The Ecology of Coexistence and Conflict in Cyprus

Exploring the Religion, Nature, and Culture of a Mediterranean Island

Irene Dietzel

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781501500138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism

What is the significance of sustainable resource management for the functioning of Mediterranean island societies? How do human-environment relations reflect in a multi-ethnic religious landscape? This book poses these questions in the context of the Ottoman, British, and modern history of Cyprus. It explores the socio-ecological dimension of the Cyprus conflict and considers the role of local environmental practices for historical coexistence and modern division. The book synthesizes theoretical approaches from the research on 'religion and ecology' with the anthropology of Cyprus, with the goal to develop and establish an ecological perspective on coexistence and conflict in the Mediterranean. Religion is seen as the place where local representations of nature and traditions of resource management are generated and maintained. The work takes a comparative look at the impact of Eastern Orthodox and Islamic institutions on the island's landscape, as well as the religious and economic practices of the rural peasant communities. The findings are then spelled out in the context of current discourses on religion, environmental ethics, and social justice.

1. Introduction

“Meaning is a decisive factor in nature; it appears always, often in novel and surprising guises.”

(Jakob v. Uexküll [1940] 1982, 77)

“There can be no radical break between social and ecological relations; rather, the former constitute a subset of the latter.”

(Tim Ingold 1996b, 150)

Cypriot history is paradigmatic for South-Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean in more ways than one. Cyprus displays the typical ethno-religious plurality of the region: its cultural landscape bears testimony to the island’s Byzantine (330 – 1191), Latin (1191– 1571), and Ottoman (1571– 1878) periods. Contrary to the common image of Cypriot society as bi-communal, the Cypriot religious landscape is distinctly plural. Next to a majority of Orthodox Christians,¹ and a minority of Turkish speaking Muslims,² there are also Latin, Maronite and Armenian communities,³ whose presence on the island dates back to Medieval times. In pre-modern Cyprus, the side-by-side of religious and linguistic communities within the urban and rural localities of Cyprus was markedly unproblematic. Three centuries of Ottoman rule on the island show that religious and linguistic differences posed neither an obstacle to communication, nor a hindrance to cohabitation (Kyrris 1977; Jennings 1999; 1993; Michael, Kappler and Gavriel 2009; Aymes 2005; et al.). While researchers have emphasized a diversity of reasons that enabled the coexistence of religious communities, they overall acknowledge peaceful coexistence to have been the norm, rather than exception.

Alas, Cyprus has not been spared of the tragic history of nationalization typical for the post-Ottoman societies of Europe’s South-East. During the second half of the 20^th century, the island experienced phases of anti-colonial struggle, postcolonial instability and the divisive effects of antithetical nationalisms that have lead to internal violence both, between and within the two major ethnic groups of Greek and Turkish Cypriots. The summer of 1974 brought a Greek military coup that triggered a Turkish military occupation of the island’s North. The subsequent division of the island into a Greek South and a Turkish North resulted in the displacement of large parts of the population. Today, the ongoing state of division has added further facets to the Cyprus issue, such as pending demands for repatriation and property restitution, difficulties at preserving the cultural heritage beyond the border, and the still unresolved fate of the missing persons, the unaccounted casualties of civil war. The much more subtle, yet equally tragic consequences of the conflict are psychological: the experience of division and displacement, of uprooting and resettlement have lastingly disturbed the sense of place of those affected.

It may be gratuitous to claim that the history of coexistence and conflict in Cyprus concerns matters of social nature, complete with their economic, political and cultural connotations. Without doubt, there is also an environmental dimension to coexistence and conflict. After all, coexistence rests on particular constellations of resource distribution, while land and resources, in turn, constitute the very object of contention in a majority of inter-communal struggles. The environmental parameters of Cyprus, such as topography, climate and local biodiversity further accentuate this dimension. They are defined by the island condition – a condition that renders Cypriot history particular vis-à-vis comparable mainland contexts.⁴

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Few would deny that the constrains and possibilities afforded by the island environment feature as elements in local history. The island landscape is in a fact a classic feature in Mediterraneanist writing. Fernand Braudel famously described it as the milieu of a history of longue durée, an unchanging geographical feature that provides the setting for history to unfold in. Braudel’s description of the longue durée and his depiction of the larger Mediterranean islands as “miniature continents” (1990, 214) conveys, at least intuitively, a sense that the history of islands has a mind of its own.

