One Anthropologist, Two Religious Revivals: Lloyd A. Fallers and his Theologically Engaged Anthropology on Turkish Islam in the 1960s

Abstract

HALF a century ago, in the pages of this journal, anthropologist Lloyd A. “Tom” Fallers (1925–1974) published an ethnographic comparison of Ramadan in Turkey with Advent in the United States (Fallers 1974). This article may be regarded as an early forerunner of today’s new directions in the anthropology of religion in that it presented a call for comparative anthropology of lived religions and proposed a courageous invitation to bridge anthropology and theology. However, it was destined to be all but ignored. First, with almost no references, “Notes on an Advent Ramadan” stylistically resembled an ethnographic field report; hence, it did not obviously express Fallers’s long-term intellectual interest in the predicaments of religion in modern times. In fact, the anonymous readers of the article initially “lift[ed] their skirts and sniff[ed] their noses at the thought of including such a thing in JAAR.”¹ Moreover, Fallers was a renowned expert on political and legal systems in East Africa (particularly in today’s Uganda), and when he died a few months after the article appeared, the rest of his two-decade scholarship contained not even a page about Turkey or Islam.² As he admitted in an unpublished paper on Turkish Islam, he was “really an Africanist.”³

These considerations notwithstanding, my archival and oral history research on Fallers’s Turkey work has found that article to be just the tip of the iceberg. Rather than a passing interest in the popular and exotic topic of “Turkish Islam,” his decade-long preoccupation with modern religiosity was a product of his personal journey as a believing university professor who endeavored to find a path through the religious revivalism, New Age evangelical movements, and liberal secularism in the US during the rebellious 1960s. Furthermore, the conclusions he reached were ahead of his time and strikingly aligned with the scholarly literature of the 2000s thus far, as I will show below. This article digs beneath Fallers’s published footprints and unearths his multilayered work on religion, focusing on his unpublished drafts of speeches and essays, his letters to colleagues and his wife, and my conversations with his daughter, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan. Fallers died of brain cancer at the age of forty-nine in 1974. In the words of his wife and co-fieldworker, Margaret C. Fallers, “It is sad that Tom didn’t get to finish his Turkey work because I think he was going to work on some interesting problems of church and state or religion and politics. He wanted to finish.”⁴ The primary aim of this article, therefore, is to reconstruct what he could not finish.

Moreover, I propose that Fallers’s research is also relevant today for the students of the anthropology of religion—not only a forerunner in its history. His questioning of the sacred/secular divide, his focus on everyday religiosity, his discomfort with the liberal-secular take on religion, and his proposal to engage anthropology and theology theoretically are in an almost anachronic dialogue with the recent discussions in the anthropology of religion. His writings from the 1960s could, one feels, be quoted by scholars whose theoretical interventions respond to contemporary entanglements of the religious and secular in public space. In that sense, the Fallers case reminds us of a parallelism between the 1950s–1960s and 2000s in terms of the public revival of religion, the collapse of the idea of secular modernity, and the global transregionalization of religious experience, even though scholars are tempted to identify these changes with the 1990s–2000s and explain new developments in the anthropology of religion thence (e.g., for the anthropology of Christianity, see Robbins 2014; Jenkins 2012). Such contextualizations may be questioned, however, as exemplified by Fallers’s work and the literature on Turkey and Islam.

The rise of political Islam in the 1990s and the historic victory of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) in the 2002 elections—which is still in power—revived studies on religion in Turkey with a new focus on “conservative modernism” (İrem 2002). Scholars realized that neither the (then) EU-oriented, neoliberal, and developmentalist JDP nor its electorate fit the old secular-Islamist distinction; thus, a body of literature developed that demonstrated the fuzziness of such boundaries in “new” Turkey (Tuğal 2009; Silverstein 2011; Hart 2007; 2013; Özyürek 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2020; Henkel 2007). The problem remained, however, that this conceptual elaboration was associated with and confined to the 2000s and the JDP reign (Yavuz and Öztürk 2019), whereas historical reconstructions of the earlier periods of the Turkish Republic continued to repeat the old binaries of state-society and secular-religious (see, e.g., Çınar 2005; Çağatay 2006; Gürbey 2009; Azak 2010). Fallers, however, argued that the negotiated and harmonious dynamic between secularism and Islam was historically grounded and predated the JDP. His interpretation of Turkish Islam diverged from the then-existing literature, which was heavily marked by the opposition between the radical secularism of the Atatürk era (1920s–1930s) and the recent Islamist awakening in the 1950s. What Fallers had done was to critique the widely shared distinction between religious common people, on the one hand, and the secular, educated elite, on the other. Instead, he found harmony within the “religio-secular continuum” (Dressler 2011) in Turkish society, thus predicting, as it were, the conceptual turn in the scholarship on Turkey and Islam in the 2000s.

In sum, this study of Fallers’s scholarship on the anthropology of religion has both historical and contemporary relevance. First, it sheds light on a forgotten figure in this disciplinary area and enables us to historicize the social background of recent theoretical developments. With its biographical focus, it draws the attention of the readers to the intersections between the personal and contextual, following the invitation of recent studies on W. E. B. Du Bois and John Templeton (Cladis 2023; White and Hughey 2023; Jordan 2023). Second, the article contributes to contemporary discussions about how to do an ethnography of everyday religion while engaging with theology at a theoretical level. Joel Robbins recently asked, “Is there a chance to develop this kind of [mutually transformational] conversation between anthropology and theology now?” (Robbins 2020, 4). Fallers wished so and made some—albeit limited— attempts to bridge the two disciplines theoretically.

In the following section, I begin with biographical information and explain why and how Fallers began working on Turkey and Islam. Then, I discuss his methodological choices for an ethnography of everyday religiosity, particularly his abstention from studying religious movements, noting his focus on moralism in Turkish Islam and the significant parallelism between his ideas and today’s literature. Finally, the last two sections examine Fallers’s ideas on the mutually transformative potential of anthropology and theology, first placing Fallers’s ethical search in the context of the 1960s in the US and then investigating his efforts to affiliate the two disciplines.

