Nicolas Argenti (editor) - Post-Ottoman topologies : the presence of the past in the era of the nation-state

Focusing on analysis as a meeting ground of the empirical and the conceptual, this series provides a platform for exploring anthropological approaches to social analysis while seeking to open new avenues of communication between anthropology and the humanities, as well as other social sciences.

Edited by Nicolas Argenti

Edited by Jason Hickel and Naomi Haynes Afterword by David Graeber

Edited by Katherine Swancutt and Mireille Mazard

Edited by Mateusz Laszczkowski and Madeleine Reeves

Edited by Tatjana Thelen, Larissa Vetters, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann

Edited by David Kloos and Daan Beekers

Edited by Susanne Bregnbk and Mikkel Bunkenborg

Edited by Ruy Llera Blanes and Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic

The Presence of the Past in the Era of the Nation-State

Nicolas Argenti

First published in 2019 by

www.berghahnbooks.com

2019 Berghahn Books

Originally published as a special issue of Social Analysis, volume 61, issue 1.

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Names: Argenti, Nicolas, editor.

Title: Post-Ottoman topologies : the presence of the past in the era of the

nation-state / edited by Nicolas Argenti.

Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2019. | Series: Studies in social

analysis ; Volume 8 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019011296 (print) | LCCN 2019011513 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789202410 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789202397 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781789202403 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: NationalismBalkan Peninsula. | National characteristics, Balkan. | Collective memoryBalkan Peninsula. | Balkan Peninsula History20th century.

Classification: LCC DR38.2 (ebook) | LCC DR38.2 .P67 2019 (print) | DDC 320.5409496dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011296

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to Westernise and modernise may have been, the more desperate wish, it seemed, was to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire: rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloveds clothes, possessions and photographs. But as nothing, Western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to Westernise amounted mostly to the erasure of the past. (Pamuk 2005: 27)

The Ottoman world was pluralreligiously, culturally, linguistically, and legally, with members of the millets or castes within the empire subject to different regimes of taxation, dress code, legal rights, and obligationsbut it was by the same token a unified social and political space in which Christians and Jews as well as Muslims could thrive as traders and professionals and could ascend to the highest levels of political authority and influence. The demise of the Ottoman Empire in the nationalist wars of the early twentieth century gave rise to a multiplicity of autonomous nation-states defined by their ethnicity in a forced movement of peoples the likes of which the world had never seen before. This volume examines how individual and collective memories, affective states, and embodied experience are born from episodes of rapid social transformation, crisis, and political violence in the transition from an ethnically and culturally plural empire to a congeries of nation-states defined by nationalist ideologies predicated on the realization of ethnic and religious homogeneity.

Maria Couroucli (2012: 12) has recently referred to the newly nationalized, monocultural and monochromatic societies of the Eastern Mediterranean as a post-Ottoman space in which religious pluralism gave way in the twentieth century to nationalist cultural homogeneity in the image of Western nation-states.1 The term post-Ottoman as we use it here is intended to question the nationalist assumptions that are often used to explain the fracturing of the Ottoman Empire and the dissemination of the modernist ideal of the ethnically pure and sovereign nation-state. To adopt a post-Ottoman perspective is to ask what the loss of Ottoman identity as a supra-ethnic affiliation has entailed and how the violent ruptures occasioned by the collapse of the empire live on in contemporary social formations. In doing so, the contributions to this collection question the applicability of dominant models of linear time, revealing that peoples of the post-Ottoman world do not always experience their relationship to the historical transformations they have witnessed in a straightforwardly chronological fashion, as the Time of the State would have it, with the beginning of political time marked (and commemorated annually) by the birth of the sovereign nation in the violent destruction of an inevitably derided original state of ethno-religious and cultural pluralism. This is not to suggest that post-Ottomanism is a form of collective social atavism, nor does it entail an idealization of the Ottoman Empire in terms of a Rousseauesque prelapsarian Eden of uninterrupted equality and peace. Nationalist historiographies have nonetheless focused on the breakers and white caps of historical crises while ignoring the underlying tides of intercommunality that bound plural communities and