fragments of modernization: domestic spaces indicating traditional dialects in a modern speech

Fragments of Modernization: DomesticSpaces Indicating Traditional Dialectsin a Modern Speech

Ozge Merzali CelikogluTechnical University of Istanbul (ITU)

This article examines the change in Turkish domestic space throughmodernization and, in particular, the artifact of lace, as a nonchangingobject in Turkish home in its relationship with the “traditional” and the“modern” domestic settings. Thereby it investigates how traditional andmodern settings are defined in Turkish society and, this leads to a fur-ther analysis of the modernization process in Turkey within the scopeof Turkish house and its domestic settings. The aim of the article is toanalyze lace as an agent, which is an actant of the change in domesticsettings, to read the connection between the daily life of people andsocial lives of artifacts. Therefore, examining the dialogue of lace withtraditional and modern domestic settings provides to deconstruct thenetwork of the artifact, the house and the individual during the modern-ization process that Turkish society has been through. The theoreticalperspective of the article relies on a material-semiotic approach withan emphasis on Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and, the methodologyof the article is based on ethnography: It includes observations andsemi-structured interviews conducted with people from different socialenvironments focusing on the meaning and the use of lace in domesticenvironment.Keywords: material culture, modernization, sociocultural change,domestic culture, actor-network theory

INTRODUCTION

Objects and artifacts that exist, evolve, and disappear in everyday life provide uswith information about how their users go through individual and social changes.They become the projection of people’s social lives at certain moments in time. Sinceobjects serve to create and represent human beings and their worlds—identities,

Direct all correspondence to Ozge Merzali Celikoglu, Department of Industrial Product Design,Faculty of Architecture, Technical University of Istanbul, Taskisla, Taksim, Istanbul 34437, Turkey;e-mail: [email protected].

Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 37, Issue 3, pp. 391–411, ISSN: 0195-6086 print/1533-8665 online.© 2014 Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1002/SYMB.115

392 Symbolic Interaction Volume 37, Number 3, 2014

relationships, interactions, reactions—understanding the meaning of objects pro-vides a way to understand the people who live with them. This article examines theprocess and interpretation of modernization in Turkey as this has affected domesticsettings within Turkish homes, taking the object of lace, a traditional craft product, asa starting point, as an agent around which networks are constructed, deconstructed,and reconstructed.

PERSPECTIVE AND METHOD

As Appadurai (1986) argues in The Social Life of Things, the best way to understandthe complex ways in which humans invest value in things is to follow the things them-selves through space and time—that is, to follow their “careers,” “biographies,” and“social lives.” Appadurai claims:

Even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view thatthings have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions,and motivations endow them with … we have to follow the things themselves, fortheir meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is onlythrough the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human trans-actions and calculations that enliven things. Thus, even though from a theoreticalpoint of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodologi-cal point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and socialcontext.

This article adds to Appadurai’s approach by investigating “things” as agents intheir own right. Appadurai is less interested in the things themselves than in howthey signify human relationships.

Later scholars notably Latour (1992), Gell (1998), and Bennett (1998) have movedbeyond Appadurai’s semiotic framework. This article stands at the intersection ofboth approaches: while agreeing that objects can signify human relationships, itsemphasis is on the “agency” of the objects in following them through their changingsocial life and position in their user’s domestic world during the modernization pro-cess. It adopts actor-network theory (ANT)—which usually investigates networksconsisting of technologies and people—to study an ornamental component of thedomestic setting to reveal its nontechnologic but still influential functions and thenetwork around them. In the words of Latour:

The distinctions between humans and non-humans, embodied or disembodiedskills, impersonation or “machination”, are less interesting than the completechain along which competences and actions are distributed.

ANT focuses on the connections that are being made and remade between humanand nonhuman entities that are part of the issue at stake. It describes how theseconnections lead to the creation of new entities that do not necessarily representthe sum of the characteristics of their constituent entities. An actor or actant is thatwhich accomplishes or undergoes an act. This can be a human being, an animal,

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object, or concept that accomplishes or undergoes an act. According to Callon (1987),“Reducible neither to an actor alone nor to a network…An actor-network is simul-taneously an actor whose activity is networking heterogeneous elements and a net-work that is able to redefine and transform what it is made of.” Additionally, Latour(1996) claims that, “An actor in ANT is a semiotic definition—an actant—that issomething that acts or to which activity is granted by another… an actant can literallybe anything provided it is granted to be the source of action” (Latour 1996). Whenwe act we always interact with others, and as John Law has stated: “interaction is allthat there is.” During these interactions we change other actants. At the same time,however, we are being changed by those actants. It is a reference to semiotics, whichassumes that signs have meaning only in relation to other signs. ANT argues actorscan only be understood within a network wherein their identity is defined throughtheir interaction with other actors. As Law and Callon (1988) claim, actor-networktheorists are not primarily concerned with mapping interactions between individuals.Their objectives are to map the way in which actors define and distribute roles, andmobilize or invent others to play these roles.

