[Discussion] tarih degisikligi

[sule tarakcioglu]

This is to announce a change of dates for the conference "Re-thinking
Culture in the Ottoman 18th Century." In order to avoid overlap with
the American Historical Association annual meeting, the new dates for
"Re-thinking Culture" are Jaunuary 15-16, 2005. Below is an ammended
re-posting of the conference:
Rethinking Culture in the Ottoman 18th Century

Recent research has effected a cumulative revision of the long dominant
“decline thesis” and has created an increasing awareness of the extent to
which the Ottoman 18th century was a period characterized by newness and
change. These findings point to the need to move on to a
re-conceptualization of the Ottoman 18th century that posits the period in
new and analytically helpful terms. A small conference, entitled
“Rethinking Culture in the Ottoman 18th Century”, funded by the Mellon
Foundation, will be held at Princeton University on 15 and 16 January,
2005, with the aim of charting and understanding change in patterns of
cultural production and consumption in the Ottoman 18th century

Using any one of the definitions and/or categories of culture – scholarly,
material, artistic, literary, popular, etcetera – colleagues are invited
to present papers that re-think the Ottoman 18th century by considering
cultural ruptures, discontinuities, re-definitions, culminations, or new
syntheses, while emphasizing the circumstances to which these changes were
a response, as well as to consider the consequences of such changes,
especially with regard to individual and collective self-definition. 
Papers should address one or more of the following interrelated domains:
1) The domain of practice: can one detect a change in social and cultural
practices, whether individual or collective during the course of the
Ottoman 18th century? For example, are there changes/modifications/new
adaptations/conclusions in the methods (and where relevant, the sites) of
knowledge transmission, entertainment and leisure, religious ritual and
celebration, dress and fashion, etcetera? What purposes do these changes
satisfy?
2) The domain of cultural production: Are there changes/new
variations/cessations in cultural production? Can one detect the
culmination of existing cultural phenomena and emergence of new ones? For
example, are there newly constituted, defined or synthesized literary,
artistic, architectural, culinary, etcetera, forms? If so, who are the
creators of these forms, and why and for whom did they create?
3) The domain of cultural consumption: Are there new or different
consumers of culture in this period? Can one speak of new
audiences/publics? Is there a change in the quantity of certain aspects of
cultural consumption: that is, are particular ideas/products becoming
more/less popular or fashionable in the 18th century? How and why?
4) The domain movement of cultural practices and products: Can one detect
a migration of cultural practices, products/forms across geographical
space, and/or language and social groups? To what are these movements a
response?
5) The domain of sources: On a circumspect note, given the unequal
distribution of sources – whether in quantity or in kind – along the
timeline of Islamic history, and given our own relative proximity to the
18th century, is our perception of change in the 18th century merely a
result of the coincidence of the of survival of certain kinds of sources
from this period, but not from earlier periods? In other words, have we
(mis)construed the existence of these sources as reflective of newness,
rather than representing a continuity of phenomena, the earlier evidence
for which has simply not survived? Put bluntly, is the perceived change
in the 18th century more apparent than real?

Informal inquiries and paper proposals may be sent to the conference
organizer, Dana Sajdi, at dsajdi@alcor.concordia.ca by May 1, 2004. 
Authors of the selected papers will be notified by June 15, 2004. The
invited paper presenters, who will number about ten, will be provided with
airfare and accommodations. Submissions from younger scholars (including
PhD candidates) and from scholars outside the USA are encouraged.
Presenters must submit the full text of their papers without diacritics as
Word document e-mail attachments to the conference organizer by 1
December, 2004, to facilitate distribution to the other participants. It
is anticipated that a number of the papers will subsequently be published
as a volume. Unless otherwise agreed in writing, the conference organizer
will have first option on all papers presented at the conference, and
paper presenters will be notified by June 1, 2005 whether that option will
be exercised.

Dana Sajdi

Department of History
Concordia University