Inscribing çingene in Late Ottoman Cultural Forms

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Ottoman social order and urban popular culture. Social upheavals contributed to the intensified display of the çingene stereotype, with the çingene representing the experience of social marginalization. Playing out the anxieties of urban audiences as they confronted problems of modernity, urbanism, social disruption, and moral decay, the stereotypical figure of the çingene remained consistent from the late nineteenth century to the 1990s. A discussion of the dramatic nineteenth century Tanzimat reforms is followed by analyses of çingene characters in karagöz shadow puppetry, kanto theatrical songs, and Ottoman literature. The çingene was portrayed in two irreconcilable types: as an essentialized, nomad in pastoral rural settings; as the polluted degenerate and potentially contagious agent of urban chaos, social disorder, and moral decadence. By portraying the “çingene” as the quintessential “other” among an array of diverse social types, these forms rendered the anxiety-producing urban social landscape in stark relief.