Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on anthropologist Lloyd A. Fallers’ ethnographic fieldwork and philosophical thoughts on lived religion in Turkey and the U.S. in the 1960s.

Paper long abstract:

In the history of world anthropology, ethnographic studies on religions have always been one of the most fertile grounds in provincializing Western theories. Compared to political systems or kinship schemes, the seemingly absolute otherness among religions has either rendered the building of a general theory impossible or, at least, highlighted the biases of the center more explicitly. In principle (but not always in practice), anthropology of religion has been tolerant to other ways of knowing and to theoretical contributions from the so-called periphery since neither secularism nor Christianity could be easily promoted as universal targets like parliamentary democracy or modernity. In this paper, I will talk about anthropologist Lloyd A. Fallers’ work and thoughts on religion in the 1960s. I focus on his comparisons of lived religion in Turkey and the U.S. when both countries were going through a period of religious revivalism. Like many of his contemporaries, Fallers was fascinated by ‘Turkish Islam’, but his comparative view and field experience allowed him to criticize the traditional Orientalist accounts of the revival. Moreover, he used his articulations on Turkey, reached through his conversations with theological scholars like Hüseyin Atay, to question the liberal Protestant response to conservativism in his home country. In the end, evoking the literature of the 2000s, he called for a collaboration between anthropology and theology centered around the theme of ‘othering’.