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

Rebecca Bryant

In the handbook for Cypriot police officers published in 1896 by the island's British colonial administration, there is a passage that appears at first innocuous but that had important resonances for the development of legal and political statuses in Cyprus of the period. Under the section "Police Duties" and the subheading "Constables," the handbook notes that "[c]onstables are expected to possess such knowledge of the inhabitants of their District as to enable them readily to recognize them. They are to be instructed to watch unceasingly all persons having no visible means of support, and obtain knowledge of all suspected thieves, idle and disorderly persons, and disorderly houses." This responsibility was reemphasized under the subheading "Knowledge of Characters," where officers were told that:	1
The knowledge of the individual characters of the inhabitants of each District is necessary to the constitution of an efficient Police; it therefore becomes an important duty of the Police quartered in the Town and villages to make themselves as far as possible acquainted with the persons and haunts of all suspected persons therein, in order to their being able to bring them forward without delay in the event of their being charged with the commission of any crime or misdemeanor, or by close observation of their movements deter them from committing depredations or other offences against persons or property.1
Moreover, "the names and addresses of all discharged prisoners and suspected persons," the guide says, should be written in the "District Book," which was the responsibility of the local commandant.	2
This list, commonly known as the "bad characters' list" or "blacklist," was an internal mechanism of the police force. But clearly those persons whose names appeared on it believed that their reputations had been soiled. The records of the time are full of complaints against this regulation. In one case, a police chief reported that an imam (muslim religious leader) placed on this list "complained pathetically to me in one of my visits to the village of the disgrace of his name being in the police list of bad characters."2 According to the report, the imam was never actually placed on the list, but he apparently did insist on carrying a gun. What is important is the imam's belief that his name had been placed on the list, indicating the extent to which even association with the list brought shame. This can be seen, as well, in the complaint of a number of villagers to the bishop of Kition that, as a result of being on this list, "they lost their reputation and that even zaptiehs [police] do not consent to associate with them."3 It was also a device that called for resistance. For instance, a petitioner in 1909 requested that his name be removed and submitted the statements of his fellow villagers and the muhtar (village headman) to the effect that his character had improved.4	3
This article examines the relationship between rules and roles as those rules and roles were being altered in Cyprus at the turn of the twentieth century. Descriptively, I demonstrate the ways in which the implementation in Cyprus of a European governmental rationality and categorization could not be contained within the forms of that rationality itself. Analytically, I ask what the encounter of Cypriots with that legal-bureaucratic rationality at the turn of the last century may tell us about the sorts of political identities that developed in Cyprus then and after. My focus is the loose category of the "bad character," a classification used in order to blacklist and shame persons seen as potential or actual troublemakers. The "bad characters" of British reports are very similar to the "rowdy-sheeters" of India: persons who are "known" by the police and the bureaucracy, persons who are observed as troublemakers and often detained in advance of potential disturbances.5 As in the Indian context, the "bad characters" of Cyprus clearly represent the "other" of the honest, law-abiding citizen-subject.	4
Dhareshwar and Srivatsan describe the rowdy-sheeters of India as criminals associated with the primarily urban lumpenproletariat. But "bad characters" in Cyprus were described as both sheep thieves and town ruffians, as both illiterate peasants who insisted on carrying guns and hooligans who followed political leaders out to stir up trouble. In colonial records, then, "bad characters" appear both as men with a tendency to criminal activity and as men without agency who were manipulated by local elites to stir up political unrest. That same political unrest, however, would ultimately find expression in the 1950s in a large-scale campaign to evict the colonizers and unite Cyprus with Greece. In fact, the category of the "bad character" seems to have been loose enough to encompass all those persons who appeared to threaten the social order, from sheep thieves to bandits to town youths roused by elite agitators.	5
I suggest here that what sheep thieves and town ruffians have in common is their complete otherness to governmentality, as chaos is to order. Clearly, the category of the "bad character" spilled over the bounds of legal-bureaucratic rationalization, taking on all the changing qualities of the anti-citizen. "Bad characters" were known both for their excess and for their lack: an excess defined by the ways in which they overflowed bounds,6 and a lack defined by their failures to meet basic criteria of the citizen-subject, such as property and literacy. The solution to this problem was not found, however, in the mechanisms of individual discipline described so well by Foucault.7 Rather, it was found in a corporate discipline that I suggest may have had implications for later politics in the island.	6
Foucault has argued that European methods of punishment, correction, and discipline derived from a view of human nature reduced to the mechanisms of the body, which could be coercively trained through what he calls a "micro-physics" of power.8 In colonial legal practice, however, that "nature" was also "culture," in contrast to the presumably noncultural individualism enjoyed by British subjects themselves.9 Uday Mehta has argued that liberalism gives "a specifically political significance to human nature." It does so, he believes, because "[b]eing born equal, free, and rational, birth—notwithstanding its various uncertain potentialities—becomes the moment of an assured political identity."10 In colonial practice, only from the presumably noncultural vantage point of European colonizers was full individualism possible; others were not yet advanced enough to break away from the shackles of their cultural nature.	7
In British colonial terms, liberal legal practices should lead to the development of democratic institutions that would, in turn, both indicate and promote a people's political maturity. In other words, it was an ideological underpinning of British colonial rule that legal-bureaucratic rationalization—applied to all persons equally—should lead to civilizational and political maturation. This was usually glossed as "teaching people how to be free." That this process never seemed to happen in the way that it was supposed to was not counterevidence to the developmentalist approach. Instead, the strong hold of religion, family, or other elements of "culture" was blamed for retarding political development. For instance, even as late as 1946, the British chief justice of the island concluded in a report to the governor that the corporatism of Cypriot life meant that jury trials were not suitable for the island, since Cypriots would always show more loyalty to their immediate groups than to abstract ideals of justice.11 This echoes, of course, John Stuart Mill's observation that certain groups have not yet reached the "civilizational maturity" that would allow them to govern themselves, and that the proper rule for many groups is despotism, as long as its aim is their improvement.12 Hence, in contrast to the individualistic micro-physics of power that Foucault describes, both the enactment of legislation and the forms of surveillance and punishment in Cyprus were written around the assumption of Cypriots' corporate nature.	8
This article argues, first, that in the early part of the colonial period in Cyprus, the presumed corporatism of Cypriot life was written into law as a popular anthropology of Cypriots' nature. Immediately after the British arrival in the island in 1878, crime appeared to explode despite the rapid penetration of more efficient administrative structures, policing, and the judiciary. In the Cypriot popular imagination, this increase in crime was directly linked to a breakdown of the social order and its traditional hierarchies. The attempt by British administrators and Cypriot legislators to combat this crime wave resulted in new legislation aimed at understanding the "real" or "natural" causes of crime in the island. As we will see, the primary result of these new laws was to categorize certain "traditional" practices as "backward," "uncivilized," and in need of correction and punishment. These practices were those of the "backward" villager, the "natural" Mediterranean hotblood, whose practices needed to be corrected by his superiors.	9