AN AFRICANIST GOES TO TURKEY

Why and how did an anthropologist of East African sociopolitical systems come to work on Turkey and Islam within ten years of completing his PhD? The answer seems to lie in a combination of personal background, the Cold War social sciences context, and sheer coincidence. Born in Nebraska City in 1925, Tom Fallers grew up in a Methodist, working-class environment. He was the first member of the family to gain a higher education, and he dedicated his life to modern scientific thought, accompanied by an alienation from Midwestern religious puritanism. But his story diverged from the standard narrative of a scientist in the secular university environment who breaks loose from the religious conservatism of the countryside. In fact, according to Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, during his stay in Kampala for doctoral and postdoctoral research in the 1950s, he was influenced by the intellectualism of the Church of England.⁵ Although he always remained critical of puritanism, over the years, he formulated an ethical stance toward social problems through Christian terminology, while his empathy with working-class culture in the US led him to keep the liberal-secularist view of religion at arm’s length as he tried to reconcile modern science with religious morality.

When Fallers returned from Kampala to the US in 1957 to take up an assistant professorship at Berkeley, he was already determined to study religion. This sat well with his plans to do comparative research at a time—during the Cold War era—when the modernization paradigm and comparative perspectives were at the center of the social sciences. Despite having pursued an anthropology career, Fallers’s conceptual orientation had been carved out by political science and sociology. As a student of Edward Shils at The University of Chicago, he had been influenced by Talcott Parsons and Max Weber, particularly by the comparative analysis of national cultures. During his fellowship at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in 1958–1959, he was already seeking a new field site at which to study “comparative religion,” among other themes (for a few years, he seriously considered choosing Ethiopia as his second field, where he was particularly interested in the “local church”).⁶

In the meantime, at the CASBS, he was able to reunite with his former professors Shils, Fred Eggan, and David Apter, as well as to meet with new colleagues, such as Clifford Geertz. There, Shils and Apter laid the foundations of the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations (CCSNN) at The University of Chicago. In 1960–1961, they recruited Fallers, Geertz, and David Schneider to Chicago. Coincidentally, Turkish anthropologist Nur Yalman soon joined Chicago’s anthropology department from Cambridge and impressed Fallers with the case of Turkey. Thus it was that, in the summer of 1962, Fallers joined Yalman for a two-week tour across the country, and they “jeeped around the Black Sea Coast a good deal and then took local buses across Anatolia to the Mediterranean.” Fallers’s plan was to “find a site for future fieldwork” where he would “ultimately... work on Islam and politics.”⁷ He picked Konya, a medium-sized Anatolian town known for its historical religious heritage, Islamic urban landscape, and lively public religious life. Meanwhile, the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations agreed to grant generous funding to the CCSNN for its proposed comparative research projects. Hence, in 1964, Indonesia specialist Geertz went to Morocco, and Uganda expert Fallers flew to Turkey.

POLITICS AND MORAL COLLAPSE

Fallers lived a total of two years in three different cities in Turkey between 1964 and 1969. Thus, this was a period of intermittent fieldwork that coincided with arguably the twentieth-century’s most rebellious five years. Fallers experienced both the teach-ins, occupations, and protests on the Chicago campus and the anti-Americanism and rising leftist activism in Turkey. As I have discussed elsewhere, he was a Democrat professor belonging to the Cold War generation who always kept the New Left at arm’s length. As a matter of fact, he felt marginalized in the university environment, where ideological conflicts, he believed, were beginning to overshadow the academic ethos and critical thinking (Sipahi 2024). Fallers wanted to find a third way between right-wing conservatism and the liberal left. In fact, he understood the late 1960s as a period of moral collapse, which impacted his thoughts on politics and religion. In a personal letter to Edward Shils in 1970, he wrote:

As I recall, we once had at this place, with all its crudities and weaknesses, a certain rough and ready, but reasonably tolerant, dialogue about public affairs—a climate of debate which usually avoided both propagandizing and apolitical quietism. We have it still, but its participants have declined in number and there are more hysterics. Unless I am badly mistaken, one reason for this is that in the social sciences we have, as you say, become too scientistic and too disengaged from fundamental problems of man-in-society, including especially this society. The result has been a lack of moral education for students and faculty alike. Scientism has, among its other shortcomings, the defect of assuming that social science can be carried on in a moral vacuum. It has the same logical flaw as utilitarian liberalism.⁸

As he noted in his diary, this moral problem could only be addressed if scholars remembered that their real duty was to simultaneously shed light on a “practical understanding of the world” and a “fundamental understanding of the nature of man.”⁹ There could be no pure science that was unrelated to the lived world and thus prone to “morally ambiguous consequences” (Fallers 2017, 156), and “practical relevance” did not simply mean the “immediate applicability of problems to public policy” alone—rather, it needed to involve “an inquiry which enhances our capacity to understand the hopes and fears, the triumphs and tragedies of human communities in their historical settings and hence contributes to our own and others’ wisdom as citizens of the nation and the world” (Fallers 2017, 147).

In short, Fallers experienced the late 1960s as an ethical nadir, particularly in academia, and he diagnosed the underlying problem as a misplaced insistence on a duality between practical, real-world values, on the one hand, and value-free science in a moral vacuum, on the other. Here, his interest in theology came to the fore as a viable alternative through which to connect politics and philosophy using the glue of a nonpuritanical moralism. Thus, as Eggan implied in his commemoration speech upon Fallers’s death, the preoccupation of the deceased with religious philosophy had been closely related to the political context: “He was deeply concerned about the University and the community and worked hard to change the injustices and uncertainties which he felt were alienating the younger generation. In his own life he was quietly religious, and felt a personal relationship with God which enabled him to carry on in the face of pain.”¹⁰

Thus, from the mid-1960s onward, Fallers was quietly contemplating the possibility of formulating a moral stance in the rapidly transforming world and thinking this within a theological terminology. An early, “rambling” letter to his wife from Konya in 1964 indexes well the early phase of his enlightenment:

I tend to think about this in Christian theological terms, because that’s the framework in which I myself try to operate, but I know well enough that this [is] not the only way to think about it... My own maturity has involved a renewed interest in theological language as a tool for thinking about all the moral (in the wide sense) problems that seem increasingly important to me—not really in the [paraphernalia] of “religion,” which are at most (best) aids to theological inquiry, commonly known as prayer, and an aesthetic window-dressing; and at worst, a form of idolatrous fetishism. What rather most concerns me is the central ideas of Christianity, which to me provide the most satisfactory framework—a sort of paradigm—for [working] things out.¹¹

Evidently, Fallers’s fieldwork in Turkey coincided with his renewed interest in theological terminology and the outbreak of political activism. And it was while he was wrestling with the binary opposition between “the ivory tower and a preoccupation with the immediate practical” and looking for a middle way between “uncritical acceptance of the modern ethos” and “an atavistic rejection of the modern world”¹² that he took a shine to Turkey as the land of harmony between tradition and modernity.

FIELDWORK IN TURKEY: A LAND OF HARMONY?

Fallers was determined to work on religion in Turkey from the beginning, and it was no surprise that in 1964 he chose Konya, the so-called Islamic city, for his first four-month field stay. Strikingly, however, he devoted his primary year-long fieldwork in 1968–1969 to the study of artisans in Edremit, a town on the Aegean coast, Turkey’s most secular region. In this section, I describe critical moments of his fieldwork experiences and discuss how the Turkish case became an answer to his ethical-political questions. I conceptualize the shift from Konya to Edremit as a methodological intervention: Fallers realized, I believe, that one could only study everyday modern religiosity by abstaining from working on religion per se. It was the ordinary practice of middle-class entrepreneurs—what may be dubbed the Muslim ethic and the spirit of capitalism—that interested Fallers.

During his Konya days, Fallers had been fascinated by the harmony as opposed to confrontation between modernity and religion, notwithstanding the opposition between recent Islamist movements and the radical secularism of the Atatürk era that heavily marked the existing literature on Turkey (both native and foreign [Turkish and English language]). In a nutshell, the end, in 1945, of the single-party regime of Atatürk’s secularist Republican People’s Party (RPP) paved the way for the emergence of alternative movements and thus released religion from Pandora’s box. The unfettered rise of the Democrat Party (DP) after WWII was based on the idea of a (pious) people’s rebellion against the (secularist) elite. The RPP tried to forestall its fall by relaxing restrictions in religious education: elective courses on religion were added to the primary school curriculum, a Faculty of Theology was opened at Ankara University, and Preachers’ Schools were founded. Despite such somewhat humiliatingly populist concessions, however, the DP won a great electoral victory in 1950 and ran the government until a military coup in 1960. Naturally, the Islam revival continued at full speed in the 1950s: the call for prayer was changed back from Turkish to Arabic after a prohibition of almost two decades; previously banned dervish orders were legalized; shrines were opened for visits; religious programs and Koran readings were allowed on the radio; and new mosques mushroomed throughout the country, including in villages. In parallel, mosque attendance and religious publications rose considerably (Azak 2010; Adak 2022; Çağatay 2006; Yücekök 1972).

Although the secularist Turkish and Western media tended to interpret this revival of religion as a reactionary threat to the early republican ideals, keen observers agreed that Turkey was not becoming an Islamist country. In fact, during the same period, reactionary religious orders were prosecuted, and an Islamist party was closed. The election results also indicated that “the Turks want to continue the separation of Islam and the state” (Reed 1954, 281–82). A more nuanced explanation of these developments relied on the assertion that the secularist reforms of the Atatürk era had never had more than a minimal effect on peasant Anatolia (Lewis 1952; Thomas 1952). According to anthropologist Paul Stirling, “What looks like a revival... is in fact only, so to speak, the religious stream emerging from an underground section of its course” (Stirling 1958, 408). In the 1960s, the prominent Turkish sociologist and political scientist Şerif Mardin theorized this resurfacing thesis with the support of Shils’ framework of center versus periphery and popularized the idea that the whole of Ottoman and Turkish history was a struggle between the secular elites and religious masses (Mardin 1973). This, however, was precisely the point where Fallers disagreed with his new friend. “‘Bifurcation’ seems to me an over-simplification,”¹³ he wrote to Mardin, questioning his narrative:

Is it not a bit too simple to say that “the large masses in Anatolia have not been touched by the secularist values...”? It’s certainly true that they haven’t been convinced that religion is unimportant, but a significant number of them have adopted crucial aspects of “secularist values”—e.g. economic enterprise and education—and more are doing so all the time. They would probably not see this as inconsistent with religion. Indeed, there are strains in Islam—notably its populism and egalitarianism (in the sense of equality of opportunity) which support such “secularist values.”¹⁴

In contrast to the secular elite versus religious mass distinction, Fallers observed in Turkey a “remarkable” degree of “national cohesion and integrity” and “extraordinary national solidarity in the face of deep ideological divisions.”¹⁵ For him, the seemingly unbridgeable poles of secularism and conservativism were not as irreconcilable as they first appeared. For one thing, secularism and the republican reforms had been “very widely accepted.”¹⁶ There was “no important body of opinion” questioning “the basic legitimacy of the secular republican regime”¹⁷ or “advocates [for a] reversal of these secularizing and Westernizing changes.”¹⁸ Those who did were suppressed by the government as well as seen widely as “a gerici—‘reactionary’ or yobaz—‘religious-fanatic,’ with overtones of ‘uncultured bear.’”¹⁹ In sum, he concluded that “Turks today live happily under European order.”²⁰

Nevertheless, it was also not true, as some observers suggested, that Turkey was no longer an Islamic society. On the contrary, “Islam is extremely strong in Turkey,” even among the secular elite, when one looked at daily practice, such as mosque gatherings, pilgrimage, and Koranic readings.²¹ In fact, “a government indifferent to Islam” was “simply inconceivable even to secularist Turks.”²² It was this “new synthesis” between secular modernism and religious piety that interested Fallers most. Although there was tension between the two camps, “large numbers of Turks” had been able to “resolve it on terms of other than the outright rejection of one or the other body of belief.”²³

Fallers’s observations on the Mevlana festival held in Konya, where Mevlana (Jalal ad-Din Muhammed Rumi, 1207–1273) was buried, exemplify how he substantiated his view of the “synthesis.” Since the dervish orders had been outlawed in the 1920s, the Mevlevi convent seemed to have continued as just a tourist attraction. For Fallers, however, it was clear that the festival-like happening was actually “a cover for continuing the order’s religious activities”²⁴ and that “it still has profound meaning for people.”²⁵ Having said that, he diverged from the resurfacing thesis by pointing out that such recent religious activities had not been conducted by social groups whom the secularist reforms had spared:

An extremely dapper man of about fifty who looks just like Commander Whitehead in the Schweppes ads is here from Istanbul for the purpose, according to my friend Kemal, of teaching people to perform the ceremonies for the Tourists. It’s obvious that there’s a functioning tekke [dervish lodge]... in Istanbul. This whole subject is fascinating from the point of view of my interest in modern Islam. These are all very modern people—well-educated intellectuals.²⁶

