Julia Hauser

Der Siegeszug vegetarischer und veganer Lebensweisen im Westen seit Mitte des 19 Jahrhunderts geht auf recht freie Übernahmen indischer Esskulturen zurück, deren westliche Interpretationen sich zwischen Körperpraktiken und Rassetheorien bewegten. Dabei wirkte die Internationalisierung des Vegetarismus wieder auf die indischen Ernährungsbewegungen zurück.

In this contribution, I argue that it is through international cooperation in research and teaching, outreach beyond the narrow sphere of education and academia and a new approach to academic teaching that global history could come one step closer to its intention of challenging Eurocentrism. A new approach to teaching taking into account the diversity of students' skills and perspectives, which might contribute in a much more direct manner to a change in consciousness within academia and the educational system at large as well as among the general public, could add to this. None of these changes would address the problems scholars are confronted with because of neoliberalism in academia, and indeed, great care would have to be taken in order for these changes not to come at the expense of research. Nonetheless, they would help history to step out of the ivory tower to live up to its position between the humanities and the social sciences as a discipline with a social responsibility.

In this contribution, I argue that it is through international cooperation in research and teaching, outreach beyond the narrow sphere of education and academia and a new approach to academic teaching that global history could come one step closer to its intention of challenging Eurocentrism. A new approach to teaching taking into account the diversity of students' skills and perspectives which might contribute in a much more direct manner to a change in consciousness within academia and the educational system at large as well as among the general public could add to this. None of these changes would address the problems scholars are confronted with because of neoliberalism in academia, and indeed, great care would have to be taken in order for these changes not to come at the expense of research. Nonetheless, they would help history to step out of the ivory tower to live up to its position between the humanities and the social sciences as a discipline with a social responsibility.

Geschichte ist identitätsstiftend für Gesellschaften. Der Geschichtsunterricht in den Schulen verschweigt jedoch oft einen Großteil der historischen Akteur*innen. Eine solidarische Gesellschaft muss zu historischen Erzählungen über sich selbst gelangen, in denen alle sich wiederfinden können.

In the context of the covid-19 pandemic, Germany witnesses debates on whether masks could help contain the spread of the virus. This article argues the controversy may be rooted in the deep-seated suspicion of facial covering in Europe since the nineteenth century.

Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond explores the cultural ramifications of food and foodways in the Mediterranean, and Arab-Muslim countries in particular. The volume addresses the cultural meanings of food from a wider chronological scope, from antiquity to present, adopting approaches from various disciplines, including classical Greek philology, Arabic literature, Islamic studies, anthropology, and history. The contributions to the book are structured around six thematic parts, ranging in focus from social status to religious prohibitions, gender issues, intoxicants, vegetarianism, and management of scarcity.

This article explores Indian protagonists' motives at the Fifteenth World Vegetarian Congress (1957) in India, the first congress of the International Vegetarian Union (IVU) to be held outside Europe. I argue that nationalism and internationalism intermingled in the agendas pursued by Indian protagonists. On the one hand, they portrayed their country as a moral superpower above the divisions of the emerging Cold War. On the other hand, they sought international support to promote national aims, and used the topic of the congress to re-define the Indian nation.

In much of recent research on missions and colonialism, the notion of a civilizing mission has served to highlight asymmetries of power in colonial encounters. Drawing on the example of the school and orphanage run by German Protestant deaconesses in late Ottoman Beirut, this article questions these perspectives, arguing that an analysis focused on the criterion of discipline fails to seize the profoundly reciprocal character of missionary encounters. Missionaries were doubtlessly involved in bringing about global cultural transformations, but they were not omnipotent. This article offers a novel perspective on the study of missions, showing that local agency as well as the dynamics of the larger field turned the missionary encounter into a conflictual process of negotiation starkly at odds with the idea of a unidirectional civilizing mission.

