Overview

In Artifactual, Elizabeth Anne Davis explores how Cypriot researchers, scientists, activists, and artists process and reckon with civil and state violence that led to the enduring division of the island, using forensic and documentary materials to retell and recontextualize conflicts between and within the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities. Davis follows forensic archaeologists and anthropologists who attempt to locate, identify, and return to relatives the remains of Cypriots killed in those conflicts. She turns to filmmakers who use archival photographs and footage to come to terms with political violence and its legacies. In both forensic science and documentary filmmaking, the dynamics of secrecy and revelation shape how material remains such as bones and archival images are given meaning. Throughout, Davis demonstrates how Cypriots navigate the tension between an ethics of knowledge, which valorizes truth as a prerequisite for recovery and reconciliation, and the politics of knowledge, which renders evidence as irremediably partial and perpetually falsifiable.

Full Product Details

9781478017202

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Reviews

Artifactual is a brilliant exploration of knowledge production through forensic science and documentary filmmaking in postwar Cyprus. Raising penetrating questions about knowledge and the making of truth and evidence in anthropology, Elizabeth Anne Davis makes significant contributions to the anthropologies of missing persons, forensics, and visual anthropology. -- Yael Navaro, author of * The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity *

“Artifactual is a brilliant exploration of knowledge production through forensic science and documentary filmmaking in postwar Cyprus. Raising penetrating questions about knowledge and the making of truth and evidence in anthropology, Elizabeth Anne Davis makes significant contributions to the anthropologies of missing persons, forensics, and visual anthropology.” - Yael Navaro, author of (The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity) “The truth in situations of deep conflict may be impossibly elusive, yet people are often forced to reconcile with that opacity. In this beautiful and sensitive book, Elizabeth Anne Davis explores the reckoning with historical violence staged by forensic and documentary knowledge. Exhumed bones and archival images cannot settle a haunted past. But, as Davis shows, these artifacts and those who work with them can achieve something difficult and profound, marking out paths toward a plausible future.” - Anand Pandian, author of (A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times)

Author Information

Elizabeth Anne Davis is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and author of Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece, also published by Duke University Press.

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