Thalassaemia in Cyprus

Frequencies of the thalassaemias in Cyprus were examined by a survey of hospital inpatients and haematological investigations of adult and newborn population samples. The data indicate that 15% of the Greek and Turkish Cypriots are carriers of beta-thalassaemia genes, while 10% of the population carry alpha-thalassaemia genes. These are the highest frequencies of thalassaemia genes found today in any Caucasian population.     

The Lens of Science: Anthropometric Photography and the Chippewa, 1890–1920

ABSTRACT

Nineteenth-century anthropologists struggled to establish themselves as scientists in a cultural milieu of enthusiasm for “curiosities.” Because commercial photographers appropriated the “authenticity” of photographic realism, the need increased for ethnographic photographers to distinguish between such realism and the “scientific authority” of their own visual productions. Through a case study of anthropometric photography of the Chippewa, this article examines the tension between, on the one hand, ethnographers' exploitation of the technological and symbolic attributes of photography to promote the scientific and political goals of the discipline, and on the other hand, the influence and function of visual genres and visual allegories in conditioning and framing what viewers accepted as “real” and “true.”     

“A Devil's Engine”: Photography and Spirits in the Western Solomon Islands

This article looks at photographic practices in Roviana Lagoon in the western Solomon Islands of the South Pacific. It argues that the efficacy or affective power of photographs in this context must be understood in terms of what is locally called maqomaqo (soul or shadow). Photographs contain a material trace of the essence of what they portray, which enables them to “touch” their viewers. This case study allows us to think about the innate metaphysic of photography, and about the way in which “photography” only ever exists as a series of local photographies, which emerge from the interplay between this innate metaphysic of the photographic technology and local ontologies.     

Photographing the “Other”: Immigration and New Images of the Greek Ethnic “Self”

ABSTRACT

Significant transformations in the ways the ethnic “self” and its relationship to the “other” are perceived have led to the transgression of the two traditional poles (East and West) that were prevalent in the definition of Greekness since the creation of the Greek nation-state. By placing the photographs of immigrants published in the most popular local newspaper in Central Greece within their wider social and historical context, we can “see” that immigrants (a group that is perceived to be homogeneous and transcendental) constitute a new axis around which the negotiation of ethnic identity and otherness in Greece is now conducted.     

Dermatoglyphics and flexion creases of the cypriots

A comparison of the dermatoglyphic features of 60 Greek Cypriots from the coastal region of Yialousa and 60 from the isolated mountainous region of Troodos showed significant differences only in the frequencies of digital whorls and loops in the left hands of the males and in the frequencies of Thenar/I patterns in the palms of the females. All other comparisons produced nonsignificant differences. The overall dermatoglyphic similarities are in contrast to the previously described serological, hematological and historical differences indicating that the mountain and coastal people of Cyprus may be genetically distinct. Two possible explanations for the observed discrepancies between the blood group and dermatoglyphic findings were advanced: (1) The more involved inheritance of most dermatoglyphic features which renders them less vulnerable to the influence of isolation and genetic drift than the blood groups, and (2) the similarities in the frequencies of the dermatoglyphic features among the various ethnic groups of the eastern part of the Mediterranean.     

Visual processing of pictures

Word responses have been used to dedde whether pictures of expressive faces or postures portray truthful expressions. Previous investigators have assumed words are used only as symbols of “meaning”. They did not appreciate the use of words as symbols of “sorting”. If one viewer calls two photographs “angry” and another viewer calls the same two photographs “happy,” the viewers may disagree in their “meanings” but they agree in their ‘sortings” both agree each photograph portrays the same expression. Sorting groups reveal how the visual system processes photographic images.     

The National Struggle Museums of a divided city

The article compares the two National Struggle Museums situated on either side of Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus. Their differences, it is suggested, reflect the differences of Greek and Turkish nationalism while their similarities are an outcome of their sharing the same form of historical representation: the past as a narrative of national struggle. The structural similarities of the two museums are thus utilized in order to highlight the specific ‘syntax’ of narratives of national struggle, as well as to discuss some of their implications for multi‐ethnic states in which the past is primarily conceptualized in this way. It is suggested that the notion of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ should be supplemented by a notion of the nation as the central actor and moral centre of a historical narrative that gives meaning to the past and indicates future orientations.     

