Banu Şenay and Christopher Houston: Hiding in plain site: Ottoman objects and the crafting of alternative Muslim citizenship in Istanbul

Lecture
14.1.26, 19.00
Orient-Institut Istanbul
Language: English

Picture: İstimlak (Expropriation), artwork by Tuğrul Yıldırım, “El-mülk-ü lillah” (Photo by Dilanur Yıldırım)

Ottoman objects, art traditions, and social practices occupy a contested place in Turkish political life, shaped by the Republic’s selective rupture with its Ottoman past and more recent projects of civilizational restoration. This talk explores how contemporary practitioners of so-called ‘traditional arts’ relate to Ottoman objects in ways that exceed official narratives of heritage and repair. Drawing on object-oriented ontology and the work of Graham Harman, it examines how these practitioners attend to the pleasures, ethical resonances, and existential depths of objects themselves, cultivating personal and unofficial attachments to Ottoman–Islamic arts and places. Şenay and Houston argue that such engagements constitute everyday practices of alternative citizenship, enabling forms of Muslim life that sit alongside, rather than within, dominant state projects of religious and historical authority.

Banu Şenay is an anthropologist at Macquarie University, specializing in the anthropology of Islam and Muslim practices. Her research focuses on Islamic art and craft traditions in contemporary Turkey, exploring how these practices serve as alternative sources of authority for Muslim actors. She also leads an Australian Research Council-funded project on Islamic bureaucracies in Turkey and Indonesia. She is the author of two monographs, Beyond Turkey’s Borders (2013) and Musical Ethics and Islam (2020), and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Turkey’s Diasporas (2025).

Christopher Houston is Professor of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney. He has carried out extensive fieldwork in Turkey on Islamic social movements, nationalism, urban processes in Istanbul, political activists, conscientious objection, and on the Kurdish issue. His recent books include Istanbul, City of the Fearless: Urban Activism, Coup D’état, and Memory in Turkey (2020, University of California Press); and Theocracy, Secularism, and Islam in Turkey. Anthropocratic Republic (2021, Palgrave Macmillan). A new volume (2024), co-edited with Jean-Paul Baldacchino and published by Rutgers University Press, is titled Self-Alteration. How People Change Themselves Across Cultures.

The language of the event is English. Participation is free of charge.
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