Once in a while, a book comes along that tells you everything that we already knew yet still had to be written. Even rarer is when that book is well-researched, organized, and presented in a way that is fresh, thorough, and substantial. Toufoul Abou-Hodeib's Taste for Home is such a book. In honesty, Taste for Home tells us much of what we think we knew partly because Abou-Hodeib's previous articles on the development of an Arab middle-class “taste” (dhawq) have had such impact. Some of these articles have been folded, seamlessly, into this book.
Taste for Home “argues that middle-class domesticity took form in a matrix of changing urbanity, the politicization of domesticity in public debates, and change consumption patterns” (2). Chapter 1 examines the emergent middle class's economic, discursive, and physical impression on turn-of-the-century Beirut's changing urban space. While Abou-Hodeib makes clear that hers is not a study of gender, she pays particular attention to how this impression took a gendered expression when the city developed as a provincial and economic capital, stating “women's changing positions in society was tightly bound with the outlook of the emerging middle class,” manifesting itself in a number of emergent discourses including education, urban spaces, and commodity consumption (p. 18). Particularly noteworthy, Abou-Hodeib marks the opening and recoding of public spaces in dialectical relationship with the architectural, social, and discursive demarcations of private domesticated spaces, specifically as defined by the “home.” Equally original, she comments on, but does not fully develop, the relationship between the practice and discourses of domesticity and the coalescence of a new discourse of (Ottoman) citizenship. Most fruitfully, she names and scrutinizes a number of ways—legislative (through new municipal and building codes), urban planning (demolition and construction of new roads, buildings, and parks), and social (migration and sectarian clustering)—in which the city grew to develop discrete middle-class neighborhoods.
After providing an overview of the urban fabric of 19th-century Beirut, Abou-Hodeib examines “taste” as the operative concept that “provided a natural bridge for understanding how changes in the public sphere influenced and corresponded to changes at home” (p. 29). Chapter 2 is largely a conceptual review of taste through the framework of Pierre Bourdieu and how it functions as a linchpin between consumptive practices and the reconfiguring of new urban space. Within this conceptual big-picture, that author makes it clear that this process—the formation of the private and public and the roles of consumptive practices in delineating that distinction—is not exclusive to Beirut, but rather transpires in a global and Ottoman context. With this in mind, she carefully attends to the Ottoman and nahda contexts, where taste maintained a regulatory role in “defining middle class authenticity” (p. 37). With this in mind, it is important to note how, throughout the book Abou-Hodeib attends to the particularities of Ottoman Beirut but, essentially, offers her study as one more example to provincialize modernity within a larger global context.
Mixing an impressive array of archival and print sources, including journal articles, memoirs, municipal council records, Ottoman archival sources, and Hanafi court documents, Abou-Hodeib offers in Chapter 3 a fascinating, if not, entertaining narrative of waste management, principally sewage, as an example of the reorganization of the residential–urban—public–private matrix. Likewise, we see how discourses of “public benefit” versus “public welfare,” municipal governance, urban planning and regulations, hygiene and waste management form an arc within an aesthetization of public space that is related to the aesthetic discourse of domesticity and the middle class. In other words, Abou-Hodeib shows us how a number of nahdah reform discourses coalesced into standardizing the management of the city that simultaneously conditioned the aesthetics and spatial ordering of private space (i.e., the home), essential to the formation of the middle class as a coherent body. Moreover, she demonstrates, not insignificantly, that the social and economic transformations in the city underlie a view of the home as private property.
A lot is going on in this rich chapter, which might have been organized into two separate chapters. Perhaps, theory and practice could have been parsed in order to show how the discourse of urban space might look through application and, subsequently, how “regular maintenance, sanitary installations, and other urban improvements around the inner city add capital value to [private] property” (p. 73). Indeed, much of her examination of the interweaving of discourses of hygiene, aesthetics, and domesticity could fit comfortably into the following chapter.
That said, the chapter is rewarding. The vignette of Ayshe bint Khalil al-ʿAris is an exemplary piece of history writing, uncovering the fifteen-year saga of a remarkable woman whose home was partially demolished in the redesign/demolition of Bab Idriss. At the same time, Beirut municipality saddled her and her large family with an unfair tax burden for that house. We witness the complexities of Ayshe's legal battle with the Beirut municipality and how she tirelessly deployed not only the discourse of Ottoman reform and modernity but also exploited an array of existing Ottoman legal mechanisms to counter municipal power, especially relentlessly petitioning Istanbul, both individually and collectively.
Chapter 4 foregrounds the materiality of the emergent middle class “domesticity.” Abou-Hodeib's method adroitly moves between discursive constructs (as enunciated, for example, in the popular press), governmental practices and legislation (including policing), and the actual introduction and naturalization of material objects (e.g., particular forms of furniture, linens, and kitchen supplies) that communicated membership in the new middle class and established new modes of living. The author's close tracking of the marketing, consumption, and foreign and domestic production of particular kinds of chairs and beds (as well as the social practices that surround them) is an extraordinary mapping of material culture that often passes as the backdrop and white noise of 19th century social transformations, not the instantiations of them. Not only does Abou-Hodeib use Hanafi court records to determine the types of commodities in households, but she also offers illustrative court cases. One central anecdote, in particular, revolves around a phonograph in a divorce case, where the final judgement alerts us surprisingly to the ambiguity, at least in the eyes of the judge, of the new form of exchange value of new domestic commodities. That is, Abou-Hodeib shows us that taste remained to be fully naturalized, consensual, and shared where some household items were clearly valued as objects with “use-value” while others, such as the phonograph, with a more dubious “pleasure-value.”
