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Lecture: "When they killed us”: The right side of history and its discontents.Abstract
The idea of a “right side of history” has dominated the public sphere, not least through heated debates on Palestine. This presentation discusses how a sense of a right side of history is formed, how it shapes people’s own historicity, and what it does to futurity. Looking at one community’s perennial versions of what is the “right” side of history, the paper explores the moralization of historical narrative, focusing on violent events. Based on interviews with communist and far-right elderly survivors of a low intensity civil war amidst the EOKA-led anticolonial insurgency against the British, the analysis zooms in the events of one specific day in a Cypriot village during the late 1950s. Ideas on who is right, by way of who has acted (im)morally in the moment and who is vindicated by events after the moment, underpin this historicity. The paper therefore explores the temporality of the right side of history, and argues that it is a bundle of rights that mobilise past, present, and future in a moral narrative. Indeed, the contested futurity built in anticolonial struggles regarding who is right and what is right still lingers in many contemporary communities, dividing them decades after decolonization.
Bio
Theodoros Rakopoulos is Professor at the Social Anthropology Department, University of Oslo. He is author of two monographs, From clans to co-ops: Confiscated mafia land in Sicily (external link), and Passport island: The market for EU citizenship in Cyprus (external link), editor of The global life of austerity (external link) and co-editor of Towards an anthropology of wealth (external link). He has published articles on conspiracy, sovereignty, citizenship, mafia, silence, betrayal, masculinity, personhood, cooperatives, austerity, crisis, and commodification in Current Anthropology, the JRAI, Social Anthropology, and many other journals. Theo generally works on economic and political anthropology in the Mediterranean. His current book project focuses on “weirding capitalism”, while he is also pursuing two ethnographic and oral history projects looking at Bektashis in the Balkans, and historical legacies of anticolonialism in Cyprus.
2:15-3:30, Fosswinckels Gat 6, Bergen, 9th floor seminar room.
All interested are welcome!
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Event venue
Fosswinckelsgate 6, 5007 Bergen, Norway, Fosswinckels gate 6, 5007 Bergen, Norge, Bergen, Norway
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