Second, I claim that it is in the figure of the "bad character" that we find traced most clearly the outlines of the emerging citizen-subject, who is to be the bad character's good twin. In much legislation, crime was not only the crime of villagers, but the crime of villages. Putting people back in their "proper" social places ultimately meant controlling those forces of communal chaos embodied in the bad character. But it was precisely the new category of citizen-subject, the category defined in Cyprus as both naturally corporate and legally equal, that was in theory responsible for controlling the forces of chaos and bringing about order. I suggest, then, that in contrast to the universalist, Enlightenment figure of "man-as-Machine," the legal image of Cypriots as naturally possessed of corporate characteristics ultimately led to a disciplining of the citizen not as universal individual but as member of his or her ethnic group.	10
The Meanings of Equality
Within a few years of the British arrival in the island, colonial administrators were faced with what appeared to be an explosion of crime, and they began to discuss ways to root out what they considered to be the "worst class" of such crimes, namely sheep stealing and murder. In statistical terms, between the years 1885–86 and 1886–87, the number of cases committed to trial increased 78 percent, and another 46 percent in the following year. Between 1888 and 1893, arrests rose from 5,724 to 8,543.13 By 1889, the chief justice commented in his report of crime statistics that "the state of things thus disclosed is little short of appalling, and is deserving the most serious attention. That serious crime should prevail to the extent indicated by these returns in an island with a purely agricultural population, is a very remarkable circumstance, and seems to point out to a widespread demoralisation amongst the people."14	11
This statistical rise is clear, though it is more difficult to say what it indicates, since much of the rise could be attributed to changes in the laws, increased effectiveness of certain branches of the police, and the reclassification of certain practices as criminal offenses. For instance, the theft of a sheep or a knife drawn during a cafe brawl were the sorts of "crimes" that were often not reported before the advent of "British justice,"15 and a consistent complaint of officials was the difficulty in getting people to bring a crime to the police rather than settle it among themselves. At the same time, these sorts of crimes constituted almost all of those brought to trial under the heading "robbery with violence."16 Sheep stealing, however, was a common practice among shepherds intent upon proving their wits and manhood, as Herzfeld has observed with regard to similar practices in neighboring Crete.17	12
But there was also clearly a perception among Cypriots that a significant change had taken place. This perception may be attributable both to the clear statistical rise and to the publication of crimes in the local newspapers that began operation in the same year as the British arrival.18 In 1894, one newspaper, Foní tis Kýprou, printed an article titled, "The Moral Situation of the Island," in which it complained, "The newspapers record murders, thefts, rapes, dishonorable acts , vandalism, sacrilege, and all possible sorts of crimes, which were born in the decades of the British occupation. In the pages of these records one sees: on the 1st of January A. is finished with a sword, and on that same day B. is finished with a knife; on the 2nd C. shoots at someone, and on the same day D. strangles someone...."19 The newspaper, however, does not associate the perception of a crime wave with its publication. Rather, like many villagers of the time, it associates the island's "moral situation" with the advent of British rule.	13
Indeed, local officials commented that villagers were in a state of panic, and in 1891 the high commissioner, Sir Henry Bulwer, decided to take a tour of the Limassol and Paphos areas, which were most affected by the crime wave. In every village residents complained of crime—mostly sheep stealing and murder or assault—and made recommendations about how to put a stop to it. One villager's remarks are typical:	14
He [the villager] thought the fault was partly due to the education. The schools that have been established teach very little, and their effect has been to weaken the influence of the clergy and of the elder people of the village. Those who go to these schools and learn a little think they are wiser than the priest, and they look down upon their elders. If a priest were to venture now to say anything in church about the thieves he would suffer, and if any elders of the village were to say anything against them they also would suffer.... The people of the district are some of them industrious and some of them idle. Those who are idle make up for their idleness by crime. The old Turkish system was best suited to put a check to crime in the district.20
This statement appears at first contradictory. The villager remarks that education is responsible for this state of affairs, even though the common perception of "bad characters" was that they were ignorant and illiterate.	15
This appears less contradictory, however, when we notice that the real complaint was of the loss of traditional authority, interpreted by this villager as a result of education. Moreover, he echoed the observation of many villagers that only the Ottoman system really could control crime, because only it produced fear and a proper subjection to authority. During this same tour, at the village of Omodhos an address was presented stating that "a sudden transition to a comparatively liberal constitution had let loose the minds of people having a tendency to wickedness, and that taking advantage of the liberty enjoyed by them they engaged openly in crime."21 Indeed, many villagers appeared to think that prisons were too comfortable, that the formalities of British law were too stringent, and that not enough responsibility was placed on villagers themselves, who always knew the criminals.	16
Villagers themselves, in other words, attributed the rise in crime to British justice, which appeared to give an excessive liberty and which also appeared to demolish social hierarchies. Under this new rule any priest, imam, teacher, or elder could be—and often was—charged with the same crime as the ordinary villager. Overnight, distinctions were erased on all levels, from the villagers who were all taxed equally to the clerics who were suddenly equally accountable under the law. In a particularly scandalous case from 1879, two priests were arrested for grazing their goats in protected forest land. While in prison their heads and beards were shaved as part of the usual policy of shaving prisoners. Letters of support addressed to the archbishop and of condemnation of this "vandalous action" addressed to the high commissioner were published in the new newspaper, Néon Kítion: "The official manner of this vandalous action is protested, and we request official satisfaction. The English nation is a civilized nation, governed by a justice-loving government, and we hold the firm belief that it will not accept to hear of this illegal action."22 While the sentence itself was not protested, the assault on the bodies and hence on the honor and status of the priests brought fierce condemnation on the over-zealous prison guards and their superiors.23	17
A few years later, Bulwer described the breakdown of authority in the villages and the disorder that appeared to prevail in areas with no police to patrol them. Bulwer commented: "The influence of the elders of a village and of others whose position ought to carry weight is no longer sufficiently regarded by those disposed to disorder and lawless conduct."24 Indeed, the sudden divorce of religious and political authority was causing a crisis of representation that manifested itself as an apparent crisis of morality. For instance, the Foní tis Kýprou reported in 1895 that it had received letters from several villages describing vandalism and a breakdown of order: "During the evening the doors of priests and honest heads of families were sprayed with human excreta, and large stones were hurled against the houses of decent people."25 The control previously exercised by priests and elders was not only called into question but also challenged.	18
And clearly, many villagers thought that an assertion of authority was what was needed to bring things back under control. An 1897 petition of residents of Omodhos, for example, reveals many of the prevalent village concerns, since their request appears to be based on a rumor that circulated throughout the district. The police chief, Mr. Greenwood, reported,	19
From what I hear the Omodos villagers wish that their village be transferred to the Papho District because they are under the impression that Mr. Mavrogordato has authority from Govt. to use the whip; several villagers of Omodos, Arsos, Tokhnou, Ayios Therapou, Pano Kividhes, Kandar, and Episkopi seem to be under the same impression as on different occasions asked me why I do not get permission from the Govt. to use the whip like Mr. Mavrogordato, they all agree that the use of the whip is the only means of stopping crime, and that Mr. Mavrogordato has been able to put a stop to crime by making use of it.26
It should be noted that the whip—used on horses and dogs and in Greek legend by Ottoman officials on their Christian subjects—was not only an instrument of violence but also an instrument of humiliation.27 Crime could be controlled, these villagers thought, by putting people back in their appropriate social places.	20
Clearly, ordinary people of the period perceived a direct link between the breakdown of traditional hierarchies and the breakdown of social order. Moreover, they encouraged British administrators to use systems that had been in place under Ottoman rule, such as making entire villages responsible for crimes committed in them or simply taking the word of villagers that someone was a "bad character." Bulwer commented,	21
