Download PDF | Nicolas Trépanier - Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia_ A New Social History-University of Texas Press (2014).
262 Pages
Introduction
The history of Turkish reggae is a short and uneventful one. In fact, for a long time casual observers of Turkish popular music like myself could name only one song fitting the description, “Domates biber patlıcan” (Tomato, pepper, eggplant), by the late Barış Manço. To the distracted listener, “Domates biber patlıcan” gives off the vibe of a cheerful song about vegetables, one that Sesame Street would use to teach toddlers the intricacies of the produce section at their local supermarket. Yet paying more attention to the lyrics, one discovers behind the lively tune (and the vegetables) a heart-wrenching story, that of a hopelessly shy man who finally musters the courage to confess his love to the woman of his dreams only to be interrupted, as he is about to utter the most important words of his life, by the calls of a produce seller on the street: “Tomato! Pepper! Eggplant!” Long after that tragic moment when, we are left to assume, the appeal of fresh vegetables annihilated the promise of marital bliss, the only thought keeping him alive is the hope of one day holding her in his arms. As the song fades out, all we hear are the echoes of the fateful street seller’s calls: “Tomato! Pepper! Eggplant!” Just as “Domates biber patlıcan” tells about more than vegetables, this book tells about more than food. It offers an investigation of the subjective experience, the “texture of daily life,” of late-medieval Anatolians and, through this, of their worldviews. Food, in short, deserves its place in the title of this book because it is at the center of a much broader inquiry, in the same way that conductors deserve mention on the program of symphonic concerts in which they will not be heard.
Objectives
This book has four main objectives. At the most basic level, it offers a picture of daily life in fourteenth-century Anatolia. Beyond this narrow function, it is also meant to serve as a methodological model, using food as an organizing principle to present the general picture of a society. Third, it is also meant to show how a deep reading of narrative sources, together with archaeological data, can serve as the basis for social history in the absence of archival material. Finally, it raises some questions about our own cultural relationship with food by contrasting contemporary practice with an intensely foreign culture in a way that makes this book relevant and, I hope, interesting to readers outside academia. The first objective of this book is to establish a “baseline,” a general picture of society in the late-medieval Anatolian context, to serve as a frame of reference for studies whose subjects are more narrowly focused. The fourteenth century was a pivotal moment in the history of a region that includes most of the Middle East and eastern Europe. It saw the waning of Mongol power, which had profoundly reshaped the geography and political culture of the Muslim world. Perhaps more important, the fourteenth century also saw the realm of the last “Roman” rulers, the Byzantine emperors, slip into the hands of the Ottoman family. This moment is therefore located at the juncture of two millennia of imperial history.1 Research on the social history of that period has tended to concentrate on a limited list of social organizations such as ahi-led groups, gazi volunteers, and Sufi orders. All of these presented unique configurations in late-medieval Anatolia, and I do not mean to deny the relevance of their study. For example, the debate around ahi-led groups, which were social structures that incorporated characteristics of both labor and religious organizations, has brought about a healthy questioning of the all too easily borrowed concepts of “religious order” and “craftsmen’s guild.” Likewise, a long-standing debate on the role of gazis, religious volunteers whose military operations greatly benefited the expansion of the young Ottoman state, has raised important questions on the relationship between religious heterodoxy, motivations for holy war, and the peculiarities of a frontier setting. Yet it remains difficult to understand a social institution without knowing much about the society in which it arose, from which it received its main influences, and, sometimes, to which it reacted. It is, after all, perfectly worthwhile to study the hippie movement or McCarthyism, but one cannot expect to gain much understanding of these phenomena without relating them to the broader post–World War II social developments in the United States. Providing a broader context is bound to bring insight not only to the discussions I just mentioned, but also to our understanding of the ways in which the early Ottomans turned from a sheepherding family to masters of most of the Balkans within a few generations. This book, in short, offers a new starting point for those studying the social and cultural context from which the Ottoman Empire arose. My second objective is to show how one can use food as the organizing principle in painting the picture of an entire society. Food is more than the edibles we put into our mouths. It is a “total social fact,” following the terminology of Marcel Mauss, that is, a single element that brings together virtually all aspects of human life, even those that at first glance seem unrelated to each other. As a topic, food can organize a survey of the entire experience of daily life within a culture (“daily life” being defined as the sum of all the practices and elements of the worldview that members of the middle and lower classes would have described as ordinary and usual). Thus, food’s production, agriculture, constitutes the primary occupation of the great majority of the population in the period I study here and lets us, for instance, explore the ways in which the daily routine of a gardener differs from that of a pastoralist nomad. Food’s exchange both establishes and reflects networks of power and information over the land and between groups