ANT recognizes that nonhuman entities are influencing us constantly, just asmuch as humans. Although actants access existing action nets, thus recreating andstabilizing these connections, they must also continually form new connections. Suchconnections are forged during the process of translation, where words, numbers,objects, and people are translated into one another. This translation appears asthe process of making connections, of forging a passage between two domains, orsimply as establishing communication (Brown 2002). Like calculation, translation isdispersed: everybody translates although some translations, like some calculations,have more currency than others (Czarniawska 2004). According to Czarniawska(2004), and corresponding with the aim of this article, studying action nets meansanswering a dual question: What is being done and how does this connect to otherthings that are being done in the same context? It is a way of questioning that aims atcapturing the traces of the past but not permitting them to decide the future: actionnets, even those strongly institutionalized, are constantly remade and renewed.For ANT, to study any type of organization, social order, technical innovation,or scientific discovery is to study the connections between heterogeneous actorsenrolled within a network. These networks consist of humans and nonhumans;people, animals, objects, and things.

Critics of ANT have questioned whether nonhumans can have equal importanceto humans in networks. Although it is commonsensically supposed that objects arepassive entities until oriented to by humans, ANT asserts that “objects too haveagency”: Latour (2005) states that, “Objects, by the very nature of their connectionswith humans, quickly shift from being mediators to being intermediaries, countingfor one or nothing, no matter how internally complicated they might be in thesenetworks.” Another criticism questions how researchers can “follow the actors” ifthere are so many actors who may emerge and disappear. Can they all be given equalimportance in a network under the “flat ontology” adopted by ANT? Latour (2005)


suggests that the connections between humans and nonhumans can be traced duringfieldwork through empirical data. This description reveals the connections that leadto the creation of a certain entity.

Within the framework of this article, in order to make these connections of net-works visible, an ethnographic inquiry among a group of people revealed a varietyof experiences and approaches starting from the object of lace and its connection tothe domestic space, to the concept of change and modernization. Considering thatethnography is the work of describing a culture, the approach is based on learningfrom people rather than studying them (Spradley 1979). Instead of collecting “data”about people, the aim is to learn from people, to be taught by them. With this per-spective, semi-structured interviews were conducted with people from different age,gender, and educational backgrounds. The aim of the ethnographic inquiry is to takethe lace as an agent, which builds connections with its changing surround from pastto present and to have an understanding of this change and meaning in everyday lifein Turkish society. So, the nature of this research requires an interpretative processto understand human behavior and sensitivities.

In this research, ten people were interviewed using a semi-structured interviewmethod. Most participants were female because lace-making activity is usuallyrelated to women. In addition to the semi-structured interviews, many conversationstook place with these people, as a part of the methodology. Since a conversationis a co-operative venture, which has a direction and allows new understanding(Feldman 1999), it is very useful during an ethnographic inquiry. The transmission ofknowledge through an informal conversation provides the transmission of some kindof tacit knowledge regarding the issues of daily life. In addition to semi-structuredinterviews and informal conversations, visual data were collected: photographswere taken in participants’ houses so that a deeper analysis can be made with thedocumentation of the visual data (Pink 2007).

FIELDWORK

Considering their relationship with the society, objects are conveyers of culturalvalues, lifestyles, and elements of life decoration where cultures are reflected anddocumented. Thus, they are messages from the society that produces them and signi-fiers of their users’ identities (Bilgin 1986). Studies on the material culture of homesshow that people can move from being supposedly alienated or passive consumers toactive producers of meaning by using artifacts to create “meaningful décor” (Cheva-lier 1999). Empirical studies of material culture, interactions between people andtheir homes, suggest that there is an active meaning-making process in which objectsand people play roles (Dittmar 1992). Thus, the starting point of the fieldwork was todetermine and question the existence of lace in its connection to domestic space, asan object of domestic material culture and, then trace it to see whether it has connec-tions to wider concepts. Interview questions were formulated to obtain informationabout the lace, its connection to the home, its meaning, and the relationship between


FIGURE 1. Lace in Display Cabinet

lace and its user. The most interesting answers were generated by the question“How would you describe a house without lace?” which provided some access tounderstanding how participants made sense of lace in their domestic environment.

