Untidy Households: Kinship, Service, and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Qajar Iran

Abstract

“Untidy Households” explores how feelings among household members shaped conceptions of individuals and the family over the Qajar era. In attending to the emotional dimensions of domestic life, I reveal how affective tensions in Qajar households led to transformations of the “household-family” as a legal, biological, and affective unit in ways that also intersected with shifting meanings of racial and ethnic categories. I intervene specifically in the emerging literature on kinship, gender, and race in the Middle East by applying affect theory to a corpus of underutilized and unstudied sources. Persian-language letters, marriage contracts, wills, memoirs, and diaries, as well as photographs, attest to what it meant to be “part of the family.” Reading sources such as letters and diaries through affect theory reveals how members of elite households navigated feelings of familial affection, or lack thereof, and negotiated ideas of familial belonging. By looking at affective relationships across and within Imperial and elite households, I show how concepts of marriage, divorce, kinship, and service changed over time, and also illuminate how affect and power intricately enabled one another within and beyond palace walls. This approach to people’s visceral reactions, and how they mediated feelings surrounding social relations, enables me to investigate how private interactions evolved against the backdrop of greater social and political transformations, changes which both reflected and produced those transformations. The transformations, I argue, began with the Imperial Household, where intimate sources, such as memoirs, diaries, and letters show how the interplay of power, affect, and desire generated a new understanding of the household and what kinship and service meant within that space. In examining different relationships in the Imperial Household sphere, several trends become apparent between the reigns of Fath ‘Ali Shah (r. 1797-1834) and Mozaffar al-Din Shah (r. 1896-1907): marriage overall, and the expansion of kinship, became a more affection-based enterprise as opposed to one arranged primarily for political or economic gain. These marital trends show the increasing centrality of bureaucratic state apparatuses in the Qajar court, and the lessened importance of expanding and strengthening Qajar tribal kinship structures. Categories of race and ethnicity were simultaneously debated and reformatted as certain people became acceptable only as domestics, while others were more easily able to traverse that boundary; some could become legal kin, while others were affectively portrayed as family, yet were functionally property. For example, while an enslaved white Circassian or Kurdish woman could become a wife, an enslaved Black African woman remained a motherly figure raising children of the Imperial Household, not contributing her own. I follow these developments into royal and elite households outside the Imperial Household, where new ideals mixed with the already blurred boundaries between household members, troubling the intertwining of family and labor. In addressing those households most immediately influenced by Imperial Household dynamics, similar shifts in meanings of marriage and domestic servitude occurred. Using published sources that have only recently begun to be mined for their insights into domestic spaces and introducing new sources from private family collections and Iranian state archives digitized by Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran (WWQI), I trace commonalities and differences across households. I show how Imperial Household dynamics influenced those beyond the palace walls, how affection increasingly shaped kinship ties, both legal and affective, over the nineteenth century, and how integral shifting meanings of race and ethnicity became to these differing modes of being family. I argue that domestics were a central node around which the Qajar household operated, and though some were compensated for their service, and depicted fondly, many were functionally property, and any feeling of kinship was likely not reciprocal. This project fills a major gap in the history of Iran by contributing an overview of what kinship and domestic servitude looked like within the Qajar-era household, and what kinship and perceptions of racial and ethnic difference came to mean by the end of the nineteenth century. While there have been case studies of families based on urban political networks, and scholarship on the harem, there has not been a study of what happened within Qajar households, or what that means for how the modern Iranian family has taken shape, specifically in who the family includes and excludes. My work also contributes to histories of kinship, gender, slavery, racialization, and ethnicization in the Middle East and non-Western worlds more broadly, particularly through my use of affect theory in attending to dimensions of human interaction shaping kinship and racial understandings. In bringing this theoretical framework to the Iranian context, I read old sources in new ways and rethink the history of that time through these lenses and categories of race, ethnicity, and gender at the intersections of kinship and labor.