Fallers, then, was fascinated by the harmony of modernity with religious tradition in Turkey and thus departed from the scholarship of the Turkish literati and Western commentators, who both tended to see Turkish society as paradoxical, deficient, or poorly or only partly modernized on the grounds that the modern secular and traditional sacred coexisted. He was eager to observe that “big families come in to the restaurant with grandma in her black çarşaf, mother in a very modest Western dress and the girls dressed like the universal mid-20th century teen-ager,”²⁷ a scene regarded by most educated Turks as embarrassing and by Western observers as paradoxical. Since the anthropologist’s reflex was to identify with the common people and their genuine respect for a pious life, Fallers always had an ambivalent relationship with the elites. On the one hand, he could speak the same language (literally and figuratively) as them and feel at home. Although his visits to Ankara and meetings with faculty at Middle East Technical University (METU) excited him to the extent that he decided to stay in Ankara for his second three-month stay in 1967,²⁸ their alienation from the realities of their own country annoyed him. While Fallers was voluntarily doing fieldwork in Konya, educated and secular outsiders, such as an engineer from Ankara with his French wife and a Turkish Air Force sergeant, were all depressed and found living there unbearable, as if in exile. They were, Fallers noted, “unhealthily alienated from the Anatolian countryside, from the old cultural tradition and from the country’s politics”;²⁹ thus, they all wanted to “escape from the provinciality of Konya.”³⁰

Fallers wanted to place both the secular elite and religious fundamentalist groups aside to give due place in social theory to the moderate majority who simultaneously embraced modernism and Islam. His originality lay in an awareness of “the difficulty of drawing a sharp line between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular.’” After all, he wrote, the “distinction is a modern and rather artificial one everywhere.”³¹ A good example was the mushrooming of İmam Hatip schools (religious vocational high schools) in the 1960s.³² Contrary to the then dominant view that they were a hotbed of insurgency against secularism, Fallers soon realized that this “fascinating phenomenon”³³was “nothing less than a parallel school system” (rather than a hoca-training school), which, in the face of enormous demand, successfully combined secular and religious education.³⁴ The movement was led by the “rationalist” wing of the Islamists, who “accept the Republic and the modern world.” For Fallers, these people were “sensible Turks and not nutty zealots” (at least “so far”).³⁵ Essentially, the schools reflected the need for a “sophisticated Islam.”³⁶

BETWEEN SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS: NONPURITANICAL MORALISM

Fallers proposed to overcome the binary opposition of the secular versus the sacred/religious at a time when the distinction was strong and “religious revivalism” (in the US and in Turkey) was a hot topic. The secular-religious divide has since been repeatedly challenged, especially in the 2000s, and secularism has come to be seen not as the absence of religion but as an umbrella term for diverse ways to contain enchantment and the transcendental by this-worldly practices and philosophies (Calhoun et al. 2011). Scholars have pointed out that church and state have not been completely separated anywhere, including France, while the so-called theocracies, like the Ottoman Empire, were more secularist than they seemed from the outside (Asad 2006; Casanova 2010; 2011; Barkey 2010). Similarly, the “postsecular” world, which refers to the rise of fundamentalist/religious political movements in the 2000s, means less an increase in religiosity or the end of secularism than a shift in public perception of already existing practices (de Vries 2006). Researchers stopped running a secularism check for every country in different time periods because, in this essentially secular world, there are “multiple secularities” or “varieties of secularism,” namely different social constellations of the this-worldly and other-worldly (Katznelson and Jones 2010; Warner et al. 2010). As shown, Fallers anticipated this recent scholarship, albeit in different words.

More importantly, Fallers’s work is also in tune with the critical scholarship that refused to conceptualize the rising public appearance of religious activities and groups since the 1990s in different parts of the world simply as a reactionary retreat from secularist modernity. In an early paper, for instance, Charles Hirschkind argued that the so-called rise of political Islam was, in reality, a form of competition between the state and Islamist movements in public domains, such as education, and that this was a result of the expansion of state power into such domains (Hirschkind 1997). Fallers had also understood the sprawling of the İmam Hatip schools in the 1960s as a hybrid system alternative to state institutions, although he never discussed the role of the modern liberal state in this process, as Talal Asad (2003) and Saba Mahmood (2005) did. He was very much attentive to what Hirschkind called the “Islamic counterpublic,” which was “not limited to issues of personal piety but necessarily extends to address such matters as the methods and content of education, appropriate styles of popular entertainment, modes of public conduct for men and women, and even appropriate forms of employment” (Hirschkind 2001, 14). Indeed, besides his remarks on the İmam Hatip schools (education) and Mevlana festival (popular entertainment), Fallers also published with his wife an article on “sex roles” (Fallers and Fallers 1976) in addition to his work on artisans in Edremit.

The affinity between (the) Fallers’s writings and contemporary works stands out even further regarding a shared observation on the importance of everyday ethics. Brian Silverstein’s study of Sufism in late Ottoman society and today’s Turkey analyzed the movement as a form of ethical self-formation (Silverstein 2011). Similarly, Hussein Ali Agrama, working on the Al-Azhar’s fatwa center in Egypt, conceptualized “the fatwa as a form of the ethical care of the self” (Agrama 2010, 14). During his fieldwork in Cairo, Hirschkind noticed that public religious practice was oriented to carving an ethical self that would conduct equanimous behavior free of extreme passion (Hirschkind 2001). Indeed, Fallers was surprised by the everyday ethical speech that discredited puritanism, which was why he referred on several occasions to a sermon given by a mufti on Berat Eve (marking the gift of the Koran to Muhammed):

The story which most moved them [the mosque congregation] was one about a soldier (Ottoman times) who was away at war for 18 years. When he returned he looked in the window of his house and saw a young man with his wife and was blind with rage. As he was about to kill the two of them, however, he discovered that the youth was a young kinsman and that the wife had been entirely faithful. All the old men rocked from side to side, weeping and murmuring Allah, allah! at this, for there’s a good deal of homicide here in connection with jealousy.³⁷

This leads to the point that although this was a strongly moralistic social universe, “extreme puritanism” was not welcomed; the story was very touching “because it showed that even such an important virtue as due regard for the purity of women can be overdone.”³⁸ Importantly, the moralism dealt with everyday problems in a realistic and moderate manner. Thus, philanthropy was urged as a form of wealth redistribution, underpaying employees was reproached, and business ethics was always a hot topic.³⁹ As Fallers wrote to Mardin, he was amazed by the fact that the quite moralistic evening sermons also included discussion of worldly problems, like a minimum wage.⁴⁰ Contrary to what he had learned from the secondary literature, Ramadan was surprisingly “not looked forward to as somber and penitential”—rather, daily life carried “the here’s-wishing-you-a-happy-ramazan (...) tone.”⁴¹ Later, he framed the Nasreddin Hoca stories as another example of antipuritanism, as “humor directed at moralistic rigidity and hypocrisy.” Such stories showed “the Turk’s ambivalent relationship to the austerity of Sunni legalism and puritanism,” and “his faith reveals itself in its characteristic deviances and dissents as much as in its consensus and compliance.”⁴²

