An Aesthetics of Self: Moral Remaking and National Education

Rebecca Bryant

Morality, observes Alasdair MacIntyre, is a concept that has been eviscerated in modernity, so that it no longer applies to a whole person but only to a person’s deeds and actions. This observation is nowhere more in evidence than in writings on modernization or Westernization in the Middle East, which often pose change as a challenge or threat to indigenous values, especially the values of Islam. In such cases, it appears that one is faced with two unequal but competing concepts or ideologies, the choice between which often seems to be strategic. One particularly apposite example of this is the literature on the modernizing ferment of the late Ottoman Empire, which for many decades presented that moment as a rejection of “tradition” in favor of the adoption of Western values. While more recent literature has advanced beyond that paradigm, there is still tremendous difficulty in taking account of what appears to be a clash of values, especially in the centrally important institution of education. This paper aims to address the debate over morality and education in the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican period. Using the lens of local-level ideals and aspirations, I argue here that education was never a tool for inculcating morality, and that it can be seen in that way only from a Western perspective of what morality means. Using comparative materials from the Greek context, I outline here a culturally specific understanding of morality that sees the education of virtue as the shaping of a whole person’s life and practices, not only of his deeds and actions. Moreover, I claim that morality in this sense is inseparable from manners, and that the unity of morality and manners must be understood within the context of ideals of “civilization.” The value of comparing the Ottoman and Greek contexts is that we see through that comparison that ideals of civilization—and of the morals and manners that derive from those ideals—were not the same. This difference, I believe, helps us to identify the culturally specific nature of morality in Ottoman pedagogy.

About Rebecca Bryant

Rebecca Bryant received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1998 and in the 2002-2003 academic year is a fellow in the Cornell University Society for the Humanities. Along with the NAE/Spencer award, she has held numerous fellowships for her work in Cyprus, including a Fulbright-Hays, two IIE-CIES Fulbright awards, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Fellowship. She has published in Comparative Studies in Society in History and The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, among other journals. Under her NAE/Spencer award she has recently completed a book manuscript entitled Educating Ethnicity: On the Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus.