Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T11:25:02.840Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bandits and “Bad Characters”: Law as Anthropological Practice in Cyprus, c. 1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Rebecca Bryant
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the handbook for Cypriot police officers published in 1896 by the island's British colonial administration, there is a passage that appears at first innocuous but that had important resonances for the development of legal and political statuses in Cyprus of the period. Under the section “Police Duties” and the subheading “Constables,” the handbook notes that “[c]onstables are expected to possess such knowledge of the inhabitants of their District as to enable them readily to recognize them. They are to be instructed to watch unceasingly all persons having no visible means of support, and obtain knowledge of all suspected thieves, idle and disorderly persons, and disorderly houses.”

Type
Articles
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , Summer 2003 , pp. 243 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Standing Orders and Regulations of the Cyprus Police (Nicosia, 1896).

2. State Archive of the Republic of Cyprus (hereafter SA1) 1474/99, memorandum from Police Chief Chamberlayne to chief secretary, 2 June 1899.

3. SA1/302/1900, memorandum of Trooper Artemis Christodoulou to Limassol commissioner of police, 21 January 1900.

4. SA1/286/1909.

5. Dhareshwar, Vivek and Srivatsan, R., “‘Rowdy-Sheeters’: An Essay on Subalternity and Politics,” in Writings on South Asian History and Society, Subaltern Studies, 9 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 201–31.Google Scholar

6. What Dhareshwar and Srivatsan call “the excessive body of the rowdy” in opposition to “the disincoporated body of the citizen” (ibid., 223; emphasis in original).

7. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977).Google Scholar

8. Ibid., 139.

9. The literature on British colonial legal and administrative practice is vast. Among those dealing with the questions addressed here, some of the most noteworthy are Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Cohn, Bernard S., “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” in Writing on South Asian History and Society, ed. Guha, Ranajit, Studies, Subaltern, 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 276–329Google Scholar; and Cohn, Bernard S., “Law and the Colonial State in India,” in History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology, ed. Starr, June and Collier, Jane F. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 131–52Google Scholar; Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. 1 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mitchell, Timothy, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).Google Scholar

10. Mehta, Uday Singh, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Cooper, Frederick and Stoler, Ann Laura (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 59–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; quotation on 61, emphasis in original.

11. SA1/1122/1913, letter from chief justice to governor, 16 October 1946.

12. Mill, John Stuart, “On Liberty,” in The Essential Works of John Stuart Mill (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), 249–360.Google Scholar

13. SA1/1217/1891, Sir Henry Bulwer, High Commissioner, to Lord Holland, Secretary of State for the Colonies, August 17, 1891.

14. Report by Her Majesty's High Commissioner for 1887–8, “Report by the Chief Justice,” June 27, 1888, p. 17.

15. Despite the rising fear of crime, however, no stigma was necessarily attached to elites jailed for a crime. Indeed, many of the elite class were jailed for crimes such as repeated libel or disturbance of the peace, and this appears to have been an accepted and ordinary part of dealings with the government. (See, for example, SA1/2136/1890, for the case of a jailed publisher applying to have the editorship of his newspaper changed during his imprisonment.) In fact, legislative council members proposed at one point to eliminate the penalty of hard labor for those jailed for certain types of nonviolent crimes.

16. Colonial Office Archive, London (hereafter CO67) 105/5846.

17. As, for example, when a shepherd might invite another to go to “eat roast meat,” meaning that he invited him to go on a sheep-stealing expedition. See especially Herzfeld, Michael, The Poetics of Manhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).Google Scholar Also see, for example, CO67/10162, 1886, for Cyprus.

18. The fact that the first local newspaper was produced in 1878 was a matter of coincidence and not directly associated with the arrival of the British. The first publisher, Theo-dhoulos Konstantinidhis, had already secured the permission of the Ottoman kaymakam of Larnaka and had brought printing equipment from Egypt by the time the British arrived. On this see Sofokleous, Andreas K., Συμβολή στŋν Ιατορία του Κυπριακού Τύπou (Nicosia: Intercollege Press, 1995), 11.Google Scholar

19. Φωνή της Κύπρου, 17 February 1894.

20. Parliamentary Papers, 1887–1905, enclosure No. 20, Sir Henry Bulwer to Lord Knutsford, received April 13, 1891.

21. Ibid.

22. “Η καταδίκη των ιερών” (The sentence of the priests), Νέον Κίτιον, 25 June 1879.

23. It was, no doubt, also known to many that the British were generally horrified by the state of the bodies and clothing of the village priests. The prison guard who shaved the priests in question claimed that they were lousy, while other officials speculated that villages chose the most disreputable and filthiest among them for the holiest position.

24. Quoted in Katsiaounis, Rolandos, “Land, Labour, and Politics in Cyprus” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1996), 244.Google Scholar

25. Ibid.

26. SA1/1962/1897.

27. Whipping apparently was a widespread form of extortion and humiliation, as Juan Cole remarks that it was commonly practiced in Egypt in order to extract taxes from the peasants. See Cole, Juan, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt's 'Urabi Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 85–89.Google Scholar

28. Parliamentary Papers, 1887–1895, 51.

29. Ibid., 50.

30. See Sir Hill, George, A History of Cyprus, vol. 1, The Ottoman Province: The British Colony, 1571–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 207–9Google Scholar; and Cyprus Annual Reports for 1879, p. 195.

31. Until recent years, most Ottoman historians had followed the millet thesis in suggesting that the legal and limited political autonomy of the millets, or religious communities, of the Ottoman domains led to a relatively strict separation of those religious communities and formed the basis for later nationalist uprisings. However, as recent research has shown, this “foundation myth” of the Ottoman state constitutes a much later projection into the past of an institution that appears actually to have taken full shape only in the middle of the nineteenth century. Especially good examples of this literature include Al-Qattan, Najwa, “Dhimmis in the Muslim Court: Legal Autonomy and Religious Discrimination,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 31.3 (1999): 429–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Braude, Benjamin, “Foundation Myths of the Millet System,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, ed. Braude, Benjamin and Lewis, Bernard (London and New York: Homes and Meier Publishers, 1982), 1:69–88Google Scholar; Goffman, Daniel, “Ottoman Millets in the Early Seventeenth Century,” New Perspectives on Turkey 11 (1994): 135–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kasaba, Reşat, “Izmir 1922: A Port City Unravels,” in European Modernity and Cultural Difference from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean, 1890's-1920's, ed. Fawaz, Leila (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).Google Scholar Kasaba notes that “[b]efore that time Ottoman society had resem-bled a kaleidoscope of numerous, overlapping and cross-cutting relations and categories more than it did a neatly arranged pattern of distinct elements” (Kasaba, “Izmir 1922,” 9). In Cyprus, as elsewhere, an independent Christian court did not develop, and religious minorities often sent cases of personal status to the shari'a court, where they were judged by the local kadi. For early Ottoman rule in the island, see Jennings, Ronald C., Christians and Muslims in Ottoman Cyprus and the Mediterranean World, 1571–1640 (New York: New York University Press, 1993).Google Scholar For later periods there is scattered evidence in Hill, A History of Cyprus, as well as in documents relating to the British occupation. Politically, however, the archbishop enjoyed special privileges, such as the right to use the local police force to collect tithes from his congregation. Other church privileges, such as its autocthony, were preserved from the early Byzantine period.

32. The Ottoman legal reforms of the nineteenth century were part of a general restructuring and “modernization” of the imperial administration. For standard accounts, see Davison, Roderic H., Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–1876 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; and Shaw, Stanford J. and Shaw, Ezel Kural, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2, Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

33. Cyprus Annual Report for 1883; also Orr, C. W. J., Cyprus under British Rule (London: R. Scott, 1918), 114–20.Google Scholar

34. In its initial form, this body was composed of the high commissioner plus not less than four and not more than eight other members, half being official and half unofficial. After complaints from the Cypriot population and an extensive report to the Colonial Office, the constitution was granted and the Legislative Council reorganized.

35. CO67/13/18868/Biddulph 332, 10 August 1880.

36. Messick, Brinkley, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 161.Google Scholar

37. Cyprus Annual Report for 1882, Report by Chief Commandant of Military Police, A. Gordon.

38. Parliamentary Papers for 1887–1895, No. 21, Sir Henry Bulwer to Sir H. T. Holland, Enclosure 1, Minute by the High Commissioner on subject of the Prevalence of Crime in the Paphos District.

39. Orr, Cyprus under British Rule, 76.

40. Cyprus Annual Report for 1881, Report by Arthur Young, Commissioner of Paphos.

41. CO67/13260, enclosure in despatch no. 136 of 9 June 1897.

42. CO67/21628, Enclosure no. 2 in Cyprus despatch no. 110 of 22 June 1911; Report on a law “To Amend the Knives Law of 1888,” John A. Bucknill, King's Advocate, 12 June 1911.

43. SA1/1468/1909.

44. SA1/725/1912.

45. There is an enormous literature on honor, shame, and violence in Mediterranean societies. Among the earliest and best known of these are Campbell, John, Honour, Family, and Patronage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964)Google Scholar and Peristiany, John G., ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).Google Scholar For the “classic” perspective on these problems, see also Black-Michaud, Jacob, Cohesive Force: Feud in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, with a foreword by Peters, E. L. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Boissevain, Jeremy, “Towards a Social Anthropology of the Mediterranean,” Current Anthropology 20.1 (1979): 81–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, John, Peoples of the Mediterranean: An Essay in Comparative Social Anthropology (London: Routledge Kegan and Paul, 1977)Google Scholar; Gilmore, David, ed., Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1987)Google Scholar; M. J. Giovannini, “Female Chastity Codes in the Circum-Mediterranean,” in Gilmore, ed., Honor and Shame, 61–74; Schneider, Jane, “Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honor, Shame and Access to Resources in Mediterranean Societies,” Ethnology 10 (1971): 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stirling, Paul, Turkish Village (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965).Google Scholar For more critical perspectives on the importance of the “honor and shame complex” and on the presumed unity of the Mediterranean, see Abu-Lughod, Lila, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Stanley Brandes, “Reflections on Honor and Shame in the Mediterranean,” in Gilmore, ed., Honor and Shame, 121–34; Goddard, Victoria A., “From the Mediterranean to Europe: Honour, Kinship, and Gender,” in The Anthropology of Europe: Identity and Boundaries in Conflict, ed. Goddard, Victoria A., Llobera, Josep R., and Shore, Cris (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 57–92Google Scholar; Herzfeld, Michael, “Honour and Shame: Problems in the Comparative Analysis of Moral Systems,” Man 15 (1980): 339–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Horns of a Mediterraneanist Dilemma,” American Ethnologist 11.3 (1984), 439–54; Pina-Cabral, João, “The Mediterranean as a Category of Critical Comparison: A Critical View,” Current Anthropology 30.3 (1989), 399–406Google Scholar; and Stewart, Frank Henderson, Honor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).Google Scholar For the most succinct analysis of honor and shame in Cyprus, see John G. Peristiany, “Honour and Shame in a Cypriot Highland Village,” in Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame, and “Introduction to a Cyprus Highland Village,” in Contributions to Mediterranean Sociology, ed. Peristiany, J. G., Acts of the Mediterranean Sociological Conference, Athens, July 1963 (The Hague: Mouton, 1968).Google Scholar

46. SA1/1122/1913, letter from Chief Justice to Governor, 16th October 1946.

47. Berger, Peter, “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honour,” in Liberalism and Its Critics, ed. Sandel, Michael J. (London: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 149–58Google Scholar; quotation, 154.

48. Parliamentary Papers, 1887–1895.

49. Foucault, Discipline and Punish. For an overview of Foucault's analysis of the role of policing and security in the liberal state, see Gordon, Colin, “Government Rationality: An Introduction,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1–51.Google Scholar

50. Cassia, Paul Sant, “Banditry, Myth, and Terror in Cyprus and Other Mediterranean Societies,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35 (1993): 773–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; quotation, 784.