Meriç (53 years) is a housewife who lives with her husband and two children (a sonand a daughter). She graduated from elementary school, but has never worked at ajob: she is some kind of “professional housewife.” She likes making lace and puttingit on her furniture: in the display cabinet in the living room and in the drawers ofher chiffonier. According to Meriç, “A home without lace would be a home withoutlabor.” Making lace is a part of the job of the housewife: it is equal to building a homeout of a house.

The use of lace in a display cabinet is common: the display cabinet itself couldbe a subject of research in modern Turkish houses. The display cabinet is a part ofthe “furniture set,” which belongs to the salon. It has shelves and doors of glass,and, as implied by its name, its function is to “display” objects. These are generallyprecious tea/coffee sets, and related accessories, that are mostly used only as elementsof decoration. It is one of the most show-off items in the room since it usually containsspecial things that were part of the housewife’s bridal chest. Thus it is not surprisingthat all the shelves of the display cabinet are covered with lace (Figure 1). Similardisplays would once have been seen in almost every house.


As Meriç says, lace has always been a signifier of the home in Turkish culture. Itis identified with the housewife, her talent and dominance over the house and hersuccess in turning the house into a warm home. Morley (2000) notes,

There is a collapsing image of the image of the wife/mother into the image of thehome itself [whereby] The woman and the home seem to become each other’sattributes.

Housewives, through their own housework and home decoration practices, notonly constitute their own identities, but do so in terms of their personal departuresfrom what they see as tradition (Pink 2004). Women’s roles in creating and maintain-ing their homes can signify relationships of equality with, rather than of oppressionby, their partners (Gullestad 1993; Silva 2000)—in this case it can even be called“dominance” over the household.

Merve (23 years) is a graduate student studying architecture and design. She liveswith her parents who are retired and has an older brother who moved out from theirparents’ house after getting married. While taking photographs at the end of theinterview, Merve starts laughing and says,

I never realized that there were so many laces in our house; that’s more than Iwould expect from my mother. I think she likes to exhibit her talent. Look, weeven have that stereotypical telephone-lace image.

She claims that she will definitely have no lace when she moves to her ownapartment, “They make the house look old fashioned—not modern.” she adds.Besides being an element of decoration, lace becomes a product of some kind of an“exhibition” that is created by the housewife, or by the grandmother, where she canexhibit her talent as a woman. The more difficult and complicated lace pattern is, themore proud is the housewife of herself and her lace-work. As Pink (2004) observes,to understand the status of the housewife, it is crucial to acknowledge contempo-rary discontinuities between theoretical uses of binary dichotomies, the traditionaldiscourses embedded in cultural representations, and how continuities and changeare constructed by individuals and constituted in the diversity of everyday lives andactions.

The use of lace with the telephone (Figure 2) is a good example of how continuitiesand change are constructed in domestic space by individuals in their everyday life.It was just the beginning of creating “object-object hybrids” (Shove et al. 2007), andwas followed by 1980s popular stereotypical image of the “television and its lace,”as in Figure 3. Thus, the lace placed on the television with its hanging side over thescreen was like a decorative protective-cover that one has to lift to be able to watchthe television. Modern devices that entered everyday life became traditionalized andadapted to the context of the salon.

Selin (23 years) has recently graduated from university with an engineeringdegree. Her parents live in a small city and she had to move to the metropolis forstudying. While studying, she used to stay in a dormitory. She has an older sister who


FIGURE 2. Telephone-Lace Hybrid

lives with their parents. Selin decided to stay in the metropolis after her graduationbecause she thought that she had more choices and opportunities for a job there.She found a job and rented an apartment with one of her friends from the university.When she talks about lace and her parents’ home she says:

FIGURE 3. Old Television With Lace


My mother is making lace… She is doing it because it looks beautiful and throughit she can exhibit her talent. (… ) My mother puts lace under some objects such asvases, DVD players, bibles because she thinks that it looks nice and also becauselace is identified with objects such as coffee table, display cabinet, and etc. I per-sonally do not like and use lace in my apartment, we have a modern decorationsimilar to a students’ house. When I go home [indicating her parents’ house] mylife with laces continues.

