Zeynep Tezer (University of Chicago)
Idiosyncratic Forms of Social Criticism in the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth‑Century Ottoman Empire.

At court Müfti Pir Üskübi offers the plaintiffs a dildo to settle a dispute (from a manuscript of Ata’i’s “Hamse”, printed in: Ortaöğretim 11. Sınıf Tarih Ders Kitabı, Ankara: MEB Yayınları 2017, p. 57.)

The dissertation aims to recontextualize examples of inappropriate conduct in communal and professional settings in the later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire as alternative, idiosyncratic forms of social critique. While the assassinations of sultans, the Janissary uprisings, and the Celali rebellions of this period of crisis have often been studied as organized and overt instances of political initiative, the question of how the many other Ottoman subjects who could or would not oppose the regime by participating in a collective effort might articulate their dissatisfaction remains mostly neglected. Through microhistorical case studies of professional improprieties and humorous conduct drawn from various segments of the early modern Ottoman society, the project intends to accommodate a wider range of actions under the umbrella of non-conform behaviour and to contribute to our understanding of the diverse spaces that could be inhabited by the Ottoman subjects. By doing so, the dissertation also aims to problematize the prevailing association of “the individual” with the Western modernity and to observe personhoods not through the window of Westernization but out of the special historical trajectory upon which the Ottoman society was set.