In essence, then, Fallers identified the nonpuritanical moralism of Turkish Islam and found in it an ethnographical instantiation of what he had been seeking as a characterization of his philosophy of life: an ethico-political stance that refused to sacrifice philosophical contemplation to practical relevance or vice versa. With these concerns in mind, I suggest, Fallers was deeply “impressed by the moralism of Islam here.”⁴³ Its “highly moralistic character” expressed Turkish Islam as a predominantly “ethical” practice as opposed to a “ritualistic” one, as in the Moroccan case.⁴⁴ The local community placed great value on the hoca or mufti’s preaching, which was “almost Bible-belt–American in its evangelism.”⁴⁵ The preaching style was “very moralistic”; a “good sermon” was “one that moves people.”⁴⁶

I contend that Fallers’s interest in everyday ethics rather than formal religion was the underlying reason why Edremit was chosen over Konya for the year-long fieldwork. Originally, in a joint application submitted with Geertz and Binder to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1963, Fallers had proposed to “focus particularly upon the role of leaders of mosque congregations and religious orders (tarikats) and upon the local leaders of political parties, government and economic enterprise.”⁴⁷ He situated his Turkey work as a project on “modernization of Islam,”⁴⁸ and Konya, home to “a lot of religious activity,” was “good for my purposes” because it was “clearly a place where a strong Islamic tradition confronts all the new forces and institutions.”⁴⁹ As a result, he lived for three months in Konya in the fall of 1964 with the aim of “getting fluent in Turkish and learning enough about the town to plan serious research.”⁵⁰

A few years later, however, he found the real focus of his research, which was only put into words in an unfinished report written for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1967 when he was teaching at METU in Ankara:

At the most general level, my research is stimulated by a concern with the problem of the relationship between ideas (“culture”) and institutionalized action (“social structure”) in human affairs. Descriptively, it is concerned with the culture and institutions of a Turkish provincial city. The research problem at the “in-between” level concerns the relationship between certain particular segments of social structure, especially occupational structure, and selected segments of culture, principally religion.⁵¹

In the remainder of this “Statement of Research Aims,” Fallers first explained his Weberian/Geertzian take on the reciprocal relationship between the social and cultural, tradition and practice, and structure and action through the “meaning” conferred on the latter element by the former. Then, he reviewed the rising importance of work and occupation in modern life at the expense of traditional networks, such as family and church congregation. Finally, he concluded, “when all this has been said, however, there is ample evidence that for large numbers of modern men, traditional (the word, as used here, means ‘continuous with the past,’ not ‘unchanged’) religious faith has remained crucial to their lives and has both influences, and been influenced by, the modernization of their work lives.” He knew that many religious movements in recent history had erupted in reaction to and not in support of modern relations of work and employment, yet he emphasized that it was “also clear that millions of modern Western men have found it essential to view their occupational situation in a religious light.”⁵²

At this point, it was similarly clear that Fallers had no interest in religious movements, groups, or events in Turkey. Inspired by his references to Weber, Bellah, and Niebuhr, I would describe his project as a study of the Muslim ethic and the spirit of capitalism in Turkey. Therefore, he chose to dedicate his year-long ethnographic stay to a mainly secular town that was undergoing a “mini-industrial revolution” in western Turkey.⁵³ And, during the Fallers’s stay in Edremit from August 1968 to June 1969, Tom primarily focused on artisans and shopkeepers, who were “the principal bearers of the religious tradition, the source of most of the new enterprise and... politically very attractive”⁵⁴ In an “old fashioned ethnographic way,” he began to survey the shopkeepers by occupation, starting with the whitesmiths.⁵⁵

While in Edremit, Fallers’s first-hand experience of Ramadan became crucial in shaping his understanding of Turkish Islam from a comparative perspective. Indeed, he penned his aforementioned “Advent Ramadan” article on the coincidence of the two religious events in December 1968. What most interested Fallers in Edremit was the nonpuritanical moralism in everyday Islam. It seems that he found here an answer to his philosophical question stemming from the American context of the 1960s, namely, how is one to live an ethical modern life without being trapped by either Midwestern puritanism or secular liberalism?

THE AMERICAN CONTEXT: BETWEEN RELIGIOUS REVIVALISM AND THE 1968 MOVEMENTS

In the above-quoted “rambling” letter from Konya to his wife, Tom Fallers concluded that “one thing that seems clear is that a simple, rigid moral (in the narrow sense) puritanism is not the answer.”⁵⁶ As mentioned, he drifted apart from his conservative childhood environment and embraced the promises of science and modernity. Nevertheless, for Fallers, “the answer” was not secular liberalism either. Critically elaborating on the post-9/11 perception of Islam in the West, Saba Mahmood argued that the liberal envisioning of religion commonly imposes “a normative religious subject who understands religion—its scriptures and its ritual forms—as a congeries of symbols to be flexibly interpreted in a manner consonant with the imperatives of secular liberal political rule” (Mahmood 2006, 344). In this view, public rituals and received authority are usually condemned for being relics of the past and “correct” religiosity identified with belief and inner self. She also pointed out that liberal Muslim reformers also shared this restrictive, secularist view of religion. Fallers, in my judgment, could not agree more. He was neither comfortable with the condescending view held by Turkish secular-liberal scholars of the religious masses, nor was he satisfied with recent American trends that sought to reconcile Christianity with the modern world.

Regarding the latter, a good example was the “religionless Christianity” movement. In the 1960s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s concept of “religionless Christianity” became an inspiration for alternative interpretations of religion in America. Bonhoeffer suggested that the distinction between the religious or sacred and the everyday realm needed to be erased and that a good Christian should be actively involved in the secular world instead of dealing with religious rituals and church activities. Moreover, due to modern science, we did not need a God figure to answer questions about material existence; rather, people had to follow Christ, in whose actions was God’s will reflected. Since, in this thinking, one finds God by being active in the actual world, social activism was seen as a way of living as a good Christian. Hence, significant political activism emerged among some religious communities in the 1960s. The idea of religionless Christianity shared with the “God is Dead” movement the belief that we live in a secularized age led by advanced science (Flowers 1984, 15–20).