of people, allowing us to examine the texture and frequency of the interactions between a villager and the tax collector, or any other representative of the state. The consumption of food typically follows time-honored rules of behavior, affording us a glimpse into worldviews that would otherwise remain unvocalized—for example, through the meaning ascribed to seating arrangements in a banquet. Furthermore, food and food-related practices are often endowed with value and meanings that reflect religion as it is practiced, rather than the official prescriptions of theological treatises—for instance, marking those engaged in extreme fasting with a social identity unlike any other. The following chapters will therefore strive to present food as a rare element that can bring together a large swath of the subjective experience of daily life in a given period. Third, this book also presents a method of investigation into the social history of a period where archival material is essentially nonexistent. The research presented here relies first and foremost on deep textual analysis of a wide array of narrative texts (primarily hagiographies), as well as a study of endowment deeds and archaeology. I will discuss the nature of these sources and the method I employ to approach them in greater detail later in this introduction and in the appendix. For the time being, however, I simply want to emphasize that this material does not share the systematic, serial organization of the archival documents on which most social historians rely when researching later periods in the Ottoman Empire or other times and places. Finally, at a more abstract level but also closer to the reasons that made me a historian in the first place, the fourth and final objective of this book is to present historiography as an intercultural endeavor. I wish, in other words, to look into the worldviews that prevailed in a society as culturally distant as can be from my own, a land unreached by even the faintest echo of cultural influences that we today deem universal, from movable type to popular sovereignty. Learning about alternative perceptions and conceptions of the world, in turn, allows for a rich infusion of perspective in our own worldviews. This explains (and, I hope, justifies) the many references, examples, and comparisons to our contemporary world that are scattered about the following chapters.
Fourteenth-Century Central Anatolia
As I pointed out above, the period discussed here is interesting in its own right, in no small part because it saw the birth of a state that would lead the destinies of a good part of the Middle East and eastern Europe all the way down to World War I. So what do we talk about when we talk about fourteenth-century central Anatolia? The best way to give a feel of central Anatolia’s appearance might be through its colors, a palette ranging from yellow to gray, with short-lived patches of green at the beginning of the summer and a white blanket of snow lasting for most of the winter. The land is dry but not barren, with gentle slopes curving up into rocky spines—the only areas truly inhospitable to cereal cultivation.2 Rivers are few and tend to follow deeply eroded beds. Summer rain pours down in short and infrequent bursts. Trees never seem to gather in large-enough numbers to deserve the title of forest.
Although not entirely flat, the plateau that is central Anatolia (which I roughly define as extending from Kütahya to Sivas and from Larende— today’s Karaman—to Kastamonu) is surrounded by land more mountainous than itself. To the north, its edge is pleated to form the southern half of the Pontic range, whose northern slopes catch most of the Black Sea rain before it can make its way inland. To the west, it melts into increasingly well-watered valleys, ultimately becoming the horticultural heaven that is the Aegean coast. To the south, it quickly rises into the Taurus range, through which Anatolia shoulders the Mediterranean. To the east, valleys become deeper and mountains higher, as if to channel those traveling from the Caucasus and Iran into narrow highways. All of these “sharp edges” create a dramatic ecological contrast with the surrounding coastal regions, whose direct consequences will become obvious as we discuss the political evolution of the region throughout the Middle Ages. Impressionistic evidence concerning the identity of the people who lived in Anatolia in the fourteenth century strongly suggests a heterogeneous ethnocultural makeup that, in its simplest form, can be divided in two on the basis of origins. The first category, the locals, had its roots in the numerous Anatolian peoples one can trace back to antiquity (such as Isaurians and Cappadocians), together with a few groups that Byzantine authorities had forcefully settled in the region. By the time the Byzantines no longer ruled over central Anatolia, in 1071, these populations had been undergoing a millennium-long and still partially incomplete process of assimilation into a Greek-speaking, Christian mainstream. Perhaps as diverse as the first, the people of the second category were descendants of immigrants who came to Anatolia from various regions of central Asia and Iran in successive waves between the late tenth and the thirteenth centuries. Mostly nomads, these newcomers spoke a number of Turkic (and, to a lesser extent, Mongolian, Persian, and Kurdish) dialects, and most can be described as Muslim. The religious map was as fragmented as the ethnolinguistic one, with a myriad of groups claiming to follow “real Christianity” and “real Islam”—and a few more who did not even try. The sources I use refer to a number of groups (using name tags such as Rūm, Armenians, Jews, Turks, and Tatars), and they do suggest that Persian was the common language among the educated urban elite, itself overwhelmingly Muslim. However, how these groups interacted on a daily basis is less obvious. Regional differences, the interplay between various levels of identity (religious, linguistic, ethnic, economic), and the importance of the “cultural survivals” probably still