In April 1931, Gaston Doumergue, the president of France (r. 1924-1931), travelled to Kairouan and attended a major touristic festival. The festival offered pay-per-view spectacles like the performance of Sufi rites and a “Grande Fantasia,” which featured a competition among tribal horsemen, a bridal ceremony, a camel troop raid, Arabic music, snake charmers, Black musicians, and magicians. The entrance fee for attending the Sufi rites was 5 francs and 10 francs for the Grande Fantasia. This festival was typical of “ethnographic” sightseeing, which, by 1931, was one of the main sub-sectors of Tunisia’s emerging tourism industry, alongside wintering and thermal stations, archeological sightseeing, automobile excursions, and cruises. 1931 marked 50 years since the founding of French protectorate in Tunisia. It was also an occasion to take stock of the concomitant rise of an organized tourism industry there—a reckoning that was chronicled in Le Journal des Touristes, a Tunis-based tourism trade magazine edited by the French journalist Armand Ravelet. Primarily drawing on accounts in this magazine that described the establishment of hospitality amenities and opportunities for ethnographic and archaeological sightseeing, I argue that this industry was a colonial-capitalist enterprise that advanced French imperialism in interwar Tunisia. Tourism was deeply intertwined with other colonial-capitalist enterprises built on extractive practices. Entrepreneurs active in the tourism industry often had experience in other industries like the transport, finance, and agriculture. And as with North Africa’s agricultural resources, colonial entrepreneurs justified their commodification of Tunisian natural resources—human and non-human alike—on the basis that Tunisians had failed to do so adequately for themselves. A colonial-capitalist enterprise, the modern Tunisian tourism industry was initially developed by colonists for colonists. This paper would thus aim to engage with histories of capitalism and scholarship critical of dominant modes of “economic development,” which have often done more to support colonial-capitalist projects of value extraction from colonized populations than to improve their socio-economic well-being.

Annual trading fairs have been an important part of social, economic, and cultural life in small towns across Turkey. Fairs (panayır, in Turkish, from the Greek panegyri) provide a rare opportunity for shopping and entertainment to the residents of small towns and villages. Women have always played vital roles in the fairs, not only as consumers, but also as fair merchants, vendors, and entertainers. The roles of women, especially Roma women, have been particularly pronounced in the entertainment sector of the fairs, from the singers and dancers in the “entertainment tent” to operators of the ring toss, penalty kicks, and the various games of chance. The earlier scholarship on the fairs mostly focused on the economic dimensions of the Ottoman-era fairs. In recent decades, scholarly interest in the fairs has grown some, led by a small number of geographers, folklorists, and historians. However, the role of women and gender in the fairs, especially the role of female Roma entertainers, is yet to be fully explored. Two recent articles in the Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association have touched on the subject within the context of the early republican history, but these studies did not extend beyond the 1940s. Drawing primarily on oral historical and ethnographic research conducted at five separate fairs in Thrace, the Western Black Sea, Marmara, and Aegean regions, this paper explores the place of women, particularly the role of female Roma entertainers, within the changing landscape of Turkey’s panayırs. The ethnographic method allows for documenting how the panayır entertainments function with the Roma women’s presence on the fairgrounds. The oral interviews enable the researcher to move from macro level questions to the micro level, bottom-up histories of everyday life at the fairgrounds. The oral narratives provide insights into the experiences and self-perceptions of the Roma women as women, wives, mothers, and entertainers. Their gender, along with their belonging to a historically and socially marginalized ethnic community, complicates the experiences of the Roma women and girls at the fairgrounds. While the focus is on the life-histories and micro analysis, the oral accounts especially with the older women also offer insights into the transformation of the panayır culture and entertainments since the 1970s. Reading these oral accounts in tandem with the oral narratives from panayır guests, memoirs, films, and photographs, this paper sheds light on the lives of panayır women and the changing gender dynamics at the fairs.