And yet, the island environment often remains a passive setting, a plane on which history runs its course. Apart from the attention historians have ascribed to its geo-strategic significance for international diplomacy, the island factor has overall received little attention. This may be credited to a general scepticism towards geo-determinist interpretations of history. Without doubt, the marginalization of the environment in historical analysis corresponds with the nature-culture dichotomy of Western thought and the consequent division of academia –after all, the particulars of history cannot be interpreted with the explanatory models of the generalizing natural sciences. Environmental factors thus often remain external to an analysis, just as nature is perceived as external to culture and society.

Still, the insularity of Cyprus underlies the bio-geographical reality for all local life. As Ann Jepson puts it, ethnographic studies of Cyprus cannot escape the impression that there is a “sensual awareness of physical boundaries that informs a particular sense of attachment that is perhaps peculiar to islands” and that these “non-negotiable” boundaries affect the consciousness of its inhabitants (Jepson 2006, 159). Despite this impression, however, the factor of insularity has rarely been incorporated systematically into the research on Cypriot cultures.

The relative absence of environmental factors from the analysis of ethnicity and inter-communal relations in Cyprus may be credited to a further factor: It is in part a reaction of the academic community to the ideology of ethno-nationalism. It results from an invaluable effort of many social anthropologists to deconstruct notions of ethnic essentialism and to dislodge those claims of primordiality that have furnished the ideology for ethno-national aggression. Inspired by classical theories of cultural evolution, the beliefs in an ethnic essence were common currency among the national ideologues of Europe’s modern era. In contrast to the Marxist vision of humanity’s siege over nature and the firm belief in the boons of the industrial age, nationalists romanticized about an organic bond between land an people on which the spirit and essence of a nation depended, and that legitimated an expansionist “struggle for space.”⁵

In the history of Cyprus, such ethnic essentialism abounds. The national narratives of both Greek and Turkish Cypriots involve what Rebecca Bryant has termed a “naturalization of the nation,” i. e. the idea that land and people are of a “common substance,” expressed in the language of kinship and gender. In her comparison of the Cultures of Nationalism in Modern Cyprus, Bryant states (2004, 190): “The national ‘family’ is never only people but also invokes some gendered image of the land as a member of that family. The land ‘belongs’ to the national family, just as people do. In Cyprus,” Bryant continues, “taking account of a kinship with the land has entailed a transformation of kinship relations that also partakes of religious imagery.”⁶

Curiously, yet perhaps typically for the exclusiveness of ethnic essentialism, religion serves as an idiom for both, a collective sense of belonging as well as a marker of difference. Although both cultures of nationalism entertain a sense of kinship to the land, inter-communal kinship is practically absent, as the rate of inter-marriage has always been low due to the regulation of marriages by the Orthodox Church. Indeed, the Orthodox Church also holds principal authorship of ethno-national legend and continues to reproduce the notion of an organic bond between land and people. Thus writes the Greek-Cypriot Church historian Benedict Englezakis about the Ottoman period (1995, 448): “In its teaching the Church spoke the language of the farmers and in its liturgical life followed their rhythms, for Cyprus was a land of agriculturalists. The Church belonged to the cultivators of the soil, because they were poor and the place of Christ was there with them.” In the light of Ottoman plurality and the fact that the class of agriculturalists included both Christians and Muslims, this statement appears odd, yet symptomatic for the particular exclusivity of ethnic essentialism.

Since the 20^th century, religion has played a crucial role in the conflict by providing the basis for nationalist discourses of the Us and the Other, making the conflict appear as an inevitable clash between Christianity and Islam. Conventional accounts of national history, be they Greek or Turkish, often reduce the complexity of historical agency to a mere performance of ethno-religious behaviour and a display of ethno-national motivation. The anthropologist Yael Navaro-Yashin has thus called for a “de-ethnicization” of the ethnography of Cyprus, pointing to the socio-political ruptures within ethnic communities as well as to the allegiances that formed across them (Navaro-Yashin 2006).⁷ The principal method of such a “de-ethnicization” has been a Marxist, or largely materialist critique of hegemonic discourse, which demystifies national legend and argues against claims of primordiality – the notion of an organic bond between land and people being a central target of critique. However, the objective to overcome such ethnic essentialism may have lead anthropologists to discard the cosmology of local cultures along with the bathwater. More than that, it has ceded the privilege of interpretation to the conservative camps, who continue to write history with some degree of “semio-cosmological sensitivity” (Ergene 1998, 40).⁸

