Overview

In contemporary Turkey-a democratic, secular, and predominantly Muslim nation-the religious healer is a controversial figure. Attracting widespread condemnation, religious healers are derided as exploiters of the sick and vulnerable, discredited forms of Islamic and medical authority, and superstitious relics of a pre-modern era. Yet all sorts of people, and not just the desperately ill, continue to seek them out. After years of research with healers and their patients in working-class neighborhoods of urban Turkey, anthropologist Christopher Dole concludes that the religious healer should be regarded not as an exception to Turkey's secular modern development but as one of its defining figures. Healing Secular Life demonstrates that religious healing and secularism in fact have a set of common stakes in the ordering of lives and the remaking of worlds. Linking the history of medical reforms and scientific literacy campaigns to contemporary efforts of Qur'anic healers to treat people afflicted by spirits and living saints through whom deceased political leaders speak, Healing Secular Life approaches stories of healing and being healed as settings for examining the everyday social intimacies of secular political rule. This ethnography of loss, care, and politics reveals not only that the authority of the religious healer is deeply embedded within the history of secular modern reform in Turkey but also that personal narratives of suffering and affliction are inseparable from the story of a nation seeking to recover from the violence of its own secular past.

Full Product Details

9780812244168

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Reviews

A fine ethnography that examines the cultural politics of healing practices in contemporary Turkey. It offers a fresh and original account of the cultural discourses and modes of aesthetic representation and perception that congeal around questions of religious healing. -Robert Desjarlais, Sarah Lawrence College A very impressive, theoretically sound and consistent, and empirically detailed account of how state power and its secularist project in Turkey excludes, despises, attacks, and yet contains and controls the religious therapeutic authority. -Berna Turam, Northeastern University

Author Information

Christopher Dole is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College.

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