According to Jacques Ranciere, aesthetics is bound up in the struggle for the political order and is therefore closely related to questions of power. On the social level, Pierre Bourdieu investigates the role of taste in ordering and giving content to class distinctions. In a more directly political sense, Leora Auslander argues that taste also finds expression in the ways political regimes try to use taste not only to express, but also to construct power. Given the range of interpretations it encompasses, the history of taste has the potential to bring together political, economic, and social histories, illuminating the struggles over power that range from struggles over state control, economic transformations, and intellectual and cultural production.
This panel investigates the politics of taste in the Middle East in a comparative framework. In the Middle East, just like elsewhere, from the eighteenth century the notion of "taste" (dhawq in Arabic, tat/tabi/at/lezzet in Ottoman Turkish, tat in modern Turkish) began to play a role directly related to what it meant to be part of the modern world. The uses of taste went beyond Bourdieu's notion of "distinction" and related processes of class-formation, group-identities, fashion, and consumption habits. Taste was also central in delineating scopes of social mobilization and action through cultural and material production.
Each of the presentations in the panel looks at a different set of cultural artifacts or products in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt: houses, everyday commodities, operas, and intellectual products. Through their different focuses, the various presentations deal with overlapping questions: What is the relationship between individual tastes and collective trends and fashions? What effect does mass production have on tastes? What role do states and governments play in controlling or shaping taste? To what extent do intellectuals or state authorities exercise a cultural hegemony over taste? How do tastes spread? And what are the potentials and limits for the popularization of certain tastes? Spanning a range of cities that were central to articulating the tastes of the time (Istanbul, Cairo, Izmir/Smyrna, and Beirut), the panel aims at a more general view of the function of taste in translating, understanding, and experiencing the modern world.
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Mrs. Deniz Turker
In the immediate aftermath of Tanzimat, the newly transformed bureaucracy found its architectural representation in imposing, monumental, kargir (stone and brick construction) structures with their visibly Beaux-arts blueprints. The household preferences of its members, however, turned towards light and heavily surface-treated pavilion constructions. The typologies of these timber domestic structures resembled not only the ur-form of the Ottoman house-type that balanced out the harem and selaml?k quarters evenly around a sofa (an anteroom), but in their rapid construction methods and prop-like appearances they participated in the world of international exhibitions. The fad for a novel house, built quickly and each with its unique patternbook expression – and indeed, chosen from among these globally circulating catalogues — not only begun the trend for country estates in various Istanbul neighborhoods, but also spoke of stylistic competition as a measure of status and affluence among the bureaucrats and the palace elite in an increasingly volatile political era. Rapidly changing styles and access to these trends were the measure for urban class distinction.
This paper will investigate the late-nineteenth century Ottoman taste for ephemeral architecture. It will attempt to place the development of and preference for this particular taste within an urban culture used to debilitating fires as well as earthquakes. It will also try to understand how Ottoman builders used novel modes of prefabrication as techniques for fast building as not only the homes but their garden accoutrements such as orangeries to miniature pleasure pavilions evidence such practices. The sources for these largely non-extant garden complexes will range from equally novel photographs and architectural catalogues as well as intriguing newspaper advertisements and Ottoman memoirs.
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Dr. Julia Phillips Cohen
This talk will explore the ways that late Ottoman Jews came to define themselves as oriental through their engagement with “oriental” products, both within the empire and beyond its borders. Moving from a carpet shop in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar to the streets of Chicago and from dance halls to the interiors of Ottoman Jews’ homes, this talk explores the themes of performative identity, Orientalism, patriotism, and purchasing power in order to better understand how late Ottoman Jews fashioned themselves alaturka through their engagement with material culture. It is equally concerned with asking the following questions: how, when, and where did Ottoman Jews come to think of themselves as “easterners” and in which respects did this self-ascriptive identity coincide with their consumption habits or occupational profiles? Although much has been made of Middle Eastern non-Muslims’ propensity to “westernize” during the modern era, my talk will ask how Ottoman Jews’ expressions of taste for things oriental helped them announce their local, class, and imperial identities, to Ottoman and foreign audiences alike.
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Dr. Toufoul Abou-Hodeib
With Beirut's growth in the second half of the nineteenth century into a leading port city on the eastern Mediterranean seaboard, the consumption habits of its inhabitants changed. In addition to trends and commodities reaching it from places such as Damascus and Aleppo, it was subjected to an influx of cheap, mass-produced goods from the industrialized countries of Europe. The press was soon replete with articles admonishing the widespread focus on appearances among the middling classes of the city and criticizing their obsession with novelty. Consecutive French consular trade reports giving advice to potential French exporters echo these sentiments, describing prevalent tastes as “garish”, “showy”, and “loud”.
In trying to understand what these tastes involved, this paper looks at a layer of labor that both catered to and contributed to constructing new tastes in Beirut. Mass-produced commodities competed with local and regional products, which they often copied. Local and regional artisans and manufacturers attempted to survive the onslaught of cheap imports by adapting their products both to imported styles and to imported materials. In doing so, they not only responded to a growing fascination with certain popular items, but also offered hybridized goods that ready-made commodities could not compete with. Although such manufactured articles may have appeared grotesque to some, they managed to successfully compete with mass-produced commodities and to carve out a local taste niche. I argue that this taste niche not only helped local manufacture to survive, it also catered to the need of a growing group of consumers to partake of the myth of social mobility that Beirut had to offer.
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Dr. Adam Mestyan
R. Bereson called a technique of late-nineteenth-century ceremonial rule ‘operatic state’. This means the use of the theatre, typically an opera house, for the ruler’s representation that functioned as means of announcing political legitimacy. During a performance in a royal/state opera house the audience, a target of political ideology and aesthetic recreation, was caught between the ruler’s lodge, the stage, and the content of the play. On the other hand, the audience was composed of various individuals who by going to the theater actively acquired a common grammar of behavior and often sought such occasions as rituals of self-transformation and expressions of class consciousness or an imagined political community.
This presentation focuses on the first decade of the British occupation in Egypt (1882-1892). As a case study of ceremonial rule, I argue that during this period the controversial Khedive Tevfik could exercise his monarchical powers only in the field of culture. One particular feature of such restricted, symbolic rule were the selected theater plays in Arabic in the Khedivial Opera House in the hope of creating a loyal cultural expression to the dynasty. Ultimately, the performances of these plays became occasions of political demonstrations – anti-British, pro-Ottoman, or pro-khedivial. Whatever were the political sympathies of particular members of the audience, contemporary press-reports described the participants as wataniyyin, patriots, thus transmitting an idea of what I call ‘monarchical patriotism’. This peculiar means of political legitimacy and community building, as expressed in the setting of a hierarchical space – an opera house – also entailed to the formation of a new habitus that started to function as a social marker. In this way, the interplay between aesthetics, political legitimacy, and class-differentiation embodied in a new shape of taste in the laboratory of the Khedivial Opera House.
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Mr. Benjamin Geer
In the early 20th century, Egyptian effendi intellectuals used nationalism to introduce tastes in new types of literature, cinema, music, and journalism into Egypt. To this end, they constructed a nationalism that portrayed them as ideally qualified to be the nation's guides, in contrast to the clergy, whose qualifications they devalued. Thus the promotion of nationalist tastes not only advanced effendi intellectuals' careers by creating demand for their products; it was also a strategy in a broader struggle among Egyptians over prestige, credibility, and economic interests. This struggle was carried out in the pages of novels and essays, in political conflicts over educational policy, in courtrooms, and in the streets. The nationalism that emerged from this struggle, and became part of respectable mainstream tastes, increasingly resembled religion, and helped legitimize military dictatorship in the 1950s.