The old Turkish system of punishment, many people declare, was far more effective than the present in dealing with offenders. The old administration often left things alone for a long while, but when it moved it came down with a heavy hand on the offenders. It did not stop for many formalities or for great preciseness in the evidence. It was enough that a man was known as an evil-doer to the people generally, and that there was reasonable cause to believe him guilty of certain offences.28
In an interesting variation on this, the bishop of Kition reported that "the people wish restrictions to be put on persons of bad character, on persons whom the Mukhtar [headman] and Ayas [Turkish = elder] of a village may say are of bad character. Such persons might be restricted by being confined to certain localities."29 The latter suggestion clearly offered a very interesting compromise between the British desire for codification in a legal code and the local understanding of the most effective means of social control.	22
The Ottoman criminal legal system in force when British administrators arrived in the island was one that those administrators complained was too centralized and that they entirely altered within the first five years of the British administration. In the system in place when the British arrived, each of the five , or districts, of the island had its own district court, while a central, "supreme" court in Nicosia tried more important criminal cases and sometimes admitted appeals. The court of a (known as the meclis-i daavi) consisted of two Muslim and two Christian members, all of whom were elected by the people, with the kadi or the kaymakam presiding. The central court of Nicosia (meclis-i temyiz or meclis-i tahkik) was similarly structured but with three Muslim and three Christian members. The kadi presiding over the Nicosia court was also considered to be the supreme authority on legal matters in the island. District courts tried both civil and criminal cases, while important criminal cases were sent to the capital.30 The shari'a court () dealt with civil cases of marriage, divorce, inheritance, or any other such cases that might fall under Islamic law.31	23
British administrators complained that the system was too centralized; that elected judges were prone to graft; and that aside from the kadis, other judges had no legal training. Administrators claimed, as well, that the kadis were trained in shari'a law rather than in the full workings of the Ottoman legislative system that was put in place in the decades of reform in the middle of the nineteenth century and based on the Code Napoléon.32 As a result, within a few months of the British arrival a Court of Justice for the Queen in Cyprus was established, consisting of the high commissioner, a judicial commissioner, and deputy commissioners. Within two more years, a complete overhaul of the system resulted in a unified organization of courts that administered a dual system of law: British subjects were under the laws of England as modified by local legislation, while Ottoman subjects were under Ottoman law. All cases were tried in the same courts, however, which continued to be divided into six districts, now with sixteen subdistricts. A supreme court was established that had jurisdiction over all cases and consisted of two English judges. In the district courts, one English judge presided and judged non-Ottoman cases, while in cases under Ottoman law two Cypriot members—one Muslim and one Christian—who had been appointed by the government assisted. Small civil cases and some criminal were tried in the subdistricts by village judges, who were either Muslim or Christian and were, again, appointed by the government. In many cases, Muslim judges were replaced with British judges. The former judges acted as interpreters, while the British judges issued verdicts.33	24
Moreover, the British administration established a Legislative Council immediately in 1878, with changes to that council's constitution enacted in 1883. This council was ultimately composed of six official members and twelve elected members, the latter divided approximately according to population, with nine Greek Orthodox and three Muslim members, the high commissioner presiding.34 In concert with the Executive Council, it was the role of the Legislative Council to deal with legal issues that related specifically to the situation in Cyprus. And at the level of enforcement the changes were equally significant. While a large proportion of the Ottoman zaptiye, or police, force was retained, significant numbers of British troops were also employed in law enforcement. This extended force, and the new rules that governed it, meant that more suspects were taken into custody, and more cases came to trial.	25
For British administrators, this new system was intended to correct what they believed to be the corruption and rapacity of the old regime. Under that regime, elected judges were ill-paid or not paid at all, and so according to British officials most cases were decided by bribery, which they believed to be endemic to the Ottoman system. In 1880, for instance, High Commissioner Biddulph wrote to the Colonial Office that the kadi of Paphos district had been tried on the charge of accepting bribes from suitors in the local court. He was sentenced to prison, a sentence that Biddulph ordered be carried out in the fortress of Famagusta. "Although the punishment is not severe according to our notions," Biddulph comments, "yet it will create some sensation amongst the people; for although the Cadis, like other officials, are almost universally corrupt, I believe the trial and conviction of a Cadi for accepting bribes is an absolutely unprecedented occurrence."35	26
British officers believed, in other words, that teaching "the Turk" how to rule meant the implementation of fair and impartial justice guaranteed by an efficient police force. Cypriots, however, perceived this same system as the cause, in large part, of the apparent wave of crime that swept the island in those decades. The comfort of life in the British-administered prisons, as well as the formalities of British law, meant that few "bad characters" were deterred from evil deeds and that many, in fact, were encouraged by the new system to criminality. The assumption, in both British and Cypriot assessments of the situation, is that those "bad characters" always existed in the island, but that the new system had "let loose the minds of people having a tendency to wickedness." It was the very equality of the new system that had supposedly accomplished this, and it was with this new equality that both Cypriot legislators and average villagers would have to contend.	27
Putting People in Their Places
Two of the changes in the legal system against which villagers consistently complained and which they persistently resisted were unavoidable under this new form of justice. The first was the elimination of what we might call "character witnesses" and the institution of evidence-based justice. It was reported in many instances that under the Ottoman system it was enough that someone was known as a "bad character" to those of good reputation in the village or district. More consonant with practices elsewhere, however, was the general agreement that the testimony of two credible witnesses had been enough to convict. Messick has noted that in Yemen the definition of a credible witness was someone of irreproachable character, a definition concerned "not so much with absolutes as with deviations from local societal or even personal norms, which are taken as indicative of an instability of character thought to bear on one's capacity as a truthful witness."36 For instance, someone of high social standing engaged in a lowly occupation would be suspect. The request that restrictions be put on persons whom "the Mukhtars and Ayas of a village say are of bad character" is clearly a local use of the validity of the testimony of credible witnesses.	28
Under the British administration, however, judgment was based on collected evidence and on sworn statements by eyewitnesses; all else was considered to be hearsay. Because of the nature of many crimes (such as sheep stealing, which often took place at night and in remote locales), gathering evidence or eyewitnesses was difficult, so that villagers were discouraged from reporting crimes. Many saw that those accused often went free and returned to take revenge on those who had reported them. Moreover, the clear shift from witness-based to evidence-based justice meant a decline in the power of elders in villages to control "evil-doers." As we saw above, this was also interpreted as an effect of education, which appeared to undermine traditional authority.	29
To many British officials, however, it seemed clear that the failure of villagers to report crimes was related to the system of village adjudication. "Under Turkish administration," reported the chief commandant of military police in 1882, "the police were not in the habit of prosecuting, this duty being left to the injured party or his friends. There was grave reason to believe that this system led to compromises and condonements of offences against the public peace."37 And so the second problem for many villagers was the attempted elimination of village adjudication, which British officials tended to interpret as complicity. This was also sometimes seen as encouraging the "kidnapping" of herd animals, which were the most common reasons for such adjudication:	30
