Avner Wishnitzer. Reading Clocks, Alla Turca

The transformation of Ottoman temporal culture has long been interpreted as a consequence of top-down reform within the contexts of Ottoman Westernization and modernization. While this approach to the subject highlights an important aspect of a prolonged process that brought about a major conversion, it falls short in situating that change in a more coherent context of temporal dimensions of social and personal life and religiosity. Avner Wishnitzer’s Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire deals brilliantly with changes in the temporal dimension of social life. This pathbreaking study, conceived on a broad scale and written with precision and authority, analyzes the various dualities in the temporal culture that emerged in the nineteenth century. These dichotomies, such as mechanical clocks and natural rhythms, cyclic and linear images of time, as well as religious and mundane conceptions of it, became inseparable, producing a highly complex understanding of temporality. In this period of transition, time evolved into a concept that was simultaneously religious and secular, modern and premodern, forward-moving and cyclical. These dualities, best symbolized in double-dialed watches, produced hybrid forms of observance with fluid boundaries. For instance, a Muslim Ottoman bureaucrat could use alla turca and alla franca times while, respectively, attending a theater play and performing his prayers. Thanks to temporal culture’s new multidimensional nature, the transformation was far from being rectilinear, straightforward, and abrupt.

Ancient history · Art · Empire · Ottoman empire · Political science · Politics · Reading (process) · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies