Semih Celik

One of the most frequent cases in which vermin appear in Ottoman official correspondence is when they "attack" or "invade" human settlements, consuming or destroying food produced specifically for human consumption. Until effective ways and tools to manage them emerged in the late nineteenth century, communities withstood flies, locusts, and rats. Indeed, specific categories of animals subsumed within the category of vermin/haşarat seem to have become among the biggest troublemakers in rural Anatolia and Mesopotamia. These vermin caused not only short-term scarcity of food, especially concerning during famines, but also writ-large settlement abandonment, resulting in the temporary and even long-term problems of rural/ regional economic systems. Yet very few Ottoman historians have reconstructed these stories within a critical animal history perspective. While it is true that these attacks and invasions of vermin created great burdens on human (and other animal) communities throughout history globally, the ways we historians have handled such cases tend to be anthropocentric. Here I argue for an ontological turn towards spatial aspects of vermin lives within human settlements and thus position my line of thinking about interaction from the ground-up, both literally and figuratively. From early-modern Ottoman discourses about vermin and the strategies used to cope with them from dictionaries/lexicons, literary and scientific texts, legal codices, and archival material, I develop a new analytical tool to understand interaction between humans and vermin as competition over perceived and actual space. I argue that we approach vermin behavior from the perspective of a spatial consciousness that constructed extended liminal configurations of space, which I call animalscapes. Human communities in Anatolia and Mesopotamia on the other hand, acknowledged the vermin perception of animalscapes and negotiated their place within, until the invention of chemical weapons against vermin at the end of the nineteenth century.

First half of the nineteenth century has been a period of environmental crises and climate change in the Ottoman territories. At the end of the “little ice age,” temperatures started going up and instability in precipitation levels became the rule, landscape started to change as a result of the frequent droughts and famines devastating the empire. Such changes coincided with an increase in the attempts at understanding nature through a “scientific” perspective. A political-ecology was due to emerge in the hands of the experts, who were not necessarily scientists, but intellectual-bureaucrats acting in accordance with a “fantasy of empire,” aiming at knowing, classifying and controlling the Ottoman nature.

In the middle of that process lies a hitherto neglected story, where plants, animals, doctors, scientists, intellectuals, bureaucrats of various identity and local populations were the protagonists. The story starts with the foundation of a herbarium and natural history museum in Istanbul, within the Ottoman Imperial Medical College complex in Galata Sarayı, in 1836. The few accounts (mostly by botanists) written on the history of the establishment and management of the herbarium and museum consider its history in connection with the colonial ambitions of the European actors, while employing the concept of “westernization,” implying the asymmetrical influence of European technology, values and knowledge over the Ottoman realm, leading to the imitation and copying of European ways of imperial administration.

This paper takes the first herbarium and natural history museum experience within Ottoman territories to argue that it functioned as a hub where doctors, scientists, plant collectors, bureaucrats from the Ottoman Empire and from different parts of Europe (including Russia) formed an inter-imperial network around interests not only of scientific values, but also political and economic ones. The relationship between different actors was a dialectical one rather than colonial or asymmetrical. Similarly, the processes of collecting and classifying of plants, animals and minerals for the museum and herbarium involved a dialectic relationship not only with such natural phenomena, but also with a dynamic socio-ecological knowledge developed by local populations of the empire. Furthermore, climatic fluctuations, and especially the famine of 1845-50 (killing tens of thousands of human beings, hundreds of thousands of animals and devastating the flora especially of Anatolian territories), limited the scientists’ ability to “practice” their science, demonstrating the agency of non-human actors. As a result, the fact that the museum and herbarium, which was considered by the contemporaries as a successful example comparable to European ones, burned to ashes in 1848, became emblematic of the modern science failing the world.

By employing archival documents from the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, contemporary newspapers, travel accounts and scientific literature, this paper aims not only to uncover the story of the Ottoman herbarium and natural history museum of 1836-48, but also to emphasize conflict, cooperation and negotiation between different – human and non-human – actors to contextualize it within a set of dialectical relationships, rather than giving agency to a mere European colonialism or Ottoman westernization.

"Most accounts on Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, including academic and journalistic works represent the movement in a nostalgic manner, basing it on democratic and egalitarian values and attributing it a solidaristic character, while the Park itself is depicted as a value-free space, in which all differences and conflicts existing within the movement were melted. The Park, previously meaningless and empty, has been attributed a political and cultural meaning and has become an important symbol of resistance to the authoritarian political regime in Turkey.

This paper critically argues that the movement itself was not totally democratic, egalitarian and solidaristic, and that the space it occupied was not static and given, before and during the protests. Once an Armenian cemetery, then almost a site for the reconstruction of a military barracks-shopping mall, the Park has gained different meanings in the eyes of the citizens of Istanbul, until it was “awarded” with the political significance it has today. Focusing on the “June resistance” days, it is argued in this paper that the story of this change toward a politicized space reveals the class nature of the Gezi movement, and involves issues related to bourgeois aesthetics, violence and identity. Trying to attribute a new meaning to the Park, Gezi protesters resorted to politics of inclusion and exclusion; therefore trying to establish a physical and symbolic space against the existing authoritarian hierarchies and policies, the movement created its own hierarchies and mechanisms of exclusion, while reproducing the existing pejorative correlation between working-classes/underclasses, violence and ethnic identity."