attested to the multiplicity of backgrounds that had come together to form this society. In other words, although it is clear that late-medieval central Anatolians were fully aware that their neighbors had languages, accents, religious practices, and other cultural traits different from their own, we remain in the dark concerning the particular ways in which they dealt with these differences, both in terms of mental classification and in terms of quality of interaction. It seems reasonable to estimate the population of fourteenth-century Anatolia as a whole (including the coastal areas, which fall outside the scope of this book) at somewhere between five and ten million people.3 Perhaps more striking for the modern reader, and certainly more important for the analyses I put forward in the following chapters, was the size of the cities, which seldom exceeded ten thousand inhabitants; the largest ones probably had a population of thirty-five thousand or so.4 The relative anonymity that most readers of this book enjoy as they live in cities of several hundred thousands or even millions of inhabitants, in other words, was simply absent from daily life. From a political perspective, the fourteenth century in Anatolia can be termed the “age of the beyliks,” or emirates—regional polities that divided the land between themselves for most of the century. At a superficial level, the beyliks seem to constitute a fragmented episode contrasting with a succession of unified rules over Anatolia: Byzantine until the end of the eleventh century, Seljuk from the late eleventh century, and then Ilkhanid Mongol for the second half of the thirteenth century. As Ilkhanid rule imploded, local beyliks arose to fill the political void, and it is only at the end of the fourteenth century that one of these beyliks, that of the Ottomans, began to reunify Anatolia through conquest.5 Although it corresponds to the typical timeline offered when presenting the transition from Byzantine to Ottoman times, this chronological sketch is an oversimplification at best, and in many respects wholly inaccurate. It obscures the role of lesser-known and ultimately unsuccessful polities that coexisted and sometimes rivaled those empires, such as the Danishmendids in the eleventh century. It also gives the wrong impression of “centralized” political power when most rulers could in fact not aspire to much more than loose and indirect control over the local authorities in cities where they did not reside. In many instances, the difference between “overlord” and “rival neighbor” was in fact unclear even to those it involved—or the subject of bloody disagreement. This sketch also misleads by giving the impression of an evolution that unfolded evenly over Anatolia as a whole, whereas the rise of the beyliks to the rank of independent polities took place at an irregular pace and spans several decades, from the late thirteenth to the early fourteenth centuries. The eastern half of central Anatolia clung to the fiction of central imperial authority for more than half of the fourteenth century, long after the beyliks located on the Aegean coast, acting as de facto independent units, had amassed unparalleled riches and glory through war and commerce. From the longer-term social perspective of this book, the main consequence of this political evolution is the fundamentally different social dynamics between the central plateau and coastal areas. The latter remained under Byzantine rule (and thus in close cultural and economic relation to Constantinople) for much longer than central Anatolia, in some cases well into the period discussed here. Most of central Anatolia, on the other hand, had been under the influence of Muslim institutions and subject to massive immigration for more than two centuries, since the second half of the eleventh century. Such longer history of social and political integration resulted in a much more stable (though not homogenous) social makeup in central Anatolia than on the coasts. In other words, no matter if a recipe or agricultural sheep-rearing technique made its way into fourteenth-century central Anatolia through the mother-to-daughter teachings within an Armenian family of Sivas or on the back of a horse arriving from central Asia, it was more likely to be familiar to all those present and remain unmodified throughout the fourteenth century on the central Anatolian plateau than in the rapidly changing coastal regions. Given the kind of snapshot this book intends to offer, and given the limited source material available to serve as its basis, the relatively stable sociocultural background this entails is simply invaluable. That being said, “fourteenth-century central Anatolia,” as it appears in this book, should be understood as a guideline in the selection of the sources rather than a sharply defined geographical and chronological scope. This is because most of the information available cannot be reliably linked to a particular time or place, for two main reasons: the passages I use are often geographically or chronologically unspecific (or both), and the written accounts we have are often the last link in an otherwise oral chain of transmission. I therefore include the texts that, through the setting of their subject matter or the background of their authors, were likely to contain material reflecting life in fourteenth-century central Anatolia. I also rarely identify an element of information with a specific city or decade within this broader framework. I obviously do not mean to suggest that the society I describe was entirely unchanging and homogeneous. But given that many of my conclusions are based on the comparison of an extremely limited number of passages, to give too much importance to a handful of chronological hints would have resulted in suggesting a host of (often contradictory) historical trends where there may have been differences of perspective between only two or three authors. As a result, I have strived as much as possible to settle on conclusions that best account for all variations between the various sources I use.