[W]hen an animal was lost the owner knowing or suspecting who had stolen it would employ a third person who would put himself in communication with one of the associated of the supposed thief and come to terms with him. The principals in the transaction, namely the person who has been robbed and the thief, never appear personally in the negotiation, which is carried on by agents on both sides. A sum of money being agreed upon, a place is named by the associate of the thief where the stolen animal will be found at such and such a time.38
This was apparently the common practice among shepherds themselves, often extended to what one British witness of the period calls the "perpetual feud between the owners of flocks and the tillers of the soil."39 In the latter case, however, the "tillers of the soil" clearly wished to use the new justice system not only to prevent crime but to eliminate pastoralists.	31
British officials thought the best way to deal with crime was increased efficiency in the collection of evidence and its prosecution. But Cypriots themselves clearly believed that the real solution lay in an adaption of local practice to the new legal system. Villagers and legislators alike suggested on many occasions that the most effective way of dealing with crime would be simply to confine the "bad characters," or those who were known by others to be "bad characters." In other cases, villagers suggested that villagers be made responsible for crime in the villages. In 1881, for instance, the commissioner of the Paphos district reported that "[i]t is not very long ago since I received petitions asking that the Mukhtar and Azas (headmen) [sic] of the village from whence the robbery had taken place might be imprisoned, as they know who the thieves were. Villages, too, have sent down a paper saying that so and so are the bad characters of their village, and requesting that they be imprisoned."40 In other words, many villagers believed that local practice should be enshrined in legal code. Controlling crime was not just a matter of policing but of putting crime in its proper social context.	32
In terms of legislation, this meant that Cypriot legislators called upon by British colonial rulers to deal with crime had to undertake an anthropology of village life that attempted to understand the social origins of crime. Legislation such as "The Field Watchmen's Law" and the "Malicious Injury to Property Law" had a profound impact on the structure of village life and on the capacity of the administration to penetrate it. The former provided for village police, requiring each village to appoint one of its own to patrol the fields at night and prevent sheep theft and injury to property. The latter ordered that remuneration for damaged property would be paid to the victim by the village as a whole if no arrest was made, and that the muhtar would be responsible for collecting the required amounts. It is notable that both these laws require the active participation of villagers and place the responsibility for any single villager's actions on the village as a whole.	33
The manifest goal of these and other laws was to identify "criminal elements" and to pressure their fellow villagers to use the legal system over which the British administration had control. Clearly, this form of pressure was based on the perceived communal nature of Cypriot identity, in which destroying reputation and public shaming were considered to be some of the most effective means of social and crime control. Another aim, of course, was to eliminate pastoralists, who were too difficult to assess and tax, and to encourage the stability and calculability of agriculture. It was not difficult to enlist Cypriot members of the Legislative Council for this purpose, since several of the Greek members were moneylenders with a vested interest in the stable continuation of agricultural production. In fact, one of these elected members proposed in 1897 an amendment to the "Malicious Injury to Property Law" that would expedite the collection of compensation, since, as the bill stated, "In some parts of the Island the Mukhtars have been unable or unwilling to collect the compensation."41	34
At the same time, there were important disparities between the British officials' and the Cypriot legislators' interpretation of the "nature" of Cypriots. In their many discussions of such matters, British officials clearly attributed culture to nature, seeing crime as a result of the "nature" of the Mediterranean hotblood, who was also controllable only by corporate means. On the other hand, most Cypriots—both legislators and villagers alike—clearly saw "nature" as something subordinate to, rather than productive of, society. This difference appears quite clearly in the persistent conflict between Cypriot legislators and British officials over the desire of British administrators to outlaw knives in public places and to control firearms. In 1911, the government proposed a new knives law that would have allowed for their seizure by the police. The Cypriot members of the council would not agree to this law but would agree to increase significantly the fines on persons caught carrying daggers at weddings, fairs, brothels, or licensed premises—significantly, virtually the only places where villagers and townspeople met. In commenting on this bill, the king's advocate noted, "It is a pity that the unofficial members of the Council could not be persuaded to carry the matter a little further but it is a fact and well known to them of course that to the uneducated Cypriots just as to other Mediterranean people the knife naturally takes the place of the fist or less dangerous weapon of other European nationalities."42 Knives were not just a convenient tool but a characteristic of the Mediterranean and its people.	35
In contrast, bills proposed by Cypriot legislators emphasized the ways in which "bad characters" should be reigned in by society—how nature should be controlled by culture. In 1909, for instance, a Greek Cypriot member of the Legislative Council proposed to draw up a law that would have allowed anyone to bring a charge against anyone else, saying that he is a dangerous person and should be incarcerated. "And if," the proposed bill stated,	36
after the issue of such an order against a certain person, the two thirds of the towns and villages commissions lying within thirty or forty miles from his usual place of abode seal and sign a petition to His Excellency the High Commissioner that such person must be confined, then this person to be arrested at once and confined and such a person to be set free, when the two thirds of the commissions aforesaid of such towns and villages seal and sign a petition to His Excellency the High Commissioner that the same person must get rid of such a confinement.43
This merely reflects in proposed legislation the persistent demand of many villagers for the confinement of "bad characters."	37
Moreover, those "bad characters" were both an intrinsic part of and a poison in village life. One instance of this is a bill brought forward on several occasions between 1911 and 1913 and eventually incorporated into another law. This bill, proposed by the Muslim members of the council, was cited as "The Dancing-Girls at Moslem Feasts Law, 1914." Its aim was to prevent women from singing and dancing at feasts, though it was aimed specifically at prostitutes and women who sang and danced professionally. In support of the bill, the legislators gathered letters of support from the elders of numerous villages, all of which cited dancing girls as the major source of evil and crime in Muslim villages. Said one,	38
Our local Govt. is aware of a great deal of troubles and crimes that take place on account of prostitutes going out to the villages during the course of a wedding. It is being witnessed with regret that the harm and devastation brought about by these ill famed women in material and virtual points such as health, morality and peace, are prevalent. We, therefore, pray for the kind assistance of the Govt. in reducing to law the Bill precluding the dancing-girls from attending weddings.44
Dancing girls, like "bad characters," poisoned the otherwise innocent villagers, who at the same time were all classified as equally susceptible to that same poison. While British administrators wanted villagers to report crimes to the police and to become more individually responsible as legal citizens, Cypriot legislators wanted moral codes committed to law.	39
Hence, the response of British administrators and Cypriot legislators alike to the increase in crime was to pass more laws, the effect of which was to classify the crime in villages as the crime of villages. Like most anthropologists studying the Mediterranean, both Cypriot legislators and British administrators saw violence in the villages as a matter of honor and shame,45 and they tried to obviate the expected problems of perjury and complicity through increased police penetration and penalties against the villages as a whole. Where they differed, however, was in their assessments of what this meant. As I remarked at the beginning, even as late as 1946, the chief justice concluded that jury trials were not suitable for Cyprus. He explained,	40
Racial and religious divisions among the population are extremely sharp. So are the divisions between different political parties and other factions, even when formed for an apparently common object. The grouping of people resulting from these various divisions and ties attracts a far stronger loyalty to a group from its members than they could at present be expected to show, either to the public interest or to justice to an individual not belonging to the group or between two or more individuals belonging to different groups.46
