A Room of Their Own

Abstract

Studies of Turkish consumption reveal a unique character that rests on local interpretations of modernity and patterns of hybridization between local and global and traditional and modern. This research explores how deep-rooted cultural continuities manifest themselves in collective identity and how men from urban Urfa (a southeastern Turkish city) redefine the boundaries between public and private, and traditional and modern, through ritualistic leisure consumption within the context of the oda (room). The findings of the present socio-historically grounded analysis of urban oda communities and their consumption practices reveal that men from urban Urfa, as modern subjects, appropriated and re-contextualized traditional practices. Ritualistic consumption practices of or in urban odas reveal continuities with traditional ahi-order, selamlik and sira night practices. The findings also show that the oda, as a private and mahrem sphere, functions in accordance with the Habermasian model of the bourgeois public sphere, where politics and society meet.