Paul Sant-Cassia

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Full) at University of Malta

Maltese archaeology has long been bedeviled by the Mother Goddess debate pitting Mother Goddess (MG) adherents against professional archaeologists. Both groups largely talked past each other without deriving much mutual benefit. This contribution argues that despite their indubitable differences, both MG adherents and academic archaeologists shared...

This paper critically examines the Malta Agricultural Reform White Paper on Agricultural Leases (2022). It argues that the proposed reforms are neither reforming nor pro-agriculture. Instead, the proposed reforms will only entrench the underdevelopment of Malta's agriculture.

The assassination of the investigative journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta in 2017 generated local activist claims that Malta is a 'mafia state'. More than a ‘mere metaphor’, it expressed deep anxieties about the distribution of patrimonial resources that I characterize as ‘sibling or fraternal rivalry anxieties’: the product of a tension b...

Interfaith marriages in the Mediterranean constituted transgressive challenges to the social order and oriented scholarly reconstructions of the past to view them as ‘exceptional’ and not meriting scrutiny. But it is precisely because they were bracketed as ‘exceptional’ that they reveal themselves as visibly invisible tactics of social amelioratio...

This reliew article examines the work of Peter Loizos, and anthropologist who had long worked in Cyprus, tracing his engagement with his fieldwork village across time, from the mid-1960s to the early 2000's. Loizos's villagers became refugees following the 1974 Turkish invasion and Loizos explores how they coped with displacement and the loss of th...

The world after 11 September 2001 in New York and 11 March 2005 in Madrid appears to have been profoundly transformed. A climate of war, tension, menace and fear has progressively insinuated itself into the public consciousness. This atmosphere contrasts singularly with the climate of confidence, peace and hope for a new international order that em...

This article tackles the problematic notions of ‘difference’ (and ‘similarity’) between Greek and Turkish Cypriots with special reference to their perceptions of their Missing Persons - persons who disappeared in the course of hostilities between the two groups, and as a result of the 1974 Turkish invasion, and whose bodies have not been recovered....

In this chapter I discuss the attempts by some widows of missing persons in Cyprus to recover the remains of their loved ones and give them a proper burial. My aims are threefold. First, I show that although the issue of missing persons in Cyprus is highly politicized, relatives have different and conflicting needs to the agendas of the nation-stat...

Starting with Aristotle's suggestion that thought plays a central role in emotion, this chapter explores how in the absence of the bodies of missing persons, mourners find it difficult to express their emotions by 'conventional' means, either through ritual, however inadequate, or through spectacles, however cathartic. In such situations there is a...

This paper has two purposes. First, it summarises the various papers presented at a Pluridisciplinary Conference on the Mediterranean treating the region from a variety of perspectives, a selection of which are published in this issue of History and Anthropology. Second, it attempts to explore some of the tensions between historians and anthropolog...

A short text on the fascinating art work of Gian Battista Piranesi

This article provides a review of French writing on Mediterrenanean Anthropology

Ininriarum remedium est oblivio (The best remedy for injuries is to forget them).1 The case of missing persons in Cyprus constitutes one of the most tragic aspects of the recent history of Cyprus, and one which is both a symptom and a cause of relations of hostility between the two groups. Like most aspects of the ‘Cyprus Problem’, to which it cont...

This book chapter explores both the conditions that led to widespread violence and banditry in the Mediterranean up till the early 19th century, and the mechanisms operative to extract consent and complicity at the grassroots. It then examines how in popular imagination the brutal state execution of bandits turned them into popular figures of peasa...

This article explores the political and semiological contests surrounding a city exposed to massive tourism, by describing the discourses of the state, the tourist industry, the heritage industry and the local elite. It suggests that nostalgia is a specific discourse about the past that elites can use to reinforce their position. It also suggests t...

This paper examines the relationship between history, memory and experience in Cyprus by reference to the 1955–59 EOKA armed nationalist struggle, and its subsequent interpretation by Greek Cypriot villagers. While ethnic remembering as sponsored by political authorities was unambiguous, personal villager accounts of the past are constructed differ...

This paper explores representations of suffering in Cyprus, a divided island. It examines differences between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in their official publicity/propaganda photographic material in representing the issue of missing persons in Cyprus. It attempts to show that the differences are relatable not just to their different persuasive st...

Greece was the first post-colonial modern nation state in Europe whose national identity was created largely by peasants who had migrated to the city. As Athenian society became less agrarian, a new mercantile group superseded and incorporated previous elites and went on to dominate and control the new resources of the nation state. Such groups dev...

Although the concept of social banditry has received much critical attention since E. Hobsbawm published his book in 1969, the debate so far has perhaps been narrowly focused (Blok 1972; Vanderwood 1981; Dreissen 1983; Hart 1987; Koliopoulos 1987). Too often that debate has been framed in terms of whether bandits either express pre-political sentim...

This review article explores the different ways Continental and British artists tended to depict Malta, its people and culture within the context of colonialism and orientalism

T H I S P A P E R examines the relationship between religion, ethnicity and politics in Cyprus during the Turkocratia (1571-1878), the period of Ottoman rule. Its major thesis is that in the pre-industrial frame- work of Ottoman rule in Cyprus neither religion nor ethnicity were major sources of conflict in a society composed of two ethnic groups (...

This paper examines the relationship between religion, ethnicity and politics in Cyprus during the Turkocratia (1571–1878), the period of Ottoman rule. Its major thesis is that in the pre-industrial framework of Ottoman rule in Cyprus neither religion nor ethnicity were major sources of conflict in a society composed of two ethnic groups (Greeks an...

This paper is about the presentation and manipulation of the exchange of goods and services in Southern Tunisian marriages. It is also an attempt to explain the rationality of such presentations by reference to the transmission of property and to domestic politics. Most discussions on marriages among the Arabs have noted that the size of marriage p...

If proverbs are sociologically significant the one quoted encapsulates the theme of this paper: the extreme fluidity and uncertainty of post-Independence Greek Cypriot politics; the tension between individual strategies and collective action in Greek culture; secrecy, and the use of violence for political purposes (what Aristotle had called stasis...

In many Paphian hill villages there has been a change over a sixty-year period in the pattern of property transmissions within the family from a largely inheritance based systems to an inter vivos dowry one. The reasons for this shift are first explained. It is then suggested that this change has been accompanied by corresponding parallel changes i...

In this paper I want to examine the significance of Makarios' combined roles of Archbishop and President of Cyprus for his style of leadership and his political oratory. In so doing I hope to shed some light on certain aspects of ‘The Cyprus Problem’ which has hitherto received scant attention by political scientists and sociologists.

This thesis examines the changing patterns of politics and Kinship in a Greek-Cypriot village in Paphos, Cyprus, between 1920 and 1980. It seeks to show that patterns of political organization in the periphery can only be properly understood with reference to the role of kinship and the nature of property transmissions within the family. In analysi...