Vegetarianisms in Europe and Asia have long been treated as separate phenomena. Upon closer examination,
however, there was an overlap in motives from the late nineteenth century onwards. Particularly in
Europe and India, debates on vegetarianism became intertwined. Health was an important argument for
vegetarianism in Europe, though always as part of a larger agenda understood in terms of a thorough bodily
and moral reform of society. India, where vegetarianism seemed to be embraced for ethical reasons, played
a pivotal role in this context. During the colonial encounter, Europeans and Indians engaged in dynamic
conversations on vegetarianism. Thus, notions of spiritual purity began to influence European authors
while Indian sources began appropriating Western arguments for health.

Based on a middle-class notion of family life as a yardstick of social progress, the restoration of familial structures took center stage in both home and foreign mission during the nineteenth century. Family life in the "Orient" in particular appeared to Western travelers as antithetical to its European counterpart. When the Kaiserswerth deaconessate expanded to the Ottoman Empire, the activities of the deaconesses were framed by similar views. Ironically, as had first been argued by the protagonists of the reformatory movement (Rettungshausbewegung) such as Johann Hinrich Wichern, restoration only seemed possible on condition that exisiting family ties were severed. Yet the implementation of this agenda confronted the deaconesses with manifest problems. Families' opposition forced them to permit contact between children and their kin to a greater extent, while the persistence of cultural practices like marriage patterns forced them to revise their expectations for reform. Supporters back home, however, were only sporadically informed of such adjustments. As a consequence, the deaconesses' activities contributed but little to a transformation of the image of the "Oriental family" in Protestant Prussia and Germany.

During the Weimar Republic, as German bodies sought to heal from the damage and perceived humiliation wrought by World War One, while Berlin, at the same time, became a hub of anticolonial movements, Gandhi turned into an icon of the German-speaking pacifist, vegetarian, and life reform movement. Next to the German translation of Romain Rolland’s biography of Gandhi, Zakir Husain ‘s and Alfred Ehrentreich’s selection of articles published between 1921 and 1924 in Gandhi’s journal Young India was one of the first major publications on the Mahatma in Germany. This contribution will take a closer look at Husain’s and Ehrentreich’s selection, examining the editors’ political positions and aims, the resonance their book met with in Weimar Germany, as well as the question of how Husain’s and Ehrentreich’s Gandhi differed from or, indeed, resembled the one championed by the life reform movement, thus reading it in context with other contemporary publications. Tentatively, I will argue that Ehrentreich’s and Husain’s Gandhi was far more political than his life reform movement counterpart, which fascinated authors and readers most of all because of his dietary experiments. What life reformers may have drawn from Husain’s and Ehrentreich’s edition, however, was a fascination with the figure of the ascetic leader – a perspective they would soon project onto another leader with no leanings for ahimsa.

"""Recent research highlights the importance of missionaries as producers of knowledge. However, existing studies mainly focus on the production of systematic knowledge feeding into the nascent academic disciplines of the time. Knowledge production beyond these criteria is outside the purview of this perspective. Examining German Protestant women missionaries' perception of Islam in late Ottoman Syria, I argue that female knowledge production, though shaped by different parameters, is equally worth analyzing even if it ended up being marginalized in missionary discourse at home.

Protestant knowledge production about the religious Other depended crucially on space, gender and Protestant self-perception. Responding to widespread apprehensions about women's participation in the missionary enterprise and mission in Muslim lands, female missionary work in Ottoman Syria was framed as a process of doubly indirect mission. Women religious were to propagate Christianity indirectly by deed rather than word. In doing so, they were to target Christians, who, again indirectly, would influence their non-Christian environment. These discursive boundaries notwithstanding, German female missionaries did try to address and influence individual Muslims, thereby collecting knowledge on Islam and its adherents. Yet due to their scope of action and gender-specific conventions of writing, their knowledge production remained practice-oriented and episodical rather than panoramic. Moreoever, it reached the home field but to a limited extent.

This interruption of knowledge circulation was not just due to conventions of gender but also to questions of PR strategy intimately tied to Protestant self-perceptions. Whereas part of the missionary public at home would be intrigued by individual conversion narratives, mission to Muslims, by and large, remained a controversial issue in nineteenth-century Protestant Germany, particularly when it came to female agency. Responding to this ambivalence, female missionaries' individual narratives as reproduced in reports at home were complemented by a male-authorized master narrative focusing on an ultimate battle between Christianity and Islam in which female missionaries figured in the paradoxical role of a non-belligerent force. Reports on encounters on the ground questioning this binary opposition between both faiths hardly ever reached supporters in the metropole."""