Property as sovereignty in micro: the state/property nexus and the Cyprus Problem

This article shows that landed property can be an exercise of state sovereignty in micro. I argue that property tightly relates to statehood and that the concept of ‘community’ offers us a lens with which to investigate that relation. Property's ‘communal’ character in Cyprus often transcends individual rights to ownership. A house belongs not to an individual, but to persons in their capacity as members of either the Greek-Cypriot or Turkish-Cypriot constitutional communities of the Republic. Focusing on the moral and political claims that ensue from this premise, I show how refugee Cypriots encounter and rearticulate the state in a variety of institutions as they lay claims to property (periousia) – their own or others’. Consequently, I argue that thinking through ‘community’ contributes to understandings of the linkage between property and statecraft (what I call the state/property nexus). In turn, this allows us to better comprehend statehood in post-conflict domains.     

Systems of representation: Towards the integration of digital photography into the practice of creating visual images

This paper aims to set the foundations for an integration of digital photography into the broader framework of visual representation. The current climate seems to be marked by a preoccupation with contrasting the digital with the analog image. An alternative cross‐cultural approach is proposed, employing “systems of representation” characterized by the wide range of strategies for communicating through the visual image that can be found in the anthropology of art. These take into account the optical principles of depiction and their cultural determinants. The paper aims to place the practice of the digital generation and manipulation of photographs at a point of convergence with a variety of other means of transcribing the three‐dimensional world onto a two‐dimensional flat surface.     

Determinants of ethnic identification in the USSR: The soviet Jewish case

This article critically examines the generation of discourses on Greek identity following an episode that took place in northern Greece (2000/2003) when an Albanian student was elected flag-carrier in a commemorative parade. Three versions of Greek identity emerged in this context: the first was based on civic understandings of identity, promoting the current Europeanist project of citizenship as belonging. The second version drew upon the notion of “culture” as an all-encompassing concept to promote ideas of Greek cultural “purity” that have roots in Greek ethnogenesis. The third version adopted an understanding of the “nation” in terms of racial affiliation, transforming it thus into a natural category. The argument put forward is that in the context of the 2000/2003 episode (a) Greek self-perceptions are affected by the problematic economic and cultural position of Greece within Europe and (b) Greek discourses of identity are a form of resistance to processes of Europeanization that threaten traditional “imagined communities” embedded in history.     

The ideological contest between Greek‐Cypriot nationalism and Cypriotism 1974–1995: Politics,social memory and identity

As a result of the division of Cyprus in 1974, and until the mid‐1980s, Greek‐Cypriot nationalism was suppressed at the expense of Cypriotism, an ideology that pledged support to the political independence of the island. The retreat of nationalism, however, was temporary and it soon resurfaced as a dominant ideology, albeit in a changed form. The new Greek‐Cypriot nationalism does not go unopposed. Whereas the clash between Greek nationalism and Cypriotism is not a recent phenomenon, in the post‐1974 years it has acquired a greater intensity and constitutes the major battle in the Greek‐Cypriot contest over identity. This essay examines the post‐1974 period and especially the revival of Greek‐Cypriot nationalism since the mid‐1980s. The aim is to analyse the ideological contest between Greek nationalism and Cypriotism as it becomes articulated in the social construction of cultural and political identity and the collective memory of the Greek‐Cypriot community.     

Imagining the Real: The Photographic Image and Imagination in Knowledge Production

The exploratory discussion in this article starts from the fact that it is the realism of photographic representations which enables them, in an indexical sense, to point back to a reality beyond themselves as images. In the same vein, it is as a metonymic space-time fragment that the photograph can indicate a continuation of reality beyond its own framing of the visible. Or, putting it differently, rather than constituting transparent representations, presence in photographs is evoked through absence of the real. What is not problematized in photographic theory and visual anthropology is that photographs thus depend on imagination for their interpretative connection to reality. My argument sees photographic practice as interference, which pushes the medium past the implicit positivist premise for visual knowledge production in anthropology. Furthermore, when understanding the ability to imagine as movements in reason, the separation between imagination and reason, presumed necessary for the scientific production of knowledge, is also challenged. Concerned with rethinking photography in visual anthropology, imagination’s role in knowledge production will be explored through my photographic art project, Houses/Homes.     

