Gendered Knowledge: Lucy Garnett and the Nineteenth-Century Anthropology of the Ottoman Elite

Abstract (English)

The problem was that Ottoman women were not seen. By the nineteenth century, generations of foreign observers had written about the empire’s men, politics, and so forth, but women’s seclusion appeared to make its cultural core inscrutable. This inscrutability itself became a defining feature in representations of elite Ottoman society, but it also drove alternative methods of study, often led by women anthropologists. This talk considers Lucy Garnett (1849-1934), whose late nineteenth-century work centered her lengthy experience in the Eastern Mediterranean and her commitment to ethnographic diligence. Through exploring Garnett’s use of gender to justify and inform her scholarship, I demonstrate how she and her collaborator, John Stuart-Glennie, worked to position their research within general theories of human development and difference. In particular, I examine how their ideas of gender were closely tied to debates around the racial identities—and associated civilization—of the Ottoman empire. Although their influence was limited at best, I suggest their work shows both the popularity of anthropology in many less-studied social circles and alternative trajectories of ethnographic practice and theorization in the late nineteenth century.