Chapter 5 continues to examine how the emerging the middle class “capitalized on current notions of domesticity in order to give expression to new ideas about modes of governance, national aspirations, and women's roles in society,” where “home had much to do with articulating a relationship between public and private spheres” (p. 113). Abou-Hodeib nests gender as pivotal to how “taste served the most immediate purpose of marking to a place for the emerging middle class that distinguishes it from the wealthy, on the one side, and from European or Western (ifranji) influence, on the other” (p. 114). She uses the often-overlooked Julia Tuma, the principle of Maqasid's girl school and women's activist, as her interlocutor to define a political discourse and social practice of dhawq (taste) that is always relational. That is, criteria of taste, Abou-Hodeib shows, distinguished the morality and productivity of the sharqi (Eastern, indigenous) middle class not only from the backward masses (from which many of them had come) but also from native elites whose ostentatious wealth was seen as “tasteless” (p. 128), as well as from slavish consumption of ifranji commodities which served European economic imperialism and native dependency. While not the first of its kind, the study shows women's bodies (notably fashion) and the interior space of the home as sites of contestation and demarcation for defining a class sensibility of propriety, social progress, and national authenticity.
While she reveals the connections between domesticity, the difference in the production circulations of a number of commodities, gender ideals, and governmental administration, Abou-Hodeib is careful not to overestimate the immediacy and obviousness of these social relations. Throughout the book, she inlays signs of tensions, which she dedicates Chapter 6 to examine. Here Abou-Hodeib teases out how capitalism contains its own contradictions, as well as, the ways that commodity production, exchange, and consumption mediated the redefinition of the private in provincial Ottoman Beirut was no exception. For example, despite the quasi-Weberian nature of Beirut middle-class moral righteousness, its commercial taste seemed to lean toward the consumption of “gaudy and cheap” European baubles (tuhuf) (148). Likewise, the many facets of advertising domestic and foreign stores and commodities, which featured the fashion, novelty, and Europeaness of commodities, were held in tension with the middle class's aesthetic of moderation, utility, cultural authenticity, and economic patronage of indigenously produced items (p. 155). The author continues in this chapter to ground her discussion in the materiality of production and the object, providing a thorough overview of and differences between the old and new aswaq of turn of the century Beirut, where new souqs partitioned the production of their commodities away from their stores. To complicate the distinction between ifranji and indigenously produced commodities, Abou-Hodeib uses cabinets and linens as examples of how European textiles were imported, integrated into local commodities, and were sold and consumed as “national” products.
Abou-Hodeib's study continues a trend to understand the category of domesticity itself as a material field that functions as a site for production of modernity, a category that evades understanding “home” as solely a construct of state and administrative policies and designs. Her book is well written and impressively researched. Her argument holds, although, at times, the book is repetitious in its argument as often as proving it. This might have been corrected with a slightly more streamlined organization of the many moving pieces that the author is corralling. To be fair, however, part of the strength of Abou-Hodeib's study is that she is trying to ferret out the multifaceted and multidirectional complexity of the political economy of the aesthetics of new forms of domesticity (architectural, social, economic, gender, governmental, etc.).
Speaking to that complexity, Abou-Hodeib seems to vacillate between two perennial poles. On the one hand, one wonders if “domesticity” is a generative site of social practices that it produces; not only the desire for commodity consumption it creates but also the social-subjective state where individuals find (or cathect) their social identity in objects. On the other hand, one can imagine that domesticity is a product of epistemological, economic, and discursive shifts that anticipate the introduction of seemingly “foreign” practices because those very spaces are readily available to enact social practices that naturalize those aforementioned transformations. While the author does a fine job using Bourdieu to frame much of her argument, the “middle class” as an analytic concept and social and class phenomena needs to be more rigorously defined, not only by Abou-Hodeib but by all of us Middle East scholars, where Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci (especially when it comes to taste) who offer nuanced notions of the striations of class formation, might be operative. The concept is further complicated in Lebanon with the social and institutional rise of sectarianism (especially among the middle class), which, some theorize, develops in order to undercut solidarities within class formations. For those of us who study the nahdah, however, these are controversial and enormous questions, so Abou-Hodeib may not be faulted in taking a less demonstrative stance toward them, especially considering the panoply of issues that she gathers around categories of taste and domesticity.
What I personally found valuable about A Taste for Home, overall, is that Abou-Hodeib builds a series of links between taste, the home as a social, economic, urban, and architectural space, consumptive practices, urban space at large, citizenship, and modernity itself, which effectively show us capitalism's most radical transformation: how the market (commodity production, commodification, and consumption) comes to mediate all social relations in capitalist societies. A Taste for Home is a superlative book, offering specialists and non-specialists a rigorous yet approachable study on the material culture of the 19th century and the ways in which the production, circulation, exchange, and meaning of objects defined the middle class in Beirut but also the social (private and public) spaces in which they lived and defined themselves as individuals, citizens, and national (Ottoman) subjects.
