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Elizabeth Anne Davis, "The Time of the Cannibals: On Conspiracy Theory and Context" (Fordham UP, 2024)
01:30:48
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast, do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary, and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon.
- [00:59]
Elizabeth Ann Davis
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Yadong Li
It was just the five of us.
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Elizabeth Ann Davis
So this was all planned. What are you gonna do?
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Yadong Li
I will do whatever it takes to.
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Elizabeth Ann Davis
Get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All her fault. A new series streaming now only on Peacock.
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Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:04]
Yadong Li
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Anthropology Channel of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Yadong Li, a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. In today's episode, we are diving into the complexity of conspiracy theory, suspicion and knowledge making in contemporary Cyprus. Today's new book invites us to rethink what it means to study context narrative and the production of meaning, not just in any single place, but for the theorization of the word at large. I'm very happy to have Professor Elizabeth N. Davis with us today. So, Professor Davis, welcome to the New Books in Anthropology.
- [02:40]
Elizabeth Ann Davis
Thank you. I'm honored to be speaking with you about this book, and I'm excited to see where our conversation goes.
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Yadong Li
It is a great pleasure to have this opportunity. The new book Today is the Time of the On Conspiracy Theory and Context, published by Fordham University Press in 2024. The new book's author is Elizabeth Ann Davis, who is professor of anthropology at Princeton University. Her research focuses on the politics of knowledge, body and subjectivity in Southern Europe and beyond. Besides the Time of the Cannibals, she is also the author of Battle, Madness and Respons, Immortal Grace and Artifactual, Forensic and Documentary Knowing. Both are published by Duke University Press. So to begin, Hess Davis, could you please briefly introduce yourself to our NBA audience? What has drawn you to anthropology and also to the Mediterranean, and what broader questions have animated your scholarly journey, especially as you developed this project?
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Elizabeth Ann Davis
Yes, it's a challenge to think about broader questions because I tend to be very particularist in the way that I do anthropological works. So I think I would say that from the very beginning of my academic life, you know, going back to college and even before, I've been fascinated by the way that people think and the process of thinking. And so my very first project as an ethnographer was my dissertation project, which you mentioned, bad Souls. This is a book that was based on my dissertation research in northeastern Greece, where I spent a lot of time in psychiatric settings, talking with psychiatrists, other clinicians, nurses, psychiatric nurses, therapists, and also spending a very great deal of time talking with patients and trying to see how they talk to one another and how they tried to make sense of themselves for one another. I was obviously very interested in the psyche. I got very interested in what people can and cannot say about their own interior and mental lives. And I was attracted to psychiatric expertise as a way. As a sort of realm for thinking, thinking about thinking. Patients, of course, knew a very great deal about their own psyches and were very good theorists of their psychic lives. And so the patients were experts for me, you know, as interlocutors as well as the clinicians. And I think I continue, even though I've come very far from psychiatry in the past, you know, 20, 25 years, I think I'm still fascinated with how people make sense of their the worlds that they inhabit, specifically how they know and what they know about it, what they think they know. And so my second very big project was really focused on epistemologies. The work that I did in Cyprus, you mentioned Artifactual, which was a book that came out just, you know, a year before the Time of the Cannibals. I think of them as part as the same project. They were basically one book that turned into two books because it got too long. And all parts of both books are about ways of knowing, about historical experiences that actually elude consciousness in one way or another. And so I have continued to think about thinking with experts of various kinds. For the Artifactual project, I was concerned mostly with forensic science and then with documentary films. So I worked with a lot of forensic scientists who were trying to locate and exhume and identify the remains of people who went missing in the 1960s and 70s in Cyprus. And then I also worked with documentary filmmakers who were. Who were using archival images and archival film to tell stories about that same period, the 1960s and 70s, and the mass political violence that took place in Cyprus during that time, leading to the enduring division of Cyprus. And for me, conspiracy theory, which is the subject of the Time of the Cannibals, was another epistemology. And so overall, I've been trying to put forensic science, documentary and archival knowledge, and conspiracy theory into some kind of relation, to think about the different modalities of knowledge and what they afford to us. And I've done that with the. Obviously with the help of a lot of experts who know a lot more about these ways of knowing than I do. I think as an ethnographer, I just. I'm very excited about thinking with other people and the process of forcing thought into language and what that makes available to us and also what it obscures from us. So the relationship between knowing, verbalization and knowing, again, that kind of loop is. Remains rather enthralling to me. And I think these are features of everyday life. They're features of academic life. They're, you know, they're features of pretty much any dimension of life that we might want to explore for the anthropologist.
- [07:58]
Yadong Li
Excellent. Thank you very much for sharing this very impressive intellectual journey, beginning with psychiatrists and also then to conspiracy theories, but always revolving around how people know and make sense of their surrounding world. It's fascinating. So what first brought you to Cyprus as you began your fieldwork in Greece, and how did conspiracy theory come to the forefront of your ethnographic attention? Were there particularly, you know, events, relationships, or experiences that set this research in motion and shaped your approach.
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Elizabeth Ann Davis
The short answer is yes, there were particular events. I'll back up just a step to explain how I moved from Greece to Cyprus as sites of research. I had been working in Greece for a number of years, as I said in graduate school and afterward for my first project and also for my personal life. But I was, I was always living in the northeast of Greece, right on the Turkish border. I lived in the city of Alexandroupoli, which is 15 minutes from the Turkish border. And I lived there in the late 90s and early 2000s at a time when the border was somewhat militarized because it was the national border with the, you know, the so called great enemy, you know, Turkey. There's a long, long history of tension and conflict between Greece and Turkey, which I had studied but had not experienced personally. So during that time, you know, a lot of people that I talked to in northeast would tell me that the reason there was still a deployment of the Greek military along that border had to do with the ongoing conflict in Cyprus. So I, of course had heard of Cyprus, I'd heard about the division of Cyprus, but I didn't know that much about it. And it started to crop up in the way that Greeks living in the northeast would tell me about the tensions with Turkey and their own anxieties about living on the Turkish border. And so I heard quite a bit about Cyprus during the period of time when I was doing my field research in northeastern Greece. So when it came time when I was, you know, able to sort of take a next step and think about, well, where, where, where would these, where would these stories take me? I decided to visit Cyprus and just, you know, check it out. It's a, you know, it's a, it's an area that shares with Greece certain features, but also is radically different from Greece. Some of the features it shares is