Theodoros Kyriakides

The magical idiom of evil occupies an important position in numerous Christian societies. Cosmological capture refers to a historicized process through which Christian narratives and institutions attempt to integrate evil into dualist and oppositional cosmological schemas. This article begins by addressing the way that biblical stories of defeated magicians contribute to modern dynamics of cosmological capture. It then proceeds to address the role of evil in Cypriot society through narratives and descriptions of everyday rituals and events. As these narratives and rituals show, capture remains incomplete, and as evil extends beyond the limits of dualist categorization, the result is a situation of 'magical disorder': a cosmological arrangement in which evil manifests as an indifferent and inhuman force, which nevertheless conditions everyday experience and social relations.

In this essay I attempt to draw some crucial theoretical parallelisms between ancient Greek cosmology and the Anthropocene. Taking inspiration from Marcel Detienne and Timothy Morton's work, I deploy the figure of Dionysus as a conceptual persona that can help us think of strangeness as a non-human trait that human societies in the Anthropocene must urgently engage with. Events such as the ongoing Covid-19 epidemic, through which non-humans are brought to the forefront of politics and social relations, traditionally result in attempts of sublating strangeness through human modes of knowledge. As I argue, epidemics instead demand the creation of mythic practices, collectives and techniques through which strangeness is not eliminated or understood but rather elevated to a fundamental feature of social relations. In such sense, Greek antiquity presents a critical vector of ethical and ecological intervention to the current state of the Anthropocene, because it showcases a cosmos in which human life and society are constantly embedded and negotiated amid non-human strangeness.

Thalassaemia is one of the most widespread recessive blood disorders in the world. This article focuses the historical trajectory by which the Cypriot thalassaemia prevention system, one of the most successful of its kind, achieved full prevention rate. By tracing the history of decision-making of medical practitioners central to the construction of the prevention system, my objective is to further elucidate underlying logics of policy-making and health governance which can account for its success. As I suggest, the Cypriot thalassaemia prevention system achieved a full prevention rate because it operated according to a 'slow' modality of problematisation and decision-making, which accounted for the cultural, social and ethical dimensions specific to the Cypriot public.

Our research explores the contemporaneity of magical thinking in Cyprus and Orkney. By historically and ethnographically addressing the gradual dissolution of magical traditions in our respective fieldsites, our aim is to explore the means and instances by which magical thinking nevertheless continues to manifest in narratives and everyday practices of people living in Cyprus and Orkney. In addition, by exploring the current epistemological and social standing attributed to magic in Cyprus and Orkney societies, we wish to enrich anthropological understandings of the manner by which magical thinking operates in modernity. We approach such objectives by critiquing the implicit suggestion contained, but often not articulated or theorised within anthropological literature, that humans 'know' magic. Through our ethnography, we attempt to show that magical thinking in these two islands does not persist through the ability of people to understand or rationalise magic as a thing of the past, but rather emerges through an awareness of historical, social, and cognitive incompleteness, accumulated and contained within dormant magical memory. We hence wish to identify and further theorise a central tenet of magical thinking, which grants it contemporary status: the unknowability contained and nourished in social and cognitive processes, through which the possibility-future and past-of magic is thought of and narrated in disenchanted worlds. As we suggest, it is exactly such incomplete character which grants magic its current form and potency.

This article explores mystical belief and disbelief in Jeanne Favret-Saada's ethnography of Bocage witchcraft in relation to the ontological turn in anthropology. The ethnographic archive provides numerous examples in which natives display seemingly contradictory practices of belief and disbelief when it comes to mystical forces. A common way by which anthropologists deal with such contradictions is to attempt to explicate their social function and cultural significance. In doing so, they perceive belief and disbelief to be cognitive states of clarity. Favret-Saada differs in her approach since she apprehends mystical belief and disbelief to be ambivalent and connected and, as I argue, portrays it as being caught in a perilous arrangement of death. In order to convey these points, I compare her ethnographic work to that of E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Rane Willerslev. The article goes on to analyze Favret-Saada's minimal ontology of the opaque subject and how it can inform ontological anthropology.

This article explores tactics as political technologies in the context of health and patient activism. It does so by exploring how the PanCyprian Thalassaemia Association––a thalassaemia patients association situated in Cyprus––opposed a medical rationing scheme imposed by the Cypriot government and managed to overturn the decision. I make the case that " tactics, " for patient associations, are practices capable of rendering the political problematics of their illness visible to public and governmental perception, and propose four tactics by which the PTA was able to achieve such task. By putting the given event in conversation with STS and anthropological literature the article attempts to productively entangle tactics in their empirical and conceptual guises. This serves a twofold purpose: That of putting together a repertoire of practices which patient associations can use to conduct politics, and that of facilitating connection between patient associations through these proposed practices. The article concludes with some more general considerations regarding an empirical-conceptual project on tactics.

This essay connects the practice of stillness to David Graeber’s concepts of imaginative labour and immanent imagination. It makes the proposition that stillness should not be evaluated as lack of activity or movement, but rather attended to in its pragmatic and productive dimensions. The essay thus explores stillness as a potential mode of production of imagination and means of political transformation: in order for it to be meaningful, we need to reconfigure our relationship to stillness as one of imagination, resistance, thinking, and writing.