Medical Humanitarianism Under Atmospheric Violence: Health Professionals in the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey

During the 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey, volunteering health professionals provided on-site medical assistance to protesters faced with police violence characterized by the extensive use of riot control agents. This led to a government crackdown on the medical community and the criminalization of “unauthorized” first aid amidst international criticisms over violations of medical neutrality. Drawing from ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews with health care professionals, and archival research, this article ethnographically analyzes the polarized encounter between the Turkish government and medical professionals aligned with social protest. I demonstrate how the context of “atmospheric violence”—the extensive use of riot control agents like tear gas—brings about new politico-ethical spaces and dilemmas for healthcare professionals. I then analyze how Turkish health professionals framed their provision of health services to protestors in the language of medical humanitarianism, and how the state dismissed their claims to humanitarian neutrality by criminalizing emergency care. Exploring the vexed role that health workers and medical organizations played in the Gezi protests and the consequent political contestations over doctors’ ethical, professional, and political responsibilities, this article examines challenges to medical humanitarianism and neutrality at times of social protest in and beyond the Middle East.     

Creation of accurate 3D models of harbor porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) using 3D photogrammetry

Creating accurate 3D models of marine mammals is valuable for assessment of body condition, computational fluids dynamics models of locomotion, and for education. However, the methods for creating 3D models are not well-developed. We used photography and video to create 3D photogrammetry models of harbor porpoises (Phocoena phocoena). We accessed one live adult female (155.5 cm total length), and two dead animals, one juvenile (110 cm total length) and one calf (88 cm total length). We accessed the two dead individuals through a stranding network in Germany, and the live individual through the Fjord and Baelt research center in Denmark. For all porpoises, we used still photographs from hand-held cameras, drone video, and synchronized GoPro videos to create 3D photogrammetric models. We used Blender software, and other 3D reconstruction software, to recreate the 3D body meshes, and confirmed the accuracy of each of the 3D body meshes by comparing digital measures on the 3D models to original measures taken on the specimens. We also provide a colored, animated version of the live harbor porpoise for educational purposes. These open-access 3D models can be used to develop methods to study body morphometrics and condition, and to study bioenergetics and locomotion costs.     

An Analysis of Snake-Scent Application Behaviour in Siberian Chipmunks (Eutamias sibiricus asiaticus)

Some rodents assault live snakes by mobbing. Another snake-directed behaviour is shown by Siberian chipmunks, Eutamias sibiricus asiaticus, when encountering a dead snake. They approach the carcass cautiously, gnaw the snake skin, and chew and apply the gnawed bits to their body fur. We have termed this behaviour “Snake-Scent Application” (SSA). SSA behaviour is also elicited by snake urine and feces. Chemicals in snake skin and rectal and cloacal sacs release SSA. Snake urine applied to dead mice tends to suppress ingestion by snakes.     