Scholarship
This book is an attempt at opening up a hitherto disregarded realm of considerations, and not a response or contribution to a preexisting historiographical debate. A widespread belief that pre-Ottoman Anatolia offers historians limited source material has kept scholars of social history away from the Anatolian fourteenth century. Such a characterization is, of course, all relative (scholars of the Bronze Age would dream of the written sources I browsed through as part of this research project), but it is true that the dozen or so narrative sources and the few dozen endowment deeds (waqfiyyas) surviving from fourteenth-century Anatolia create a tougher set of challenges than those facing historians who can draw from millions of archival documents in their work on later Ottoman centuries. I will discuss the primary sources I used in the next section and present each one of them individually, its unique strengths and weaknesses, in the appendix.
Most historians who have worked on the period have concentrated on the twenty-odd beyliks that coexisted at the time,6 especially the one that was to become the Ottoman Empire. In the latter case, their discussions have dwelled at length on the so-called gazi debate, concerning the motivations (religious, materialistic, or both) of a group of volunteer soldiers who seem to have played a central part in the early expansion of the Ottomans.7 As far as social history is concerned, it is more accurate to talk of a handful of isolated (though sometimes very good) studies than of a significant body of literature. Perhaps the broadest in scope among them is a major opus on the Turkification and Islamization of Anatolia from Byzantine to Ottoman times.8 One can also find a few studies of social phenomena such as religious organizations,9 the ahi-led groups,10 and nomadism.11 In addition, a number of pieces on indirectly related subjects also contain references to social history.12 Yet I could find only one article, based on a single source, that even remotely resembles an attempt at describing daily life during that period.13 This book, in short, appears in a very dry historiographical landscape.
Sources
Yet it is possible to produce meaningful research on fourteenth-century Anatolian society, with the help of some creative questions and tools of source criticism. In order to do so, one must, however, cast a wide net, essentially covering all the original source material produced in late-medieval Anatolia, both textual and nontextual. Concretely, this material falls in three broad categories. The first and substantively most important category is that of narrative texts. Among these, chronicles are the oldest companions of medievalists, but hagiographies and other religious texts have consistently yielded the wealthiest harvest of details about daily life. The second category is that of the waqfiyyas, the foundation documents for endowments (waqfs) that funded pious and charitable institutions ranging from mosques to soup kitchens. Along the way, these documents describe not just the directives on how these resources should be used (which sometimes include food distribution), but also the specific origins of the endowment’s revenues, typically agricultural land. Waqfiyyas were drawn up by private individuals rather than the state and show no trace of a sequential or systematic character, but their relatively formulaic format does make them the closest equivalent to “archival documents” that fourteenth-century Anatolia has to offer. The third and final category is composed of archaeo-logical studies. These give us insight into a wide array of themes that go from specific animal productions to cooking techniques.14 Covering this broad pool of sources in a single study is more realistic than it may seem. Not counting the numerous translations of earlier works (primarily to Turkish, a new literary language at the time), a dozen or so extant narrative texts can be considered “original products” of this time and place. Likewise, copies of about three dozen of the (no doubt much more numerous) waqfiyyas that were drawn up during this period survive to this day. As for archaeology, Anatolia of course has a long history of excavations; one need recall only the infamous work on Troy by Heinrich Schliemann, in the late nineteenth century. Although these excavators used to approach medieval layers as rubbish to be discarded on the way to “the good stuff ” (mainly the Hellenistic layers), such habits are a thing of the past. As excavation methods have become more systematic, massive amounts of medieval archaeological material have accumulated in university vaults. A small but growing number of scholars have begun to specialize in the analysis of this material, yielding extremely important results that historians have yet to fully acknowledge. Since my own expertise makes me dependent on the publications of these scholars, and because only a modest proportion of the raw material has been analyzed at this time, here again the volume of data remains manageable. A relatively exhaustive approach to the source material is, therefore, a realistic ambition for this project. Of course, not all of these sources provided the same volume or type of usable contents. This uneven distribution of information actually strengthens the method used here, as sources complement each other, allowing me to cover a broader array of topics than studies based on a single type of source. For example, some texts carry greater authority when describing agricultural productions, while others tell us more reliably about the seating arrangements at a ruler’s banquet. I will address these questions in much greater detail in the appendix, which presents and evaluates each source in detail. I should add that none of these sources was specifically intended by its author to be “about food.” Some texts exist that specifically address the topic of food, but they were produced outside the time and place that this book covers, and geographical and chronological relevance is extremely important when talking about food and society. Different areas mean different ecological conditions, so the plants and animals available to be eaten vary widely from place to place. Likewise, the social and cultural landscape of Anatolia changed dramatically between the Byzantine and Ottoman periods, and it would be foolish to assume that food practices did not change as well. Still, because