Transitions in Domestic Consumption and Family Life in the Modern Middle East: Houses in Motion

Book excerpt: The volume focuses on three countries - Egypt, Israel, and Turkey (earlier the Ottoman Empire) - in the period between the mid-nineteenth and the early Twenty-first-centuries. It studies the consumption of homes and domesticity as changing processes in space and time. It further foregrounds research into the impact of economic, political, and socio-cultural transformations on the private life of individuals. Even more so, the volume advances the discussion on the processes of restructuring of self-identity and lifestyles via acts of consumption. The volume focuses on the market where producers and consumers meet, the state and the national movements with their respective ideologies and practices, the role of advertisers, but also the agency of individual and group choice. In addition, it discusses, in different ways, the close interrelations between the representation of home and domestic life, for example in journals, books, and photography, and the political economy of house consumption. Thus, this volume avoids the notion of linearity and 'progress' in the transition to modern lifestyles in favour of more subtle accounts of the different venues in which people in the Middle East restructure their most immediate and intimate surroundings.