The most traditional way for decoration with lace is to knit and use coffee tablecloths, as shown in Figure 4. Coffee tables are one of the most popular domesticobjects in Turkish house that can be used in multifunctional ways (Çaglar 2005).There is a huge variety of coffee tables but the most prominent ones are of two types:the center coffee table and the “zigon” which consists of coffee tables varying in sizeand can be stored altogether seeming as if there is only one. While the coffee tablein the center indicates a “getting together as a family” around it—just like the roomcalled “sofa” in the traditional Turkish house did—“zigon” is reserved for guests.Both types of table entered into domestic spaces during the transition process fromthe traditional to the modern Turkish house. Putting lace on every kind of furnitureis like dressing the furniture (Attfield 2000) in order to emphasize its existence andintegrate it with the rest of the decoration. However, the more interesting situation

FIGURE 4. Lace Covering Coffee Table


FIGURE 5. Lace Decorating the Speaker

starts when lace is brought into dialogue with electronic devices in the house. Asthe number of technological devices increased during the modernization process, aproblem emerged for housewives: these devices did not generally fit well with thedecoration and domestic atmosphere. Moreover, they were expensive and sensitivedevices, which should be kept safe from the children. Housewives found the solutionfor this situation: as Selin reported, they treated these devices in the same way asthey treated traditional furniture by covering them with lace (Figure 5).

There is a temporal distinguishing attitude of using lace on speakers or DVD play-ers compared to using lace on television and telephone; television and telephonewere the first electronic devices that entered the house during the modernizationprocess; they were rarely found during the 1970s and therefore very precious fortheir users. Speakers and DVD players became widely used in houses at a later time,when the modernization of the domestic space was mostly “completed.” During thischange, the role of lace stayed the same, with the same function of maintaining thecontext of home, marking the unchanging position of the housewife, which is con-nected to space rather than time.

Another reason for the use of lace in Turkish homes is that it is a gift from anolder relative. Even people who do not like lace keep it somewhere in the house as amemory of the relative and out of respect to their hand-labor. Emir (35 years) is anacademic who has recently married and lives with his wife who is also an academic. As


generally happens with recently married couples, they received many gifts from theirrelatives, which included a bridal chest with lace made by his wife’s grandmother.As Emir says:

We don’t prefer to put lace on our furniture. We use lace in the bedroom; it is amemory from our grandmother. It was a gift for the bridal chest. Although we pre-fer a modern decoration we still respect the hand-labor of our grandmother – andthey are really precious.

He adds, “A house without lace would be, let’s say, a ‘modern house’.” As Riggins(1994) notes, it is through objects that we keep alive the memory of families andindividuals who might otherwise be forgotten. Thus, lace also gains meaning throughits memorial potential and its service as a potent marker of important social ties,bonds, and connections between loved ones of different generations and traditions.However, the emphasis on the distinction between traditional and modern house isstill remarkable in Emir’s comments similar to other interviewees’ comments. Theabsence of lace is taken as a sign of a modern house.

Yaprak (27 years) has graduated from university and lives with her roommate in anapartment. Her parents live in another city and, like Selin, she came to the metropolisto study at a university and stayed there after graduation. The interview with Yaprakalso includes her mother Fulden (49 years) who graduated from high school and hasbeen a housewife for many years. She has one younger daughter, Yaprak’s sister, whostudies in another metropolis. At present Fulden lives with her husband and relativesin their home city. The definition of a house without lace is made by Fulden as “a tooplain and empty home” while her daughter Yaprak smiles and says: “I think a houseshould definitely be without lace, they have no function at all. Why should we livein an environment filled with unnecessary ornaments since it is more functional tocreate simple modern places?” Fulden claims that she likes to put lace under preciousdecorative objects so that they all look better with the furniture (Figure 6).

FIGURE 6. Lace Under Traditional Decorative Objects


The feeling that the house would be “empty” without lace can be interpreted asthe absence of a housewife’s touch, which creates a kind of warmth in the home.The housewife or mother does not only take care of the children and the family butalso maintains the concept of home as a special location associated with the family.A similar feeling is described by Demet (24 years) who is about to graduate withan engineering degree and lives far away from her parents. She lives alone in anapartment, after moving several times. Demet claims:

Lace in our home [in her parents’ house] is used as ornament, to create an atmo-sphere of home, to hide the furniture’s cold nakedness and create a warm home. Ahouse without lace reminds me of our summerhouse. When I was a child we usedto go to our summerhouse on holidays, and when we were leaving, my motherused to pack the laces from the furniture in order to keep them clean. Thereforea house without laces makes me think that there is no sign of life.

According to Attfield (2000), the dwelling furnishes the most fundamentalspatial experience in the orientation of individuals in relation to the external worldthrough the everyday mundane practices of managing and ordering domestic lifeand the special rituals, which mark particular moments of change in the life cycle.The furnishings and physical contents of the dwelling represent the material man-ifestation of its inhabitants’ sense of the world in microcosm. As Csikszentmihalyiand Rochberg-Halton (1981) state,

Although one has little control over the things encountered outside the home,household objects are chosen and could be freely discarded if they produced toomuch conflict within the self.

