1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910817598303321

Autore

Dole Christopher

Titolo

Healing secular life : loss and devotion in modern Turkey / / Christopher Dole

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia : , : University of Pennsylvania Press, , c2012

ISBN

1-283-89911-6

0-8122-0635-5

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (302 pages)

Collana

Contemporary Ethnography.

Disciplina

615.8/5209561

Soggetti

Spiritual healing - Political aspects - Turkey

Healers - Legal status, laws, etc - Turkey

Secularism - Turkey

Ethnography

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Contents -- Chapter 1. Medicine and the Will to Civilization -- Chapter 2. Healing Difference at the Limits of Community -- Chapter 3. Hagiographies of the Living: Saintly Speech and Other Wonders of Secular Life -- Chapter 4. The Therapeutics of Piety: Ethics, Markets, Value -- Chapter 5. A Malaise of Fracturing Dreams: The Care of Relations -- Chapter 6. Healing Secular Life: Two Regimes of Loss -- Conclusion: Fragments -- Appendix: Genres of Healing -- Notes -- Glossary -- References -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

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.