What, then, can anthropology contribute to the research of ethnic belonging and inter-ethnic antagonism? Or, to ask with Philippe Descola (2013, 5), what is the contribution of a “pluralistic anthropology,” one that is inclined to unearth the universals of the human condition while accepting a plurality of valid, because internally coherent world-views, without romanticizing or exorcizing them? If the forging of collective identities is a timeless and universal feature of the human condition, then “the meaning of communal existence” still demands an explanation. It is customary for the anthropological method to reconstruct an image of the past by way of ethnographic analogy, i. e. by observing and inferring from cultures that seem to be primeval to ours. In so doing, Descola communicates a lesson he has drawn from his ethnographic work among indigenous Amazonian cultures (2013, 5): “the meaning of their communal existence is not to be found in a language, a religion, or the past; it draws on a common way of experiencing the social bond and relationships with neighboring peoples, be they human or otherwise.” All cosmologies, be they “peripheral” or European, continuously develop in such an oikos of social relations – yet not distinction and exclusion are the pillars of cosmology, but communal existence within a given environment, and in the presence of others. Based on this realization, one may state that “ethnic nationalism is less a legacy of pre-modern societies than a consequence of the contamination of earlier forms of communal organization by modern doctrines of state hegemony” (Descola 2013, 5).

In an attempt to complement rather than criticize the social anthropology of Cyprus, this book aims at drawing both religion and nature back into focus. To this end, it emphasizes the ontological element of religion over and against its societal role as a marker of identity and difference. Most importantly, it recognizes the idea of a “natural nation,” not as a historical fact, but as a valid sentiment, because it is integral to a locally shared cosmology. Furthermore, the work subscribes to the statement that “religious ideology is not merely the superficial, phantasmic reflection of social relations. It is an element internal to the social relations of production” (Godelier 1977, 10). With this affirmation in mind, the work embarks upon an exploration of the religious cosmology, social relations and environmental culture of Cypriots, while investigating how these elements relate to the history of coexistence and conflict.

One may argue that the incorporation of environmental factors in the analysis of society and culture is not such a novel perspective. After all, the spatial turn of the social sciences already achieved a (re-)introduction of the material dimension to sociological inquiry, destined to compensate for the problematic neglect of the corporeality of humans, or the physicality of the world (Merlau-Ponty 1945; Lefebvre [1974] 1991; Soja 1989; Harvey 1990; Läpple 1991; et al). Indeed, the spatial paradigm of the social sciences has had a considerable impact also on the study of coexistence and conflict in Cyprus. A number of ethnographic studies emphasize the significance of mixed neighbourhoods for inter-communal coexistence on the island. They stress the importance of daily face-to-face co-presence and the micro-politics of space and place that emerged from the spatial proximity of mixed settlements (Asmussen 2001; Bryant 2004; Papadakis 2005; Karatsioli and Friedman 2010; et al.). Tragically, division not only brought about the abandonment of these neighbourhoods, but also the dissolution of these particular social spaces.

Still, it is not enough to simply admit that social agency takes place and thus has a spatial dimension. It appears that the categories of space and place remain defined as social constructions and rarely reveal anything of their bio-physical content. Even after the spatial turn, it seems, sociologists continue to explain the social mainly in terms of the social and thus preclude any ascription of historical weight to environmental factors. Far from a restoration of a geo-determinist perspective on history, however, the present work suggests a shift from geography to ecology as the relevant frame of reference.

Fredrik Barth’s paradigmatic work on the Ecologic Relationships of Ethnic Groups (1956) shall serve as a point of departure for the treatment of inter-ethnicity and ecology. In his study of the relations between several ethnic groups residing in a North Pakistan valley, Barth drew a comparison to the co-existence of different animal species in one habitat. His study introduced the biological concept of “niche” to the study of ethnicity, whereby the environment of a community is not only defined by its natural components, but also by the presence of other ethnic groups. He concluded that the distribution of ethnic groups does not correlate with larger geographical areas, but rather with the ecological niche each group manages to exploit – for instance through pastoral nomadism, or settled cultivation. Inter-ethnic relations are thus fashioned according to the niche-specific subsistence practices of each community. Barth continued to propose four ideal-type constellations of co-residence, which are not of immediate concern at this point. Important, however, are Barth’s fundamental ideas that, firstly, the environmental culture of ethnic communities is niche-specific rather than determined by geography, and secondly, that inter-ethnic relations are essentially ecological.

Talking about island ecology further elicits a set of questions that deserve some introductory clarification: For one, it calls to mind the aspects of resource limitations and ecosystemic thresholds that are more tangible on islands. The eventual depletion of these resources by human populations, so it seems, looms large in every history of island settlement. Still, Cyprus is not Easter Island. In contrast to the bio-geographical isolation of Oceanic islands, Mediterranean insularities are just as much determined by an element of connectivity, granted upon them by the relative proximity to the mainland. This has been widely acknowledged by Mediterranean eco...

Table of contents

• Religion and Society
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• 11. Conclusion
• 12. Appendix
• 13. Bibliography
• Subject Index