two lovers separated during the nationalistic shifts of the balkan wars exchange a handkerchief....again, this follows on from my last post on fabric and ritual...

The song whose lyrics I published in my last blog post is this one, from a Turkish soap opera broadcast several years ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQiv8Aq3CXA

At the moment I am grappling a bit with Clifford Geertz in an attempt to get a firmer background in classical anthropological texts, although of course that can be both a blessing in a curse. On the one hand I am learning the language of Anthro and its ancestor cult (!) but I also risk adopting ideas that have been morei ntegrated, critiqued, surpassed etc...by now. I risk being out of touch. Oh well!

While looking at Geertz have the impression that my emphasis on contextualization is…

So, I have recently returned from a conference/summer school on Meso-American traditional healing practices at the University of New Mexico. The participants were an interesting mix of academics and practitioners with the slant towards a general audience amongst the presenters.I am hoping to continue connecting to the scholars at the program, which is repeated every summer in Albuquerque.I gave a couple of short presentations on popular beliefs and healing practices in Turkish culture. Its…

...for a project between my university and the University of Rome (Tor Vergata) on Post-Secularism.

Hajji Bektash Veli Museum and the Implicit Post-Secularism of Museumisation Processes in Republican Turkey

Using the binary of religion and secularism ‘as a lighter’ in the sense emplyed by Knott in her work ‘Locating Religion’ (2005) I similarly propose to look at public  ritual and religiosity (ın a Turkish context) to shed some light on the issue of the…

After a relatively busy period of time (ok I wasn't breaking my neck, but I had very littie time for things like blogging and other optionals) I finally have a break and a chance to contemplate what projects will take priority in my research from now through the summer (i.e. before the possibility of having to finally give classes on sociology and anthropology to Turkish youngsters who are not likely to understand my English).

A number of things are on the horizon and on the…

I am currently working on a project about the role of Sari Saltik (Bektashi) shrines in Turkey and the Balkans in the overlapping of shared pilgrimage practices, shrine appropriation and relationships between narrative and spatial practice/ritual. If anyone has any thoughts on these sujects, please let me know.

I am still refining many of my thoughts, to be honest. But my intention is bring all of this to a focus on how we perceive the binary oppositions of pluralism and…

As I begin this week, I remember a conversation I had with a doctoral student friend last night who is struggling to finish his PhD. While I managed to meet my deadlines fairly well during my PhD, that was defiinitely an exception. In general, I have also struggled with procrastination, as I believe we all do at some point and I gave some thought to whether there is a vlaue to taking a psychological approach to research. In other words, its helpful to look at what in your life is taking your…

For over a year now, I believe, I have had a page here at OAC and, for most of that time I have also been thinking about making my research more accesible online via blogging. For the time being, I think that I will be using OAC's blog to see if it works well towards this goal.

My plan at the moment is to spend some time here mainly discussing my work in the sociology department of the newly founded Suleyman Sah University in Istanbul where I currently work as an assistant professor.…