Mired in what anthropologists have called "amoral familism," Cypriots were just not ready for impartial justice that was not socially relative.	41
However, we can see that while British administrators emphasized the possibility of correction, to be enacted on persons as individuals in possession of certain rights and capacities, Cypriot legislators and villagers alike emphasized control, to be enacted on persons as members of communities and bearers of honor. Peter Berger has noted that the concept of honor "implies that identity is essentially, or at least importantly, linked to institutional roles."47 Berger asserts that honor is linked to others' view of one's capacity to fulfill what is expected of one in a particular institutional role. This seems to be what was at stake when certain villagers suggested to Bulwer in 1891 that "if a system of jury trial were introduced crime would be put down."48 This was not because these villagers thought that jury trials would be impartial; it seems clear that they did not. Rather, if the goal was social control, then partiality might actually be more effective than impartiality.	42
For British officials, it was important that the nature of Cypriots be controlled and submitted to an impartial justice, which would ultimately teach them the values of equality and individualism. For Cypriots, it was important that forces of chaos within the community be controlled. As such, lawlessness was not the breaking of abstract moral rules but a disengagement from the ethical control of society. As Messick noted in the passage quoted earlier, irreproachable character was linked not to a universalized, abstract morality but to one's capacity to fulfill one's proper social role. In sum, at this time there was an effort to control crime through a codification of an "essential" Cypriot identity that did not conform to standards of individualism. For British administrators, this presumed lack was something to be overcome if Cypriots could only break away from the ties of culture and custom. For Cypriot legislators, it was precisely those customs that should be enshrined in law.	43
Corporate but Equal
The equality of British justice, which led initially to a breakdown of traditional authority, was ultimately enshrined in law as a reflection of Cypriots' corporate nature. Whereas initially and in theory that corporate nature was the corporatism of the extended family and the village, at the same time the immediate breakdown of traditional authority was accompanied by the growth of a new form of corporatism: that of one's linguistic/ethnic group. The bad character was no longer the outcast and outlier of the village community but came to represent—in both British and Cypriot imaginings—the anti-citizen. Cypriots' continuing ambiguous relationship to that anti-citizen reveals, I believe, much ambivalence about their own transformation into citizens represented not by muhtars and aas but by "ethnic" leaders.	44
In order to understand further what the political consequences of these changes may have been, it is helpful to focus on the difference in British and local interpretations of what I have called here "corporatism." Clearly, this difference centered on the meaning of institutional roles and of what it meant to be "known" as a character within the community. It was precisely at this juncture of "knowing" that we can find the difference between British and Cypriot understandings of what it meant to be a person and a legal subject. For British officials, "bad characters" were any transgressors of public order, encompassing persons with "no visible means of support" as well as bandits. In addition, this category included town youths and members of the elite classes who stirred up trouble in protests against the administration. They were, in other words, all those who opposed the laws of the state. In the case of British officials, knowing the "bad characters" meant the capacity for surveillance—the capacity to "watch unceasingly" all those who might stir up trouble, as the officers' handbook makes clear. This is, I believe, a paradigmatic example of the type of surveillance that Foucault locates at the heart of Western governmentality.49`	45
This form of governmentality was tempered, however, by Cypriot villagers' often blatant refusal to subject "their" bad characters to the mechanisms of British justice. Their "knowledge" of bad characters was a relational knowledge, embedded also in mechanisms of social control. Paul Sant Cassia, for instance, puzzles over the popularity of banditry in Cyprus during this period and concludes that "bandit morals are embedded in, and indistinguishable from, the general morality of society."50 This certainly corresponds to the common anthropological view of the Mediterranean area that perceives violent crime as endemic to Mediterranean village life and certain kinds of crime as not only acceptable but necessary to maintain the social order. "Bad characters," then, were those who threatened the social order; as a sign of the anti-citizen, it was important that "bad characters" were both excluded from and an integral part of their society. It was precisely the bad characters' violent presence that marked the boundaries of the civilized community.	46
The most spectacular example of this is the activities of an audacious bandit gang that roamed the island in the same period, known to all and yet betrayed by none. They became the subject of a popular literature that alternately portrayed them as hooligans and heroes. They were the epitome of the anti-citizen, subject to no laws but their own, their popularity revealing the ambiguities in Cypriots' own definitions of what it meant to be both a "bad character" and a "good citizen." In the Ottoman period, many of those ambiguities came from the relational nature of one's legal subjecthood, which was based less on the notion of a unitary subject than on the notion of roles—as a father or mother, a Christian or a Muslim, a muhtar or priest, a trader or a craftsman. This clearly changed as a result of British legal practice, and understanding this change is important as background to an analysis of the ambiguous popularity of bandits and other bad characters in the period. We saw that villagers complained of the destructive effects of education. Education spread in the island during the period as a result of grants-in-aid for the establishment of schools, but this education was not significantly different from what had been in place before the British arrival. Rather, the explosion of print in these years, as well as the new status of writing, gave a novel power to those who had learned to command the languages of status, namely the written word. In turn, the citizen came increasingly to be defined as a Greek-speaking Greek Orthodox or Turkish-speaking Muslim legal subject.	47
Indeed, changes in legal status were directly associated with a new sort of clientelism based on writing rather than on traditional authority. More generally, villages that may never have seen a real Ottoman official were drawn into the web of British bureaucracy and began to be linked through government ties and the new print culture to places they had never imagined before. Taxes and village problems had before been mediated through the muhtar, who had his own networks and patrons to work for him in the hierarchy of government officials. But becoming the equal, taxable subject of a "constitutional" empire meant that one's case was decided not by a co-villager or a co-villager's patron but in the impersonal chambers of government "justice" where the facts and figures of the case were inscribed.	48
Indeed, within three decades of the British arrival, Cypriots had learned the importance of paper, and the various ties linking them to the capital had become a structure of interested middlemen, lawyers, and scribes who began to reshape politics on the village level. In fact, by 1909 the English district commissioners could complain that they never had time to visit the villages because of paperwork. For instance, the commissioner of the Nicosia district lamented that	49
apart from the work connected with the business of the Capital, there are 211 villages in the District, all more or less distracted by party quarrels, and the amount of office work arising out of the management of their affairs is enormous. The villagers have now been trained to make their complaints through their so-called leaders, and so have little or nothing to say by way of complaint if approached in their villages; they prefer to send in their complaints through advocates in town.51
One presumes that, given the commissioner's observations regarding village party quarrels, the "so-called leaders" were in fact party leaders, that is, nonelected ones. Indeed, it is clear from police reports of disturbances in the districts that it was not uncommon for representatives of the Nicosia leadership to be sent into the villages, where their arrival often was cause for violence.	50
Another indication of such increasing centralization was the close connection of village schoolmasters to political leaders in Nicosia. During an election for archbishop, for example, one of the contested villages was Lefkara, about which the district commissioner reported:	51
There was no doubt a disgraceful row at Levkara, but no one was really injured, and a prosecution would have led to a crop of perjuries, and much ill feeling.... Such rows are sure to recur at Levkara and elsewhere if the schoolmasters are allowed to interfere in village politics. In this case they were found with voting tickets already written containing the names of their nominees, which they tried to foist on illiterate voters, to the natural indignation of the other side.