Considering the connection between traditions, objects, and society, lace repre-sents not only the loyalty to traditional values but also an effort for adaptation to afast sociocultural change while keeping the ties to the traditional.

Following Latour’s ANT approach, we can take lace as an indicator that makes vis-ible changes in Turkish domestic settings and social life. While following lace’s sociallife (Appadurai 1986) in the domestic environment, a network of people, objects,modernization, and social change becomes “traceable” (Latour 2005). As Latour(2005) notes, “There is nothing more difficult to grasp than social ties. It’s traceableonly when it’s being modified.” This fieldwork shows that lace is a remarkable agentindicating change in the Turkish house during the nation’s modernization project andthe construction of a modern identity. The existence of lace actually became notice-able in late 1990s when electronic devices became widely used in houses: it is oneof the time periods of modifications of social ties and domestic settings. Althoughhousewives did nothing different and continued covering the domestic settings withlace, the younger generation found it absurd and caricatured images such as thelace-covered television. Referring back to Latour’s (2005) “no new association, noway to feel the grasp” argument, the construction of new associations in the houserevealed some changes between the actants which put spotlight on certain objects,


such as lace. Thus, lace is an actant in the network of the social change, like otheractants, such as conflicts and coherencies of the concept of home, traditional Turkishhouse, modernization project, older and younger generations and conflicts of a tran-sition phase. This leads to a further investigation for the reason that made lace lookdifferent or absurd in the house.

Considering lace’s most dominant days in Turkish house, a time period between1950s to late 1990s is covered. During that specific time period, there was a sig-nificant internal migration from rural to urban areas and a mandatory transitionfrom the traditional Turkish house to a modern house: rapid urbanization resultedin small living spaces which were a trauma for households who were used to living inmuch larger areas. Continuing the life-style of the traditional Turkish house was nolonger possible because of urbanized life and modernization process. This change wasreflected in domestic settings. Many objects and artifacts in the Turkish house havechanged during the modernization process: some have evolved with time and somehave disappeared. However, as Bozdogan (2001) has pointed out, even in modernarchitecture houses, the household has preferred to continue using traditional domes-tic equipment and resisted modern ones. The change from the traditional house tothe modern house represented the change from a traditional identity to a modernidentity, which brings further issues of the deconstruction of the traditional Turk-ish house and its reconstruction within the terms of modernization: it is where oldnetworks are deconstructed and new networks are built.

DECONSTRUCTING NETWORKS: TRACING LACE FROMCHANGING DOMESTIC SPACES TO CHANGING SOCIAL LIVES

There are various definitions and interpretations of “home” in cultural studies.According to Bachelard (1969), our home is an extension of our existence whereour existence becomes visible. Therefore it represents us as people, as well as ourposition in life. It is our first point of communication with life (Fidanoglu 2001).The home can be conceptualized as a physical reference point from where peoplerelate to their inner and outer lives, their pasts, presents and futures. It is also usedas a space for the transaction of individuality, a starting point and a return fromthe external world. Domestic material culture studies show that the transitionalsignificance of the home provides a way of examining how such permanent socialstructures as the family, objectified in the dwelling, can adapt to different life stagesand the changing experience of intimacy and interiority that characterizes modernlife, and forms of relationship to the exterior world beyond (Attfield 2000). Placessuch as home may be integrally involved in the construction of both personalidentities—unique configurations of life history items that differentiate the selffrom other—and social identities—groups of attributes associated with persons ofa given social category (Goffman 1963).

Miller’s (2001) edited collection, “Home Possessions,” develops new perspectiveson the material culture of the home through the close study of people, their homes,


and the objects that surround them. Having detailed the way in which homes andtheir inhabitants negotiate a compromise between the house’s given order and theinhabitants’ preferences, Miller is also interested in illustrating how such objects andorderings can be oppressive and alienating for the inhabitants. Home as a settingfor the enactment of self and the management of domestic display has been con-ceptualized both as performance for others and a marking practice contributing tonegotiations of identity within a network of relations. Miller (2002) emphasizes themateriality of home and things as constitutive of social processes, rather than anabstracted notion of home as symbol. The home, therefore, and the material culturecontained and displayed within it increasingly becomes the site for both the appropri-ation of the outside, public world and the representation of the private, inside world(Miller 2001).

