Being a Child in the 18th Century Ottoman Society Through an Anonymous Self-Narrative: Disciplinary Construction, Physical Experience, and the Analysis of Subjective Perceptions Anonim Bir Ben-Anlatısıyla 18. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Toplumunda Çocuk Olmak: Disipliner İnşa, Bedensel Tecrübe ve Öznel Algıların Çözümlenmesi
Osmanli Medeniyeti Arastirmalari Dergisi, cilt.2026, sa.30, ss.1-22, 2026 (Scopus, TRDizin)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 2026 Sayı: 30
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.21021/osmed.1772447
- Dergi Adı: Osmanli Medeniyeti Arastirmalari Dergisi
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Scopus, TR DİZİN (ULAKBİM)
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1-22
- Anahtar Kelimeler: 18th Century Ottoman Society, History of Education, Ottoman Empire, Perception of Childhood, Self-Narrative
- Açık Arşiv Koleksiyonu: AVESİS Açık Erişim Koleksiyonu
- Erzincan Binali Yıldırım Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
This article examines an anonymous eighteenth-century Ottoman treatise as a unique narrative that conveys childhood experience through an inward and critical voice. Preserved in the Berlin State Library and dated to 1788, the treatise recounts a child’s journey from prenatal existence to elementary schooling in the first person, while symbolically revealing the bodily and affective traces left by pedagogical practices such as swaddling, cradle confinement, circumcision, and schooling. Rather than treating the text as a straightforward autobiography, the study approaches it as a multilayered narrative form in which allegorical and didactic elements are interwoven. Methodologically, the article employs a dual-axis analysis that interprets individual experience and pedagogical discourse simultaneously. This approach highlights how the intensity of memory and emotion expressed in the first-person voice intersects with the text's allegorical structure, producing a hybrid ego-narrative. At the same time, the narrative discloses the child’s limited yet meaningful responses to pedagogical domination, exemplified in scenes such as “smiling in pain” or negotiating over school holidays. Ultimately, the treatise offers a rare counter-narrative in Ottoman childhood historiography by foregrounding subjective memory and affective experience rather than institutional or structural frameworks. In doing so, it not only enriches our understanding of how childhood was imagined and disciplined in Ottoman society but also provides an original contribution to broader debates on childhood and pedagogy by demonstrating the methodological value of subjective and allegorical voices in historical inquiry.