it's a post Ottoman, know it was an Ottoman, it was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries as Greece was. It was historically a multicultural area as Greece was a multilingual. And it also had a division between a Greek language area and a Turkish language area. So I thought if I developed a research project in Cyprus, I would just be taking a next natural step in thinking about this history of conflict, division and multiculturalism. Came to Cyprus with a lot of presuppositions about what was true and what was not true about Cypriot experience. And I had to unlearn all of that, of course, because they were, all of that was based on, you know, stereotypes, very limited knowledge, and the projections of my interlocutors in Greece. So I had to unlearn quite a bit in order to become, you know, a halfway decent ethnographer of Cyprus. And I did start to unlearn a lot of those presuppositions as I spent more time there. But as a, you know, as a, a new visitor to Cyprus, the, one of the very first things I heard was as a, you know, I'm, I'm a US citizen, I come across as an American person, you know, even though I speak Greek, I spoke mainland Greek, not Cypriot Greek. And, you know, one of the first things I heard was that the US was responsible for the division of Cyprus. And I, I, I had not heard that before. You know, I started talking to people and, and I very quickly came into contact with what's sometimes called the Anglo American conspiracy theory of the division of Cyprus. There are lots of different versions of it, and I don't think we need to really get deep into the weeds on this. But I think if I had to give one reason why I started studying conspiracy theory in Cyprus, it would be because of the predominance of this Anglo American conspiracy theory of the division, which holds the UK and the US in different ways responsible for the division of Cyprus. So, and the US as part has, you know, it's very well documented and so forth, that the U.S. did support the anti communist radical Greek ethno nationalist terrorist group that attempted a coup in 19, in the summer of 1974, which then led to the invasion of Cyprus by Turkish military and in very broad brushstrokes. And I will tell you that no matter how I draw these brushstrokes, somebody is going to be offended by the way I do it. So I'm just trying to be as generic as I possibly can. The US played a role in the division of Cyprus, there's no question about it. But the questions are about how intentional, how long the historical engagement was before the division and so on. So as an American researcher in Cyprus, I came into contact with this conspiracy theory very early in my time in Cyprus. And I had a lot of conversations with Cypriots pretty early on as I was asking them, you know, about the division of Cyprus, I ended up hearing a lot of sort of joking references to Cypriots being themselves conspiracy theorists, that Cyprus was stereotypically a land of intrigue and conspiracy theory. So I came into contact with this kind of joking self representation on the part of Cypriots about their own propensity toward conspiracy theories. So this was part of my very early education in Cyprus. Again, your perspective evolves over time. And so after a couple of years of spending time in Cyprus and learning a great deal more about that period of the 1960s and 70s, I came to understand this discourse around conspiracy theory as a kind of metaphor, meta discourse. People were very well aware that they were portrayed as conspiracy theorists by people from outside Cyprus, particularly. Particularly by the sort of metropolitan, you know, metropolitan British and American people who were being blamed for the division of Cyprus. So I got a bit intrigued by that meta discourse, and I got intrigued that it was a meta discourse, you know, that is, that there was a great deal of self awareness and a kind of humor around it, even though the matter of division is deadly serious. And people were not joking about the seriousness of the division, but they were joking about their own role or their portrayal as conspiracy theorists. So there was something about the place and about the predominance of that discourse on conspiracy theory in Cyprus that led me to think that it might be a very interesting context in which to study conspiracy theory as a meta discourse. And when I tried to think about conspiracy theory in relation to other modalities of knowledge, forensic science, documentary film, and so forth, I found a lot of resonances. And so I thought maybe I was on. On a. On a fruitful path once I started thinking in that. In that direction. Now, behind all of that, of course, is my own understanding that the US is also a place of conspiracy theory. So I always had an implicit comparison in my mind. And ultimately I started to think that I needed to unpack the implicitness of that comparison and think about the US in relation to Cyprus in a much more overt way, in a much more direct way. And I started to do that by thinking about what scholars have written about conspiracy theory and how they have made comparisons across, you know, conspiracy theory locales. But anyway, that's sort of how it started, and I'm not sure it will ever end, really.
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Yadong Li
It's such a fascinating narrative. And also, I think the difficulty of phrasing this history of Cyprus, its division, and also itself as a context for conspiracy theory demonstrates the complexity of this place and also its history. Thank you very much for this attempt to do so. Thank you very much. So in recent years, I think we have witnessed the rise of conspiracy theory as a new field of academic analysis. And for scholars, across anthropology and cultural theory, and also in other disciplines like sociology, in psychoanalysis, in political science, people are paying more and more attention to conspiracy theory. So why do conspiracy theories demand our attention? And specifically, what does your research in Cyprus highlight about the social and political stakes of conspiracy theory, and then what kind ethnographic approaches contribute to our understanding of this particular research subject.
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Elizabeth Ann Davis
It's a really complicated question, and I'm not, you know, I'll do my best to approximate some kind of response, but I think this is a contested issue and I wouldn't want to pretend that my perspective is exhaustive. What I noticed as I started, I mean, I, I did a rather scholarly thing when I started, you know, taking on this project and, and realizing that conspiracy theory was going to be a big part of it, a part of the ethnographic project, I, I did the scholarly thing of trying to read every piece of scholarship I could find on conspiracy theory. And I am an older generation than you. I lived through the 1990s in the United States, and I remembered from my own experience the concerns about conspiracy theorizing that were happening in the late 90s, the sort of millennial moment in the United States. This was the time with the growth of militias and, you know, the, the see today were planted then and maybe a little bit earlier that we're now seeing flower into just, you know, radical white ethno nationalism and militarism. So I remember that time as a time of conspiracy theory. The X Files was on tv. I mean, there was all. There were all these kind of the fluorescence of conspiracy theory as an issue of concern in popular culture, in American popular culture. I remembered very well from my own experience. And when I started thinking about conspiracy theory in Cyprus, I had to contend with the idea that, oh, well, there's a different historical periodization here, because actually the fluorescence of conspiracy theory in Cyprus was being dated by scholars to the time of the division, so the early 1970s to mid-1970s, so much earlier than the millennial moment. And also it turned out out much longer than that, actually much farther back. So a lot of the US Academic scholarship on conspiracy theories really flourished in that millennial moment. So the late 1990s, up through the, you know, the 2000s, the early 2000s, I don't know. I mean, I'm just going to throw out a number. I don't know how exactly how accurate it is, but I would say, you know, 60% of the scholarship that I located was dealing with that millennial moment, not only in the US US I'm talking about US Based academic literature that was concerned with the fall of the Soviet empire, with the rise of finance capitalism globally, with ufology, with, you know, actually quite a number of phenomena that could be dated to the millennial turn And a lot of scholarship developed around that period of time. This didn't match what I was seeing in Cyprus. And also I was starting this project in the 2000 and tens and, you know, the early 20, 2010, 2011, 2012. And after a few years of working on this project, of course, it was, you know, this. Toward the end of Barack Obama's second term as president, there was already a very great deal because of all of the, you know, conspiracy theories that had been circulated as misinformation about Obama and other prominent Democratic politicians. You know, this was Trump's first presidential election. I could sense that there was again, you know, a kind of flourishing of public concern about conspiracy theory in the United States as well. All of this led me to think that maybe it's not such a great idea to try to periodize conspiracy theory too rigidly. You know, that is for sure, conspiracy theory is on the rise right now, but it was on the rise 10 years ago. It was on the rise in 1999. It was on the rise in 1974. It was on the rise during the 1950s in the US as well. So I think we're just going to be spinning our wheels if we try too hard to kind of pin conspiracy down to a particular historical moment. I started to get interested in the continuities, you know, between these periods of, you know, periods of resurgence surgeons or resurgence of conspiracy theory. And that got me thinking a very great deal about temporality and historical temporality. How can we make sense of what seems to be a social fact, that conspiracy theory keeps coming back, so to speak. How do we make sense of that? So I read as much of the academic scholarship as I possibly could. That means well beyond anthropology. You know, I read what philosophers had to say about conspiracy theory, what psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic theorists had to say about it, what sociologists had to say about it, what anthropologists for sure had to say about it. Sociologists, literature scholars, you know, cultural studies scholars. There were a lot of people who had a lot to say about conspiracy theory. And I tried to read as comprehensively as I could, and I started to see patterns in the scholarship. And that's really what I tried to focus on in the first part of this book, was to do a kind of close reading of the academic literature on conspiracy theory in order to pinpoint the limitations of the thinking thus far. To be honest, I found after I'd been reading some of this work for a while, I just started seeing the same maneuvers over and over and over again. The same analytic moves, the same wringing of hands, the same sort of reductions, the same assumptions cropping up time and time again unexamined. And I started to get annoyed and bored with the academic scholarship on conspiracy theory. Not everybody in the book, I try to make a point of pointing out which books and which articles and which commentaries I think are actually really useful. There are some. But for the most part, I was pretty unenlightened by the academic scholarship on conspiracy theory. And it really started to seem to me like a deep epistemological problem. How can we wrap our minds around conspiracy theory? Why do scholars find it so important? Well, I think when scholars say that there is a rise in conspiracy theory, it's because they have a political concern with what's going on in the world. Okay, so for sure that's the case in the U.S. i don't think there's any way around it. The Trump times have seen a surge in academic interest in conspiracy theory. And Whereas in the 1990s, the sort of millennial moment, again, there was a surge in academic interest in the US around conspiracy theory, but it had a different political flavor. So the millennial flavor was a bit more celebratory. You know, people were looking, scholars were looking at conspiracy theory as a kind of counter cultural or counter hegemonic, almost subaltern way of knowing the world that was sort of anti state and counter normative. And so there were, you know, there were a lot of academic, I would call them, you know, leftish academics who celebrated conspiracy theory as a potential sort of critical tactic. That that approach has to do with the, a critique of the US State, a critique of late liberalism that I think a lot of academics were, were embracing at that time in the U.S. the academic scholarship on conspiracy theory in the Trump Times couldn't be more different. Leftish academics are super concerned about conspiracy theory because to them it represents right wing, ethno nationalist, you know, right wing politics that is associated with QAnon and, you know, just widespread violence, hatefulness, nativism, you know, all of the things that we absolutely should be and are, I think, concerned about today in American political culture and, and not. And well outside the US of course. So now I think when scholars are in the US Are concerned about conspiracy theory, it's because they're concerned about the damage that they see conspiracy theory doing in the world. And so they are very worried about what seems to be a symptom of a deep sickness, you know, in this culture, in this society. And conspiracy theory then, you know, comes to Represent that. The feeling, I think, that academics brought to conspiracy theory 25 to 30 years ago was quite different. And again, that's one of the reasons why I think it really behooves us to think in the long term about these issues. Because if you hadn't looked at the way that scholars had dealt with conspiracy theory in the 1990s, early 2000s, you might only have a sort of Trump Times orientation to it and be extremely skeptical and suspicious. And there wouldn't. You wouldn't have any connection to the idea that conspiracy theory could be a leftist political thing, you know. So I think it's really important to look in the long term and of course, to look outside the US and doing both of those things right? Thinking comparatively across time and thinking comparatively across, across national context contexts really allows you to see conspiracy theory in a different kind of way. I mean, ultimately, the conclusion I came to was conspiracy theory actually isn't a thing. It isn't a stable enough object that it can sustain comparative thinking. And so for that reason, especially because it's impossible to pin down in terms of its basic characteristics, in terms of its political valences, in terms of its epistemological features, it's impossible to pin down. That makes it very enticing as an object, but also way too slippery to say anything intelligent about it, comparatively. So for all of those reasons, I think scholars remain super interested in conspiracy theory because it's rich, because it indicates to them something of political concern. And yet very few, I think, in my view, in my grumpy view, very few people have been able to make any headway. And thinking insightfully about how to reckon with conspiracy theory. Shopping is hard. I can never find anything in my size.
- [28:45]
Yadong Li
I don't even know my size.
- [28:46]
Elizabeth Ann Davis
I buy my clothes the same place I buy my groceries. There's a better way. Make it easy with Stitch Fix. Just share your size, style, budget, and done. Your personal stylist sends pieces picked just for you. That was easy. Stitch Fix online. Personal styling for everyone. Free shipping and returns. No subscription required. Get started today@stitch fix.com. this is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan. Real United Airlines customers. We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat.
- [29:24]
Yadong Li
I grew up.
- [29:24]
Elizabeth Ann Davis
I grew up in an aviation family, and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me.
- [29:27]
Yadong Li
Of myself when I was that age.
- [29:29]
Elizabeth Ann Davis
That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way. Think your lashes have hit their limit? Discover limitless length and full volume with Maybelline's Sky High Mascara. The Flex Tower Brush bends to volumize and extend every single lash lash from root to tip. And the lightweight bamboo infused formula makes lashes feel weightless now in eight bold shades so you can take your lashes to new heights every day. Visit maybelline.com to shop Sky High Mascara now.
- [30:06]
Yadong Li
Wonderful. Thank you for providing us with this very insightful interpretation. Basically, I think this recent interest in conspiracy theory has roots in both real politic in the US and elsewhere and also deep concern like you mentioned, within academia. And what is more interesting to me about how you deal with conspiracy theory, how you collect different conspiracy theory and analyze them in your book is you actually gather, collect a range of different sources, different material, including archival documents, media accounts, interviews and also your personal observation. So what led you to combine these different sources related to conspiracy theory and how do they complement or complicate one another in your employees, you know, in your analysis of conspiracy and context?
