AKPIA@MIT
Lecture Announcement

Tonight, Monday, May 7
5:30 pm in MIT 3-133

Status, Gender, Privacy. The Transformation of Domestic Culture in the Beirut House, 1860-1930

Ralph Bodenstein
AKPIA@MIT Post-Doctoral Fellow
Post-Doctoral Fellow, German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Cairo

Abstract
The rapid economic and political rise of Beirut during the 19th century led to massive population growth and urban expansion. Newcomers and social risers profoundly transformed the city's demographic and socio-economic composition. These changes also affected everyday domestic culture and its material expression. Social distinction and displays of wealth and status became increasingly important for both the growing classes of social risers and the established elites. At the same time, the horizon of available models was widening considerably, encompassing Istanbuli-Ottoman upper class culture and various European influences. Most conspicuously, a new form of domestic architecture - a local variation of the Ottoman sofa (or central-hall) house - proliferated among the city's wealthy and began to visually dominate the new suburbs. While such processes of cultural change have mostly been explained as Europeanization or Westernization, this presentation takes a different perspective. It examines upper-class houses not as static monuments to social status and wealth, but as evolving and changing structures that are closely interlinked with processes of social change on the level of the households and by extension, of urban society at large. More specifically, it draws upon extensive field research and case studies of houses in Beirut to explore changing forms of sociability (including gendered sociability) and social relations and tensions within the households, and how these were reconfigured in domestic space.

Biography
Ralph Bodenstein is a post-doc fellow at the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Cairo. He holds a PhD in Architectural History from the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin) and an MA in Islamic Studies, History of Islamic Art, and Urban Planning from the University of Bonn. He also received a certificate in Building Archaeology and Conservation Studies from TU Berlin. His research interests include the study of material culture as a source for social and cultural history, the uses of oral history in architectural history as well as notions of everyday life and its relations to the built environment.
His doctoral dissertation focuses the transformation of domestic culture in 19th- and 20th century Beirut. He has conducted extensive research on the urban, architectural and social history of Beirut and Saida as a research fellow at the German Orient Institute Beirut (OIB) and has published articles on these topics.