ACADEMIA lost one of its finest contributors last week and a man who put Cyprus on the anthropological map through his uncluttered, objective – yet evocative – research into refugees spanning four decades.
Professor Peter Loizos taught in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) for over 30 years. He died on Friday, March 2, aged 74.
Born in 1937 to a Scots/Irish mother and Cypriot father, Loizos first visited Cyprus as an adult, aged 29, without a word of Greek.
His father fled Cyprus in the 1930s as a communist, moving to London in self-exile.
Following his parents’ early split, Loizos was raised by his mother and only met his father twice briefly before he was 20. After his mother’s death, he embarked on a personal trip to his estranged father’s village Argaki where he was warmly welcomed by his new-found family.
Two years later, in 1968, he returned to conduct postgraduate research on the village, gaining close access to its inhabitants through his relations while mapping in detail their lives and connections to the island’s political heart Nicosia.
On the merit of his PhD research, Loizos got a job at the LSE and published The Greek Gift: Politics in a Cypriot Village based on his field work in Argaki.
The title refers to the tide of politics entering the village and all the consequences that it brought.
The village was ethnically mixed with a largely prospering Greek Cypriot population and a smaller Turkish Cypriot one. The interethnic feuds of previous years had not disrupted life in the village.
In a filmed interview, Loizos said: “The arrival of politics in the village was a gift of political modernisation and the growth of the state but it’s a dangerous gift. People start aligning with political bosses in the capital city and some of those bosses are aligned with Washington, Moscow, London, Istanbul, Athens.”
Before modern politics, the village was divided by competition between families, wealth and moral character. With politics, there were new sources of division adding to the old, though much more destructive.
“It’s the stuff coups, civil wars, invasions are made of,” said Loizos.
In 1974, the Greek Cypriot inhabitants of Argaki, including his relatives, were forced to leave the village following the Turkish invasion. Perhaps sensing the opportunity for a broader, more in-depth study, Loizos returned to Cyprus nine months later to trace Argaki’s displaced residents scattered south of the buffer zone.
He described it as “a study of the earliest phase of displacement, when destitution threatened, and disorientation and doubt prevailed”.
From his research, he published The Heart Grown Bitter: A Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees.
He said afterwards some of his best intellectual work came from trying to get to grips with EOKA B, noting that a big challenge was trying to understand the people with whom you have the least in common.
Anthropology, he explained, is about making the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar.
Regarding methodology, he said: “It’s not about asking a very good question, it’s about being there when someone is doing something revealing.”
Loizos continued his social research on the same community of displaced Argaki villagers during a third study period from 2000 to 2004, looking at how they managed their long exile, and in many cases transcended the difficulties of 1974-1975.
In later life, Loizos appeared to engage in an internal debate on the purpose of anthropology. Is it about bearing witness to people’s suffering or influencing policy-making?
Those who want to make a difference have to be absolutely dedicated to making practical changes to policy as pure anthropology and policy do not mix very easily, he said in a filmed interview.
One of his last essays was for a book called ‘Our Fathers’ put together by Menelaos Pittas. In it, Loizos had to pen his thoughts on photographs of his estranged Cypriot father.
He found the word father to be a “concession too far”, and was more comfortable with “the man who impregnated my mother”, borrowed from the Roman legal distinction between a ‘genitor’ (effectively a sperm donor) and ‘pater’, a present husband and father.
Loizos left a body of work that’s considered hugely influential, helped many others to enhance their own work, and earned the love of his friends.
The Sunday Mail spoke to people who knew Peter Loizos as a researcher during different stages of his professional life, were his students or were influenced by his work.
“Peter is one of the most important contributors to anthropology who trained others to do the same,” said Yiannis Papadakis, an anthropologist at the University of Cyprus.
Papadakis chose Loizos to be his PhD supervisor and later went on to write his own seminal work ‘Echoes from the Dead Zone’.
Commenting on Loizos’ book on Cyprus ‘The Heart Grown Bitter’, Papadakis said its importance also lay in the fact “he used a different style, uncluttered by academic language, because he was very moved by a painful experience and decided he wanted to bring out this experience in a rather powerful way”.
Through his work and that of his students, Loizos put the anthropology of Cyprus on the academic map, as well as having his own specific impact on refugee studies, said Papadakis.
Loizos was the external examiner when another student Yiouli Taki put her PhD to the test in London.
Now a senior researcher at INDEX Research and Dialogue, Taki remembers how Loizos “would bend over backwards to help us on our PhDs”.
For those trying to understand what went on in Cyprus and the development of the Greek Cypriot community, “his books were indispensable”.
“Peter’s books would open the door to a more complicated side of things beyond the generalised presentation of history you were getting,” she said.
“He broke the idea of a homogenous Greek Cypriot identity and I think he was one of the first to do that.”
He also looked at how people were affected at an individual level, mapping property ownership, family, then dispossession post-74, and what this meant on a personal level, how the dignity of the individual was affected.
To Taki and others studying in the early 1990s it was “definitely ground-breaking”.
David Officer teaches sociology at the University of Nicosia (formerly Intercollege). He shared an office with Loizos during his years as Professor of Sociology at Intercollege (2002-2006).
“The point to make about Peter’s contribution is that it transcends the narrow boundaries of Cyprus, which not many people are interested in,” he said, referring to the body of work done in general on displaced people and refugees.
Officer described how one phrase captures a large part of Loizos’ significance: “He took an abstract category like the refugee which in political discourse is used as a battering ram and humanised it, telling diverse, complex stories that emanate from being a refugee.
“He was very angry about the way in which the state and world treated whoever was displaced in ‘74, the multiple responsibilities and what happened afterwards, reducing it to propaganda appalled him and propelled him to research the displaced more.”
Officer notes that his dual British and Cypriot heritage helped him in his work, though Loizos always kept a “certain BBC objective attitude to reporting straight without embellishment”.
Referring to Loizos’ longitudinal study of Argaki community from 1968 to 2008, he said: “It’s not a snapshot. He grew up and got old with people he was working
with through possibly a momentous period in Cypriot history, not just ‘74 but also the emergence of modernity. It’s a unique record.”
Rector of the University of Nicosia Michael Attalides met Loizos in the late 1960s in London. They shared a house for a while when Loizos was working on his second book on Argaki.
“It was very important research. He was the second anthropologist after John Peristiany to ever study a Cypriot village.”
Perhaps drawing on his undergraduate degree in literature, Loizos wrote very “lucidly” and without sociologic or anthropologic jargon, making it a “very lively book”.
“In terms of anthropology, it’s part of a whole series of studies about how Mediterranean societies functioned. It created a tradition of understanding Mediterranean society as involving both traditional elements but very much being influenced by the urban and political centre,” he said.
The understanding that rural Mediterranean communities were linked to towns through patronage ties, creating clientalist states can still be seen today when talking about the problems of Greece, he added.
In reference to his earlier life, Attalides noted that Loizos spoke no Greek when he first visited Cyprus as an adult.
“He learnt his Greek in the anthropological way, through the people he was studying as they speak it. There was something a bit incongruous about this highly educated British man speaking with a heavy Argaki accent. But his links to Cyprus were clear, he had relatives here.”
Attalides reminisced about one night when Loizos was living in Argaki and having dinner at a relative’s house. He was eating souvla, drinking wine and working as always when he suddenly burst out laughing.
Asked to elaborate, he said: “Here I am doing my field work like this while some of my colleagues are eating lizards in Africa!”