Moreover, the issue of schoolmasters' political involvements repeatedly came before the boards of education, but none of the members were in favor of restraining the teachers. "This is natural," the chief secretary commented, "for the members it is my belief rely upon these schoolmasters to assist them in their elections for the Legislative Council, Education Committees, Medjliss Idare, etc."52 In other words, the direct result of this legal-bureaucratic penetration was a form of populist politics. This was, moreover, a populist politics and a legal-bureaucratic penetration that entirely depended on writing in what was supposed to be one's native language: the "high" Greek of Greece for Orthodox Cypriots and Ottoman Turkish for Muslim Cypriots. So at the same moment that Cypriots were increasingly inscribed as subjects of linguistic groups, the relative nature of village practices was in decline.	52
It is here, I believe, that we can begin to understand the importance of the ambiguous knowledge of "bad characters." "Bad characters" represented that part of the social self that was to be both remembered and forgotten, that part of identity that Michael Herzfeld terms "cultural intimacy": "the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of a common sociality."53 This appears to have been the primary reason for the popular fascination and titillation caused by the famous bandit gang known as the Hassanpoulia. While much of the literature on banditry has suggested that bandits are "primitive rebels" or are possessed of an inchoate political agenda,54 I wish to focus instead on the titillation of banditry and what I believe it indicated: the pursuit of freedom expressed in a conservative idiom.55	53
In order to see the relationship between banditry and identity, it may be useful to look at the close parallel in Greece. Koliopoulos has noted that in nineteenth-century Greece there were two parallel discourses regarding bandits: one asserted that bandits operating within the Greek state were not Greeks but were "Albanians, Vlachs, and residents of Turkey."56 Under this formulation, banditry in Greece itself was a foreign and transient phenomenon, while "the 'ethnos' was 'innocent'" and "had no reasons to fear the sullying of its honor."57 The second discourse, however, saw the bandits as heroes, associated both with the founding of the modern Greek state and with the attempt to reclaim "unredeemed" Greek territories from the Ottomans. In both state discourse and popular literature, it was said that these bandits "punished 'the crimes of the Ottomans' as well as 'traitors and Christians who were accomplices of the Ottomans.'"58 In this discourse, bandits were described as brave, handsome, patriotic, and haters of Turks .	54
The case in Cyprus was different, however. The most famous bandit gang, the Hassanpoulia, was dominated by Muslims, gained the support of wealthy Christian flock owners, and became a part of a popular literature written in Cypriot Greek.59 One such poem described the bandits as masters of disguise:	55
Hassanpoulia, Hassanpoulia, flying like birds, dressed in different clothes everyday, Greek today and Turkish tomorrow.60
The gang was so popular and well-supported that a special law, the Outlaws Proclamation Act of 1895, was passed by the Legislative Council to facilitate their capture, "extraordinary powers being given to the Executive to remove from the disturbed districts, persons suspected of assisting and harbouring the outlaws." The result was the arrest and imprisonment of the principal flock owners of the districts of Paphos and Limassol.61 When eventually captured, the gang was tried in another district to protect the witnesses, and when eventually executed, they were buried within the prison walls to avoid public displays.	56
In a special police report of 1896, it was noted that "they [the bandits] were responsible for 12 of the 17 murders reported in excess of last year together with many cases of attempts, wounding, rape, highway robbery, and animal stealing." Furthermore, "bad characters taking advantage of the temporary withdrawal of the Police for special services added to the list by going about armed and representing themselves to be the Poulis."62 The police themselves credited the law, rather than public support, for the gang's capture:	57
Until the Outlaws Proclamation Act was passed in 1895, it was found impossible to check the support afforded by the villagers, or to control the bad characters who made use of the Poulis for their own designs, but as soon as the law was in operation it did not take long to remove those persons who supplied the outlaws with food, clothing, arms, ammunition and money.63
What I believe particularly noteworthy here is not only the widespread public support but even the discussion in the police record of the manner in which "bad characters" took up arms and posed as members of the bandit gang.	58
In no discussions of these criminals has any significance been attached to the fact that they and their supporters were both Muslim and Christian, and that they were seen as changing their identity as they changed their clothes.64 Moreover, these bandits were very clearly identified with a certain age category known in Greek as the pallikári and in Turkish as . In one popular poem, for instance, the poet wishes his audience "to listen to how Hassanpoulis [the leader of the gang] was a pallikári."65 In general, the pallikári or is seen as a young man whose transgression of boundaries is permissible, because he is testing his manly strength. However, pallikári also came to have the meaning of fighter or soldier, which is how palikarya has entered Turkish as both a Greek ruffian and a Greek soldier.	59
This tension between the ruffian or criminal and the freedom fighter had a different valence in Cyprus than it had in Greece, at least at the turn of the twentieth century. The excitement caused by Cypriot banditry expressed in popular literature was related to a fluidity of identity that resisted legal-bureaucratic rationalization and expressed a "tradition" of transgression. This is very distinct from the later Greek Cypriot invocation of the pallikári in the nationalist movement of the 1950s, which aimed at evicting the colonizers and uniting Cyprus with Greece. Symbolically, there were many resemblances in the later anti-colonial struggle to the kléftes, or bandits, such as the fact that it was one of the first modern guerilla wars, in which very young men followed their leaders into the mountains, often living for extended periods in caves.66 In both cases, an appeal to "tradition" was used to justify violence: in the case of bandits, this was a living tradition of testing one's manhood through sheep theft and controlled lawlessness of the sort that British officials wished to root out. In the case of the anti-colonial fighters, this was an appeal to a glorified tradition of guerilla warfare that had also contributed to the independence of Greece.	60
The knowledge of "bad characters," then, was also a form of social solidarity and a way in which the bad character's opposite, the respectable citizen, was defined. This also meant, however, that knowledge of bad characters was relational insofar as the "bad character" was a social role that embodied a "tradition" of transgression. Committing the relational nature of this role to law and submitting it to evidentiary proceedings also entailed, I have argued, an inscription of the corporate nature of Cypriot identity. That corporate nature, moreover, was legally expressed in the script languages of two separate linguistic groups—Greek and Turkish—and ultimately dependent upon a new form of clientelism defined not by traditional authority but by writing. It is a longing for that traditional authority, I have suggested, that may have produced the extraordinary support for and popularity of a gang that so clearly defied inscription in the new legal categories. And yet it was those new legal categories that would contribute to the popular understanding of a new, and nationalist, pallikári who aimed not at the restoration of traditional authority but at the restoration of the invented traditions of the nation-state.	61
Conclusion
As in other colonized areas, the practices of law under British rule in Cyprus were neither fully liberal nor fully equal. However, the ideals of liberalism and equality under the law led both to a disintegration of traditional structures of authority and to new legal-political structures in which "equal" subjects were represented as "naturally" members of communities. This happened, I have argued, both because of local legislation that cast Cypriots as "naturally" possessed of certain traits or tendencies that were in need of correction, and also because the new structures of legal bureaucracy required that villagers depend upon the middlemen who linked them to elites in the towns. However, if equality under the law is codified not on an assumption of individualism but on an assumption of partiality and corporatism, what are the political results?	62