Analyzing the personal files and histories of Syrian women entering the Kaiserswerth deaconessate, this article fills a gap in existing research on missions where the contribution of local co-workers is still an underresearched issue. By drawing on Homi Bhabha's notion of mimicry, I demonstrate that the position of Syrian novices and deaconesses within the organization may be described as "almost the same but not quite", thus belying the family imagery undergirding official representations of the deaconessate. However, their stories should not be read in terms of a dramaturgy of victimization. At least in some cases, the contradiction between a rhetoric of sisterhood and a practice of race-based hierarchies set free a considerable amount of emancipatory energy.

Research on cultural brokers in the Ottoman Empire often focuses on certain social groups: wealthy Jewish or Christian families with a business background, close connections to European consulates, and extraterritorial status. These individuals were doubtlessly of central importance, which makes examining their role a necessity for arriving at a more balanced perspective on the late Ottoman Empire and its alleged semi-colonial status. Moreover, sources on their activities, although difficult to retrieve, are available to a certain extent.
Nevertheless, or so will be argued in this paper by drawing on sources related to a German Protestant school compound in late Ottoman Beirut, they are not the only intermediaries worth considering in analyses of cultural encounters between locals and foreigners in the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, examinations of specific encounters seem to call for a broadening of focus in order not to overlook the significant contributions of individuals with a different social, gendered or religious profile.
To be sure, this wider perspective is not without problems. Many intermediaries, at least those of lower social status, left scanty traces in historical record. Sources from the orbit of foreign organizations offer mere glimpses at cultural brokerage in many cases. Moreover, they tend to downplay brokers’ rootedness in local society while overemphasizing their alleged foreign allegiances, thus rendering their identity less ambiguous than it may have been in practice.
On the other hand, microhistorical analysis of this kind offers some insights to research on cultural encounters and cultural brokerage in the late Ottoman Empire more generally. First, it may direct scholars’ awareness to cases in which individuals other than affluent Christians and Jews acted as cultural intermediaries. In relation to this, it widens our understanding of the ways in which cultural brokerage could take place. Finally, in line with other papers in this panel, it helps to develop a differentiated perspective on the concept of hybridity. At least in some cases, actors’ strategies over time appear in terms of situative positioning rather than ongoing and simultaneous allegiances.

Beyond Hybridity? Members of Minorities as Brokers in Global Cultural Encounters in the late Ottoman Empire

Organizers: Julia Hauser (Göttingen), Christian Saßmannshausen (Berlin)
Speakers: Christine Lindner (Beirut), Uta Zeuge (Berlin), Julia Hauser (Göttingen), Christian Saßmannshausen (Berlin), Nora Lafi (Berlin)
Final Comment: Gudrun Krämer (Berlin)