In Turkish culture, the concept of “home” is always remarkably distinguished fromthe concept of “house.” Most of the time, it is the signifier of a family, a feeling ofsafety and warmth. It is generally identified with the housewife and it is the house-wife who is responsible for the order, setting and decoration of the home. During themodernization process of the Turkish house, the attitude was to abandon any kindof traditional domestic setting. However, considering the large scale change from atraditional to a modern lifestyle, lace represents the hand labor of the housewife, anindicator displaying the problematic nature of “formal” modernization through itsrealization in the home. The presence of lace in the modern house and its dialoguewith modern domestic settings provides an insight to understand this process. Enter-ing into the network of the context “modernization in Turkey,” lace is one of theimportant actants, which changes environments, perceptions and behaviors of otheractants, such as people, spaces and objects. ANT maps relations that are simultane-ously between objects and between concepts, and assumes that many relations areboth material and semiotic. With this approach and revisiting the data from the field-work, these relations come along while tracing the object of lace and its connectionsto people and other domestic objects. To make sense of these relations requires anexploration of the traditional and modern Turkish house.

Traditional Turkish House in the Material-Semiotic Framework

The traditional Turkish house retains traces of former nomadic lifestyles andemphasizes privacy, which became dominant in Turkish culture after the adoption ofIslam. To understand the process of modernization that the Turkish house has beenthrough, an examination of the actants of the change of architecture and domesticsettings would be helpful.

In the plan of traditional Turkish house, sofa is the center area of the house towhich all other rooms have direct connections. Sofa is the place where all membersof the family can spend time together and also, guests can be hosted. It has a strongsignificance so that all house plans are determined according to the type of the sofa.Bozdogan (1996) claims


FIGURE 7. Sedir in Traditional Turkish House

The sofa is an unspecialized space giving access to other rooms such that - in aninteresting analogy between the house and the city - Eldem visualized the roomsof the house as individual houses in themselves, and the sofa as the street or squareallowing access to them.

The architect Sedad Hakkı Eldem (1984b, 1984a) made the first categorization ofhouse plans. In this categorization, the most important ones are plans with exteriorsofa, with interior sofa and with centered sofa (Günay 1998). Rooms in the tradi-tional Turkish house are multifunctional rather than specified for a single function,as in most American or European houses: in every room, people can sit and rest,sleep, wash, eat, and even cook (Hacıbaloglu 1989). Since rooms are designed asvolumes having many functions, objects used in these rooms are also portable andmultifunctional. Whenever an action is completed (such as eating, sleeping, etc.), therelated objects are taken away and stored in another place: Beds are stored in closetscalled yüklük and taken out whenever it is time to sleep (Küçükerman 1985). Simi-larly, sini, a circular wooden table very close to the ground, is brought to the centerof the room whenever it is time to eat. To facilitate the multiple use of the room, thecenter area is left free of any objects. Furniture is built together with the house andthe sitting element sedir continues along walls, as in Figure 7 (Küçükerman 1985).The household generally uses these sedirs for sitting and resting (Göker 2009).

One type of traditional Turkish house plan, for instance, consists of two main sep-arated areas, which are called haremlik and selamlık. Haremlik is the area for womenand selamlık is the area for men when guests are hosted. In this type of house plan,guests can be led to the guest room basoda without meeting the whole household.Considering the issue of privacy, garden walls are so tall that the garden could notbe seen from outside. With the same reason the first floor of the house does not


include any windows on the side of the house, which faces the street (Günay 1998).It is possible to say that settled lifestyle and Islam have been dominating factors forthe perception of privacy and its reflection on the traditional Turkish house.

Considering the connections of domestic objects to each other and to the structureof the house, it is possible to claim that the traditional Turkish house consists of con-cepts such as mobility with connotations to nomadic life, plainness, which includesfunctionality, and privacy with strong emphasis on gender issues following the adop-tion of Islam.

Modernization and Reconstruction of the Turkish House

Modernization in the houses of the upper class of the Ottoman Empire started in1839 with the Tanzimat reforms. Trying to respond to European, especially French,tastes and attitudes, Ottoman bureaucrats and officers started to change theirlifestyle, dress and housing to match European culture. This resulted in interestingsituations, for instance, dressing tables and mirrors from Paris were located withEastern carpets and marquetry Islamic furniture in the same house. The elite classalso abandoned the traditional “haremlik”—‘selamlık’ separation in the house atthe same time period (Bozdogan 2001).

During the 1920s Turkey underwent a transition from a disintegrating empire toa secular nation-state under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of theRepublic. As Bozdogan (1996) claims:

In architectural terms, the revolution meant that references to the high cultureand tradition of the former empire were no longer appropriate, since the newmodernizing elites sought to dissociate the cultural politics of the Republic fromthe Ottoman/Islamic past. When such Ottoman motifs as domes, arches, and tiledecoration (applied primarily to public buildings well into the early 1930s) wereabandoned as markers of Turkish identity, the stripped aesthetic of German andCentral European modernism stepped in.