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Elizabeth Ann Davis
Yeah, I'm afraid it might complicate more than compliment, but I guess you, you, you, the reader would be a better judge of that than I than I am as the author of the book. So I think I had a challenge and just sort of back up a step, you know, obviously as an anthropologist and as a, as a human who's lived a life as an anthropologist over the last, you know, 25 years or so. So, you know, I working in Cyprus, Cyprus is a very small place that makes it vulnerable to stereotyping, to dismissal, to reductions. It also means that I can't count on broad interest. So I'm very conscious as an anthropologist that Cyprus is not on most people's maps map. And there are all kinds of reasons for that. Some are completely understandable. Some are just, you know, ordinary inattentiveness or you know, lack of, just lack of interest. And I thought that actually this might make Cyprus a very interesting context. I mean, Cyprus is in a sense a nation state in a very complicated sense. And again, I don't think we need to get too deep into the weeds on this question. But Cyprus is an, is an anomaly international law. It is a country that is a member state of the European Union, but functionally only 2/3 of it geographically actually participate in European Union membership because the northern, roughly third is occupied by the Turkish Military. There is an internal border that is not a national border, but functions as a national border. The Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots have functionally been separated for 50 years and in many cases longer than that. So the extent to which we're talking about a context, it's already very complicated. And that's actually, in the end, I think I started to think that the long term division of Cyprus made it an especially interesting place to think about conspiracy theory because, because no one would take for granted that there's one society that is being, you know, riven by the destruction, the destructiveness of conspiracy theory. It's an open question how many societies, how many countries we're actually talking about? And that makes it harder to take for granted that the nation state is homologous to the ethnographic research context. I know you know this as a, as an anthropology person, think about all of the ethnographies, the monographs that are published year after year after year, and the subtitles almost always end in, in country. It is amazing how durable the nation state remains as an implicit framework for ethnographic research. Cyprus makes that very complicated immediately from the start. And so Cyprus as a small place and Cyprus as a divided context, I think made it a very interesting place to think about conspiracy theory. So thinking about the, so returning to the issue of, you know, who's interested, who cares about Cyprus anyway? Cypriots for sure. Do you know there's a lot of interest in Cyprus and Greece and Turkey and in the UK and beyond that, you know, maybe not, maybe not so much so. So I thought that I should take this as a, as an exciting challenge, as an ethnographer, to make a, to, to kind of renovate this very old concept of a case study which actually comes from psychology, right. And think about Cyprus as a, as a kind of, as a context in which a case study on conspiracy theory could be written. The gambit, meaning I'm not staking a propositional knowledge claim, I'm just, you know, issuing an open ended question. Can we do a case study in conspiracy theory? If we can, it's because we find an epistemologically sound and ethically viable way to place boundaries around the context so that it is a context. This is very challenging. And in Cyprus it's a particular kind of challenge. So I, I decided that I would try and write a case study on conspiracy theory in Cyprus. I didn't take for granted though, that anybody would care to read such a thing. So I thought I would also do a kind of, I Didn't call it this, but like a case study in conspiracy theory about cons. In theory about conspiracy theory. Theory. So the first part of the book could be read by anybody, regardless of their interest in Cyprus. Because it is my attempt to do what I was talking about earlier, a close reading of academic scholarship on conspiracy theory. And it doesn't matter where you're located or where you do your own research. The literature is international, it's global, it's multidisciplinary. And I do my best to kind of read as much of it as I can and digest it, you know, for readers and explicitly thematize the limitations of that scholarship and suggest that there might be a better way of theorizing conspiracy theory. But easy, easy to say that how do you actually do it? That's what the case study on Cyprus is for. So on the one hand, some of the materials that I'm using in the book are the theoretical materials that other scholars have developed in their own attempts to wrestle with conspiracy theor theory. That's part one of the book. Part two of the book is. It is the case study taking Cyprus as a context for thinking about conspiracy theory and the materials that I lean on in that part of the book. Somewhat ethnographic, although I would say this is the least ethnographic book that I've written. It's some other kind of thing that definitely could not have been written if I hadn't lived in Cyprus for 15, you know, off and on, and worked in Cyprus for over 15 years. Experience as an ethnographer tooled me to be able to do the case study that I did. But the writing itself, there are only a few moments in that part of the book that are actually what I would consider to be ethnographic writing that is, you know, storytelling based on my first person experience. A lot of the. The writing in that second part of the book, the case study is actually my. My reading of press material. So media. The media coverage of this particular event that took place, which becomes the focus of the case study on conspiracy theory. So I read newspaper articles, op. Eds, reports from media sources in Cyprus, both in the south, so Greek language materials and then in the north, Turkish language materials. A few are in English. There's one Anglophone newspaper published in Cyprus, for example, that I leaned heavily on on. And I looked at their coverage of this event, again trying to think about scale. What if I made this case study about one event that led to a bunch of conspiracy theorizing? How small and how particular could I get this in order to, you know, to kind of, to develop a useful analysis of conspiracy theory. And that event was the theft of the remains of a former president of the Republic of Cyber Cyprus, Tasus Kavadopoulos, who had died in December 2008. And a year later, almost exactly to the day, his remains were stolen from his grave in a cemetery in southern Nicosia, which is the capital city of Cyprus. This led to several months of rampant public discourse. So a period of almost three months from December through or more than that, three months from December 2009 up until about mid March of 2010, of daily coverage of this shocking event. Different kinds of coverage in the north and the south, as you might imagine. But also there was a sort of conversation going on between the newspapers in the south and the newspapers in the north. So I was trying to track that conversation as well. Well, as one kind of theory after another was offered for public consumption about who was behind the theft, what were their motivations, why would they do this, who were they? And it very quickly became obvious to me as I was reading these accounts, that the prominent theories in a lot of the southern newspapers pointed toward Turkish Cypriots or Turkish nationals as the culprits Cyprus. And this indicated to me that the conspiracy theory discourse that was emerging out of this event was also reflecting the long term division of Cyprus in a very particular way. So what I did in the second part of the book for this case study was read that discourse very closely, try to track the conversation between the Greek language theorizing going on in southern papers and the Turkish language papers in the north. I could also see conversations going on across the newspapers in the south. For example, there are right wing conservative papers and there are left wing, you know, liberal to radical papers in the south. And there was quite a lot of theorizing and counter theorizing going on across that partisan division as well as between the division of north and south in Cyprus. And so I just, I tried to look at the kinds of accusations that were being made, the sources from which those accusations were coming, and what the, what that whole theoretical discourse might ha. Might tell us about the overall context. Now, because Cyprus is a small place and the readerships of these papers, you know, for anybody who works anywhere else in the world, especially big places, places so us, China, India, places like this, where you're talking about millions and millions and millions of readers and a sense of a public that maybe may comprise mostly people who are strangers to one another. This is Michael Warner. You know, publics, encounter publics. Cyprus isn't like that. Cyprus had, at the time fewer than a million residents total and a great deal more intimate knowledge between readers and writers of public media pieces. And because of the scale, I felt that I might be able to construe media discourse as an ethnographic object in a different kind of way. I should say I was limited as an ethnographer because I wasn't in Cyprus when the remains of Tasha's Papadopoulos were stolen. I was there the following summer and picked up on the fact that there was a trial ongoing. So people had been arrested for the crime. And I was aware then I became aware in the middle of the following year that this event had taken place. So I wasn't there when it happened. I wasn't in a position to talk to people. I wasn't in a position to see what their reactions were and do what I would normally have done as an ethnographer, to pick up experientially on how people were responding to the event. I felt that I had to treat it a bit as an archival project and somehow come up with a methodology that would allow me to do an ethnographic archival mode of analysis at the same time. So those materials were very helpful to work with, but I would never mistake them for the entire social world of discourse around this event. And I had to be very rigorous in limiting the kinds of claims I could make as an anthropologist based on what was available to me in these public media sources. And I tried to do more ethnographic work, you know, talking to people I knew, telling people that I was, you know, interested in this story and did they remember it and did they have ideas? I did a lot of ethnographic work, but mostly my analysis is based on the media coverage and the kind of discourse that emerged in those kind of, you know, those in. In public discourse in the years after the events. So it was an experiment. This whole project was an experiment from beginning to end. And I think I needed that kind of. That range of materials to develop the epistemological tools and the skepticism about claims about conspiracy theory based on academic scholarship, as well as the sort of challenges of trying to combine ethnographic research with archival research. I think I needed that whole range of materials in order to develop the intimacy with this particular event that would then allow me to somehow develop the context I was talking about earlier in an epistemologically sound and ethically viable way. How do you set boundaries around the context that remained the sort of challenge of this project from beginning to end and led to the central question of the book in the end, which is about context and how do we think about that as anthropologists?