Coffeehouses emerge as vital keystones in the intricate urban mosaic of Damascus. Their significance extends far beyond their physical structures, embodying a rich cultural and social heritage that has shaped the city's recreational culture and urban identity over centuries. This research delves into the historical and architectural essence of Damascene coffeehouses, particularly “Al-Nawfara,” within the city walls, and “Bāb al-Salām,” a converted tannery outside the city, during the transformative 17th and 18th centuries. These establishments are pivotal in understanding Damascus’s urban landscape and socio-cultural dynamics. The study seeks to answer how these coffeehouses epitomize the cultural, social, and architectural narrative of Damascus, exploring their role in shaping the city's recreational culture and urban identity and as symbols of socio-political shifts. The thesis posits that these coffeehouses are reflecting the city’s historical evolution, socio-political shifts, and cultural heritage, marking them as integral components of the city’s identity. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, the research intertwines historical analysis with architectural examination, scrutinizing historical texts, architectural records, and contemporary accounts to trace the evolution of these coffeehouses and their socio-cultural significance. The findings uncover rich historical narratives and architectural details, revealing their transformation and the socio-political narratives they encapsulate, illustrating how their design choices mirror socio-cultural norms and the dynamic urban fabric of Damascus. The study concludes that Damascene coffeehouses are emblematic of the city's rich cultural and architectural heritage, offering unique insights into its historical and socio-cultural dynamics and advocating for the preservation of such cultural keystones, emphasizing their role in maintaining the socio-cultural fabric of urban centers.

Traditional and cultural spaces are important in the Gulf region due to their uniqueness and nostalgy that they bring to the collective memory. The importance of these spaces can be a good venue for networking between governments and ordinary people, which push for more cross-border cooperation and sometimes potential threats. This paper focuses on camel races, festivals, and markets in the Gulf, mainly Qatar and Saudi Arabia to understand how such tribal venues have become a source of discomfort, mobilisation, and political competition. The paper will focus on to what extent traditional spaces related to camels in the Gulf can be a source of mobilisation during the periods of political crisis and state-level competition. Process tracing and case study will be in place to refer the development of camel industry in the Gulf, which gives a chance to regional regimes to penetrate these venues for political gains. The plan is to understand how Saudi regime used cultural and traditional spaces (camels) to influence transnational tribes in Qatar to build leverage against their regime. Moreover, the paper will draw on information that the researcher already collected during fieldwork in Qatar between March and August 2021. The paper will be divided into three parts: placing the research within the ontological security literature, importance of camels for tribes and states, and the Gulf crisis and use of camel owners for mobilisation. Here, the goal of Saudi regime was not only about using its leverage over Qatari camel owners against their own government but extended to creating Saudi dominance in camel industry. The Saudi government has established the International Camel Organisation (ICO), which includes over 50 countries, and camel owners can get benefits for their membership. The ICO shows that the Saudi efforts to establish international and regional dominance over this cultural space. In contrast, Qatar has not yet become a member in the ICO and has also invested to have its own camel market and festival in addition to the races, which have started since 1970s. To understand these efforts to dominate the camel industry for political gains, the paper will combine the ontological security literature, which highlights the importance of understanding how and why regimes feel insecure about their self-identity, with the literature of transnational identity-building and cultural spaces. This paper’s main contribution is understanding the state-level competition over informal cultural spaces.

This paper broadly examines the practices and discourses within Algeria’s Islamist Movement for a Society of Peace (MSP) after the Algerian Civil War (1992-2002), in order to elucidate how political Islam moves beyond formal electoral contestation or observable acts of coordinated rebellion as it contends with shifting modes of authoritarian domination. Using ethnographic methods including observation of party meetings, informal conversations with members spanning multiple years, and semi-structured interviews, supplemented by text analysis of primary sources, media sources, and the movement’s social media discourse, this paper shows that instead of confronting the state and its institutions outright, the MSP members have turned to more subtle contentious acts, including appropriating the language and symbolism on which the state’s legitimacy historically relied. In particular, Algeria’s national scouting organization, the Algerian Muslim Scouts (SMA), is a site of these ongoing contests, as it continues to occupy a special place in the Algerian imagination for its religious-ideological, military, and educational-formational role in Algeria’s War of Independence—indeed as “soldiers of the Algerian future.” (Mahfoud Kaddache, 2003: 73) It is widely hailed as an heir of the revolution and an icon of Algerian authenticity. In addition to rendering it an iconic nationalist object, the SMA’s religious-military activities rendered it a space through which Algerianness was state-brokered and -monopolized. Mobilizing and establishing affinity with the historic SMA at the expense of the state—in most cases and localities, quite effectively—allowed the MSP to trespass on, resist, and appropriate components of the state's symbolic power and legitimacy without actively confronting the state’s coercive power. Through this investigation, this paper responds to the extant focus in both social movements studies and Islamist studies on upheaval, rebellion, and antisystem repertoires of contention—all of which have become culturally unavailable to Islamist movements in Algeria (a) after the civil war, wherein the state aggressively reconsolidated power through repression and anti-Islamist propaganda, and (b) amidst the shifting political-cultural landscape produced by the 1989 political opening.