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Gender and Ottoman Social History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2014

Başak Tuğ
Başak Tuğ*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, and Europe in the Middle East/The Middle East in Europe Fellowship Program, Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin; e-mail: basak.tug@bilgi.edu.tr
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Extract

Starting with Said's critique of Orientalism but going well beyond it, poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques of modernity have challenged not only one-dimensional visions of Western modernity—by “multiplying” or “alternating” it with different modernities—but also the binaries between the modern and the traditional/premodern/early modern, thus resulting in novel, more inclusive ways of thinking about past experiences. Yet, while scholars working on the Middle East have successfully struggled against the Orientalist perception of the Middle East as the tradition constructed in opposition to the Western modern, they often have difficulties in deconstructing the tradition within, that is, the premodern past. They have traced the alternative and multiple forms of modernities in Middle Eastern geography within the temporal borders of “modernity.” However, going beyond this temporality and constructing new concepts—beyond the notion of tradition—to understand the specificities of past experiences (which are still in relationship with the present) remains underdeveloped in the social history of the Middle East.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2: Politics of Benevolence , May 2014 , pp. 379 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 Jennings, Ronald C., “Women in Early 17th Century Ottoman Judicial Records—the Shari'a Court of Anatolian Kayseri,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 18 (1975): 53–114Google Scholar; idem, “Kadi, Court and Legal Procedure in Seventeenth Century Ottoman Kayseri,” Studia Islamica 48 (1978): 133–72; Gerber, Haim, “Social and Economic Position of Women in an Ottoman City, Bursa, 1600–1700,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 12 (1980): 231–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Economy and Society in an Ottoman City: Bursa, 1600–1700 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1988).

2 İslamoğlu-İnan, Huri, Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East and West (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004)Google Scholar; Deringil, Selim, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (2003): 311–42Google Scholar.

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5 Hamadeh, Shirine, The City's Pleasure: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Esmer, Tolga, “Economies of Violence, Imperial Governance, and the Socio-Cultural Dimensions of Banditry in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1800,” Past & Present 224 (forthcoming, August 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 For social history, see Jennings, “Women in Early 17th Century Ottoman Judicial Records”; Haim Gerber, “Social and Economic Position of Women”; Faroqhi, Suraiya, “Crime, Women, and Wealth in the Eighteenth-Century Anatolian Countryside,” in Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era, ed. Zilfi, Madeline C. (Leiden: Brill, 1997)Google Scholar; and idem, Stories of Ottoman Men and Women: Establishing Status, Establishing Control (Istanbul: Eren, 2002). More explicitly feminist works include Tucker, Judith E., In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Peirce, Leslie, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Semerdjian, Elyse, “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

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13 Scott, Joan, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 2Google Scholar.