Between the waves: Harvard Pigeon Lab 1955-1960

Six or more graduate students were active in and around the Pigeon Lab in the spring of 1955 and also in 1960, but when I arrived it the fall of 1955 there were none. Looking back in 2001 at that period I can appreciate the unique opportunity for research that I had, as well as the exceptional and productive groups of graduate students who had recently finished their study and research and those who would carry on the tradition of excellence.     

Macedonian Reforms and Muslim Opposition during the Hamidian Era: 1878-1908

This article investigates Muslim opposition to European reforms within the framework of the Macedonian Question as it developed between 1878 and 1908. Reforms granted to the Christian communities in the Macedonian provinces after the Berlin Treaty (1878) did not bring tranquillity but rather contributed to the escalation of the existing turmoil. In addition, the worsening situation and the diminishing role of the Ottoman administration as a result of European interference created concern, but more importantly caused an intensification of religious sentiment among the Muslims. As a result, various classes of Macedonian Muslims, urban and rural, peasants and professionals, joined forces to prevent a further decline in their circumstances by demanding reform to the central administration.     

From psychosocial equilibrium to catastrophic breakdown: Cyprus 1955-1974

The recent history of Cyprus presents an example of a society in which a centuries-long peaceful coexistence of diverse populations gave way to violence and murderous hate, with devastating end results. This paper tries to understand and describe the process by which Cypriot society slid from a position of psychosocial equilibrium and integration towards one of disintegration, fragmentation and catastrophic breakdown. This paper draws from work by social anthropologists, sociologists, historians and others, and from my own personal experience. To these I applied insights afforded by psychoanalysis to identify and explore the psychic processes and states of mind that characterized a psychosocial disintegrative process. I came to see external political events and internal psychological processes as inseparably intertwined and dynamically interdependent, each emanating from and catalysing the other. The factual details of the process described are of course unique in their local specificity, but the psychic phenomena that characterized it are not: at both the individual and group levels they are replicated in other societies undergoing similar processes of self-destruction.