The corporatism of Cypriot political life throughout the twentieth century is a subject that has been much discussed in the literature on Cyprus.67 Indeed, one sociologist claims that "[t]his corporatization of political and civic life poses serious obstacles to the rationalization and modernization of the political culture and ethos of the Republic of Cyprus."68 Moreover, the same scholar argues that "[t]here appears to be a general reluctance to question accepted dogmas and to express individual opinions, with an implicit acceptance that only social groups or organized actors are legitimate sociopolitical actors."69 A similar phenomenon clearly exists in the Turkish community of Cyprus as well and, in both cases, is expressed in a unifying ideology of nationalism.	63
However, implicit in the analysis I have presented here is the suggestion that the uses of "corporatism" as an analytical category need to be problematized if we are to understand the strength of nationalism for the formation of identities in the island. Although I do not argue that the forms of legal-bureaucratic rationalization under British rule caused the current state of Cypriot politics, I do suggest that a careful examination of legal-bureaucratic practice under colonialism can help in understanding Cypriots' postcolonial problems. The ambiguities produced by this legal-bureaucratic experience can be seen in the figure of the "bad character," who defines the citizen by modeling the anti-citizen. Ultimately, the simultaneous attribution of corporate responsibility and expansion of forms of linguistic, bureaucratic representation had the effect of inscribing persons as members of linguistic groups. And it was in such a context that bandits might represent a dangerous, but titillating, form of freedom from the constraints of categories.	64
Rebecca Bryant is a fellow at the Society for Humanities, Cornell University <rb269@cornell.edu>. She gratefully acknowledges the support of the following foundations and institutions: the Social Science Research Council International Predissertation Fellowship; the United States Institute of Peace Jennings Randolph Fellowship; the Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship; the Institute for International Exchange/United States Information Agency Fulbright Fellowship; the University of Chicago Council for Advanced Studies in Peace and International Cooperation Summer Travel Grant; the Institute of Turkish Studies Dissertation Writing Grant; the Sawyer Seminar on Religion, Law, and the Construction of Identities Fellowship, funded by the Mellon Foundation; The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Program on Peace and International Cooperation Research and Writing Grant for Individuals; and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Notes 1. Standing Orders and Regulations of the Cyprus Police (Nicosia, 1896). 2. State Archive of the Republic of Cyprus (hereafter SA1) 1474/99, memorandum from Police Chief Chamberlayne to chief secretary, 2 June 1899. 3. SA1/302/1900, memorandum of Trooper Artemis Christodoulou to Limassol commissioner of police, 21 January 1900. 4. SA1/286/1909. 5. Vivek Dhareshwar and R. Srivatsan, "'Rowdy-Sheeters': An Essay on Subalternity and Politics," in Writings on South Asian History and Society, Subaltern Studies, 9 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 201–31. 6. What Dhareshwar and Srivatsan call "the excessive body of the rowdy" in opposition to "the disincoporated body of the citizen" (ibid., 223; emphasis in original). 7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977). 8. Ibid., 139. 9. The literature on British colonial legal and administrative practice is vast. Among those dealing with the questions addressed here, some of the most noteworthy are Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Bernard S. Cohn, "The Command of Language and the Language of Command," in Writing on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies, 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 276–329; and Bernard S. Cohn, "Law and the Colonial State in India," in History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology, ed. June Starr and Jane F. Collier (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 131–52; Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. 1 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991); and Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 10. Uday Singh Mehta, "Liberal Strategies of Exclusion," in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 59–86; quotation on 61, emphasis in original. 11. SA1/1122/1913, letter from chief justice to governor, 16 October 1946. 12. John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty," in The Essential Works of John Stuart Mill (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), 249–360. 13. SA1/1217/1891, Sir Henry Bulwer, High Commissioner, to Lord Holland, Secretary of State for the Colonies, August 17, 1891. 14. Report by Her Majesty's High Commissioner for 1887–8, "Report by the Chief Justice," June 27, 1888, p. 17. 15. Despite the rising fear of crime, however, no stigma was necessarily attached to elites jailed for a crime. Indeed, many of the elite class were jailed for crimes such as repeated libel or disturbance of the peace, and this appears to have been an accepted and ordinary part of dealings with the government. (See, for example, SA1/2136/1890, for the case of a jailed publisher applying to have the editorship of his newspaper changed during his imprisonment.) In fact, legislative council members proposed at one point to eliminate the penalty of hard labor for those jailed for certain types of nonviolent crimes. 16. Colonial Office Archive, London (hereafter CO67) 105/5846. 17. As, for example, when a shepherd might invite another to go to "eat roast meat," meaning that he invited him to go on a sheep-stealing expedition. See especially Michael Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Also see, for example, CO67/10162, 1886, for Cyprus. 18. The fact that the first local newspaper was produced in 1878 was a matter of coincidence and not directly associated with the arrival of the British. The first publisher, Theodhoulos Konstantinidhis, had already secured the permission of the Ottoman kaymakam of Larnaka and had brought printing equipment from Egypt by the time the British arrived. On this see Andreas K. Sofokleous, (Nicosia: Intercollege Press, 1995), 11. 19. , 17 February 1894. 20. Parliamentary Papers, 1887–1905, enclosure No. 20, Sir Henry Bulwer to Lord Knutsford, received April 13, 1891. 21. Ibid. 22. "" (The sentence of the priests), , 25 June 1879. 23. It was, no doubt, also known to many that the British were generally horrified by the state of the bodies and clothing of the village priests. The prison guard who shaved the priests in question claimed that they were lousy, while other officials speculated that villages chose the most disreputable and filthiest among them for the holiest position. 24. Quoted in Rolandos Katsiaounis, "Land, Labour, and Politics in Cyprus" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1996), 244. 25. Ibid. 26. SA1/1962/1897. 27. Whipping apparently was a widespread form of extortion and humiliation, as Juan Cole remarks that it was commonly practiced in Egypt in order to extract taxes from the peasants. See Juan Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt's 'Urabi Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 85–89. 28. Parliamentary Papers, 1887–1895, 51. 29. Ibid., 50. 30. See Sir George Hill, A History of Cyprus, vol. 1, The Ottoman Province: The British Colony, 1571–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 207–9; and Cyprus Annual Reports for 1879, p. 195. 31. Until recent years, most Ottoman historians had followed the millet thesis in suggesting that the legal and limited political autonomy of the millets, or religious communities, of the Ottoman domains led to a relatively strict separation of those religious communities and formed the basis for later nationalist uprisings. However, as recent research has shown, this "foundation myth" of the Ottoman state constitutes a much later projection into the past of an institution that appears actually to have taken full shape only in the middle of the nineteenth century. Especially good examples of this literature include Najwa Al-Qattan, "Dhimmis in the Muslim Court: Legal Autonomy and Religious Discrimination," International Journal of Middle East Studies 31.3 (1999): 429–44; Benjamin Braude, "Foundation Myths of the Millet System," in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (London and New York: Homes and Meier Publishers, 1982), 1:69–88; Daniel Goffman, "Ottoman Millets in the Early Seventeenth Century," New Perspectives on Turkey 11 (1994): 135–58; Reat Kasaba, "Izmir 1922: A Port City Unravels," in European Modernity and Cultural Difference from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean, 1890's–1920's, ed. Leila Fawaz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Kasaba notes that "[b]efore that time Ottoman society had resembled a kaleidoscope of numerous, overlapping and cross-cutting relations and categories more than it did a neatly arranged pattern of distinct elements" (Kasaba, "Izmir 1922," 9). In Cyprus, as elsewhere, an independent Christian court did not develop, and religious minorities often sent cases of personal status to the shari'a court, where they were judged by the local kadi. For early Ottoman rule in the island, see Ronald C. Jennings, Christians and Muslims in Ottoman Cyprus and the Mediterranean World, 1571–1640 (New York: New York University Press, 1993). For later periods there is scattered evidence in Hill, A History of Cyprus, as well as in documents relating to the British occupation. Politically, however, the archbishop enjoyed special privileges, such as the right to use the local police force to collect tithes from his congregation. Other church privileges, such as its autocthony, were preserved from the early Byzantine period. 