@article{2775429,
    title = "The Body and Ottoman Society / Le Corps dans la Société Ottomane",
    author = "Irene Kamberidou",
    journal = "MESOGEIOS Mediterranee, Histoire, People, Langues, Cultures",
    year = "2006",
    volume = "28",
    number = "2006",
    pages = "13-29",
    publisher = "HERODOTOS Mesogeios, Paris",
    issn = "1284-1935",
    keywords = "Harem, multiethnic harem slavery system, multiethnic-multiracial slavery institution, "in the yoke of the Harem", "women of different nations" (1816), Military slavery, Child slavery, Obesity/fat  considered beautiful,  the children's harem, deviations from islamic tradition-the sultan dancing, Greek songs in the harem",
    abstract = "Women travelers of the 18th and 19th centuries are shocked, disgusted ad outraged by the motions of the human body in the harems. This study, exclusively for firsthand female accounts,  examines the position and roles of the harem entertainers: dancers, acrobats, pantomimes, musicians and singers, who were all female islamized slaves that belonged to the harem's elite slavery system. The women who cultivated music an dance were islamized slaves whose talents were recognized as children and who were trained to use their artistic abilities to amuse, entertaine and distract their owners/masters/mistresses.  They were not taught to dance, perform acrobatics, sing and play musical instruments for their own personal pleasure, diversion, amusement or self-expression, but solely for the pleasure of their socially superiors: their owners/masters, the women belonging the  harem's higher pyramidical hierarchy (eg. the valide sultan/the sultan's mother, the princesses (the sultans' daughters and sisters, etc.) . Dance, acrobatics and any form of physical movement, activity, exercise and manual labor were symbols of social inferiority for the Ottoman Turks. MORE ANALYTICALLY: Women travelers of the 18th and 19th centuries surpassed the socio-religious barriers of Islam by penetrating into the gendered sphere and gendered boundaries of the Ottoman family and household, in other words the Harem.  They succeeded in doing what no male traveler, no man, who has written about the harem, harem dancing and the position of women in Islam, had been able to do before or after them. They visited and resided—as official guests, as intimate friends and as employees— in harems that corresponded to all the socioeconomic Ottoman classes. As a result they accused male travelers of misleading and misinforming their readers, stressing that their accounts were based on second or third hand information, on their unrestrained exotic fantasies and had nothing to do with the terrible realities of everyday life in “the yoke of the harem” (Lott, 1866:296) and the degrading and humiliating position of women in Islam. European women, in their identification with ‘the Other’, the women of the East, used terms such as ‘womanity’, ‘woman-kind’, ‘slavedom’, ‘privileged rape’, ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’. Undeniably the Ottoman harem’s multiethnic composition and the harem culture remained a mystery to the male gender, since any man apprehended in an attempt to penetrate the forbidden zone of the harem would lose his life. There was no social contact, social intermingling, social interaction, social interrelations, social communication or authentic personal relationships between the two genders, even between those of the same family. The women and the men of the same so-called family (the harem and the selemlik) led totally separate social and private lives, sharing nothing between them. This paper examines the position and roles of the harem entertainers: the dancers, acrobats, pantomimes, musicians and singers, who without a single exception, were all islamized slaves that belonged to the harem’s elite slavery system. These sectors of the arts belonged to the socially ‘lower’ class individuals or the less privileged, as were considered the slaves of the Ottomans, as well as the non-Muslim subjects of the Sublime Porte, such as the Greeks, the Armenians, the Jews and the Gypsies.  The women who cultivated music and dance were all islamized slaves, whose talents were recognized as children and who were trained to use their artistic abilities to amuse and distract their owners. They were not taught to dance, perform acrobatics, sing and play musical instruments for their own personal pleasure, diversion, amusement or self-expression, but solely for the entertainment of their ‘superiors’: their  owner/master, the women of the higher harem classes or pyramidical hierarchy such as the master’s mother, his legal wives, of which the Koran allowed four, his daughters, his ikbals (favorite slave concubines) and their female visitors or female guests, as was the case of the western women travelers of the 18th and 19th centuries."
}