methodological questions are of particular interest to this study, it is worth spending some time surveying the kind of thematically relevant texts that neighboring times and places produced. Cookbooks are the most obvious type of food-related sources, and they were not completely absent in the Middle Ages. Thus, the first known Ottoman cookbook, the fifteenth-century work of one Meḥmed b. Maḥmūd Shirvānī, is in fact the Turkish translation of a thirteenth-century Abbasid (i.e., Iraqi) Arabic-language cookbook to which the translator seems to have added a number of recipes of his own.15 One could also mention a half-dozen Abbasid cookbooks from between the tenth and thirteenth centuries,16 as well as the two Safavid cookbooks (sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) published by Iraj Afshar, once again composed in geographical settings (respectively, Iraq and Iran) that fall outside the scope of this study.17 Research on later periods would have to jump all the way down to the nineteenth century, when the printing of cookbooks rather suddenly became a regular occurrence in the Ottoman Empire.18 Medical literature also has some bearing on food-related practices and beliefs, and fourteenth-century Anatolia did in fact produce a number of medical treatises. However, it would have been difficult to integrate them in this research project. For one, many of these works are adaptations of Arabic and Persian originals, usually translated into Turkish. Furthermore, those that can be considered to be “original texts” deserve this status not so much by virtue of being entirely original works, but because they are the result of a more extensive process of adaptation, as they are all very much part of a long tradition of medical thought that can be traced back to ancient Greece. The degree and nature of this adaptation to local conditions are certainly significant and meaningful in themselves, but can be identified only by someone who already possesses a thorough knowledge of the history of the medical discourse. I have deemed it preferable to concentrate my efforts on other categories of sources, although there is no doubt that late-medieval Anatolian history would greatly benefit from such a survey by a specialist of medical history.19 Dictionaries open another, if slightly trickier, path to knowledge about food. The first Turkish (to Arabic) dictionary, the famed Diwan Lughat alTurk, does in fact contain relevant food-related material. Once again, however, its chronological location (the eleventh century) and geographical associations (it was written in Baghdad by a scholar for whom Turkic peoples had much to do with central Asia and nothing at all with Anatolia) create the same problems as would be caused by using a dictionary from the Elizabethan period to discuss nineteenth-century American society. In other words, while a significant portion of the vocabulary the author includes was still cur-rent in fourteenth-century central Anatolia, it is far from obvious that the same words still meant the same thing after three centuries and a migration of thousands of miles. The shifting meaning of words is a constant problem, but in this case the risk of falsely assuming the relevance of (even carefully selected) data from the Diwan was simply too high. In other contexts, archival documents provide a natural gateway to a wide array of data on social history. When discussing food in particular, we can, for example, think of reports of taxes collected on food production and exchanges, just to name the most obvious. Yet as far as the fourteenth century is concerned, no body of state archival documents remains in existence. This situation primarily derives from political history: the fourteenth century represents a period of reconstruction for administrative structures in Anatolia, after the institutions of the Seljuk and Ilkhanid Empires had collapsed in the thirteenth century. The states that took over (beyliks, or emirates), including the Ottoman one, were at this stage rather diminutive in scale and probably organized in large part on the basis of tribal principles, two factors contributing to a limited production of archival documents. Whatever state records may have existed were in any case lost sometime during the Ottoman conquest of most of these beyliks in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries or during the various transfers of the Ottoman capital until the mid-fifteenth century.20 Finally, unusual texts appear here and there that squarely address the relationship between food and social or cultural issues. Examples show up in contexts neighboring the scope of this book, though in all cases they involve equally unique reasons that would have made their use here questionable. There is, for example, a short treatise written in 1405 by Maqrīzī on the topic of famines in Egypt,21 but when Maqrīzī denounces the Egyptian rulers’ attitudes in times of food scarcity, he tells us little about Anatolian history, especially if we consider the importance he gives to the Nile’s influence on such scarcity. Likewise, Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī’s Mawaʾid al-Nafaʾis fi Qawaʾid al-Majalis, a treatise devoting much attention to banquets at the Ottoman court, is thematically relevant to this study, but its chronological location (the sixteenth century) reflects traditions that in large part developed well after the period covered here.
Methodology
Any study of the life experiences of late-medieval Anatolian peasants or craftsmen needs to be indirect, insofar as they left no testimony for us to dissect. All the written sources that remain from the period originate, in one way or another, with the learned elite. In this book, it is therefore by reconstructing the world surrounding them (the “texture” of their daily life) that I try to extrapolate on their worldviews. Just like any historical scholarship, albeit to a higher degree, the conclusions presented in this book are therefore hypothetical in nature. In the following pages, I will present both the methodological challenges that this project brings about and the choices I made in order to overcome them. These challenges fall into three broad categories: the identification of ordinary life in sources that explicitly concentrate on extraordinary characters and occurrences, source criticism taking into account the context of composition, and the identification of purely literary influences.
