The Practice of Writing Curricula Vitae among the Lower Government Employees in the Late Ottoman Empire: Workers at the Şeyhülislâm’s Office

Abstract

The personnel records collection of the Ottoman Seyhulislâm’s Office contains the dossiers of the ancillary workers who served at the bureaus and the Sharia courts in the early twentieth century. Drawing on these rare materials, this article examines the practice of writing curricula vitae (CVs) among the workers to understand to what degree and in which manner they had access to and made use of written words, with special focus on the workers from Puturge in the Kurdish speaking regions of Eastern Anatolia. The language skills and the education of the workers expressed in their CVs indicate that most of them acquired some sort of literacy, which was different from the literacy required to write official documents. Thus, they usually had scribes write their CVs on their behalf. While the involvement of the scribes in the process of writing CVs belies the general assumption that writing is an individual act, this and other practices of the workers undermined some of the basic principles of the working of the Ottoman bureaucracy based on the written documents. Still, they knew the value and usage of written documents and thus were able to deal with the written culture of the Ottoman bureaucracy.