Inventing Laziness

Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-1-108-44821-5
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 318 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 466 g

Neither laziness nor its condemnation are new inventions, however, perceiving laziness as a social condition that afflicts a 'nation' is. In the early modern era, Ottoman political treatises did not regard the people as the source of the state's problems. Yet in the nineteenth century, as the imperial ideology of Ottomanism and modern discourses of citizenship spread, so did the understanding of laziness as a social disease that the 'Ottoman nation' needed to eradicate. Asking what we can learn about Ottoman history over the long nineteenth-century by looking closely into the contested and shifting boundaries of the laziness - productivity binary, Melis Hafez explores how 'laziness' can be used to understand emerging civic culture and its exclusionary practices in the Ottoman Empire. A polyphonic involvement of moralists, intellectuals, polemicists, novelists, bureaucrats, and, to an extent, the public reveals the complexities and ambiguities of this multifaceted cultural transformation. Using a wide variety of sources, this book explores the sustained anxiety about productivity that generated numerous reforms as well as new understandings of morality, subjectivity, citizenship, and nationhood among the Ottomans.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hafez, Melis

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Demographie, Demoskopie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Theorie, Politische Philosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Sozialphilosophie, Politische Philosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Naher & Mittlerer Osten

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction; 1. Moralizing productivity in the age of reform; 2. Criminalizing laziness: Punishment, reward, and negotiation in the Ottoman bureaus; 3. Imagining Ottoman dandies and industrious effendis; 4. Militarizing the productive body; 5. Exclusionism at work: Politics, power, and productivity; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Hafez, Melis
Melis Hafez is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Virginia Commonwealth University. She holds a PhD from the Department of History, UCLA. Her scholarship spans late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East, with a focus on social and cultural transformations.