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Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the long aftermath of Cypriot wars which occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, I argue that anthropologists should pay attention to indifference as a particular form of everyday disposition in relation to wars and violence that is distinct from ‘silence’, ‘denial’, or ‘forgetting’.

Paper long abstract:

In my paper I focus on the ‘indifference’ that Turkish Cypriot villagers in my field site in northern Cyprus demonstrate towards the work of the UN supervised Committee of Missing Persons (CMP). The CMP is a joint Greek and Turkish Cypriot effort founded with the aim of locating, exhuming, and identifying about 2000 Greek and Turkish Cypriot persons who went ‘missing’ in Cyprus during the conflict in the 1960s and the war in 1974. Specifically in the village under discussion, the CMP is searching for Greek Cypriot prisoners of war who were summarily executed and unceremoniously buried in a number of mass graves in the village. It is suspected that several Turkish Cypriot villagers, most now deceased, were responsible for these atrocities. Nevertheless, contemporary Turkish Cypriot villagers neither overwhelmingly aid (because the CMP relies on ‘witness’ testimonies) nor seek to hinder the investigative and excavation efforts near their homes. Instead, most villagers express a remarkable ‘indifference’ towards the CMP and the discovered mass grave sites and detach themselves from the ‘historical’ events under investigation. Inspired also by local self-criticisms and moral evaluations, I argue that ‘indifference’ should be analysed with attention to local experiences of time, space, and ethics in post-conflict settings as a generationally specific everyday disposition related to, but distinct from, ‘silence,’ ‘denial,’ or ‘forgetting’. I also trace these expressions of indifference back to the very particular post-conflict ethics of ‘reciprocity’ and ‘closure’ disseminated by the CMP itself.