Ethnographic surreality,possession and the unconscious

In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, issued by André Breton in 1929, surrealism was described as “a total recuperation of our psychic strength by a means of none other than vertiginous descent into ourselves, systematic illumination of the hidden places and progressive darkening of the other places, a perpetual walk in the forbidden zone”. Surrealism sought to represent the unconscious and forbidden zones of the psyche, of the body, of the noumenal world within, which offered access, for surrealists, to energies and intuitions repressed by “civilized” modes of perception. For Jean Rouch, the significance of surrealism, of automatic writing and ciné‐transe, rested in the potential escape they offered from the formal constraints of conventional film and of conventional perception and observation. In his celebration of ciné‐transe, and of the technological apparatus that makes it possible, it is possible to detect his desire for a freeing‐up of the constraints of consciousness—a desire to “write with the body”, to dream, to tap the unexplored power of the unconscious in its overturning of “reality”, of system, and of convention. As a phaneroscopic “wide‐angle lens”, surreality aimed to document the scientifically unexplainable, the immense experiential overload of ritual possession. It attempted to make visible, in the movement between observation and participation and across disjunctive points of view; the crossings‐over into the unconscious world by which possessed Songhay dancers gained access to powers of phaneroscopic perception. By adopting filmic techniques which follow the surrealist practice of creating “verbal and visual collage”, in which randomly‐generated images, emerging out of a trance‐like state (of “automatic writing” or "ciné‐transe"), are juxtaposed in indeterminate and polyphonic relations with each other in an attempt to disturb or destroy patterns of perception which are confining, rationalistic, linear, or restricted to conscious phenomena, Rouch believed he could create powerful representations of the unknowable. This paper relates the phaneroscopic practice of ethnographic surrealism to psychoanalytic models of the unconscious. In a discussion of Rouch's interpretation of the Hauka spirit cult in his film Les Maîtres Fous, the paper argues that the neo‐Freudian paradigm which allowed him to depict the Sohghay's weekend Hauka rites as a parodic reversion to “savagery” (which both reversed the hierarchy of colonizer/colonized and enabled participants to experience a therapeutic release from the traumas of colonization) has been challenged by Lacanian and post‐Lacanian “re‐readings” of Freud that call into question the extent to which the unconscious can be equated with a pre‐linguistic state characterized by disjunctive “primitive” and “instinctive” energies. The surrealist longing for a rupture of the symbolic order of Western rationalism and a return to the “imaginary order” of the unconscious is confounded in the Lacanian conception of the unconscious as a zone inhabited by the “discourse of the Other”. However, the work of Gillès Deleuze and Félix Guanari [1977] provides a means of conceptualizing the unconscious in terms that avoid simplistic binary logic (phenomenon/noumenon; signifier/signified; subject/object; conscious/unconscious; civilization/savagery). The unconscious is not the “unrepresentable” Other of consciousness; it is a schizophrenic phaneron, a signifying “machine”, a transgressive producer of “group fantasy”. Rejecting both Freud's Oedipal model (the unconscious as primal imagery or “ghostly signifieds"), and the Lacanian notion of the unconscious (as a play of “empty signifiers"). Deleuze and Guattari argue that the unconscious cannot be accounted for in terms of the individual child and its entry into language any more than it can be conceived of as the domain of the primitive. On the contrary, the unconscious is constituted as “group fantasy”, as collective public memory which need not be reduced to elemental (Oedipal) signifiers: “all delirium possesses a world‐historical, political and racial content”. The schizophrenic embodies the public nature of unconscious meaning, since schizophrenia is primarily a communication disorder in which an individual never sees himself in terms of a linguistically‐generated “selfhood”, and fails to adopt the “false” identity which is offered to him in the language of the Other. Schizophrenia is characterized by a refusal to treat some meanings as superior to others, to remain within the bounds of a stable identity, or to distinguish between material (noumenal) things and actions and their (phenomenal) meanings. The schizophrenic unconscious treats all experience as signs, registering language in the same way as the body registers physical stimuli. Thus “meanings in the unconscious are simply meanings as workings of the body” [Harland 1987:174–175]. The schizophrenic as a model for the unconscious holds several implications for those interested in representing the experiential power of public rituals, for the public meanings in circulation during such rituals are material and noumenal, and are registered on the bodies of the dancers as they transgress boundaries and pass beyond consciousness. Rouch's surreality attempted to inscribe this unconscious production of public meaning as it was manifested in the movements of the ritual and in the movements of the camera‐body.     

Schärfentiefe nach Maß

“Focus stacking” in biology: Depth of field as large as required As the shooting distance gets more narrow in photographing, the depth of field shrinks remarkably, making macro and especially microscope photography increasingly difficult. The focus stacking technique solves this problem by producing a series of photographs with different planes of sharpness, which are then combined into a photograph with extremely large depth of field with the help of a computer.     

The Purity of Spirit and the Power of Blood: A Comparative Perspective on Nation, Gender and Kinship in Cyprus

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 that land and people are imagined to share. Moreover, this common substance is regarded as so 'natural' that it constitutes an important axiom that is central to understanding the logic of nationalisms.