Magical Memory and Ineffability in Contemporary Cyprus and Orkney
Our research explores the modern status of magic in two different European island settings: Cyprus and Orkney. By historically and ethnographically addressing the gradual dissolution of magical traditions in our respective fieldsites, our aim is to explore the means and instances by which magic continues to manifest in narratives and everyday practices. By exploring the current epistemological and social standing attributed to magic in Cyprus and…
Epidemic Strangeness and the Need for Myth in the Anthropocene
In this essay I attempt to draw some crucial theoretical parallelisms between ancient Greek cosmology and the Anthropocene. Taking inspiration from Marcel Detienne and Timothy Morton’s work, I deploy the figure of Dionysos as a conceptual persona which can help us think of strangeness as a non-human mode of relationality Anthropocene societies must urgently engage with. Events such as the ongoing Covid-19 epidemic, through which non-humans are br…
Evil, Cosmological Capture, and Magical Disorder in Cyprus
The magical idiom of evil occupies an important position in numerous Christian societies. Cosmological capture refers to a historicized process through which Christian narratives and institutions attempt to integrate evil into dualist and oppositional cosmological schemas. This article begins by addressing the way that biblical stories of defeated magicians contribute to modern dynamics of cosmological capture. It then proceeds to address the rol…
Daimons in and of the Anthropocene: From the Greeks to Latour and Back
This article puts archaic Greek perceptions of nature in dialogue with Bruno Latour's work on Gaia. I begin by summarizing Greek narratives of the archaic period that highlighted nature as a vital, wild, and daimonic terrain that existed outside but also penetrated and sustained Greek society and subjectivity. My central argument is that this daimonic realm of nature historically shaped modern understandings of society and culture, and is becomin…
Flood narratives, emotional plateaus and the in-betweenness of disaster in Cyprus
Purpose This paper explores the intersection of governmental disaster management practices and the lived experiences of flood-affected communities in the Republic of Cyprus, with an analytic emphasis on emotions and narratives tied to incidents, memories and expectations of disaster. It examines how these emotional states and narratives acquire a political afterlife, shaping interactions between citizens and the Cypriot state. Design/methodology/…
Sociology (13 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Anthropology (7 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Law (6 works)