Healing Secular Life: Loss and Devotion in Modern Turkey * By CHRISTOPHER DOLE

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a steady rise in publications about Turkey and Islam. Rare are the texts, however, which are able to move beyond the often trite debates about the uneasy relationship between secularism and Islam. Christopher Dole’s Healing Secular Life: Loss and Devotion in Modern Turkey, however, is a work of anthropology which problematizes the opposition between the political and theological spheres and studies secularism as a dynamic and productive set of ‘ideas, policies and institutional practices’ which reorders social life. Dole, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College, studies the survival and mutations of religious healing practices, and indeed religious healers and their clients, in a modern secular context where they are outlawed. The focus is mainly on two figures: a highly controversial Alevi living saint (veli) Zöhre Ana and a Sunni religious healer who treats patients cursed by humans or possessed by jinns, known in Turkish as a cinci hoca or an üfürükçü hoca. A lesser centre of attention is represented by the kurşuncu—the ‘lead-reader’ who pours molten lead into water and reads the solidified pieces to determine the source of the evil eye which has struck their client.