Island Studies

Reprint of the special issue of Princeton Papers, 18 (2017) entitled Insularity in the Ottoman World.

Islands have no single obvious attribute, geographic or otherwise. Insularity, then, should not be taken literally and imply isolation; rather it is about what it means to be an island. This volume employs this concept analytically to study islands as a constituent part of the Ottoman world. Drawing attention to the interplay between the material and the mental, it explores how historical actors experience, imagine, and project their engagements with, and within, the spatial setting of islands.

Islands are most commonly conceptualized as oscillating between connectivity and isolation. Contributions to this volume transcend this dichotomy by enquiring into alternative ways to understand insular space. Divided in three parts, the volume explores various historiographical conceptualizations of islands; the manifestations of violence and law in terraqueous spaces; and different ways in which the state has historically tried to regulate insular space.

Table of contents:

Antonis Hadjikyriacou, "Envisioning Insularity in the Ottoman World"

PART I: CONCEPTUALIZING INSULARITY

Spyros Asdrachas, "Observations on Insularity in the Greek World"

Eleftheria Zei, "The Historiography of Aegean insularity"

PART II: VIOLENCE AND LAW IN TERRAQUEOUS SPACE

Michael Talbot, "Separating the Waters from the Sea: The Place of Islands in Ottoman Maritime Territoriality during the Eighteenth Century"

Murat Cem Mengüç, "Maritime Warfare in the Aegean and Ionian Islandscapes: Safai’s History of the 1499 Lepanto Expedition"

PART III: REGULATING ISLANDS

Fatma Şimşek, "Blockading an Island: Collective Punishment, Islanders, and the State in the “Largest” Island at the End of the Nineteenth Century"

Kahraman Şakul, "The Ottoman Peloponnese before the Greek Revolution: “A Republic of Ayan, Hakim and Kocabaşı” in “the Sea of Humans and Valley of Castles”"

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Kinyras: The Divine Lyre is also available online through the CHS website: http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/6329. The web version, however, does not have page numbers, so that internal cross-references cannot be easily followed. Hence the PDF here.

Within the dynamic global tourism industry, understanding the reasons for a destination’s competitiveness is essential in order to enhance its performance, facilitate more effective destination management, and inform its overall sustainable economic development. This paper applies Kim and Wicks’ (2010) tourism cluster development model to Bali - a small, mature destination in the developing economy of Indonesia. It demonstrates that there are complex relationships between: (i) cluster actors; (ii) barriers preventing effective networking; and (iii) the significance of these interactions for the local host community. This paper contributes to the debate by addressing new and different attributes and actors such as transnational corporations (TNCs), universities, and the concept of co-opetition, as being significant attributes in Kim and Wicks’ initial model. Through a qualitative approach involving n=23 semi-structured interviews, this paper illustrates intricate issues and relationships that are identified in Bali, a small mature destination. Purposive sampling methods were employed to generate a range of key stakeholders who informed our understanding of ‘cluster actors’ in Kim and Wicks’ terms. The systematic examination of these key tourism elements provides a detailed analysis of the destination’s strengths and weaknesses, and a more nuanced understanding of what facilitates a destination’s competitive position.

Key words: destination competitiveness; cluster theory; impacts; island tourism; Indonesia

In recent decades, excavations and other research have greatly enriched our knowledge about island monasteries – may they be situated in the sea, in lakes or rivers. For some regions overviews and syntheses have been presented (e.g., Meier 2009; Gutscher 2000) and we are starting to see monastic islands as a pan-European phenomenon at the beginning of the medieval period (Signori 2019, Bully/Jurković/Sapin 2013).
Continuing but also complementing this Europe- and Christianity-centered approach, the session intends to widen the geographic, chronological and religious frame. At the same time, the topic will be narrowed by adopting a ‘fluid focus’ or ‘liquid lens’: presenters are asked to look for everything related to water and the technologies to manage it as a material and spiritual resource.
In the past, islands have attracted monastic communities across cultures. Water creates their isolation and interconnectedness at the same time. The session would like to explore these contradicting properties as well as varying perspectives and different methodologies for investigating island economics, monastic sites and hydraulic technology. The topic could be tackled from angles such as:
- water management on islands and the role of monastic communities,
- the application of water technologies in island monasteries,
- monasteries on marine islands as opposed to islands in lakes and rivers,
- island monasteries as part of ‘water heritage’ (e.g., Willems/Schaik 2015).