Invisible Landscapes
Growing the Ottoman Capital: Apocalyptic Narratives, Urbanism, and the Rise of the Bostans after 1453
Thursday, March 2, 4:00 - 5:30PM
Aleksandar Shopov - Binghampton University
After the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453, Istanbul underwent a dramatic transformation. The making of the new capital was crucial to Ottoman state-building and the centralization policies initiated by Mehmed II and subsequent Ottoman sultans. However, not everyone was happy with Istanbul’s new centrality. By the 1470s, opposition to Istanbul as the capital emerged within Ottoman society, finding expression in apocalyptic narratives. In an anonymous Ottoman chronicle written in the late 15th century, agriculture and agricultural metaphors are invoked in arguments about Istanbul’s unsuitability as a capital; Istanbul is characterized as an ecologically unstable and unproductive space, prone to natural disasters and decay. As if in reaction to this, in the following decades the rebuilding of Istanbul would incorporate agriculture into the city’s very foundation: produce gardens (bostans) would come to be seen as a metaphor for the city itself as a flourishing, nutritive, and productive space, with techniques of urban farming likened to the techniques of political power.
Blind Spots in the Ethnographic Gaze: Rethinking Indigenous Amazonian Relationality Through a Microbial Lens
Thursday, March 9, 4:00 – 5:30 PM
Beth Conklin - Vanderbilt University
Growing understandings of the microbiome open possibilities to look at classic anthropological issues with fresh eyes. In ethnography from the Wari’ of western Brazil, bringing the animacy of place-based multispecies assemblages into focus expands interpretations of Wari’ praxis around biosocial identity, alterity and hospitality, death rituals, and landscape relations. Reflecting on what we may have been missing by discounting the empiricism of Indigenous “practical reason” in favor of immaterial, cognitively-focused interpretations foregrounds the double standard in anthropological respect for Indigenous knowledge and commitments to take Indigenous ontologies seriously. Thinking microbially enables us to ask new questions about the interplay between cultural forms and lived experience.