Fallers was not a good diary-keeper, yet one of the few themes he took note of in 1966–1967 was the challenge of the religionless Christianity movement. In an entry under the title “A defense of ‘religion,’” he wrote: “Religion must not, of course, replace God as the object of faith. But ‘religionless Christianity’ is as impossible as concept-less thought. If received rite, symbol, myth are inadequate or meaningless, one must work with them, re-understand them, etc. But one cannot do without them or their successors.”⁵⁷

Although he pulled away from ritualistic Methodism, Fallers never made peace with liberal Protestantism, which reduced religious practice to individual and private devotion. In agreement with the anthropological critique of missionary enterprise (Keane 2002), he refused to see ritual as a nonfunctional shape of the real content. Apparently, his wife Margaret was not of the same mind. Their daughter Winnifred remembers that sometimes Margaret would criticize formal rigidities in Christianity, and in his diary and letters, we find Fallers trying to articulate his view also in response to Margaret, for whom he had great respect. For instance, he made the following rather defensive introduction to a diary entry entitled “To the kids, on religion”: “Explain ‘religionless’ Christianity: Don’t go to church if it would hurt someone else or if some other loving duty takes precedence. On the other hand, we can’t be practically Christian without the self-discipline supplied by acting out the paradigm of faith: credo, confession, absolution, communion. Only saints can live without ‘religion.’”⁵⁸

In the new liberal interpretations of Christianity in the 1960s, the moral and practical aspects of religion were separated and assigned respectively to private faith and public activism. Fallers was also critical of the latter due to the religio-philosophical moral vacuum in its politics. Accordingly, as is neatly laid out in the quotation below, he could not stand the populist leftism of Bishop James Pike (and of many others, including the student movement), who appealed to the New Age movement through his outspoken statements on racial desegregation, gay and lesbian rights, gender inequality, and spirituality, among others. Instead, the celebrity preacher Billy Graham appealed to Fallers because they were both sufficiently democratic to embrace the civil rights movement but conservative enough to keep their distance from the radical movements of the long 1968 (Dorrien 2008; Hays 2017; Kruse 2015). In fact, although he left the pietist tradition, Fallers respected his parents’ working-class culture, to which most of Graham’s audience belonged.⁵⁹ In January 1967, he wrote on Pike in his diary thus:

Not a serious theologian, certainly. A religious pop artist, like the ‘great preachers’ of the past. If that’s his nature, then the test is whether or not he has an audience and whether he speaks to it, since the more enduring content is nil. Billy Graham, our best contemporary religious showman, always takes a position slightly to the moral left of his audience, which is lower middle class (I guess). He maintains a tension with them. I’m not sure Pike does this. He debases his audience, rather than challenging it, assuming his audience consists of left intellectuals.... He makes passing reference to things, rather than discussing them; mentions favorably things like psychedelic drugs, ESP, civil rights, sex, but discusses nothing in a systematic way.⁶⁰

In sum, even though he moved away from the strictly observant Midwestern Methodism of his childhood home, Fallers remained suspicious of modernist-liberal interpretations of religion in the 1960s. During his fieldwork in Turkey, as well, he was primarily interested in nonpuritanical moralism, which made him diverge from the secularist view of religion that was dominant among Turkish social scientists of the period. It was in this regard, I believe, that Fallers’s most original contribution to the literature was his quest for an ethico-political philosophy that neither revived religious puritanism nor gave into a reductionist, liberal-secularist conceptualization of everyday religiosity.

BRIDGING ANTHROPOLOGY AND THEOLOGY: CROSS-RELIGIOUS TRANSLATION

If Fallers’s work and thoughts on Turkish Islam, in particular, and everyday religiosity, in general, were fairly original, it would not be an exaggeration to judge his attempt to bridge anthropology and theology as unique. In the 2000s, anthropology of religion began studying theology and showed an interest in theological concepts in anthropological theory. However, as Joel Robbins pointed out, the encounter remained an unequal one as theology was never given a higher (i.e., theoretical) status than just that of an object of inquiry (Robbins 2006, 2020). Thus, he opined that “without moving theoretical work on religion into the centre of the anthropological study of ethics, this is a crucial aspect of ethical life I think we are likely to miss” (Robbins 2016, 780). Fallers would agree.

In his foreword to his doctoral student Abdul Hamid El-Zein’s book Sacred Meadows, Fallers stressed that the anthropologist of religion also needed to be a scholar of theology (El-Zein 1974, xvi).⁶¹ As I expound below, Fallers conceptualized theology and anthropology as compatible ways of knowing how to relate to others in a culturally diverse world. As a matter of fact, he was almost responding to Robbins’s proposal for a rapprochement between the two disciplines through the idea of “otherness” (Robbins 2006, 287–88). For Fallers, ethnographers were equipped with the tools to translate diverse ways of nonsecular thinking through a comparison of, to allude to Daan Beekers’ recent call, “Muslim and Christian lived religion” (Beekers 2020).

To begin with, Fallers realized that working on religion in the field (doing anthropology on religion) could not be easily separated from theoretical conceptualizations of religion (theology). During his Konya days, he immediately felt the “proselytizing” tone in conversations about religion; it was “extremely difficult to indicate sympathy and a desire to understand without seeing a potential convert.”⁶² Four years later, in Edremit, he also thought that he had “to be careful in showing an interest in religion because people are apt to misunderstand and think me a candidate for conversion!”⁶³ Therefore, during Ramadan in December, Tom and Margaret Fallers agreed that they “should attend namaz [prayer in the mosque], but stand, as a sign of respect, instead of going through the movements.”⁶⁴ In anthropological terms, there was a limit to their participation as observers. The fuzzy boundary between a convert and onlooker could, nevertheless, create comical moments, such as the “black-humor game” between Tom Fallers and their neighbor: “We say lâ ilahe illâllah together and then she goes on with Muhammedü’r-resulu’llah! (We shout it like a football cheer here), while I drop out. Then she pleads, half seriously, ‘Say it, Tom Bey, say it!’ I think she has an unusually vivid notion of hell.”⁶⁵

Second, Fallers was aware that theological debates were not confined to academic circles; to the contrary, conceptual discussions related to the fundamentals of religious traditions could frequently play a central role in everyday conversation. As part of his proposal for a collaboration between anthropology and theology, Joel Robbins reminds his readers that “we are often wrong in ethnographic terms to imagine that many of the people we study do not care about systematically formulated religious knowledge of the kind I am calling ‘theology,’” and he concludes that “many people now feel it is not enough to proclaim that one belongs to such-and-such a faith. To securely inhabit that religion, one should also know a good deal about it” (Robbins 2019, 15, 17).