- [45:21]
Yadong Li
Perfect. I think I totally agree with you. I think as an experiment, it's a very insightful and inspiring experiment. And compared to Bad Souls, which is an extremely well written book, I think the Time of the Cannibals might not be that ethnographic in the classic conventional sense, but this book is very interesting for us to read. I really hope that our audience can see all the images, media, and stories in the book themselves. I mean, it really creates a context through this multimedia representation. So it's marvelous. So in this book, you also, like we mentioned before, you map out five major scholarly approaches to conspiracy theories. Symptomatic, epistemological, particularist, and psychoanalytic and political. So what was your rationale for this typology of different patterns in conspiracy theory studies? And how did you classify these models? How does your own approach engage with or move beyond them?
- [46:22]
Elizabeth Ann Davis
It's interesting. I found myself developing a taxonomy for the sake of my own mental clarity. Because if you. I mean, if you've had any engagement with conspiracy theory, you know, you can easily fall down a rabbit hole and maybe never emerge. I felt that. And at the same time, as I was saying earlier, I was finding a lot of repetition in the academic literature. So, you know, people kind of saying the same, making the same observations over and over again without having learned from other people, having made those observations. And I thought, okay, well, what I see, I think is a lot of exceptionally intelligent and resourceful people spinning their wheels. Why is that happening? And I thought, well, it must have to do with some unexamined premises. I mean, often that's what happens, right? If. If there's. There's no. If there's little insight emerging from academic work, it's probably because the wrong questions are being asked. So what are the right questions to ask? So I tried to do, you know, I tried to do a sort of exhaustive analysis of how people were thinking about the problem of conspiracy theory, which meant thinking about what they were taking for granted, which is in the background of what they put into explicit discourse, right? So thinking about both of those frameworks, right, what they were announcing as problems and what they were announcing as solutions to those problems, and what was not being debated or put into discourse at all, and the relationship between those things. And so I started to make a kind of map of the, you know, the different, you know, the unexamined premises that I. I was suspecting were behind a lot of this scholarship and then also the ways that people were trying to analyze conspiracy theory. And I certainly, I would say, although I did find some disciplinary tendencies. That is, anthropologists tended to say certain kinds of things that were a bit different from what philosophers tended to say. I found it hard to establish in rigid terms, disciplinary approaches. There was actually quite a bit of cross talk across disciplines. So anthropologists were reading philosophers and psychoanalysts were reading cultural studies work and so forth. And I didn't want to do a kind of disciplinary typology of approaches to conspiracy theory because it didn't seem that that actually characterized the literature. What I tried to. The. The kind of central categories or. Or I call them approaches in the book that you named the symptomatic, the epistemological and. And so forth, the psychoanalytic, the particularist, the political. Those categories emerged from my analysis of the literature in terms of what people were taking for granted as premises, premises. And so learning what people take for granted as premises also gives you a next step to take, because when you learn what other people are taking for granted, you can then stop taking them for granted. You can put them into explicit discourse and think about them. So the idea was to kind of map the unexamined ground beneath, you know, all of this. All of this scholarship. And I thought it would be, and might be helpful to readers if I could show some of the patterns in. In. In. In this. So the symptomatic approach is, you know, for sure, the. The. The broadest. Let's say it's the approach shared most broadly across, you know, scholars, across disciplines. The symptomatic approach, I mean, in broad brush strokes, is. Is just an approach that takes conspiracy theory to be a symptom of some kind of social dis. That the disorder is not individual, that that's more like the psychoanalytic approach, that the disorder is collective, social in some sense. And the symptom of it is conspiracy theory or the surge or resurgence of conspiracy theory. The idea that there's something wrong and that conspiracy theory is a sign of what it is that's wrong. That I think, as you know, that broad, that broadly symptomatic approach is widely shared among scholars across the dissident disciplines. So the symptomatic approach, that is the section that is the longest in the first part of the book, because it's the most representative, I think, and needed the most unpacking and the most pituating. The epistemological approach has to do with scholars attempts to identify distinctive features of conspiracy theorizing so it's actual epistemological characteristics. So, for example, the propensity of conspiracy theorists to connect the dots, dots in way between piece of evidence 1 and piece of evidence 2 in a way that scholars themselves would not. So, you know, leaps in logic, that kind of thing. Some people who take the epistemological approach tend to associate conspiracy theory with those kinds of features. The epistemological approach is related to the symptomatic approach. The symptomatic approach assumes that conspiracy theory can be distinguished from other kinds of theory theory. The epistemological approach gives you the details for that assumption. So how is it that we can actually identify conspiracy theory when we see it not just based on our gut reaction, but based on the actual traits of the theory itself? This is what the epistemological approach attempts to show. The political approach. Well, maybe the psychoanalytic approach. It's. This is a very interesting approach. It's one to which, to a certain extent, I'm sympathetic because I think it's the best, theoretically the most richly developed approach. So it actually explains what it seeks to explain. The problem is the unexamined premise, which is that it takes the social absolutely for granted, rather than thinking about what the social is or could be and how we could identify it. So it kind of takes a psyche that works through the projection of fantasies for granted as the site where conspiracy theory happens and does not offer us a way to think about how conspiracy theory might work differently in different contexts. Because there aren't any different contexts. There's just, you know, the individual and their society, whatever it is, society, as the collective stage of the psyche, is taken for granted. So the psychoanalytic approach, of course, assumes a reading of conspiracy theory as a kind of destructive fantasy about power. And the political approach is the approach that I was talking about much earlier in our conversation that understands conspiracy theory as an expression of a political position. The difficulty with this approach, of course, is that it's impossible to pin conspiracy theory down to a particular political valence. Conspiracy theories have been propagated by leftists, by right wing people. They've done damage that, you know, politically crosses the entire spectrum. And it's also, we have better languages and better concepts for thinking about politics that don't require that we posit conspiracy theory as a particular kind of political problem. So. And then we have the particularist approach. I'm going a little out of order here. I hope that. I hope it will make sense. The particularist approach is one that will be very familiar to Anthropologists because it has to do with situating conspiracy theory in cultural context. And by cultural, you can add all of the other descriptors on that you want social, economic, political, historical, et cetera. The particularist approach is the most widely represented among anthropologists whose work I have read on conspiracy theory and is directly implicated in the symptomatic approach. Because once you take conspiracy theory as a sign of something wrong in society, you have to figure out what are the boundaries around the society in which conspiracy theory works as that kind of symptom. So which society are we talking about? Why is that society one that leads to conspiracy theorizing? So these seem like anthropological questions and anthropologists have tried to answer them by thinking about context. Now, this might sound like a great idea, but the way that it actually has worked out in practice, in my view, and again, you know, other people will surely see different things in the literature. From what I saw. The problem has to do with the way that particularists, people who want to situate conspiracy theory in so called local context. Context, the way that they allow the local as a frame to operate unexamined in their thinking. So what the local is as a context, who counts as being local? Who counts as, you know, there's a kind of implicit separation between the anthropologist and their interlocutors that crops up the moment the anthropologist says, says this is the local context. I'm not in it, they are in it. I am not. So I am not implicated in conspiracy theory. I'm going to tell you how other people make sense of their world through conspiracy theory. There's an. There's a kind of. And this comes partly from my engagement with Marilyn Str's work on ethnocentrism. There's a certain kind of ethnocentrism that I found endures in anthropological work on conspiracy theories. Theory that I think anthropologists would actually be very critical of if they were thinking about a different kind of object. And so the kinds of commentary and the kinds of contextualizing that anthropologists do when they're trying to show readers in their writing the qualities and challenges of their interlocutor social worlds involve a certain kind of context set setting that in many people's projects does not involve that kind of division between anthropologist and interlocutor. But when it comes to conspiracy theory almost always does. I'm going to help you reader, understand why these people over here make sense of their world using theories that you and I know are false. Conspiracy theory brings this out in anthropology and it seems to go unremarked and unexamined. And so I wanted to draw anthropologists attention in particular to the ways in which their talk about conspiracy theory is ethnocentric in order to redirect our attention. I'm by no means the first person to think about this. I don't want to suggest otherwise. I'm looking at a of lot longstanding way that anthropologists have developed of criticizing themselves in relation to the ethics of ethnographic engagement, but in the particular context of conspiracy theory. So I think, you know, the division or the asymmetry, as Talal Assad once put it, you know, in his very famous essay on colonialism, the asymmetry between strong languages and weak languages, or between, as Fadi Bardol puts it, between places of theorizing and places of ethnographic material. Lots of folks have thought about this, that asymmetry endures in anthropological work on conspiracy theory in a way that has been disavowed when it comes to lots of other analytic objects. So I just wanted to draw some attention to that problem in the particularist approach to conspiracy theory that I, I think so pervasively shapes anthropological work on conspiracy theory. Toast the holidays in a new way and raise a glass of Rumchata, a delicious creamy blend of horchata with rum. 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- [61:02]
Yadong Li
That's fascinating. Thank you for, you know, giving this kind of summary of your typology of content of contemporary anthropological literature on conspiracy theory. I personally think this topology very helpful for me to think about the current literature. And also I really want to talk more about the case study, the specific conspiracy theory that you study in the book. But prior to this, I think we need to talk about one keyword, a concept you use in your analysis, which is conspiracy attunement. So could you please explain this term for our listeners? Why is this notion central both to your own understanding and to a reimagining anthropology of conspiracy theory?
