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. My background is in an interdisciplinary approach to the study of ritual, inlcuding ritual studies itself, anthropology, sociology and other disciplines.

I am working mainly on Alevi-Bektashi ritual and sites in Turkey and the Balkans at the moment and also developing a project on comparative traditional healing practices in Meso-America and Turkey/the Turkic world. In my work on ritual sites I tend to focus on space-sharing, contestation, 'syncretism', and a thick description-oriented style of contextualisation.

What I plan to blog here is the research process itself, methodological/theoretical issues and the core subjects of my research.

More soon....