Report
On March 13, 2024, Tobunken Seminar “Petitions and “Individuals” : First-Person Narratives and Historical Agency at Intersections of Diplomatic, Administrative, and Legal History” was held jointly by the IASA and the Islamic Trust Studies Group B01 “The Ideas of the Muslim Community and State Systems."
The seminar featured Dr. Orçun Can Okan of University of Oxford, who specializes in the history of the transition period from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the post-WWI Middle East. His lecture focused on petitions in Ottoman and post-Ottoman societies during and after World War I.
After examining memoirs and other first-person narratives, Dr. Okan discussed the agency that can be traced from petitions, showing a video of a petition-writer in Beirut in the 1920s and a petition written by a woman from post-Ottoman Iraq requesting a pension.
There were seven participants at the venue and 19 online. During the Q&A session, there was a productive exchange of ideas, with questions about the prevalence of petitioning during the mandate period, potential shifts in rhetoric and vocabulary during that period, and whether petition-writers organized themselves into guilds.
Event Details:
Date and time: March 13, 2024 (Wed), 3pm~5pm
Venue: Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, 2nd Meeting Room (302)/Zoom
Speaker: Orçun Can Okan (University of Oxford)
Title: Petitions and “Individuals”: First-Person Narratives and Historical Agency at Intersections of Diplomatic, Administrative, and Legal History
Chair: Jun Akiba (IASA, U Tokyo)
Abstract:
Historians use various kinds of first-person narratives to trace past experiences and analyze historical actors’ claims about the past, the present, and the future. These include memoirs published in multiple editions, manuscripts written for the eyes of the very few (if any), as well as petitions processed (or ignored) on the desks of bureaucrats. With a focus on petitions in particular, this talk invites renewed attention to how first-person narratives can facilitate the contextualization of historical agency in new, explanatory ways. It critically engages with the role of memoirs in recent scholarship on World War I and its aftermath(s) in the Ottoman Empire, and highlights alternative research directions that foreground petitions formulated to address specific administrative and legal problems in times of state succession. By questioning some of the basic assumptions underlying notions of “ordinary people” and “bottom-up” approaches, it problematizes uncritical reliance on these notions in analyses of social interactions through archival sources. Ultimately, the talk aims to stimulate conversation on how to balance structural factors with “individual” (and collective) agency in particular historical contexts.
Co-organizers: Working Group “Methodological Issues in the Study of Ottoman Primary Sources” (Principal Investigator:Jun Akiba (IASA)) / JSPS Kakenhi 20H01322 / Grant-in-Aid for Transformative Research Areas (A), “The Ideas of the Muslim Community and State Systems” (Principal Investigator: KONDO Nobuaki (ILCAA); 20H05827).