During the late Ottoman period, individuals and groups which deemed to be deviant, marginal, irregular, and abnormal in the eyes of the authority and public were to be policed, medicated, removed, and punished based on the contemporary understandings of being a "proper subject." This panel explores the multiplicity of marginalities and marginalizations by bringing together papers focusing on lower-class female mobility, disease, poverty, religious persecution, and female madness in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on Ottoman state documents, communal records, literary texts, local press, and missionary records. Spatial, corporeal, and literary approaches employed in these papers enable us to re-read elite sources and narratives critically, challenge the idealized notions of imperial and communal identities, and determine the ways in which marginality was embodied and enacted in historical settings. This panel focuses on three questions: What constituted the margin? How did marginal bodies move and take up space? How did authorities respond to these unruly bodies?
The marginal members of the late Ottoman Empire have long remained on the margins of their societies as well as the margins of Ottoman and Middle East historiographies. With the aim of rescuing these individuals and groups from their isolation, this panel links them to spaces of everyday life and political context through empirically grounded readings of wide-ranging processes across time and space. Thus, this panel reframes the structures of social identities while expanding the narrowly conceived interpretations of margins in the late Ottoman context. This panel makes two arguments. First, rather than as spaces of isolation, both discursive and material spaces of marginality were decentered sites of state-society relations, intracommunal and intercommunal interactions, collaboration, and conflict. Second, marginal bodies cannot be understood as ahistorical objects since marginals were products of the very social and political arrangements of the historical period itself. Charting changes and continuities in practices concerning marginality not only as disconnected vignettes but rather as testimonies to the lived reality through marginals' agency and subjectivity, papers on this panel reframe the modern Ottoman experience from the margins. While joining the growing discussion on new theoretical and methodological terrains for the study of marginal identities in the Ottoman realm, this panel not only offers a nuanced image of history from below but also illuminates complexities of local and regional societies within a rapidly modernizing empire.
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Canan Bolel
Within the late-imperial framework, the public space emerged as a dynamic political realm in which various groups existed through bodily performances grown out of their social identities. Concurrently, public space was embraced by the public domain where imperial authority was constituted over the differentiation between legitimate and illegitimate practices. While the public realm became the locus for defining, describing and monitoring the appropriate central type and the socially abnormal and deviant characters, the public awareness of marginals intensified, and the body became the primary material of discourse and the main site of intervention. Accordingly, throughout this period, treating the body as something of a crisis was a common practice since it was believed that unruly and inappropriate bodies required repairing and disciplining. This paper explores the treatment of Jewish cholera patients and regulation of their mobility in Izmir during the cholera epidemics of 1865, 1893, 1910, and 1911. Through a corporeal analysis of the medical and social significance of cholera for the Jews of Izmir, this paper seeks to answer the following questions: What was the understanding of contagion of cholera among Jews and how did it shape their interaction with non-Jews? How did central and local Ottoman authorities and local Jewish leaders deal with the diseased Jewish body? Finally, what kind of histories of cholera in the late Ottoman context can be written using the archives despite the absence of personal testimonies of the patients? Drawing on Ottoman state sources, Jewish communal records, Turkish and Ladino press, and popular Ottoman and European medical literature of the period, I argue that both medical and social implications of cholera epidemics were embedded in discourses of modernization and civilization in the late Ottoman Izmir. Especially the medical discourse concerning diseased Jews was not limited to treatment of the disease, but it was also extended into social issues, racial configurations, and spatialized understandings of the epidemic. This paper contributes to discussions of historical geographies of epidemics while analyzing the social order within an Ottoman urban context which was based on a firm distinction between the healthy and contaminated. This study on cholera-stricken Jews of Izmir gives voice to the excluded members of the community who have long remained on the margins of a minority, as well as the fringes of urban reality.