- [61:45]
Elizabeth Ann Davis
Yeah, I mean, it's funny and thinking about, I mean, I was writing this book over the course of many years and my thinking changed. Of course, you know, it's natural that this happens. And I had a lot of wonderful, you know, friends, colleagues, students reading this material over the years and showing me all the weaknesses in my own thinking. So this was very helpful. I came to conspiracy attunement fairly late in the game. You know, I would say in the last, I don't know, year of writing the book, I had, I, by then I felt that I had developed a pretty solid critique of, you know, academic scholarship on conspiracy theory, and I felt that I had developed a pretty solid case study. What I had not done was theorize the way that I was setting a context in a way that was different from the way, you know, from. From all of the other work on, on conspiracy theory. I had come up with the critique of particularism that I just, you know, quickly artic to you just now, which is a critique of the way that anthropologists continue to set boundaries around the context of their research without theorizing the way that they're doing that when it comes to conspiracy theory. I had developed that critique already. And the next question for me is, okay, well, how am I going to do an analysis of conspiracy theory that doesn't just reproduce that unexamined way of setting a context for my research? I knew that taking Cypress as a nation state as a concept was out. That was not an option. I already knew that that was going to be intellectually, politically, ethically, epistemologically, a complete dead end. So I couldn't talk about it as a, you know, in Cyprus that was not going to work for this case study. Nevertheless, I knew that the, the. The context in which I had done this research was rather specific, specific and particular. So how could we think. How could I think about the particularities of this context without Doing the bad kind of boundary making that I had seen so many other anthropologists do in their work on conspiracy theory. And ultimately, ultimately I sort of came up with this, this concept of conspiracy attunement. And I don't want to take too much, you know, original authorship claim on this. This is really just a phenomenological reading of discourse. So there's know, there's nothing fancier than that about it. I, I, you know, I, I am a psychological anthropologist and I do a lot of thinking and teaching in sensory anthropology and I'm, you know, I, I, I, Phenomenology is one of my crucial tools as a, as a, as an ethnographer. And I allowed myself to be inspired by some key phenomenologists to think about the discursive environment of conspiracy discourse in Cyprus. So Cypriot conspiracy disc, the object is discourse and the context is Cypriot, but it's an experiential context. So thinking about the ways that, so sort of taking a step back and thinking about another sort of, another part of my critique of scholarship on conspiracy theory is the kind of ready to hand way in which so many people think about conspiracy theory as an issue of blind belief. You know, do people really believe that? Can you believe what that person believes? You know, those kinds of observations which are just everywhere. The moment you open your mouth and start speaking about conspiracy theory, the issue of belief comes up. I'm already very skeptical about belief as a concept. I was trained to think about language in a, in a different kind of way that I don't assume that what people say is just, just a represent representation of their inner thoughts. I, I think that language does things in the world and I think that people use language to make things happen. So I, I had a, I had a propensity already to think about the way that people talk about conspiracy theory as itself the object of my analysis. So not conspiracy theory itself, but the way that people talk about it and the, what they think they're doing and what they're trying to do, do when they talk about it in those ways. So basically a pragmatic orientation to language and a view of language as performative, among other things, certainly as performative. Those kind of propensities in my own perspective drew me to think that maybe the context in which I was conducting my research had to do with the sort of phenomenology of talk about conspiracy theory. So who is talking to whom? What are they trying to accomplish when they do that? When a, when a Cypriot tells me an American, oh yeah, Cypriots are Conspiracy theorists, you know, don't you know that we blame you for everything that's happened in our country? Joking, what are they doing when they're making that joke? To me, what are the, what kind of interlocution are they drawing me into? I certainly, I would have to be pretty tone deaf to hear that as a propositional knowledge claim. And so I developed this kind of frame of conspiracy attunement to try and capture that phenomenology of interlocution that really was the object of my own analysis. So attunement is a concept that's been used by many anthropologists. Katie Stewart is one of the people whose work I learned most from. Along these lines, Tom Shoredash and other others who have talked quite a lot about attunement as, as a way of thinking about how people are in relation with other people and their environments. And it seemed to me that this could be very useful for thinking about how conspiracy theory circulates and how people get attracted to talking about it and why, what they get out of that kind of talk, what they try to accomplish in talking about, about it, beyond the kind of simple minded notion that they're just expressing beliefs that they have. And so I started to think about conspiracy discourse as a kind of phenomenological environment in which a person could kind of tune in to conspiracy discourse or tune out. And so if you're in that context, you would hear certain kinds of comments, comments as significant in relation to conspiracy theory. If you're not in that context, you would just dismiss or not even hear the comment the same way. So there's a lot of metaphors kind of circulating here around hearing and sensing. So conspiracy attunement, I hope, can be a framework that sets a context for ethnographic racism research. So conspiracy in, in, in a context of conspiracy attunement, the people who are engaging actively in that environment are talking about conspiracy theory, feeling it, thinking it, engaging in conversation about it, developing it, experimenting with it, doing all kinds of things, living through it, surviving it, making it thrive. They're doing all kinds of things with other people who are also in that context. Now, that context does not map on to national borders. There are tons of Cypriots who do not care at all about the Anglo American conspiracy theory of the division and didn't pay any attention when Tashas Pueblopoulos's remains were stolen from his grave. So it's not about Cypriot identity, it's about being in relation with other people who care about the things that you care about. And who use some of the same language that you use to talk about, about those things. Now, those things usually have to do with power in one way or another. So it is a way of thinking about power relations among people in Cyprus as a divided society or societies. There are always going to be questions about how social division maps onto power relations and that all analysis of all of that has to be part of the context of conspiracy attunement. And I, to try, try to, I try to flesh those power relations out in the, in the case study. But I think ultimately, if, if my intervention is successful at all, it will be to insist that when we're studying conspiracy theory as anthropologists, if that's what readers are, if that's an identity they want to embrace, we can't think of conspiracy theory in national ethnonational.
