| This dissertation investigates domesticity as a site for the production of modernity in late Ottoman Beirut. It focuses specifically on the material aspects of the home in trying to understand its formation in relation to urban management, intellectual discourses, and changing trends of domestic consumption. As a state institution, the municipal council played a role not only in the home's alignment along the ideals of a modern urbanity outlined at the imperial center but also in commodifying the home. The council deployed the category of "public benefit" as a means of inclusion and exclusion in the process of urban generation and of recasting the home as property subject, like any other property, to the value-creating processes of the real estate market. Intellectuals in Beirut posited the home as a direct challenge to the homogenizing transformations in the public sphere and as a model for the wider political participation of an emerging middle class. Managing a changing material world using the category of "taste" stood central to this discourse of domesticity. As cultural capital, taste constituted an attempt to carve a place for an emerging middle class vis-a-vis the upper classes as well as to articulate an inner sphere of "Oriental" culture localized in the home and distinguishable from ifranji (Western/European) fashionable adoptions.;In the absence of formative state institutions and a hegemonic intellectual project, a fuller understanding of modern domesticity needs to pay heed to the home as a space of consumption. I explore how "things" escape their status as objects, constructed by subjects, and participate in the formation of domesticity. Beyond legislative and intellectual attempts at getting the material environment under control, domestic things lent the home its own hierarchy of spaces and stretched relations across a gendered public/private divide. Most significantly, the labor that came into the production of domestic objects complicated the intellectual injunction to consume local, challenged prescriptions for moderate consumption in the discourse of domesticity, and made the task of distinguishing between Oriental and ifranji objects---and therefore consumption habits---irrelevant. |