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Amaan Merali
The late Ottoman Empire was legally pluralistic. The complementary fora from which Ottomans could seek justice comprised new civil and criminal courts alongside shari’a courts; greater legal standardization and regulation through codices; and recourse to the constitution after 1908. Still, many subjects looked to the sovereign as final arbiter of justice and the longstanding practice of petitioning the sultan remained extremely popular. This paper examines the context and content of a selection of petitions from a cache in the Ottoman archives written by the Shi’i Nizari Ismailis of Greater Syria between 1909 and 1911. The petitions are the only extant Ismaili correspondence with the state at a time when their relationship had changed for the worse. To be sure, the Ismailis did face some religious persecution throughout the centuries of Ottoman rule – narratives of which have made sectarianism and victimisation commonplace in Ismaili literature. This change, however, was largely one of imperial politics precipitated by the Ismailis’ recent recognition of a British Empire loyalist residing in Bombay, the Aga Khan III, as their imam. Their association with the Aga Khan led officials to suspect collusion with a foreign power, something subsequent trials would affirm. Seen to be a fifth column, the Ismailis suffered at the hands of rapacious provincial officials who extorted property and valuables from them and imprisoned their notables. Already having been failed by the courts, the Ismailis responded by petitioning the sultan. Ministers in Istanbul considered the petitions, and took some action, but ultimately the promises of the constitution were left wanting. This paper has several implications for the study of state-society relations within the framework of late Ottoman law and legality. Broadly, it highlights the continued importance of the petition as an official means to redress injustice. It also questions the independence of the Ottoman Ministry of Justice in light of other ministries’ policies, especially those related to foreign meddling. More specifically, it provides the only first-hand accounts of Ismaili articulations of justice and rights in the second constitutional era. By looking at these petitions in local and imperial contexts, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the changing dynamics between the Ottoman state and the Ismailis, suggesting it was not sect that cleaved relations but imperial politics writ large.
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Dr. Nefise Kahraman
My paper examines the references to nerves and the nervous system in the works of Ottoman-Turkish author Halid Ziya Usakligil (1866-1945), and how these references and associated imagery impacted public perception at the time. In many cases, it was the female characters in Usakligil’s works that were stricken by nervous illnesses effectively marginalizing woman as the weaker sex. Aside from this simplistic engendering of nerves, I dig deeper into Usakligil’s works to determine whether diseases of the nervous system disproportionately impacted different socioeconomic classes at that time. My paper also focuses on the metaphors Usakligil draws on to construct the images of nerves. In his novels, nerves often attack people, poison them and claim lives. His emphasis on nerves and the potential threats they pose are striking. I argue that Usakligil borrows from the narratives of contagious diseases while medicalizing and analogizing nerves. This observation inspired me to raise the following questions: Where does this language come from? In other words, what might have motivated Usakligil to rely on the language of contagion? Were nervous illnesses deemed contagious at the turn of the twentieth century in the Ottoman Empire? Does Usakligil refer to an external reality when he chooses to compare nerves to contagious diseases? Last but not least, what kind of fictional possibilities might have Usakligil harnessed through the language of contagion? To be able to answer these questions, I focus on Usakligil’s early novels often clustered as his Izmir novels: Nemide (1889), Sefile (1887), Bir Ölünün Defteri (1889), Ferdi ve Surekâsi (1894). My paper, standing at the intersection of medicine and literature, seeks to contribute to the field of Medical Humanities from a non-Western perspective.
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Dr. Sebnem Yucel
Izmir, old Smyrna, was a cosmopolitan port in the Eastern Mediterranean, housing Ottoman Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Levantine communities in the nineteenth century. Each community were living in their own quarters in the city. Within this multi- ethnic panorama, neighboring Turkish and Jewish neighborhoods were the poorest in the city, experiencing plagues and frequent fires due to poor living conditions. Today, majority of the physical signs of the existence of this multi- ethnic quarters have been wiped out after a World War, an independence war, a major fire that took place in 1922, nation-building processes and brutal urbanization that started in the 1950s.
Among the few remaining physical evidences of this cosmopolitan past of the city is located in the old Jewish neighborhood, Judeira district. It is a building type known as “kortejo” or “cortijo”. Cortijo, referred also as judeo, yahudihane (house of the Jews), and aile evi (family house), was a one or two-storey building organized around a courtyard, with rows of single rooms on every floor. Each room housed a poor Sephardi family, who shared the common facilities like the kitchen, toilets and the water well with the other families. While cortijos were located on busy streets, they were also completely isolated, and even hidden from the view via their gateways and blind walls. They were real and “absolutely” other places for the poorest members of a minority group. After the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 majority of the cortijo residents moved to Israel. Their emptied out rooms became home for other equally poor residents, first for rural migrants, then for mostly single, elderly people, who were without a job, lost contact with their families and with history of addictions. Today many cortijos are abandoned or demolished, and some took over by small production ateliers.
With a concentration on the life in Izmir’s cortijos until 1950s, this presentation investigates the varying degrees of otherness and marginality established and sustained by both the physical environment and its residents. Through accounts and depictions of the lives in stories, newspapers, biographies and social documentary photo exhibits, it gives snapshots from the lives of the cortijo residents through history and opens up the discussion on the heterotopic character of these spaces.