- [70:55]
Yadong Li
Terms.
- [70:56]
Elizabeth Ann Davis
It doesn't make sense to talk about conspiracy theory in the us it doesn't make sense to talk about conspiracy theory in Cyprus as if those, those contextual frames offered us any explanation at all as to why people were talking in the way that they were talking and thinking the way that they were thinking. We have to think in different terms about those contextual boundaries if we're going to get it, so to speak. So conspiracy attunement, it's a way of thinking about discourse as a phenomenological environment that can capture something of the way that people relate to one another across discrepancies in power and desire. And if we think about context in those terms instead of cultural ist or nationalist terms, I think we will come up with a much better understanding of how conspiracy theory operates. So I, yeah, I think that's the, that's my, my overall objective. I don't, you know, you can tell me how well you think it works.
- [72:02]
Yadong Li
Well, I think it definitely works. And I do think we cannot explain this concept without talking about the specific case and also for listener to read the books themselves. So as we have talked about this case of the conspiracy theories around Papadopoulos, I think many listeners have been very curious about it. So let's give some time for this particular, very wonderful case study. So the second half of the book, as we mentioned before, discusses the safe and contested art afterlife of former President Tasso's Papadopoulos body. So why did this episode take on such significance for you? And what does this case reveal about sociality, context, and also the force of conspiracy theories in ordinary words?
- [72:44]
Elizabeth Ann Davis
So, you know, I was saying just a few moments ago, not everybody, I mean, not all Cypriots care about this case at all. Some people don't. Don't want to have anything to do with it, didn't care. Some people were obviously extremely upset. And some people found it funny, some people found it just. I got a wide variety of reactions when I started telling interlocutors that I was thinking about studying this event and the theories that arose to try and explain it in the first few months after the theft, just in broad brushstrokes, what actually happened, as far as I know, is that the remains were stolen. And for that period from December 2009 through March 2010, there was a lot of speculation as to who was respons, you know, whom was responding, responsible for the theft and their motivations and, you know, what would ultimately happen. In March, three people were arrested and charged with the crime. These were two Greek Cypriot brothers who were reputed anyway, to be heads of a. What I think was not an actual. Not a. A criminal organization that was very small scale. So, you know, two criminal brothers and their employee who was an undocumented individual Indian national who was almost never named in the media coverage. And it's only because I really dug in and tried to talk to people about it that I figured out his identity. So these three people were charged because the, the Indian national, I won't name him now, but if you read a book, you'll see what it is. He apparently tried to ransom the remains back to the Papalopoulos family and ended up up coming into the orbit of the police and being caught. And. And then he told the police that his employers were the people who had actually organized the theft. They were tried, all three of them, that summer, so that's the summer of 2010, for the crime. And they were all convicted. They were charged with overlapping different, you know, kind of different overlapping crimes. And they were sentenced to differing lengths of time, time based on the, The. The crimes that they were convicted of. Now, this didn't resolve things. A lot of people who had speculated about the crime and the culprits in the months before these three men were charged rejected the official story that these were the people who were actually guilty and continued to theorize. So one of the reasons I thought this was an interesting event to study in relation to conspiracy theory is that there's no closure. There's no closure. The official narrative just makes people more skeptical. So another reason is by the time I started thinking about, you know, thinking seriously about writing about conspiracy theory in Cyprus, I already knew that I did not want to write about the Anglo American conspiracy theory of the Division of Cyprus, Cyprus. This had been the site of a very great deal of lay research, academic research, public talk, rumors of all kinds, and so on and so forth. Just, I mean, for Cyprus. Again, think in terms of scale for Cyprus, a massive, truly massive discourse on the Anglo American conspiracy theory of the division of Cyprus. I didn't feel equipped to contend with that entire discourse. And I also felt, thought I would just be repeating, you know, what people had said. What I got interested in was how the event of the theft of Thassos Papalopoulos's remains related to the division of Cyprus and the conspiracy theories around it. I started to think in terms of the recursivity of conspiracy theories about the division of Cyprus as they cropped up in the conspiracy discourse around Tassos. And indeed, I found the division of Cyprus all over the conspiracy theories about Thassos remains. And so I thought that this event offered a good opportunity to think about how conspiracy theory connects historical moments or establish, you know, it allows us to see certain kinds of continuities that we would not, not see if we thought only in terms of historical moments of the resurgence surgeons or resurgence of conspiracy theory. If we think in terms of periodization, we're going to miss all of the continuities. And we're also going to miss what seemed to me obvious that there wasn't much novelty in these conspiracy theories. So Thasoppopadopoulos remains were stolen in 2009. And so historically it was an event that was much more recent than the division of Cyprus. But that doesn't mean that there was anything new in these conspiracy theories. I wanted to disaggregate novelty from historical recency because what I saw was actually something much more like a recursive kind of epistemology in play where the division happens over and over again in new conspiracies theories. So thinking in terms of historical periods isn't very helpful for making sense of the way that 1974, for example, in Cyprus, keep coming up and coming up and coming up. So the conspiracy theories didn't resolve, let's say it didn't resolve into a public narrative that was very successful, as far as I could tell. I'm sure some people in Cyprus were convinced of the official narrative, but a lot of my interlocutors were not. You know, they were already very, very skeptical about the police investigation. They were skeptical about the state, which has been, you know, a corrupt and dysfunctional state since, you know, 1960s. And. And so I think the official narrative tells us something about the way that the state operates in Cyprus, but it doesn't put an end to the conspiracy, conspiracy theorizing. And so from that perspective as well, I thought this particular event could help us see some kind of general, could, could give us some kind of insight or access to this context of conspiracy attunement in which any new conspiracy theory is going to reproduce conspiracy theories from the past. And the way that we know that is that we can sense it based on our own long term experience of this happening over and again. So again, a shared experience of a phenomenological environment of relating to conspiracy theory in this way. So it might be worthwhile for me to just say a quick word about the interlude of the book, which is where I actually try to. So there's the part one, which is the sort of close reading of conspiracy theory literature. There's part two, which is the case study on Tajpava. There's an interlude in between in which I do a great deal of speculation. Let's say I'm not resolving anything in particular, but I do a lot of speculation about why Faustus Papadopoulos body became such a dense discursive site. And so that involved thinking about Thassos Pablos as an historical figure, right? As a person who was intimately involved in, in the division of Cyprus, but also in public governance from even before Cyprus was an independent sovereign nation state. So going Back to the 1950s, Tasos Revolophilos was as close to the center of power as any human person could be, and continued to be that close all the way through his life. You know, he was the head of a political party. He was a member of parliament. Then he became president of the Republican, um, and he's married to the, the heir of one of the biggest wealthiest families in, in, in Cyprus. So the, the Levendi's family. So his family is not only politically prominent with multiple children holding political office today, but also the wealthiest. So Papalopoulos himself is a figure of sovereignty in some kind of way. And I wanted to think about how the. And, and I, I noticed of course, in reading all of these, this newspaper coverage of the theft of his remains, that some newspapers were horrified by the theft of his remains and categorized the theft as a desecration. So using actually heavily religiously inflected terms to talk about what had happened to his remains. And other newspapers, particularly the leftist ones, expressed horror, but not. Didn't use religious language in order to talk about the nature of the horror and the crime that had been done. So I started to think about the body of the president as some. As a. As a kind of focal point for a political theology of power in Cyprus that might help to account for why this particular event attracted so much attention when it did, and why it resisted narrativization in the way that it did. So the interlude is my attempt to kind of wrestle with some questions about how sovereignty is embodied in presidential personae that actually isn't particular to Cyprus. And I do sort of discuss some other really famous cases like Franco and Bolivar and Gaddafi and other heads of state whose bodies have been toyed with after their death to think again, comparatively about, you know, what. What can we learn from thinking about the embodiment of sovereignty in a head of state and what happens to those bodies after death? What can that tell us about how political theology is. Is operating in these contexts? It was a way of opening up certain questions that I haven't resolved, you know, and one of my hopes, you know, I think a hope that any author would have is that in writing a book there's certain gestures that I hope will be received and then be given back to me in the form of answers, critiques, further questions, and so forth. Because I think one of these, the embodiment of sovereignty and a head of state, is one of these durable theoretical problems a lot of anthropologists, philosophers, critical theorists have thought quite a bit about and what it means for democracy and economic justice. These are questions that I think are really, really pressing, ever more pressing, you know, as we move through these crazy times.