During his fieldwork, Tom Fallers also occasionally found himself in the middle of a theoretical discussion. In fact, in daily conversations, it was “all too easy to fall into an attack-and-defense type of conversation.”⁶⁶ He quickly realized that the root of the problem lay in the literal translation of religious concepts, the meaning of which rather needed to be inferred from the cultural system in which they were embedded. For instance, in an informal meeting with some hocas in Konya, Fallers tried to avoid an attack-and-defense dialogue by making parallels (namely, translating) between Jesus and the Koran and between the Gospels and hadiths (instead of Jesus–Muhammed and Gospel–Koran) to dodge the argument that incarnation was polytheism from a Muslim point of view.⁶⁷ Similarly, in “An Advent Ramadan,” he argued that the correct counterpart of zekat was city property tax, not tithe, due to the former’s public aspect (Fallers 1974, 49).

For Fallers, this Geertzian effort at cross-cultural translation (or finding counterparts) based on social meanings was not simply a practical tool for use during fieldwork. In fact, it would enable us to communicate and think across different faith systems, including nontheist worldviews, similar to the way in which ethnography enables us to talk through diverse cultures. Anthropology and religious studies had the common aim of nurturing cross-cultural understandings of meaning systems from the native’s (indigenous, emic) perspective. It was especially important to make a case for the unity between theology and social sciences because, Fallers felt, “the academic atmosphere” was “hostile to faith”:

The public expression of faith (outside the chapel) is a far more daring act than the public expression of unbelief. Many—perhaps a majority—of the university’s members, both faculty and students, believe faith and the free intellectual life to be incompatible. In consequence, the faithful often feel themselves [to be] a barely tolerated sect in a society loyal to other gods.⁶⁸

In his effort to partner up anthropology and theology, Fallers placed special emphasis on the empathetical relationship with the Other and its never-ending nature. In an early letter to his wife from Konya, he proposed that “Divinity (the ‘ultimate’ or ‘best’) is approachable only in relation to other people,” and it “demands respect for others’ autonomy.” Moreover, the “guiding framework of ideas... is something to be constantly worked with and re-understood, not something completely understandable at any given time.”⁶⁹ Tom Fallers wanted to confront fundamentalists theoretically: indeed, he believed there were no fundamentals in the first place. As he later explained during a Christmas sermon, in the times of Jesus, neither was the world culturally more homogeneous than today, nor were the doctrines of Christianity more easily understandable. On the contrary, “Christ was born into a culturally diverse milieu,” which meant that “both radical cultural diversity and human universality were essential features of the world in which God chose to incarnate himself.” Thus, “the human world into which Christ came is simultaneously one in its capacity to receive Him and diverse in its modes of understanding Him.”⁷⁰

For Fallers, such diversity (or, the inability to fix doctrines) was not a threat but a reward—unless, that is, cultural diversity were “foolishly” confused with radical relativism. Humans were able to “translate and inter-communicate across these barriers” with “disciplined inquiry.”⁷¹ In fact, such translation work was the core of his philosophy since an ethical life required an unending translation of culturally diverse philosophies about human fundamentals. Therefore, anthropology and theology had much more common ground than was generally supposed. Due to its skepticism, theological inquiry would prevent intellectuals from ideological dogmatism.⁷² Similarly, “the scientific study of cultural diversity”—anthropology—would help “the church to extricate itself from the cultural idolatry which has too often characterized our attempts at intercultural mission”; it would “teach us to listen before we speak.”⁷³ Anthropology and theology were to meet in the idea of an ongoing personal contemplation of spiritual as well as worldly matters simultaneously they had to be in constant conversation with others. Understanding the Other’s point of view through (coeval) conversations—that is, ethnographic fieldwork—constituted for Fallers the core of theological inquiry.

Finally, as implied in the previous sections, Fallers refused to sacrifice the autonomy of religion in his quest for a unity between anthropology and theology. Although he was with his friend, Geertz, in seeing religion as a cultural system, he resisted secularized or spiritual interpretations of religion. Therefore, he confronted the religionless Christianity movement and Bishop Pike’s public persona in his diary. As we understand from Geertz’s comments about his thoughts on theology and the university, Fallers was also critical of “beat pietism.”⁷⁴ (He would perhaps have had uneasy feelings had he heard about the native rituals performed in the form of a spiritual séance in the anthropology seminars in the house of the newly recruited Victor Turner and his wife, Edith [Turner 2006, 98–99].) Fallers rather defended traditional rituals of Christianity and, amid the political rebellion of the spring of 1968, proposed to rescue such rituals from their (pejorative) labeling as “conservative”:

Religion is a sub-culture less ‘determined’ by social exigencies than others. This is one significance of the ‘withdrawal from the world’ characteristic of much ritual. Or, such ritual is essential to its autonomy. This, then, makes it possible for religion to be more ‘creative’ than most other sub-cultures and thus to have greater potentiality for changing the world.⁷⁵

In this sense, to follow the terminology proposed by Derrick Lemons, what Fallers had in mind was a “transformational” engagement between theology and anthropology in which the disciplinary collaboration transforms the respective disciplines (Lemons 2021) and, Fallers would add, changes the world. Here, it may be apposite to end this discussion by calling attention to Fallers’s theoretical inspirations.

The thinkers Fallers held in high esteem on theoretical grounds were three scholars of Islam. Although working in different disciplines, these all focused on lived religion in a culturally diverse world instead of allowing themselves to be confined to doctrinal and static analyses. First, historian Marshall G. S. Hodgson (1922–1968), Fallers’s colleague at Chicago, was then, in the mid-1960s, formulating in his courses a brand-new world-historical approach to Islam. The Venture of Islam (1974), his masterpiece posthumously published based on his lectures and writings after his early death, challenged Eurocentric accounts of Islamic history and placed importance on Muslim people’s point of view. Fallers was very much influenced by Hodgson’s global history approach.

