Ottoman Pasts, Present Cities: Cosmopolitanism and Transcultural Memories
AHRC Research Network International Two-Day Conference, 26- 27 June 2014, Birkbeck College, University of London
Gönül Bozoğlu recently co-presented a paper at the ‘Ottoman Pasts, Present Cities: Cosmopolitanism and Transcultural
Memories’ conference at Birckbeck College, University of London.
As the conference organisers note, the Ottoman Empire is still
relatively understudied although it was one of the largest and longest.
Running from the early 1300s to 1922 and stretching East to West, it included
key sites of present or recent conflict, such as Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Gaza,
Istanbul, Jerusalem, Nicosia, Sarajevo and Belgrade. Yet for centuries
these cities were largely characterised by dynamics mostly forgotten: cultural
exchange, ethnic cohabitation, and religious tolerance. These
transcultural exchanges manifested themselves in fusion and cross-pollination
in architecture, art, food, music, literature, language, family stories,
memories and lives. Ottoman scholarship has so far largely been organised
by the historical, political, philosophical, archaeological and linguistic,
often concentrating on Edward Said’s ‘orientalist’ representations of the
Ottoman Empire. The conference aimed to further the revaluation of
orientalism by engaging different disciplines to read the legacies of Ottoman
cities.
One of the most fascinating things about the Ottoman past
is its apparently multicultural and cosmopolitan nature, for within the Empire
different ethnic and religious groups co-habited within the same spaces. For
this reason, the Empire is often held up as a precursor of contemporary
multicultural states. It becomes a historical emblem of contemporary
cosmopolitan attitudes such as cultural mobility, openness to and toleration of
Others, multilingualism, tendencies towards cultural exchanges and celebrations
of hybridity. However, a strong focus of the conference was a critical analysis
of the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ itself, illuminated by theorists from Immanuel
Kant to Ulrich Beck, and compared to other concepts such as ‘con
vivenza’ and ‘conviviality’. For me, the clearest insights came from the
conference highlight of Edhem Eldem’s keynote, which looked at micro-historical
sources such as the records of the Ottoman bank that show how many languages
its employees spoke (many!), as well as people’s signatures and costumes,
criminal records and even tattoos. He concluded that the Ottoman Empire
involved a cosmopolitanism that was not egalitarian because it depended on
difference and the maintenance of exclusionary barriers between Muslims and
others (e.g. Jews, Armenians, Greeks etc.). He also asked whether non-elite but
wordly and multilingual people such as sailors and criminals could be classed
as cosmopolitan. One of the undertones of the conference was the contemporary
relevance of Ottoman cospomolitanism. Does cosmopolitanism today also relate
mostly to social elites, and does it also depend upon barriers and exclusion?