- [83:53]
Yadong Li
Exactly, exactly. Thank you for finally, you know, giving this all this very urgent and big question for us to think about, you know, our real politic. And also based on this case, very small case of conspiracy theory. And also, I agree with you, the interview. Lud does such a great job bridging the first part of the book. And the second case study, you know, it's such a fascinating way to bring embodiment into discussion about this particular case to make it to provide a very important context, like you mentioned. And before we close, could you please share with us what research directions or questions you are exploring now or next? How has this project shaped your current interest? And what might your future work look like after the time of the cannibals?
- [84:41]
Elizabeth Ann Davis
After the. Well, there is no time after the time of the cannibals. It is all emerging present moments, unfortunately for humans on planet Earth. Yeah, I actually am. I'll just say two quick things. One is the interlude from the time the cannibals did become did kind of did produce a Side project. I am working on an article, sort of revising an article now, now that's actually on body doubles, political decoys involving Trump, but other people as well, other heads of state whose bodies are very, very troublesome. And thinking about if we take what happened to Tasso's body after his death and Gaddafi's and Saddam Hussein's and Franco's and every, you know, all. If we think about what happened to all these, you know, dead body bodies, it might help us understand what's in play when a head of state hires somebody to be a political decoy for them in life, what does it mean for a head of state to have an actual body double? And so that's a piece that's actually about political humor. It's about, like how to desecrate a politician without messing with his court, but by making fun. And so it's a piece that's about body double humor, political humor. And as a mode of political critique that might be more effective in some ways than debunking. Debunking of conspiracy theories is premised on the earnest belief of people who are deluded about reality. Political humor doesn't require that we think this about the beliefs of other people and addresses us in a different kind of way and maybe can mobilize us in a different kind of way. So it's sort of unintentionally, sort of inadvertently, I got inspired by thinking about Tasos Papavopoulos's core to thinking about Trump's body doubles. So that's just one little kind of side project. My main ethnographic project that I started sort of picking away at over the past few years. But I'm really going to start in earnest in January when I have a sabbatical. I'm moving to Athens. I'm going to be studying death practices and changing death practices in Greece, including the legalization of cremation, but also a lot of, I would say, innovation around the burial of migrants who have died at sea or coming across Greece's land border borders. So, so many thousands of people have died coming into Greece in the past decade. And this has put pressure, political and social pressure on people's ideas of what a proper burial is. I've gotten very interested in the Greek Orthodox Church as a political actor, you know, sort of fighting against cremation and also trying to preserve certain kinds of boundaries between all Orthodox Christians and Muslims, for example, long standing historical question and problem in Greece. So I'm going to be doing ethnographic research on, you know, how death happens. Today, not just in Greece, but, you know, thinking broader, thinking more broadly and thinking regionally about kind of plural traditions of care for the dead and how those traditions are being challenged by the way that death itself is changing. And so. So, I mean, I think it's safe to say I've been working on death for the last 15 years, and I'm gonna keep working on death, but in a different kind of way and in a more actively ethnographic way in Greece and thinking possibly of working in Turkey as well. So, you know, again, trying to sort of push against the ethnonational borders that map onto nation state borders as we think of. About people's sense of propriety in relation to death, what's right and proper, what a good death is as opposed to a bad death, and who belongs to the communities of the living who are going to actually care for and care about the dead. So that's the new project that I'm working on. I imagine it will be a very long time before I wrap my mind around any of those big questions, but that's the horizon for me at this stage. And I'm continuing to work on a film that I started with a friend and collaborator in Cyprus, which is about, let's say, the public life of important bones in Cyprus. So thinking about St. Lazarus, whose remains, whose relics are purportedly held at a church in Cyprus, Cyprus. Tashos Papadopoulos, of course, you know, his very important remains and the public story that has been told about them, the missing, you know, and the way that their remains have been, have become public materials. So it's a. I don't know what to call it exactly. It's not a documentary. It's not exactly an ethnographic film. It's some kind of film that. Whose form has yet to be fully realized about people's attachments to the material remains and how they become politicized, sacralized, desacralized, and how they come to carry really important public narratives. So that's an ongoing project. I always want to spend more time in Cyprus. You know, these books that I've written about Cyprus are done, but my life in Cyprus is not over. And so I'm going to continue. Continue to pursue all of these projects as much as I can.
- [90:35]
Yadong Li
Amazing. Amazing. I think both the political humor project and the film and also the death project, they sound amazing to me. And I want to say I'm looking forward to reading and learning from your future.
- [90:45]
Elizabeth Ann Davis
Thank you so much. I'm really looking forward to the next conversation. We have about all of this and your work too.
- [90:52]
Yadong Li
Thank you for joining us today for the new books in anthropology and offering all your insights about conspiracy theory, anthropological knowledge, magazine making. It's been a great pleasure to chat with you today.
- [91:03]
Elizabeth Ann Davis
It's been a huge pleasure for me. Thank you so much. And for these incredibly provocative and thoughtful questions. I really am honored by your close attention to the book and your interest in this research. I really appreciate it.
- [91:16]
Yadong Li
Thank you. So in today's episode, I've been speaking with Professor Elizabeth Ann Davis about her new book the Time of the Cannibals, published by Fuldham University Press in 2024. For listeners interested in the anthropology of the Mediterranean, the anthropology of suspicion, public discourse, and also the politics of knowledge, this book offers challenging and timely perspectives. I'm Yadong Li and you've listening to the New Book Network. We hope to see you next time.
- [91:55]
Elizabeth Ann Davis
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