Second, in understanding Turkish Islam, both Fallers and his student Michael Meeker owed a great deal to their exchanges with Hüseyin Atay (b. 1930), who spent two years in 1965–1967 at The University of Chicago as a postdoctoral researcher. Atay, now a retired professor of Islamic philosophy, always promoted modernist and philosophical interpretations of Islamic history and dissociated himself from ritualistic dervish orders and radical Islamist movements. In making this move, he rather resembled Fallers in his return to Christianity.⁷⁶

Finally, Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000), Presbyterian minister and scholar of Islam, and his 1962 book, The Meaning and End of Religion, seem to have deeply influenced Fallers. Smith was critical of taking “religion” as an entity unembedded in social life and challenged the historical canon that endlessly sought origins and the “true” Islam. For Smith, scholars would do better to stop studying beliefs, creeds, and practices and focus instead on understanding in a hermeneutic way the whole lifeworld and the entire system of meaning of diverse communities (Proudfoot 1985, 199–200). Inspired by Smith’s criticism of historians of religion, Fallers also wanted to challenge anthropologists’ obsession with rituals and the elementary forms of religion. In fact, he daringly published a review of Smith’s book in the most canonic anthropology journal, American Anthropologist, and invited anthropologists to do what they were actually good at: listen to devoted observers and understand great religions from the native’s point of view without losing sight of the shared traditions of diverse groups. Fallers referred to Smithian categories of faith and tradition, but, as opposed to Talal Asad’s review of the same book thirty years later, which wrongly associated Smith’s faith with individual belief (Asad 2001), Fallers remained loyal to Smith’s much confused idea of faith (Hick 1992) as “the active religious life of the individual in his social setting” (Fallers 1967, 120). For Fallers, religions were “cultural systems” that moved in historical time and global space and thus “undergo [cultural] translation” in each period and locality, thereby producing faith as “a means of conferring meaning upon social projects.”⁷⁷ Whereas historians such as Smith and Hodgson study tradition, Fallers as an anthropologist would study faith as “tradition in native use by the person to guide his life and give it larger significance.”⁷⁸ As he explained,

What I want to study, therefore, is the way in which the inhabitants of a modern Turkish city, participating in the institutions of a partly modernized society, draw from the Islamic tradition to shape a faith which makes sense of the world as they perceive it and experience it, including the social world, with its many institutions which are quite unfamiliar to earlier [bearers] of the tradition.⁷⁹

It is telling that Fallers received inspiration from scholars of Islam who, in today’s Turkey, are widely read in Islamist circles but—with the exception, perhaps, of Hodgson—are not well known by liberal social scientists. As emphasized by Dorroll, the present study of “religion” in Turkish history has largely been confined to an analysis of religious movements and politics and overlooked the everyday religiosity of the moderate masses (Dorroll 2014). For Fallers, however, political religious movements were simply an “escape into pietistic rigidity.” As he wrote in a letter to Margaret, “This sort of fanatical anti-modernist authoritarian religiosity seems to be one of the common forms of religious ‘modernism’ everywhere”—and he gave the example of the “Protestant piety” associated with Goldwater in America.⁸⁰ Tom Fallers was not interested in these religious movements; his quest was to understand religious living in the modern world without sacrificing one for the other. Therefore, when he changed his field site from a city renowned for its Islamic heritage (Konya) to a largely secular town in the West (Edremit), he did not change his topic; he actually sharpened it.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: FALLERS’S CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE

Lloyd A. Fallers, a pioneer in legal and political anthropology of East Africa, has been absent from the history of anthropology of religion. Due to his early death, his articulations of Turkish Islam and American Christianity in the 1950s and 1960s have largely remained buried in the archives. Thus, the first aim of this article is to provide a semi-biographical account of Fallers’s research on comparative religion on the fiftieth anniversary of his death and his article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Besides the theoretical conclusions he reached, I was also interested in the process in which he switched his field site to Turkey and his research focus to religion. As a result, I framed his story as a personal journey of a believing university professor within a historical context of religious revivalism in both countries. Interweaving the personal with the contextual helped me to situate his ideas on nonpuritanical moralism, his choice of Edremit as his main field site, and his reaction to liberal interpretations of religion.

In addition to the literature of anthropology of religion, the Fallers case will also contribute to the literature about religious anthropologists. In the last decade, scholars such as Larsen and Furani documented the history of the personal relationship of anthropologists with religion in general and theological theory in particular (Larsen 2016; Furani 2019). For the most part, scholars in the 1950s–1970s tended to keep their religious persona in the private sphere separated from their anthropological practice. As Robbins pointed out, it was even rarer to find attempts to bridge anthropology and theology on theoretical grounds (Robbins 2006, 2020). Fallers stands out as a university professor in a predominantly secularist social science environment who took steps for thinking about anthropology along with theological theory. On the one hand, like many others, he mostly kept his religious identity within the non-academic sphere; on the other, he gave public sermons and discussed his ideas with his atheist close friend Geertz in letters. Moreover, just to show the complexities, he kept pursuing the scientist agenda of the period.

In essence, this article unearths Tom Fallers’s unpublished work about American Christianity and Turkish Islam in the 1960s as well as his original thoughts about a possible dialogue between anthropology and theology. Nevertheless, I also believe that reading Fallers today provides us with something beyond just acknowledging a historical forerunner. For sure, it must be admitted that the questions Fallers never asked makes it difficult to learn from him in the 2020s. He was generally silent about the power relations in both micro and global settings. He did not touch on the role of the state formation and capitalism in drawing the fuzzy line between secularism and religiosity in Turkey in the 1950s and 1960s and stood back from the Asadian critique of the secular.⁸¹ Although he had a deep interest in history, Fallers’s work mostly remained culturalist in the narrow sense of the term. He was skeptical (to say the least) about the rising critical voices against colonialism and imperialism. Indeed, he belonged, ideologically and politically, to the era before the human sciences were shaken by the Asadian–Foucauldian–Saidian turn, even though he was alive during the initial outbreak of this critical moment (in the late 1960s and early 1970s).

Nonetheless, I believe that Fallers’s research is still relevant for the bourgeoning literature on the anthropology of religion. His intellectual journey implicitly proposed that working with non-Islamist, mildly conservative and largely secular groups have the potential to elucidate everyday religiosity in society. A modernist himself, Fallers preferred to focus on educated entrepreneurs in Edremit, rather than the Islamist groups in Konya, to examine what I called the relationship between the Muslim ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Yet, still, he kept the mainly secularist interpretations of Turkish Islam at arm’s length and found himself theoretically at home with Muslim intellectuals rather than with liberal scholars such as Şerif Mardin. In that sense, similarly to his student El-Zein, he tried to overcome “the theological indifference of Asad’s anthropology of Islam,” in Yasmin Moll’s words (2023, 752). I believe that Fallers’s ethnography will be read by students of anthropology of (comparative) religion and of Islam as an original case of doing “theologically engaged anthropology.”

Footnotes

REFERENCES