The Typical and the Exceptional
In a field where research is still largely driven toward outstanding historical events and exceptional processes (e.g., the early Ottoman expansion), interest in the “typical” and the “ordinary” may be one of the defining features of this study. Yet in late-medieval Anatolia, just like today, things that are most obvious are also the least likely to be committed to paper. For example, one would be hard-pressed to find, in the entire body of modern literary fiction, a single description of a toothbrush that would make sense to someone who has never seen this object, precisely because any potential reader assumedly knows what a toothbrush looks like. The same logic prevailed in the fourteenth century: Why describe a typical meal? After all, everybody experiences it on a daily basis. This challenge is in fact even greater in medieval sources, whose narrative-driven style devotes little attention to descriptions. This is a significant obstacle, but one that we can bypass by reading textual sources “against the grain.” Let us take the example of one episode found in the Manaqib al-ʿArifin: After the spiritual master Mavlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī passes away, a cat that had previously lived in his house begins fasting and starves itself to death. Rūmī’s daughter then takes it upon herself to put the cat’s corpse in a shroud, bury it near her father’s mausoleum, and distribute ḥalwāʾ to Rūmī’s other disciples.23 Whether this mourning cat ever existed—or experienced spiritual distress—may be of some importance for Rūmī’s followers. But for the purposes of this study, the anecdote is most interesting because the depiction of a cat that is treated like a human being, as unusual as it may be, constitutes a unique opportunity to infer how a human being would be treated. Given that the narrative here tries to emphasize the high respect given to this cat, the passage therefore suggests that bodies of the deceased were shrouded and buried and that ḥalwāʾ was offered at funerals.24 Every assertion I present in this book is based on a “compatibility check” between all relevant passages I could find. Of course, the story of Rūmī’s cat is an isolated episode. But some observations offer a better ground for generalization than others, and one way to flesh out the strongest hypothesis is to consider as wide an array of evidence as possible. Thus, in this particular case, another passage of the same source presents a religious master who orders ḥalwāʾ to be prepared for a man who just died.25 Although they contain no hard proof that this was a generalized practice, it is the compatibility between these two passages that strengthens the idea of an association between funerals and the consumption of ḥalwāʾ. Obviously, unlike the case presented here, some hypotheses turn out to be incompatible with other passages. In such cases, we can infer that the hypothesis relies on a spurious (or overextended) interpretation of the passage, a divergence in the outlook or circumstances of the authors involved (when incompatible passages come from different sources), or even cases where linguistic quirks can make the hypothesis simultaneously true and false (such as claiming that the verb to drink, in modern English, entails the consumption of alcohol). As the following chapters make abundantly clear, the resulting picture leaves plenty of room for debate and imprecision. Yet it does also bring about a broad picture of daily life practices, the “typical” fabric of ordinary people’s experiences. Furthermore, an entire supplemental layer of evidence can be added when we integrate the context of composition into our discussion of sources.
Context of Composition
When approaching textual evidence, we must also take into account the context in which a given source was written. This not only increases the degree of reliability of our conclusions, but also lets us reach a deeper level whence to extract information. More specifically, paying attention to the context of textual production entails four components: identifying the intended audience, approaching orally transmitted texts as evolving organisms, remaining particularly critical of passages set in “olden times,” and avoiding the all too common temptation to conflate “traditional” and “medieval” practices.
