Inventing Laziness

Abstract

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.

Early Acquaintances with Modern Mass Culture in Late Ottoman Istanbul: The Experiences of Child Audiences at Direklerarası

“…The new cultural history, on the other hand, focuses not only on artworks and their creators, but also on the experiences of audiences and consumers, and it also recognizes the importance of the products of popular culture, which were previously deemed unworthy of academic study but with which society is intensely engaged (for a critique of the elitist approach to culture and the new understanding of cultural history, see Burke, 2008;Gans, 2008;Hunt, 1989;Tunç Yaşar, 2022). In the Ottoman studies, themes such as self-narratives, manners, image and representation, entertainment culture, and leisure time became the focus of historians' attention and has begun to be scrutinized from the perspective of new cultural history (Çelik, 2005;Esenbel, 2012;Faroqhi & Öztürkmen, 2014;Hafez, 2021;Kafadar, 2009;Kula and Özlü, 2023;Tunç Yaşar, 2016). This article follows the paradigm shift in studies on Ottoman-Turkish modernization as well as the new perspective of cultural history.…”