"From Coffee to Manhood: Grounds for Exchange in the Tunisian Coffeehouse, ca. 1898-2008" by Rodney William James Collins

Rodney William James Collins

Deposited 2008

Abstract
This historical and ethnographic dissertation examines the political economic links between the coffee trade, the public coffeehouse (qahwa sha`abiya), and manhood in Tunis, Tunisia. It investigates how the texture of urban life in the working-class quarters of contemporary Tunis has shaped, and has been shaped by, the historical and transnational circulations of coffee and the coffeehouse institution. Historically, the dissertation begins with the first French protectorate policy regulating coffeehouses in Tunisia in 1898 and extends through 2008 when the final phase of fieldwork research was completed. Ethnographically, the dissertation derives insights from the everyday lives of working-class men in the inner-city district of Tunis (wast al-`asima) who claim that the coffeehouse is the only viable public space in contemporary Tunis.

Based upon twenty-three months of fieldwork, the dissertation begins with an examination of the institutional foundations of the Tunisian coffee trade and explores how coffee is a strictly imported good as well as an essential element of the Tunisian cultural order. It then charts legislation surrounding the public coffeehouse and the consequent divisions of social space and the urban landscape that have been significant since the advent of Protectorate era policies. The legacy of coffeehouse policy is then examined in light of recent market liberalization and its determinacy on everyday public practices, attitudes, and values. It finally turns to interrogate how the predominately male institution of the qahwa sha`abiya serves increasingly as a way station for migrant men and unemployed youth held between political provisions and socio-economic constraints.

Coffee, and by extension, the coffeehouse, are shown to serve as the definitional site for the 'social good' that is at once a locus for the disillusionment of the populace as well as a promise subsidized by the state. Data from interviews, surveys, news media, and maps show how the anticipated social neutrality of the qahwa sha`abiya is deferred by contemporary economic policy reforms that serve instead to unevenly reinforce principles of social affiliation, especially along the lines of gender, class, and race. The dissertation provides an ethnographic portrait of the pragmatics of the social imagination as men in the coffeehouses of contemporary Tunis forge the gap between performances of masculinity, on the one hand, and the unfulfilled demands of manhood, on the other. By extending gender, psychoanalytic, and semeiotic theory into issues of public decency, manhood, and Tunisia's 'social economy,' this interdisciplinary dissertation offers insights into the production of social space, the formation of male subjectivities, and traces a cartography of disillusionment in North Africa.