Outlaws, swindlers, and authentic healers: Legitimacy, identity, and religious healing in urban Turkey

Based upon two extended periods of ethnographic fieldwork totaling fifteen months between 1997 and 2000, this dissertation draws upon both ethnographic and archival data to exam religious healing within two religiously distinct Muslim squatter (gecekondu) communities in Ankara, Turkey. The larger research project was conceived as an examination of how the practice, use, and meanings of religious healing within specific social worlds of urban Turkey serve as significant sites for the articulation of broader political realities, both national and global. Of particular interest was the analysis of how shared traditions of religious healing are practiced and utilized across two proximate, yet deeply antagonistic, religious communities—one Sunni Muslim, and the other Alevi Muslim. Specifically, this dissertations exams how religious healers struggle for legitimacy in discursive spaces marked by profound discourses of delegitimization; how, in turn, religious healing is deployed representationally in the negotiation of personal and collective identities within the contentious milieu of the gecekondu; and how patients, within the same contentious milieu marked by the same discourses of delegitimization, seek health and transformation. In this regard, this dissertation represents a study of the practice and utilization of religious healing, as both a therapeutic modality and a means of negotiating personal and collective identity. Although the bulk of the data drawn on for this dissertation derives from in-depth ethnographic interviews with forty-four healers, patients, and healthcare professionals, the ethnographic data was further complemented by archival research analyzing the historical relationship between religious healing and the intertwining processes of nationalist thought and the development of biomedicine in contemporary Turkey.