Within the new housing designs that were constructed in urban areas sofa lost itspower and importance in gathering people together. As a result, sofa has disappearedphysically in this housing (Eriç, Ersoy, and Yener 1986). During the 1930s, it wasan explicit national goal to construct a new, modern and Western domestic culture.However, design concepts such as open kitchens and transparency through spacesconflicted with traditional understandings of privacy and were resisted so that theunderstanding of modernism became formal rather than being spatially enacted. Thisresulted in certain adaptations, such as adding an extra a’la turca (squat) toilet tothe already existing modern bathroom or separating the rooms as living room of thehousehold and ‘guest room’ or salon (Bozdogan 2001).

The transition from the traditional Turkish house to the modern apartmentstarted with the industrialization of Turkey and the resulting internal migration fromrural to urban areas. This process started during the 1950s and was the result of


the modernization of agriculture that started with Marshall Aid (Tekeli 1996). Theinternal migration was driven more by the emergence of surplus labor in agriculturethan demand from industrialization. The mechanization of agriculture resulted inthe detachment of the peasants from the land. From this period on, the processof urbanization become a phenomenon determined by the migrants rather thanbeing planned by the government. It is also the period where the story of gecekonduneighborhoods has started. In the 1950s, gecekondu neighborhoods were born fromthe need for shelter in urban areas. They consisted of houses that offered minimumsheltering requirements. From the 1960s on, squatter housing became a public issuein Turkey. Istanbul became the core of the squatter housing process in Turkey.

During the 1960s, the gecekondu partially lost its characteristic of being theinevitable sheltering solution for new migrants and became a commodity thatcould be sold or rented. As a result of legislation and changes in tenure duringthe 1970s and 1980s, squatter houses have been replaced by “squatter apartments”(Türkdogan 2002). During the 1980s, gecekondus changed from being informalsettlements providing basic shelter to a new type of mass social housing. After 1990,there was another intense wave of migration and the issue of urbanization becameproblematic again (Bozkulak 2005).

From the 1960s to the late 1990s, Turkish middle class houses in urban areastended to consist of two main parts: the inner house, where the family lives, andthe salon, where guests are hosted. Conceptually, the inner house means sincerity,nearness, warmth, comfort, directness, density and familiarity, while salon is theworld of relationships with “disturbing” strangers (Ayata 1988). This differentiationof living spaces provides the household with the kind of privacy very similar to thatin the traditional Turkish house. Despite the change in the structure of the house,the household finds a way to continue with their old lifestyle. Due to this sharpdistinction of spaces in the same house, the family living in there has two distinctworlds, socially and psychologically. The salon was like an exhibition area for guestswhere all valuable goods of the family are displayed; these could be goods whichhave been bought and are expensive, such as a new television, video player or furni-ture set, or goods which signify the family’s memories or the housewife’s talent, suchas hand-woven or hand-knit cloths and lace. So the household and the housewifetook the salon as a place for conspicuous consumption, and the housewives’ passionto decorate this room ended in “lacing” the salon.

Today, the separation between salon and living room is not as sharp as it was pre-viously. Rapid urbanization and the consequent pressure on living space means thatthe living room has to serve as both salon and living room. So, the differentiationbetween the inner house and the outer house is fading.

To summarize, significant characteristics of Turkey’s modernization process can beread within the approach to housing and changing domestic settings: the traditionalhouse is being destroyed within its domestic setting and replaced with a “con-temporary” model (Tanyeli 2005). However, reflections of sociocultural attitudesand effects of unplanned urbanization continue to show themselves in significant


ways throughout the modernization process of the Turkish house and domesticenvironment, considering the way in which house occupiers appropriate their ownspaces in the face of the social control imposed by state governance or housing(Attfield 2000).

Among many artifacts that resist the process of modernization in Turkish house,lace is a particularly significant, in its adaptation to many different changes. Asmentioned before, the home itself and its objects become an extension of its user(Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981), and as the fieldwork shows laceis identified with the housewife—it is the “hand” of the housewife touching thehome. As Kopytoff (1986) emphasizes, things have a “cultural biography” and areembedded in frameworks of time and memory (Tilley 2001). Therefore, historiesof objects are important in the construction of individual and societal changes(Woodward 2001). Lace, as an agent acting in the process of modernization in theTurkish house is also a mediator that leads us to understand some of the problematicissues in this modernization process.

