Transitions in Domestic Consumption and Family Life in the Modern Middle East: Houses in Motion
Transitions in Domestic Consumption and Family Life in the Modern Middle East: Houses in Motion

Author: R. Shechter

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2003-11-28

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1403982694

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The volume focuses on three countries - Egypt, Israel, and Turkey (earlier the Ottoman Empire) - in the period between the mid-nineteenth and the early Twenty-first-centuries. It studies the consumption of homes and domesticity as changing processes in space and time. It further foregrounds research into the impact of economic, political, and socio-cultural transformations on the private life of individuals. Even more so, the volume advances the discussion on the processes of restructuring of self-identity and lifestyles via acts of consumption. The volume focuses on the market where producers and consumers meet, the state and the national movements with their respective ideologies and practices, the role of advertisers, but also the agency of individual and group choice. In addition, it discusses, in different ways, the close interrelations between the representation of home and domestic life, for example in journals, books, and photography, and the political economy of house consumption. Thus, this volume avoids the notion of linearity and 'progress' in the transition to modern lifestyles in favour of more subtle accounts of the different venues in which people in the Middle East restructure their most immediate and intimate surroundings.

Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond
Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond

Author: Kirill Dmitriev

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-09-24

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9004409556

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Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond explores the cultural ramifications of food and foodways in the Mediterranean, and Arab-Muslim countries in particular. The volume addresses the cultural meanings of food from a wider chronological scope, from antiquity to present, adopting approaches from various disciplines, including classical Greek philology, Arabic literature, Islamic studies, anthropology, and history. The contributions to the book are structured around six thematic parts, ranging in focus from social status to religious prohibitions, gender issues, intoxicants, vegetarianism, and management of scarcity. Contributors are: Tarek Abu Hussein, Yasmin Amin, Kevin Blankinship, Tylor Brand, Kirill Dmitriev, Eric Dursteler, Anny Gaul, Julia Hauser, Christian Junge, Danilo Marino, Pedro Martins, Karen Moukheiber, Christian Saßmannshausen, Shaheed Tayob, and Lola Wilhelm.

Fashioning the Modern Middle East
Fashioning the Modern Middle East

Author: Reina Lewis

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-06-03

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1350135224

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In the first book to address the critical role of the (un)dressed body in the formation of the modern Middle East, these essays unveil contemporary struggles over nation, gender, modernity and post-modernity. Contributions from leading interdisciplinary scholars, exploring gender representation, photography, dress and visual culture, recount the role of the visible elite body in campaigns for gender and social emancipation, dress histories concerning early nationalist women and men, and legal frameworks used by those who seek to control the movement of gendered bodies. The result is a rich picture of a historical period and cultural landscape which brings dress and visual culture back into historical narratives of the modern Middle East. Recognising multiple modernities, multiple imperialisms and diverse regional experiences of post-colonialism, Fashioning the Modern Middle East contains a range of theoretical frameworks invaluable to students of fashion studies, Middle Eastern studies, anthropology, photography and gender. Bringing forward new primary material and re-investigating extant sources from new perspectives, this is the essential introduction to the role of the dressed and undressed body in the formation of the modern Middle East.

Creating the New Egyptian Woman
Creating the New Egyptian Woman

Author: M. Russell

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2004-11-12

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1403979618

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A "New Woman" was announced in Egypt at the turn of the nineteenth century. With a new genre of prescriptive literature, new products, a new education, and a physically changed home, she increasingly emerged in public life. This book discusses and debates the place of Egyptian women, while focusing on consumerism and education. Russell sheds much-needed light on the struggle for identity in Egypt at a time of considerable flux and tension and provides a powerful angle to explore changing concepts of social dynamics and broader debates of what it meant to be "modern" while retaining local authenticity.

Gendering Culture in Greater Syria
Gendering Culture in Greater Syria

Author: Fruma Zachs

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-11-14

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0857725599

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The Nahda (lit. 'the Awakening') was one of the most significant cultural movements in modern Arab history. By focusing on the neglected role of women in the intellectual Islamic renaissance of the late Ottoman Period, Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi provide a refreshingly interdisciplinary exploration of gender and culture in the Arab World. Focusing mainly on Greater Syria, this book re-examines the cultural by-products of the Nahda - such as scientific debates, journal articles, essays, short stories and novels - and provides a new framework for rethinking the dynamics of cultural and social change in what today we know as Syria and Lebanon. The lasting impact of the Nahda is given an innovative and thoroughly unique interpretation, providing an indispensable perspective to studying the nuanced roles of the construction and development of gender ideologies in the nineteenth century Middle East. The authors explore contemporary ideas concerning modern gender roles in the Middle East, and the extent to which these emerged in nineteenth-century Greater Syria. How were these ideas incorporated into daily lives, consumer patterns and cultural activities? Was class a determining factor in the creation of gender relations in the Muslim world? How were the subjectivities of gender moulded and articulated in fictional and non-fictional texts? The authors delineate both the evolution of a discourse on gender as well the "real-life" activities of men and women as writers, readers and participants in philanthropic and cultural societies, literary salons and educational enterprises. This book reemphasizes the position of the Nahda in the worlds of Damascus, Aleppo and Beirut as an innovative, deeply influential, and significant socio-cultural and political movement in its own right, which played a major role in shaping modern Arab culture, worldviews and self-perception. Zachs and Halevi here provide a new framework for rethinking the dynamics of cultural and social change, and present a groundbreaking new interpretation of the cumulative impact of the Nahda on gender perception in the late Ottoman Period.

History, Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East
History, Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East

Author: Lisa Pollard

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-20

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1003824366

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This introductory text explores the gendered history of the modern Middle East, from the eighteenth century to the present, studying the various ways in which gender has defined the region and shaped relations in the modern era. The book captures three aspects of change simultaneously: the events that mark the “modern” Middle East, women’s encounters with the transition to modernity and gendered responses to modernity. It contains both new fieldwork and a synthesis of secondary scholarship that highlight the role of gender in the modernization of Egypt, Turkey, Iran, the Levant and the Persian Gulf states. Chapters are organized chronologically to chart the rapid developments of the modern era, but each chapter also stands on its own, with coverage of masculinity and femininity, sexuality, marriage and the family, labor and women’s contributions to Arab Spring uprisings. Through this comprehensive account, the book pushes back on stereotypes that the Middle East is an ahistorical region and that women have not been vital actors in the process of change. Richly illustrated and accessible for a variety of readers, History, Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students in gender studies and Middle Eastern history.

Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran
Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran

Author: Pamela Karimi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-29

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1135101388

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Examining Iran’s recent history through the double lens of domesticity and consumer culture, Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran demonstrates that a significant component of the modernization process in Iran advanced beyond political and public spheres. On the cusp of Iran’s entry into modernity, the rules and tenets that had traditionally defined the Iranian home began to vanish and the influx of new household goods gradually led to the substantial physical expansion of the domestic milieu. Subsequently, architects, designers, and commercial advertisers shifted their attention from commercial and public architecture to the new home and its contents. Domesticity and consumer culture also became topics of interest among politicians, Shiite religious scholars, and the Left, who communicated their respective views via the popular media and numerous other means. In the interim, ordinary Iranian families, who were capable of selectively appropriating aspects of their immediate surroundings, demonstrated their resistance toward the officially sanctioned transformations. Through analyzing a series of case studies that elucidate such phenomena and appraising a wide range of objects and archival documents—from furnishings, appliances, architectural blueprints, and maps to photographs, films, TV series, novels, artworks, scrapbooks, work-logs, personal letters and reports—this book highlights the significance of private life in social, economic, and political contexts of modern Iran. Tackling the subject of home from a variety of perspectives, Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran thus shows the interplay between local aspirations, foreign influences, gender roles, consumer culture and women’s education as they intersect with taste, fashion, domestic architecture and interior design.

Childhood and Colonial Modernity in Egypt
Childhood and Colonial Modernity in Egypt

Author: Heidi Morrison

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-10-07

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1137432780

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This book examines the transformations of Egyptian childhoods that occurred across gender, class, and rural/urban divides. It also questions the role of nostalgia and representation of childhood in illuminating key underlying political, social, and cultural developments in Egypt.

A Taste for Home
A Taste for Home

Author: Toufoul Abou-Hodeib

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2017-04-04

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1503601471

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The "home" is a quintessentially quotidian topic, yet one at the center of global concerns: Consumption habits, aesthetic preferences, international trade, and state authority all influence the domestic sphere. For middle-class residents of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Beirut, these debates took on critical importance. As Beirut was reshaped into a modern city, legal codes and urban projects pressed at the home from without, and imported commodities and new consumption habits transformed it from within. Drawing from rich archives in Arabic, Ottoman, French, and English—from advertisements and catalogues to previously unstudied government documents—A Taste for Home places the middle-class home at the intersection of local and global transformations. Middle-class domesticity took form between changing urbanity, politicization of domesticity, and changing consumption patterns. Transcending class-based aesthetic theories and static notions of "Westernization" alike, this book illuminates the self-representations and the material realities of an emerging middle class. Toufoul Abou-Hodeib offers a cultural history of late Ottoman Beirut that is at once global in the widest sense of the term and local enough to enter the most private of spaces.

Egypt's Beer
Egypt's Beer

Author: Omar D. Foda

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2019-12-15

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1477319557

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Although alcohol is generally forbidden in Muslim countries, beer has been an important part of Egyptian identity for much of the last century. Egypt’s Stella beer (which only coincidentally shares a name with the Belgian beer Stella Artois) became a particularly meaningful symbol of the changes that occurred in Egypt after British Occupation. Weaving cultural studies with business history, Egypt’s Beer traces Egyptian history from 1880 to 2003 through the study of social, economic, and technological changes that surrounded the production and consumption of Stella beer in Egypt, providing an unparalleled case study of economic success during an era of seismic transformation. Delving into archival troves—including the papers of his grandfather, who for twenty years was CEO of the company that produced Stella—Omar D. Foda explains how Stella Beer achieved a powerful presence in all popular forms of art and media, including Arabic novels, songs, films, and journalism. As the company’s success was built on a mix of innovation, efficient use of local resources, executive excellence, and shifting cultural dynamics, this is the story of the rise of a distinctly Egyptian “modernity” seen through the lens of a distinctly Egyptian brand.