32. The Ottoman legal reforms of the nineteenth century were part of a general restructuring and "modernization" of the imperial administration. For standard accounts, see Roderic H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–1876 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); and Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2, Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 33. Cyprus Annual Report for 1883; also C. W. J. Orr, Cyprus under British Rule (London: R. Scott, 1918), 114–20. 34. In its initial form, this body was composed of the high commissioner plus not less than four and not more than eight other members, half being official and half unofficial. After complaints from the Cypriot population and an extensive report to the Colonial Office, the constitution was granted and the Legislative Council reorganized. 35. CO67/13/18868/Biddulph 332, 10 August 1880. 36. Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 161. 37. Cyprus Annual Report for 1882, Report by Chief Commandant of Military Police, A. Gordon. 38. Parliamentary Papers for 1887–1895, No. 21, Sir Henry Bulwer to Sir H. T. Holland, Enclosure 1, Minute by the High Commissioner on subject of the Prevalence of Crime in the Paphos District. 39. Orr, Cyprus under British Rule, 76. 40. Cyprus Annual Report for 1881, Report by Arthur Young, Commissioner of Paphos. 41. CO67/13260, enclosure in despatch no. 136 of 9 June 1897. 42. CO67/21628, Enclosure no. 2 in Cyprus despatch no. 110 of 22 June 1911; Report on a law "To Amend the Knives Law of 1888," John A. Bucknill, King's Advocate, 12 June 1911. 43. SA1/1468/1909. 44. SA1/725/1912. 45. There is an enormous literature on honor, shame, and violence in Mediterranean societies. Among the earliest and best known of these are John Campbell, Honour, Family, and Patronage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964) and John G. Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). For the "classic" perspective on these problems, see also Jacob Black-Michaud, Cohesive Force: Feud in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, with a foreword by E. L. Peters (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975); Jeremy Boissevain, "Towards a Social Anthropology of the Mediterranean," Current Anthropology 20.1 (1979): 81–93; John Davis, Peoples of the Mediterranean: An Essay in Comparative Social Anthropology (London: Routledge Kegan and Paul, 1977); David Gilmore, ed., Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1987); M. J. Giovannini, "Female Chastity Codes in the Circum-Mediterranean," in Gilmore, ed., Honor and Shame, 61–74; Jane Schneider, "Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honor, Shame and Access to Resources in Mediterranean Societies," Ethnology 10 (1971): 1–24; and Paul Stirling, Turkish Village (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965). For more critical perspectives on the importance of the "honor and shame complex" and on the presumed unity of the Mediterranean, see Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Stanley Brandes, "Reflections on Honor and Shame in the Mediterranean," in Gilmore, ed., Honor and Shame, 121–34; Victoria A. Goddard, "From the Mediterranean to Europe: Honour, Kinship, and Gender," in The Anthropology of Europe: Identity and Boundaries in Conflict, ed. Victoria A. Goddard, Josep R. Llobera, and Cris Shore (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 57–92; Michael Herzfeld, "Honour and Shame: Problems in the Comparative Analysis of Moral Systems," Man 15 (1980): 339–51, and "The Horns of a Mediterraneanist Dilemma," American Ethnologist 11.3 (1984), 439–54; João Pina-Cabral, "The Mediterranean as a Category of Critical Comparison: A Critical View," Current Anthropology 30.3 (1989), 399–406; and Frank Henderson Stewart, Honor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For the most succinct analysis of honor and shame in Cyprus, see John G. Peristiany, "Honour and Shame in a Cypriot Highland Village," in Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame, and "Introduction to a Cyprus Highland Village," in Contributions to Mediterranean Sociology, ed. J. G. Peristiany, Acts of the Mediterranean Sociological Conference, Athens, July 1963 (The Hague: Mouton, 1968). 46. SA1/1122/1913, letter from Chief Justice to Governor, 16th October 1946. 47. Peter Berger, "On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honour," in Liberalism and Its Critics, ed. Michael J. Sandel (London: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 149–58; quotation, 154. 48. Parliamentary Papers, 1887–1895. 49. Foucault, Discipline and Punish. For an overview of Foucault's analysis of the role of policing and security in the liberal state, see Colin Gordon, "Government Rationality: An Introduction," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1–51. 50. Paul Sant Cassia, "Banditry, Myth, and Terror in Cyprus and Other Mediterranean Societies," Comparative Studies in Society and History 35 (1993): 773–95; quotation, 784. 51. SA1/388/1909. 52. SA1/442/1900. 53. Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. 54. Especially the two major works by E. J. Hobsbawm on the subject, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Norton, 1959) and Bandits (England: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969). For other, anthropological views that draw on the literature on the Mediterranean, see especially Anton Blok, "The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered," Comparative Studies in Society and History 14.4 (1972), 494–505; and Sant Cassia, "Banditry, Myth, and Terror," "Bandits," in Encyclopedia of European Social History, from 1350–2000 (2000), 3:373–82, and "'Better Occasional Murders than Frequent Adulteries': Banditry, Violence and Sacrifice in the Mediterranean," History and Anthropology 12.1 (2000): 65–99. 55. Blok draws similar conclusions when he remarks that "[t]he myth of the bandit (Hobsbawm's social bandit) represents a craving for a different society, a more human world in which people are justly dealt with and in which there is no suffering." He further notes that bandits are essentially conservative and that "actual brigandage expresses man's pursuit of honour and power." Blok, "The Peasant and the Brigand," 494–503. 56. Ioannis S. Koliopoulos, (1905 ) (Thessaloniki: Paratiritis, 1996), 250. 57. Ibid., 251. 58. Ibid., 259. 59. Cypriot Greek is quite distinct from what is known as Standard Modern Greek, i.e., Athenian Greek. Moreover, in the period before nationalisms in the island began to demand linguistic homogenization, it was quite common for Muslims to speak Cypriot as their first language, and many well-known, Muslim folk poets composed in Cypriot. For examples of the latter, see Mahmut , Türk Kültür ve : (Nicosia: Yakin Üniversitesi , 1994). 60. Quoted in Katsiaounis, "Land, Labour, and Politics in Cyprus." 61. CO67/105/5846, Annual Report of Paphos District, 1895–96. 62. Ibid., report from police headquarters, 17 July 1896. 63. Ibid. 64. I should note here that in the most thorough discussion of this particular gang of Cypriot bandits, Katsiaounis, "Land, Labour, and Politics in Cyprus," marshals considerable evidence to make the claim that widespread poverty in this period must have been responsible for a considerable part of the crime. In this regard, he sees the Hassanpoulia as akin to Hobsbawm's "primitive rebels." However, this does not seem to be a sufficient explanation for crimes in the villages, given the considerable evidence that villagers saw the "bad characters" who committed crimes as an intrinsic part of village life. Moreover, "bad characters" were often supported by or related to powerful persons in the villages. Bulwer comments, for instance, that at the village of Potamion, "[s]ome of the thieves are connected with the best families in the village, and are protected by them. Some are poor and steal on that account, but others are well-to-do and steal because it has become a habit with them." Parliamentary Papers 1887–1895. 65. "The Song of Hassan Poullis," by Chr. M. Tzapoura (1892), in K. G. Ghiangoullis, Corpus , (Nicosia: , 2001), 38. 66. Regarding this, one interesting publication by the union of former EOKA fighters, [Caves of EOKA], (Nicosia: EOKA, 1987), provides maps of the caves in which guerilla fighters hid. 67. See especially Demetrios Christodoulou, Inside the Cyprus Miracle: The Labours of an Embattled Mini-Economy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), and Caesar Mavratsas, "Greek Cypriot Economic and Political Culture: The Effects of 1974," in Cyprus and Its People: Nation, Identity, and Experience in an Unimaginable Community, 1955–1997, ed. Vangelis Calotychos (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1998), 285–300. 68. Mavratsas, "Greek Cypriot Economic and Political Culture," 285. 69. Ibid., 293.

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