51. SA1/388/1909.

52. SAl/442/1900.

53. Herzfeld, Michael, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3.Google Scholar

54. Especially the two major works by Hobsbawm, E. J. on the subject, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Norton, 1959)Google Scholar and Bandits (England: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969). For other, anthropological views that draw on the literature on the Mediterranean, see especially Blok, Anton, “The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 14.4 (1972), 494–505CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cassia, Sant, “Banditry, Myth, and Terror,” “Bandits,” in Encyclopedia of European Social History, from 1350–2000 (2000), 3:373–82Google Scholar, and “‘Better Occasional Murders than Frequent Adulteries’: Banditry, Violence and Sacrifice in the Mediterranean,” History and Anthropology 12.1 (2000): 65–99.

55. Blok draws similar conclusions when he remarks that “[t]he myth of the bandit (Hobsbawm's social bandit) represents a craving for a different society, a more human world in which people are justly dealt with and in which there is no suffering.” He further notes that bandits are essentially conservative and that “actual brigandage expresses man's pursuit of honour and power.” Blok, “The Peasant and the Brigand,” 494–503.

56. Koliopoulos, Ioannis S., Περί λύχνων αφάς: Η ληστεία στην Ελλάδα (1905 αι) (Thessaloniki: Paratiritis, 1996), 250.Google Scholar

57. Ibid., 251.

58. Ibid., 259.

59. Cypriot Greek is quite distinct from what is known as Standard Modern Greek, i.e., Athenian Greek. Moreover, in the period before nationalisms in the island began to demand linguistic homogenization, it was quite common for Muslims to speak Cypriot as their first language, and many well-known, Muslim folk poets composed in Cypriot. For examples of the latter, see İslâmoğlu, Mahmut, Kibris Türk Kültür ve Sanati: Araştirma-İnceleme Yazilan Tebliğler (Nicosia: Yakin Doğu Üniversitesi Matbaasi, 1994).Google Scholar

60. Quoted in Katsiaounis, “Land, Labour, and Politics in Cyprus.”

61. CO67/105/5846, Annual Report of Paphos District, 1895–96.

62. Ibid., report from police headquarters, 17 July 1896.

63. Ibid.

64. I should note here that in the most thorough discussion of this particular gang of Cypriot bandits, Katsiaounis, “Land, Labour, and Politics in Cyprus,” marshals considerable evidence to make the claim that widespread poverty in this period must have been responsible for a considerable part of the crime. In this regard, he sees the Hassanpoulia as akin to Hobsbawm's “primitive rebels.” However, this does not seem to be a sufficient explanation for crimes in the villages, given the considerable evidence that villagers saw the “bad characters” who committed crimes as an intrinsic part of village life. Moreover, “bad characters” were often supported by or related to powerful persons in the villages. Bulwer comments, for instance, that at the village of Potamion, “[s]ome of the thieves are connected with the best families in the village, and are protected by them. Some are poor and steal on that account, but others are well-to-do and steal because it has become a habit with them.” Parliamentary Papers 1887–1895.

65. “The Song of Hassan Poullis,” by Chr. M. Tzapoura (1892), in Ghiangoullis, K. G., Corpus Κυπριακών Διαλεκτικών Πιοητικών Κειμένων (Nicosia: Δημοσιεύματα του Κέντρου Επιστημονικών Ερευνών, 2001), 38.Google Scholar

66. Regarding this, one interesting publication by the union of former EOKA fighters, Λημερία της ΕΟΚΑ [Caves of ΕΟΚΑ], (Nicosia: Εκδοση Συνδεσμού Τομεαρχών ΕΟΚΑ, 1987), provides maps of the caves in which guerilla fighters hid.

67. See especially Christodoulou, Demetrios, Inside the Cyprus Miracle: The Labours of an Embattled Mini-Economy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992)Google Scholar, and Mavratsas, Caesar, “Greek Cypriot Economic and Political Culture: The Effects of 1974,” in Cyprus and Its People: Nation, Identity, and Experience in an Unimaginable Community, 1955–1997, ed. Calotychos, Vangelis (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1998), 285–300.Google Scholar

68. Mavratsas, “Greek Cypriot Economic and Political Culture,” 285.

69. Ibid., 293.