South-Eastern Europe

Despite growing attempts to standardise and harmonise migration-related data collection in recent decades, fully comparable migration data across countries are still scarce. The differences in the concepts used in national statistics on migration are related to the history of specific countries and their historical migration patterns that shape migration policies, as well as to the availability and collection of migration-related data. Drawing on results of the international project "Managing Migration and Its Effects in SouthEast Europe-Transnational Actions Towards Evidence Based Strategies" (SEEMIG), this essay discusses these issues at the level of SouthEast Europe (SEE).

In the early Seventies the French “nouvelle histoire” inaugurated an innovative interdisciplinary research agenda in which the body, as a new object, figured prominently. At the crossroads of science and society, the body in the work of Michel Foucault, Michel De Certeau and Jacques Revel opened a rich field of investigation:  a wealth of studies on sexuality, health, discipline, and resistance intersected a wide spectrum of textual, material and visual sources questioning the beliefs, norms and practices that shaped the changing regimes of social interaction and control. From its inception, the history of the body focused on western societies in the crucial stages of modernity.  At the intersection of the self and society, of individual experience and collective history and at the center of cultural relations, the body has been used as a mark of civilization (Norbert Elias) within a notion of modernity centered in the West.
In recent years, North American historiography assimilated the body to the growing field of cultural, gender, colonial and post-colonial studies moving away from “French theory”, social history and Western modernization. An increasing attention to the history of Empires and of European colonialisms has redefined the agenda of research looking beyond national histories towards cross-cultural encounters and transfers, exchanges, and processes of hybridity. In this framework and in nonwestern contexts, the body is the first site articulating the encounter between ethnicity, gender, religion and power. Bodies evoke disease and well-being, work and leisure, modes of gendered self-fashioning connected to status and age. They carry a variety of political, social and cultural meanings and encourage us to think beyond traditional divides of East and West, modern and traditional, religious and secular.  What did the fashioning of a modern Ottoman culture of manners, dress, material comfort and health mean? Did it imply westernization and secularization or, to paraphrase Orhan Pamuk, was western influence just an affluent display that no one quite knew what it was good for?
Within this overall context, the workshop on Shaping the modern body. Fashion, Food, Health and Manners across South Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire (17th-19th centuries) opens a rich field of research in an under researched variety of sources. The body is the prism through which we intend to analyse four areas of historical enquiry and of social interactions: Manners and Behavior; Dress and Fashion; Food; Health. Private and public spaces, meetings and social events, mediators, translators and go-betweens provide an important backdrop to our focus on male and female bodies and the disciplining, feeding, clothing, healing practices that shaped and changed their self-perceptions, experiences and social identities.  We aim to explore a set of sources ranging from costume books and portraits; inventories, correspondences and journals; books of etiquette, food and cosmetic recipes and medical prescriptions; photographs and magazines.