Any process of source criticism and analysis can be made much more efficient by taking into account intended audience. Many hints exist that suggest the identity of the people whom the author intended to reach.26 For example, in the context studied here, the choice of language is a good indicator: whereas Persian was the preferred language of written communication among the cultural elite, the authors who produced the first examples of written Turkish language in Anatolia explicitly mention that they were aiming for a broader (and assumedly less educated) audience. With the exception of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa and al-ʿUmarī, furthermore, the only Arabic texts appearing in this pool of sources are the waqfiyyas, technical documents meant to be read by people trained in Islamic law. It is also clear that chronicles, so often dedicated to the ruler himself, were intended for an audience well acquainted with courtly settings, that Enverī imagined his Dustur-nama to be consumed by soldiers and sailors (just like those from whom he heard the stories he used in writing it), and that ʿĀşıkpaşa did not target an audience with advanced religious education with his Gharib-nama. Making educated guesses concerning the intended audiences for each source is thus possible, and it provides us with one further tool to evaluate the reliability of any given piece of information. The basic principle I have followed here is simply that a source will generally be most reliable when mentioning elements with which the intended audience was best acquainted. For example, if contradictory data concerning agricultural techniques were to appear in the Manaqib al-ʿArifin and the Vilayat-nama, the latter would likely be more accurate, insofar as peasants probably made up a significant portion of its intended audience, whereas they were—at best—a marginal minority among those who received the Manaqib. The second task related to compositional context is to take into account the effects of oral transmission when we approach a text. After all, an oral text is in many ways an evolving organism whose life, lasting longer than the consciousness of any single individual transmitter, sometimes spanned several centuries before it reached the fossilized, written form in which we can now access it. The texts I use thus include, for example, the Manaqib al-ʿArifin (describing thirteenth-century events, but written in the fourteenth century) and the Dustur-nama-yi Anvari (describing fourteenth-century events, but written more than a century later). All these texts reflect the experience of the fourteenth century, but relate to it in different ways, and we must take into account the habit of oral transmitters—storytellers—to embellish and modify the details of the stories they tell. For this reason, I have ascribed a higher level of reliability to the core narrative elements (bits that need to be part of the story in order for it to make sense at all) from anecdotes set in the fourteenth century but committed to paper later on and to textural elements (details that can be readily modified without affecting the meaning of the story) in passages set in earlier centuries but written in the fourteenth. All of this, to be sure, is a matter of degree, but the importance of the “life story” of a text is the main reason that pushed me to provide detail on the pedigree of each of my sources in the appendix. The third task, to remain particularly critical of stories set in “olden times,” is in some ways an extreme version of the previous. Medieval texts frequently contain material borrowed from other sources, whether they acknowledge it or not. Even a casual reading uncovers a number of passages clearly set in a different time frame from that of the main narrative. This includes, for example, Rūmī’s narration of the story of two kings “in past times” (dar zamān-i māżī),27 but also episodes from the life of the prophet Muhammad and even the biographical sketches of some of the parents and grandparents of the saints celebrated in hagiographies. In many cases, these passages are written in a different, rather sketchy, tone that offers even less detail than the main narrative. But whether this is the case or not, the fact remains that they partly originate from a sociocultural context independent from that of the source as a whole (drawing from an older literary or religious tradition, or even from memories obtained from too long a string of informers). As it turns out, most of these passages contain very little information of relevance for the present study. In cases where they do, I have remained extremely critical in my reading, and in any case made sure to indicate the lower degree of reliability of the statements I make on the basis of these passages. Finally, it is imperative that sources describing a medieval society actually originate from the Middle Ages. As obvious as it may sound, this rule is often overlooked on the basis of the all too common (and misguided) binary construct opposing “the modern” (educated, urban, technologically advanced, morally liberal) and “the traditional” (ignorant, rural, primitive, conservative), with the implication that the latter barely changed from the Middle Ages to the advent of mechanized agriculture. But historical evolution is not the private preserve of the urban, the rich, and the famous, and we should not confuse our inability or unwillingness to see change take place in the countryside for an actual absence, at least from the longue durée. For this reason, a fundamental methodological principle of this study has been to avoid using nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century ethnological observations as core source material. After all, no living human being, Turkish or otherwise, has memories of a grandmother born in the fourteenth century. So even if the following pages contain references to contemporary or nearcontemporary observations, they typically serve as points of contrast to my descriptions of the daily life of fourteenth-century Anatolians.
