Modernity as Cure and Poison: Photo-Ethnography and Ambiguous Stillness in Therasia, Greece

As Therasiotes – residents of Therasia, a sparsely populated island sitting to the west of the globally iconic tourist destination of Santorini – engage with their landscape, they are haunted by a sense of stillness, which contrasts with Santorini’s reverberating modernity. By combining text with photographic imagery, this essay explores how Therasiotes experience quietness and its perceived antithesis, modernity, as well as the ways in which both are entangled in conflicting dynamics of pleasure and aversion, a condition invoking Derrida’s discussion of Plato’s pharmakon, with its inherent vacillation between the categories of cure and poison. The article examines peoples’ material practices and modes of looking in order to understand how they experience time and place and how they rework the island’s position in national and global hierarchies of value. It also proposes a peripatetic narrative structure that mirrors my own physical movements on the island in pursuit of photos and thus explores the ethnographic role of photography as a narrative strategy, an object of study and a research method

Citizens of Photography: The camera and the Political Imagination

Citizens of photography: the camera and the political imagination is an empirical anthropological investigation of a hypothesis about the relationship between photographic self-representation and different societies' understanding of what is politically possible

THE CRETAN CONFLICT 1866-1869: COMPETING AND COMPLEMENTARY IDEOLOGIES THROUGH THE PRISM OF THE GREEK AND OTTOMAN PRESS

Crete was historically one of the most turbulent provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The present doctoral dissertation focuses on the uprising during 1866-1869, while ex-amining it within the ideological context reflected in the publications of the Greek and Ottoman press of the time. From the presentation of the findings, it is obvious that the events in Crete not only developed within a more general resurgence of the ideological currents of the period, such as the expansive Greek megaloideatism, the unifying Ottomanism, and the ag-gressive Pan-Slavism, but to a certain extent they were made even more acute. How-ever, the attitude of the Constantinopolitan Greek newspapers on the specific issue revealed the existence of a new ideological phenomenon, that of Greek Ottomanism, which could be discerned mainly in the members of the upper class of the Greek mil-let. This phenomenon was a by-product of Ottomanism, and was linked to the desire of the Greek bourgeoisie in the Ottoman Empire to safeguard its privileges in a changing environment, while at the same time distancing itself from the ideological narrative of the Great Idea. In conclusion, the contemporary Ottoman and Greek language press not only recorded the historical event of the uprising but also became an important means of expression of all the above ideologies which characterised the developments in the area during the 2nd half of the 19th century

Ain't no mountain high enough. Man and the environment in the uplands of Crete from the Neolithic to the end of the Roman period

The island of Crete consists largely of mountains. How did this mountainous character of the landscape influence settlement patterns, economic strategies, culture and religion? What impact did these human activities have on the environment? To answer these questions, a theory section evaluates methods, the geology, flora and fauna of Crete as well as approaches to mountain archaeology. Five geographical and three thematic case studies then analyse, review and synthesize man-environment interactions across the island and over time