With the emergence of a new imperial history, scholars have become aware of the epistemological potential offered by the exploration of transnational biographies. Often, however, studies of relevant characters are presented irrespective of their geographical fields of action, as if these were interchangeable sceneries on the transnational stage. This panel, by contrast, argues that transnational biographies can only be examined fruitfully by comparing actors within a given geographical context. On the one hand, cultural brokers acted within [or between] imperial frameworks whose legal and political structures cannot be disregarded in historical analysis. On the other, Western colonial fantasies tended to attach themselves to definite areas. These parameters shaped the conditions under which cultural intermediaries were able to act.
In the Ottoman Empire, certain members of religious minorities were crucial to various kinds of interactions with Europe as well as, increasingly, with the United States of America. Their multiple identities, their liminalstatus in Ottoman society and, in many cases, their affluence, disposed them for this function. At the same time, their status was often an ambivalent one, since many of them enjoyed a status of extraterritoriality while at the same time being embedded culturally, economically and socially into local contexts. A growing literature continues to examine the crucial (and often ambiguous) role of non-Muslim minorities in cultural exchange during the late Ottoman Empire., Certain arguments to be found in research, however, are in need of revision, as they reproduce a myth of sectarianism at odds with recent historical research on Ottoman society. First, non-Muslim members of minorities, on account of their alleged proximity to Europe, have been cast in the role of modernizers. They have also been referred to pathbreakers of secularization and of nationalism who challenged Ottoman rule. Finally, they have been regarded in isolation rather than in their local contexts. Beyond these general critical interventions, it seems worthwhile to expand the usual cast of characters. Cultural brokership, after all, was not just restricted to trade and diplomacy. The literary public as well as education were important fields where members of minorities interacted with Europeans and Americans. Secondly, and in this very context, social status and gender must be brought within the fold. Female members of religious minorities, some of whom taught in missionary and other schools, were important cultural intermediaries, yet acted under conditions significantly different from those of their male peers. Often of lower social status than male cultural intermediaries with a minority background, they were less likely to enjoy the costly privilege of extraterritoriality. Both class and gender, therefore, made for differences impacting the agency of cultural intermediaries: differences in need of investigating.
This panel, therefore, addresses a number of questions. Which role(s) did members of minorities play in cultural contacts between Europe, America, and the Middle East?How did they avail themselves of the “jeuxd’identité”Marie-Carmen Smyrnelis observed in her study of nineteenth-century Izmir in these contacts? On which occasions did they assert hybrid identities? When, on the other hand, did they play the card of fixed identities? A closer look the  biographies of members of minorities who acted as cultural intermediaries opens up the chance of rewriting the story of imperial encounters from its very foundations.More particularly, it invites scholars to rethink the oft-employed concept of hybridity. While this term is able to accommodate the multiple allegiances characterizing transcultural subjects in the Ottoman Empire, it suggests a degree of continuous intermixedness belied by the often shifting strategies employed by cultural intermediaries. Ultimately, this panel hopes to arrive at a more satisfying terminology apt to characterize the striking playfulness resorted to by members of minorities in cultural exchange; to develop a terminology beyond the comfortable vagueness of the hybrid without losing sight of the transgression of boundaries central to cultural brokership.
Crossing boundaries is not just the raison d’être of cultural intermediaries. It is also a necessity for historians analyzing their biographies. Other than in the US, the notion of historiography as the handmaiden of nation building has long shaped academic historiography, with transnational and global history being but recent developments. In Germany, as a consequence, Ottoman history has long been the subject of Arabic and Islamic studies exclusively. In an age of growing global entanglements, German historians ought to enter dialogue with area studies and other disciplines (and vice versa) dedicated to the study of the world beyond Europe, while area studies ought to intensify their dialogue with historians.
This panel, therefore, is both interdisciplinary and international in composition. From the vantage point of intercultural theology, Uta Zeuge (Berlin / Wien) investigates the influence of cultural brokership on the self-fashioning of male Christian members of the emerging middle stratum in Ottoman society. Christine Lindner (Beirut), historian by training, examines the agency of female members of religious minorities in interactions with Protestant missions in Mount Lebanon and Beirut. Julia Hauser (Göttingen), trained in history as well, takes a closer look at the local supporters of two foreign schools in late Ottoman Beirut, emphasizing the heterogeneity of cultural brokers’ social and religious profile.Christian Saßmannshausen, on the other hand, whose background is in Islamic studies/Ottoman history, sheds light on how privileged extraterritorial actors navigated between conflicting identities by drawing on the example of a Greek Orthodox notable family from Tripoli. While deeply embedded into local society, they acted as cultural brokers with transregional ties and mobile lifestyles. Nora Lafi, likewise an Ottomanist, examines how Jews in late Ottoman Tunis negotiated their identity between local roots and global changes.  A concluding comment by Gudrun Krämer leads into the final discussion.

"Explicitly or implicitly, the Euro-American path to modernity has long been taken as a standard model, indeed as a definition of modernity in general. Individualization, the rule of law, technologisation, social differentiation, and secularization were seen as its inevitable manifestations. Regions of the world falling short of this “package” have been considered as in need of development by colonial rule or other forms of tutelage. Cultural difference was imagined in terms of temporal difference that could only be overcome, albeit gradually and perhaps never altogether, by embracing the Western model of modernity.
Sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt was one of the first scholars to criticize these assumptions with his concept of “multiple modernities”, pointing out that there was more than one path to modernity, more than one isotropic condition of modernity. His assumptions were quickly taken up, in part because they allowed to emphasise the specific modernity of often syncretic cultural phenomena from outside of Europe and the U.S. which embraced and appropriated both global (and putatively modern) and local (supposedly traditional) conditions of production. Nevertheless, the notion of “multiple modernities” was beset by a range of theoretical and ethical problems and is increasingly confronted with harsh criticism, especially from postcolonial theory. Foremost among these are the allegations that it shares with older theories of modernity an essentialist definition of culture and that by “decomposing modernity” it retranslates development into hierarchy, and risks essentialising economic asymmetries into cultural difference, thereby depoliticising contemporary globalization.
This summer school, targeted at doctoral candidates and early postdocs, aims at a critical reflection of modernization theory up to its most recent guises and critiques and seeks an engagement with cultural and aesthetic practices that express the seeming contradictions of contemporary global modernity. These may include, but are not narrowed to: literature and the arts, media, fashion/clothing, food, urbanisation, religious practice. It hopes to foster exchange between young researchers from diverse cultural backgrounds and disciplines in the social sciences and humanities whose work is related to theoretical implications and cultural, social, and aesthetic phenomena of global modernity.
Each day will commence with a keynote lecture delivered by renowned scholars and ample opportunities for discussion afterwards. Keynote speakers include Stefan Haas (Göttingen), Gurminder K. Bhambra (Warwick), Lars Eckstein (Potsdam), Gauri Viswanathan (New York), and Parama Roy (Davis). The afternoons will be dedicated to short presentations by participants based on papers circulated in advance and discussions of seminal texts on modernity. Select papers will be published. Anyone interested in participating is kindly requested to apply with a CV, list of publications (if available), and an abstract of 500 words at maximum until 15 March 2014. Accommodation is free for all participants. Reimbursement for travel costs is available for a limited number of applicants. In case of further questions, do not hesitate to contact the organizers, Jens Elze and Julia Hauser, via jens.elze@fu-berlin.de and jhauser1@gwdg.de.

Jens Elze and Julia Hauser
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Graduiertenschule für Geisteswissenschaften
Friedländer Weg 2
37083 Göttingen
Germany
jens.elze@fu-berlin.de
jhauser1@gwdg.de
"

This thesis analyzes the development of the Kaiserswerth deaconesses’ activities in female education in Beirut, one of the major hubs of missionary work in the Ottoman Empire. Initiated, like many other missions in the area, after the violence of 1860 in Mount Lebanon and Damascus, their Protestant establishment, composed of an orphanage for local lower-class girls and a boarding school for their middle and upper-class counterparts and children of Western expatriates, carried on its work until the onset of the French Mandate in 1919. While both Catholic and Protestant missions in the area have been widely researched, the Kaiserswerth deaconesses, despite their manifold connections to other organizations in the city, have figured but little in international research. This study aims at recovering their activities and, at the same time, decentering them. Inspired by recent suggestions of writing global history as microhistory, it examines a mission within its local context. Employing a concept of space as an open-ended sphere, it demonstrates the importance of competition, on the one hand, and perpetual negotiaion with one’s clientele, on the other, to the agenda and practice of a missionary organization. Missionary establishments, or so the central argument of this thesis, were not metaphorical islands isolated from local society, with the “home field” as their sole point of reference. As a consequence, mission cannot be understood by merely analyzing relations between periphery and metropole. Instead, it was very much a product of decision-making and ad-hoc reactions on the ground, a process in which a variety of actors, some of them linked to other metropoles, were implicated. With this broad focus, this thesis wishes to contribute to a variety of fields, including the history of missions, the history of education, Middle Eastern studies, the study of women in missionary and colonial encounters, and transnational viz. global history.

In this review, I recommend Curtis' monography on French Catholic women missionaries in the age of imperialism, an elegant and eminently readable combination of microhistory and global history, as a model for a new, actor-centered kind of global history.