Literary Concerns
Before closing this discussion of methodology, we should address a number of issues related to the literary character of the core source material for this study. After all, literary rules and usage contribute to shaping the way in which food appears in these texts. This is visible in the choice of vocabulary, of course, but also in the metaphorical uses of food, sometimes taking the shape of literary motifs. First, we should remember that the food-related lexicon (the words in use and the meanings they carry) is one that does change over time. In the absence of sufficient historical studies on the topic, the available dictionaries simply cannot account for these variations in a satisfactory fashion.28 What remains, then, is to look for hints of definition in the passages that use a given word and approach such semantic quests as an integral part of the set of questions raised in this study.29 Furthermore, we need to keep in mind that a multitude of factors influence vocabulary choices, from the aesthetics of rhyming prose to religious metaphors. Of particular concern for this study, because they can be mistaken for reflections of daily life practices, are set literary motifs, cases where a food reference is used as a short and conventional metaphor.30 Such literary uses do not contribute to the purposes of this study. After all, once an expression becomes common enough, it is used at the outcome of a cognitive process in which the original image receives little if any attention at all, shortcircuited, as it were, by force of habit. For example, the expression “straight from the horse’s mouth” may be quite striking for those encountering it for the first time, but upon hearing it most native English speakers register its abstract meaning without ever conjuring the vivid image of a horse. Such expressions are very often based on archaic practices or uses of a word, growing independent from their original meaning to the point that many people will use an expression without even being cognizant of its original meaning. Let us, for example, examine the passage where Gülşehrī states, at the beginning of his Karamat-i Akhi Avran, “Like the parrot, let us eat honey and sugar” (Tuti gibi şehd ü sükker [sic] yiyelüm).31 Besides the fact that the Arabic word şehd (or shahd ) is a rather unusual one for honey (the more com-mon being ʿasal in Arabic and Persian and bal in Turkish), one should know that the parrot eating sugar is a common literary motif in Persian literature. Using this passage to lay any claim that honey and sugar were produced for parrot consumption in late-medieval Anatolia would thus be entirely off the mark. I have clearly identified passages that might be less reliable because they fall in this category. Spotting literary motifs is not always that easy. Take, for example, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s descriptions of Anatolian cities. At first glance, any one of these instances appears to be the short depiction of what he had witnessed during his visit. Yet putting all of his descriptions side by side, one notices suspiciously repetitive comments and formulations, in which fruits,32 gardens,33 and water provisioning34 play the part of literary instruments used to praise a city or region. That a number of these agricultural elements were indeed present and visible in the cities he visited is beyond any reasonable doubt. Yet the literary concerns that seem to have governed Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s thoughts as he was telling of his visit to Anatolia should make us wary of taking his depictions too literally and assuming, as many have done, that he correctly describes every individual city as it was when he visited it. Considering each source as a whole rather than examining individual passages in isolation, though not foolproof, is the best way to prevent the most obvious mistakes. The reader should therefore keep this caveat in mind before pointing out the absence of too literal an interpretation of certain passages.
The Breakdown
As I stated earlier, food provides not only a sampling device for the evidence on daily life, but also a way to organize the presentation of the findings derived from this evidence. A broad categorization of the many roles that food plays in human life thus provides the chapter breakdown for this book. The investigation begins in chapter 1, devoted to the production phase of the food cycle. This chapter will be divided into three main sections: gardens, field cultures, and animal productions. In each of these, I will pay particular attention to agriculture as a professional activity, the peculiarities of life in the countryside, and the relationship that people entertained with the land. This survey will show that peasants had a much higher degree of agency and control over their lives than we might expect. Chapter 2 will approach food as the object of exchanges, in two broadly defined categories of cases. The first is commercial exchanges, including, of course, local markets and long-distance trade, but also the particular instances of water distribution and grain milling. The second category will include cases in which food acts as a point of contact between the population and state institutions through taxes, army logistics, and plunder. Through these discussions, we will see that, as much as the general population was excluded from the political decision-making process, it nevertheless very much felt the effects of this process, more often than not in fairly painful ways. Chapter 3 will address the issue that most readily comes to mind when mentioning the title of this book, food consumption. This chapter, the most substantial in this study, will cover a large number of issues that include the very act of eating, of course, as well as the social practices surrounding the meal. But it will also discuss the steps leading to that moment (from food acquisition to cooking and service), survey the various foods that appear in the sources, and investigate a number of more abstract concepts that relate to the central theme of the chapter, such as charity, taste, health, and mindaltering substances. Most apparent among the multiple conclusions of this survey will be the rigidity of the social hierarchy that prevailed in the region. Chapter 4 will look at the intersection between food and religion. It will do so by surveying religious rituals that involved food, among which the best documented is the practice of fasting, and canonical festivals as ways to determine the extent to which formal Islam was integrated into daily life. This chapter will also include a discussion of the mental associations that existed between certain food items and religious concepts, paying particular attention to the question of religious identity. Beyond the straightforward division of the population between roughly equal numbers of Muslims and Christians, we will see that painting a picture of the religious landscape requires a lot of nuance to fully convey the diversity of experiences in late-medieval Anatolia.
The general conclusion will consist first and foremost in an evaluation of the extent to which this book did and could shed light on the daily life and worldviews of late-medieval central Anatolians. In order to do so, it will compare the results of this investigation with the medium that might offer the most efficient means to communicate a subjective experience: literature. In the appendix, the reader will find a detailed discussion of the origin, nature, contents, and limitations of the sources used in this study: religious texts, chronicles, and geographical and other narrative works, as well as endowment deeds (waqfiyyas) and archaeological publications. The method I employ in my analysis makes a detailed discussion of the source material nec-essary: many of the statements that form the core of this book rely heavily on considerations pertaining to the perspective of the authors of the various texts and to their intended audiences. It would, in short, be impossible for the reader to judge the quality of this research without being presented with an extensive discussion of each one of the texts I have used and how I approached it.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق