Core Program, 2012–13
Moralism, Fundamentalism, and the Rhetoric of Decline in Eurasia, 1600–1900
—organized by Center/Clark Professors Andrea S. Goldman, University of California, Los Angeles, and Gabriel Piterberg, University of California, Los Angeles
The Clark and Center core program for 2012–2013 explores responses to crises and upheavals in early modern landed empires, with special focus on the Ottoman and Qing empires. In particular, we investigate the perceptions of temporary collapses of state power in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Detecting tendencies toward moralism and perceived decline in elite discourses and state policies, we look at the ways such concerns were expressed in the domains of institutional and educational reforms, sexual mores, and cultural representation. We also examine how social boundaries were both rigidified and contested at such moments of transition. We hope to discern shared patterns across Eurasia as well as trajectories specific to each political entity.
Conference 1: Moralism and the Rhetoric of Decline in Seventeenth-Century Eurasia
November 16–17, 2012
The background for this conference is the sixteenth-century price revolution in Eurasia and the attendant political and social crises of the first half of the seventeenth century. It focuses on two phenomena. The first is the religious movements and discourses of moral purification, which ranged from sexual mores to people’s attire when they appeared in the public domain. Papers on this theme consider whether this may have been a reaction to what Walter Andrews has termed the “age of beloveds.” The second phenomenon is the proliferation of literatures of decline, in which bureaucrats and intellectuals tried to diagnose what was wrong with their states and societies, and to prescribe solutions accordingly. Papers on this topic go beyond the limitations of content analysis and positivist reading, and will consider its social, literary and rhetorical dimensions.
Session 1: Decline Across Seventeenth-Century Eurasia Revisited
Chair: Gabriel Piterberg, University of California, Los Angeles
Linda T. Darling, University of Arizona
“The Ottoman Decline Literature as a Social Phenomenon: An Interim Report”
Siyen Fei, University of Pennsylvania
“Late Ming Urban Decline: Myth or Reality?”
Discussant: Zirwat Chowdhury, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow
Session 2: Piety and Crisis across Seventeenth-Century Eurasia
Chair: Sebouh Aslanian, University of California, Los Angeles
Derin Terzioğlu, Boğaziçi University
“Piety in a Disenchanted World: ‘Sunnitizing’ Sufi Preachers and the Crisis of the Ottoman State in the Early Seventeenth Century”
Jiang Wu, University of Arizona
“Chinese Zen Monk Yinyuan (1592–1673) and the Authenticity Crisis in Early Modern East Asia”
Discussant: Spencer Jackson, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow
Session 3: Morality and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Eurasia
Chair: Charlotte Furth, Professor Emerita, University of Southern California
Nir Shafir, University of California, Los Angeles
“Nasihat and Knowledge: Moral and Knowledge Order in Seventeenth- Century Ottoman Advice Manuals”
John R. Williams, Colorado College
“Moralizing Fortune: Examination Discourse and Dynastic Change in Seventeenth-Century China”
Discussant: Ying Zhang, Visiting Scholar, University of California, Los Angeles
Session 4: Manliness, Morality, and Crisis in Seventeenth-Century Eurasia
Chair: Andrea S. Goldman, University of California, Los Angeles
Ying Zhang, Visiting Scholar, University of California, Los Angeles
“The Condemned and the Redeemed: Strategic Moralism and Manly Virtues during the Qing Shunzhi Reign (1644–61)”
Leslie Peirce, New York University
“The Rhetoric of Abduction in the Ottoman Time of Troubles”
Discussant: Andrea S. Goldman, University of California, Los Angeles
Conference 2: Urban Discontent in the Long Eighteenth Century across Eurasia
February 8, 2013
The conference examines various social and literary expressions of discontent in the main urban centers across these landed empires. Topics include urban violence, sexual mores, literary lampoons, as well as states’ responses to such challenges to their authority.
Session 1: Violence and Scandal in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia
Chair: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, University of California, Los Angeles
Abhishek Kaicker, Graduate Student, Columbia University
“Popular Violence and the State in Eighteenth-Century Shahjahanabad”
Fariba Zarinebaf, University of California, Riverside
“Urban Rebellions and Violence in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul”
Janet Theiss, University of Utah
“Lessons from a Scandal: Sex, Corruption and Social Ferment in China’s “’Flourishing Age’”
Session 2: Cities, Texts, and Social Decline across the Eighteenth-Century Eurasian Continent
Chair: Andrea S. Goldman, University of California, Los Angeles
Spencer Jackson, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow, University of California, Los Angeles
“Pope, Swift, and the Ambivalent Exoticism of Feminine Commerce”
Keith McMahon, University of Kansas
Social Decline and Sexual Disorder in Fiction of the Qing Dynasty
Session 3: Critiques of State Power in Visual and Literary Representations across Eurasia
Chair: Gabriel Piterberg, University of California, Los Angeles
Zirwat Chowdhury, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow, University of California, Los Angeles
“An Architectural ‘Profile’ of the City of London in 1788”
Andrea S. Goldman, University of California, Los Angeles
“Historical Plays and Urban Discontent in Beijing during the Long Eighteenth Century”
Conference 3: Imperialism and Fundamentalism in Nineteenth-Century Eurasia
May 27, 2013
Session 1: European Knowledge, Iconoclasm, and Transformation in Nineteenth-Century Eurasia
Chair: Nile Green, University of California, Los Angeles
Lela Gibson, University of California, Los Angeles
“Ottoman Sufism and the Prussian Enlightenment: Heinrich von Diez, 1751–1817”
Chuck Wooldridge, Lehman College
“Purifying Spaces in Empires: The Taiping Movement (1850–64) in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Iconoclasms of the Pacific”
Session 2: Law and Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century Eurasia
Chair: Gabriel Piterberg, University of California, Los Angeles
Kent Schull, State University of New York at Binghamton
“The Transformation of Islamic Criminal Law in the Late Ottoman Empire”
R. Bin Wong, University of California, Los Angeles
“Self-Strengthening and Industrialization in Late Nineteenth-Century Chinese Political Economy”
Session 3: Law and Culture in the Late Qing and Ottoman Empires
Chair: Andrea S. Goldman, University of California, Los Angeles
Michelle T. King, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“The Question of Fundamentalism in Nineteenth-Century China, as Seen within the Moral Universe of Female Infanticide”
Ebru Aykut, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University
“A New Glimpse into the Ottoman Legal Change: Arson, Customs, and Justice in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Countryside”