Cultural capital: Wealth and values in late Ottoman Damascus.

Abstract

The last hundred years of Ottoman rule in Syria saw the incorporation of Damascus into the world economy, the decline of traditional elites and rise of national sentiment, and the transformation of the urban fabric by growth, class stratification, new infrastructures, public spaces, facades and discourses. This historical ethnography juxtaposes and examines the micro- and macro-processes by which these changes were effected. Drawing heavily on Islamic court archives, consular archives, journalism and memoirs, it posits that the changes in Damascus's complexion and structure can best be understood in terms of new trends in the deployment of cultural capital, i.e. different categories of valuable resources including economic capital but also the symbolic capital of family strength and prestige, the intellectual capital of religious knowledge, the political capital of power, popularity and national values. The processes of change discussed include the creative restructuring of rigid family values anchored by the strict partibility of Islamic inheritance law through intensification of matrimonial strategies of alliance, divergent patterns of saving, investment and commercial activity between men and women, and among the poor, middle class and wealthy and how the new social strata structured the city's residential and commercial quarters. An analysis of library composition revealed the contours of the reading elite and a Sufi lense with which to re-examine the local politics of the 'ulama. The successful mobilization of political capital by Ottoman governors is linked to the transformation of the city by heavy investment in technologies of transportation, communication, security and administration. The effects of competing symbolic currencies of national identity promoted by rivalrous European powers pursuing expansionistic policies especially during the First World War is shown to have had dramatic effects on regional balances of power and modern Syrian identity. Concluding that all the different levels and trends of value deployment described were part Damascene modernity, the dissertation develops a topographic model of a social landscape carved out by the movement of different types of cultural capital.