A01=Avner Wishnitzer
anthropology
assimilation
Author_Avner Wishnitzer
authority
barracks
bureaucracy
Category=NHG
Category=NHTB
Category=PGZ
clerk
clocks
commerce
economy
efficiency
employment
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
erotic poetry
ferry schedules
history
labor
legitimacy
military
modernity
nonfiction
ottoman empire
perception
police reports
political cartoons
progress
reform
regularity
schedule
schools
social change
sociology
state building
surveillance
technology
temporal culture
time
timetables
trade
transportation
turkey
Product details
- ISBN 9780226257723
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 07 Jul 2015
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the way Ottomans used their clocks conformed to the inner logic of their own temporal culture. However, this began to change rather dramatically during the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire was increasingly assimilated into the European-dominated global economy and the project of modern state-building began to gather momentum. In Reading Clocks, Alla Turca, Avner Wishnitzer unravels the complexity of Ottoman temporal culture and for the first time tells the story of its transformation. He explains that in their attempt to attain better surveillance capabilities and higher levels of regularity and efficiency, various organs of the reforming Ottoman state developed elaborate temporal constructs in which clocks played an increasingly important role. As the reform movement spread beyond the government apparatus, emerging groups of officers, bureaucrats, and urban professionals incorporated novel time-related ideas, values, and behaviors into their self-consciously "modern" outlook and lifestyle.
Acculturated in the highly regimented environment of schools and barracks, they came to identify efficiency and temporal regularity with progress and the former temporal patterns with the old political order. Drawing on a wealth of archival and literary sources, Wishnitzer's original and highly important work presents the shifting culture of time as an arena in which Ottoman social groups competed for legitimacy and a medium through which the very concept of modernity was defined. Reading Clocks, Alla Turca breaks new ground in the study of the Middle East and presents us with a new understanding of the relationship between time and modernity.
Avner Wishnitzer is a senior lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. He resides with his family in Jerusalem.
