The history of bath seen as political mobility

• Book Review: “The Hammam through Time and Space”
• Julie Peteet
• New York: Syracuse University Press, 2024, 368 pp.

Allof anthropologist Julie Peteet’s previous books have focused on Palestine and Palestinian refugees, but her newest volume examines a phenomenon common throughout the Mediterranean region: the hamman, often referred to, though misleadingly, as the Turkish bath.

Regardless of the topic, Peteet’s research is always on-the-spot and hands-on, whereby direct observation is contextualized by historical and cultural background. In this case, she visited a large number of the baths she writes about.

Countering the common misconception that the hamman began in the Roman or Ottoman era, Peteet instead traces its origins back to the Bronze Age (3600-1200 BC). “In short, the hamman is the product of a long pan-Mediterranean history marked by transformations, exchanges, declines, and revivals… Casting aside a center-periphery model of cultural flows allows us to see things in motion, moving in multiple, often not easy to disentangle, directions, interacting and inflecting one another. A cultural politics of mobility is at work here.” (p. 23)

Peteet categorises the baths she examines according to multiple criteria: From private baths for rulers and public ones built to display imperial power, to modest neighbourhood baths and modern spas. Despite its paucity of historical urban baths, Jordan figures prominantly in the book by virtue of the early Umayyad Qasr ‘Amra, famous for its stunning frescoes, and other castles in the Eastern desert, as well as Al Fudayn in Mafraq, and Jerash’s Roman baths. Most of these exhibit a melding of Greco-Roman and Byzantine influence, typical of an emerging Islamic style. (Syria, which is replete with historical baths, is unfortunately only mentioned fleetingly, as it was plagued by conflict at the time of Peteet’s research, as were Iraq and Yemen.)

At the other end of the spectrum are the numerous, modern “Turkish baths”

built as part of the Ottoman revival and the growing tourist and wellness industry, with several of Amman’s new luxury hammans being mentioned.

Yet, despite whether hammans were designed to fulfill the locals’ cleanliness needs or to attract tourists, they have much in common. “Across the Mediterranean from Morocco to Turkey, the bathing ritual has remained remarkably similar over the centuries… the sequencing of the body through space, the tools used to clean the body, notions of the aesthetically clean body, and graduations in temperatures.” (p. 28)

Alongside the history, architecture, rituals, and sensory appeal of the hamman, Peteet also explores its social and socialising functions, and thechanging attitudes of different generations and genders towards public baths.While indulging in a bath, she interviewed the work force, both managers and employees, in a number of establishments.

Moulding all these different aspects into a smooth and informative narrative, Peteet makes the connection between personal experience and the movement of history. “In the hammam, we indulge in self-care, a self-care that is thousands of years old. Bathing structures have remained a sensorium throughout the ages… [where] we can imagine other worlds, other times, other people, and other ways of socialising.” (p. 330)