CONCLUSION

Examining lace, which is a traditional domestic artifact, brings us to the network ofthe changing Turkish house, which makes sense in the context of urbanization and themodernization of sociocultural life in Turkey. The understanding and process of mod-ernization is demonstrated in the changing Turkish house, which reflects changingsociety and relationships. The dialogue of lace with traditional and modern objectsin domestic settings is similar to the dialogue of people who changed or had to changetheir social lives from a traditional way to a modernized one. Using the approach ofANT, lace serves as an indicator to detect the change in domestic settings and as atrigger to discover the network of modernization in which it is an actant.

Like all other objects, lace has its own social life. Exploring the “socialness” ofobjects reveals how they become integrated in the “social fabric of everyday life”(Riggins 1994) and how people actively embrace the emotive and social properties oftheir “things” (McCracken 1988). The use, and widespread appropriation, of objectswithin everyday life is a reflection and future projection of maintaining importantsocial relationships (McGrath, Sherry, and Levy 1993). As Attfield (2000) notes, cer-tain types of things that might appear quite ordinary in appearance, actually take onthe role of mediators in both adapting and resisting social change. Tracing connec-tions between humans and non-humans through empirical work as Latour (2005)suggests, helped to find the connection between an artifact of domestic materialculture and traditional craftsmanship, lace, and a still continuing social debate, themodernization of Turkey.

As an extension of the “modernization project” of Turkey, the Turkish houseis constructed with latest technological equipment transferred from the West justbecause it represents a “modern domestic life” without questioning the need or adap-tation of the household. Latest models of televisions, DVD players, music sets, and


so on are bought and exhibited in the salon as a proof that “this family is a part of themodern society,” even if there is only one person in the family who knows how to usethese products, which is mostly the father or the young child of the family. The house-wife is then responsible for keeping them clean and out of reach of little children. Theentrance of these products into traditional houses can be explained with their con-nections of the new social paradigm and its norms, which are imposed to individualsas crucial for “being modern.” This image of the modern society forces or encouragesindividuals to “equip” themselves with these objects of modernity. It does not mat-ter whether they use them in their daily life or not, since their “presence” at home isenough to “show” that these inhabitants are part of the modern society. This situationcreates an irony between the aim and result of the modernization project: the tele-vision with lace is a good representative for this conflict. It is debatable whether thehousehold is ready for this modernization project although they are proud of theirmodern objects. So, the individual is confused and needs to construct his own kindof world, which allows a smoother transition phase from the traditional life to theone called “modern.” That is what explains the use of lace at home, especially withelectronic devices—it is a brick helping to construct a personal transition world forthe inhabitant during an essential social change through modernization.

Finally, referring back to Appadurai’s (1986) introduction of “things with sociallives,” it is an important statement that not only humans shape things but also thingscan shape human lives, behaviors, and perceptions. Regarding his approach of fol-lowing the things through their “careers,” this article proposes to have a differentlook at domestic material culture by using Latour’s ANT: it suggests using ANT toinvestigate traditional ornamental craftsmanship products since ANT usually focuseson technologies in domestic material-semiotic studies. This means admitting thatobjects/things also have agency rather than being passive signifiers of human rela-tions and, thus developing a wider perspective of Appadurai’s approach in terms ofdomestic material culture studies. The benefit of using ANT to understanding domes-tic material culture arises from its equal emphasis on the agency of humans and non-humans. Considering the network of modernization, the actant, lace, helped to revealother actants such as, government, Westernization, society, domestic life, domesticsettings, traditional and modern house, as answers to Czarniawska’s (2004) dual ques-tion, “What is being done and how does this connect to other things that are beingdone in the same context?” by studying action nets. Therefore, this article suggeststhat the use of ANT should not be limited to study the networks of technologies andhumans. Instead, it can provide scholars of domestic material culture with an alterna-tive way to study networks of “nontechnologic” objects of domestic settings, such asornamental or craftsmanship products, which have organic connections to humans.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank all the interviewees for sharing their thoughts and experiencesduring the fieldwork. I would also like to thank the editor Robert Dingwall and


anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that helped to improve thequality of this article.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR(S)

Ozge Merzali Celikoglu obtained her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees at the Technical University ofIstanbul (ITU). She is currently a research assistant and Ph.D. candidate at the Department ofIndustrial Product Design at ITU. Her dissertation is in the intersection of design semantics, ethnog-raphy, and symbolic interaction. Merzali Celikoglu’s research interests are focused on materialculture, ethnography, symbolic interactionism, semantics, semiotics, and design methodology. Herpapers are published mainly in the peer-reviewed proceedings of conferences Design Semantics ofForm and Movement (DeSForM), International Committee for Design History & Design Studies(ICDHS), and International Conference for Design Education Researchers (DRS).

fragments of modernization: domestic spaces indicating traditional dialects in a modern speech

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