Transitions in Domestic Consumption and Family Life in the Modern Midd

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.

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.

Introduction; R.Shechter Modernity in Print: The Egyptian State as Sponsor and Producer of New Domestic Templates for Domestic Behavior, 1820-1845; L.Pollard Modernity, National Identity and Consumerism: Visions of the Egyptian Home, 1805-1922; M.Russell Late Ottoman Photography: Family, Home, and New Identities; N.Micklewright Consumption and the Place of the Economy in Society: 'Reciprocity' and 'Redistribution' in Markets for Homes and Household Durables in Republican Turkey; A.Bugra Domesticity and (Re)presentations of Self and Reality in La'Isha , an Israeli Women's Weekly; S.Laden Under Construction: Building Values and Household Economy in the Palestinian Village of Deir al-Asad; T.Forte Consumption and Inequality: Household Consumption of Material and Cultural Commodities in Israel; T.Katz-Gerro Conclusion; R.Shechter