Sharing a world with others we do not choose is a fundamental human condition. Yet finding those cohabiting others disagreeable, if not unintelligible, seems distinctive to our time. In a time when fellow feeling and reasoned debate no longer seem to suffice, my research examines how people draw on conservative religions to sustain cohabitation. Focusing on contemporary Turkey, I work across sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, religious studies, and critical feminist theory.
CURRENT PROJECT
My first book project, After Secularism: Conservative Muslim Women and Nonsovereign Tolerance in Turkey, reconsiders what forms tolerance can take in the political present through ethnographic research on Turkish state women preachers. These well-educated female authorities teach “correct Islam” within a complex bureaucratic infrastructure shaped by an increasingly authoritarian, neoliberal, and Islamist regime in an ostensibly secular state. Their work often involves advising anxious Muslim men and women who want to admonish K-pop-loving daughters, drinking neighbors, and unveiled strangers. In response to these sovereign desires to “fix” disagreeable others, however, preachers cultivate nonsovereign virtues, including inward reflection, respectful indifference, and reticent care through worship. Invoking Prophet Muhammad, who conveyed Islam through love rather than force, they redirect attention from moral policing aimed at securing collective happiness in the hereafter to respecting others as God’s creatures who share this world. This redirection helps conservative Muslims sort out conflicting ethical directions that the tradition appears to authorize. The form of tolerance they promote allows interlocutors to maintain their religious convictions while normalizing difference in proximity and making interpersonal tensions inhabitable through disengagement. This ethnographic account complicates portrayals of conservative Turkish Muslims as a homogeneous constituency of the right-wing Justice and Development Party (JDP) and, by extension, as inherently reactionary actors who endorse and embody authoritarianism. Disrupting the familiar association between conservatism and reactionary politics, After Secularism shows how conservative religious commitments can generate both authoritarian desires and the resources to resist them. By tracing the divergent orientations toward difference, collective life, authority, the state, and gender that emerge within these commitments, the book reconsiders key categories of political life and pluralist cohabitation from a situated perspective beyond the Euro-American experience.
In clarifying how conservative religiosity gives rise to, and responds to, varied ways of inhabiting political modernity, After Secularism contests understandings of secularity as a universal modern condition by showing how women preachers relate to it in two distinctive ways. First, through their commitment to preserving tradition, preachers seek to generate a lifeworld that exceeds secularity’s constraint. Second, despite this commitment, they do not deny secularity as a world-making force; instead, they recognize that secularity touches individual bodies differently, and that this difference shapes how one relates to tradition in the social world. My ethnographic analysis identifies this nuanced recognition of secularity in relation to human plurality as a key condition that keeps conservative religiosity from turning into sheer authoritarianism, enabling conservative women to accommodate disagreeable others as the best Muslim practice for navigating an increasingly fragmented world. After Secularism thus contributes to political anthropology, the anthropology of Islam and the secular, and critical feminist scholarship. The dissertation on which the book project is based received the University of Chicago’s Sol Tax Prize for the best dissertation with relevance to anthropology and action; it was supported by the Global Religion Research Initiative and multiple University of Chicago fellowships.
I have a peer-reviewed journal article drawn from the project, “On Others' Veiling: How Turkish State Women Preachers Teach Indifference as a Political Virtue," forthcoming in American Ethnologist (2027). I am currently preparing another article on Turkish Muslim mothers’ concerns about K-Pop fandom, which reconsiders debates on exemplarity by centering gendered intimacy and distance. I plan to submit it to The Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
FUTURE PROJECT
My second book project, Inheriting Islam: Family, Sensibility, and Forms of Life, extends my research program on women in conservative traditions navigating sociopolitical fractures by tracing the tension between family and religion. This project focuses on customary religious practices transmitted through kin ties, such as voluntary offerings, shrine visits, chanting, and sorcery. These affective, sensory, and habituated practices are often contested as negative family influences, even as they mediate relations of love and obligation in gendered ways. Drawing on anthropological scholarship on kinship, memory, and the body, I examine the complex ways in which family and religious tradition inflect each other, shaping how one relates to others and the broader world.
