BOOK REVIEW

Christopher Dole, Healing Secular Life: Lossand Devotion in Modern Turkey

University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2012, 291 pp

Murphy Halliburton

Published online: 17 October 2013

� Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Kemal Ataturk, the architect of the modern, secular Turkish nation strove to root out

what he considered superstitious spiritual practices and establish a scientific,

rationalist society, at one point proclaiming, ‘‘It is a disgrace for civilized society to

appeal for help from the dead’’ (quoted in Dole 2012, p. 5). Yet Zohre Ana, a saint-

like healer who figures prominently in Christopher Dole’s Healing Secular Life:

Loss and Devotion in Modern Turkey (2012), channels Ataturk’s spirit (ruh) as part

of her healing practices. This clash between the ideals of secular modernity and the

practices of contemporary religious healing in Turkey is the focus of this original

and thoughtful ethnography.

The book opens with a vignette that highlights this mismatch as we follow Zohre

Ana’s devotees while they pay tribute at Ataturk’s tomb and witness a confrontation

with the tomb’s guards who are angered by the spectacle of a spiritual communion

with modern Turkey’s iconic leader. This theme returns throughout Healing Secular

Life in exploring how religious healing is marginalized and condemned and yet

maintains significant appeal by providing experiences that some feel are lacking in

secular life. The high-profile debate in contemporary Turkey is between secularism

and orthodox Islam, but Dole claims the less visible world of religious healing

reveals important sensible and sentimental rifts.

Dole conducted research in Ankara in two unemployed and working poor

neighborhoods, one an Alevi, Shiite community that champions secular modernity

and the other a more observant Sunni neighborhood where residents are concerned

about what they see as the faithless character of Turkey’s modernist ethos. Although

he does not describe his work this way, Dole’s examination of the practices of

religious healers and their clients is impressively holistic. The cases presented are

interpreted in terms of the lives and social contexts of the healers and supplicants

and considered in relation to a variety of impinging discourses, practices, and

M. Halliburton (&)

Queens College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

e-mail: murphy.halliburton@qc.cuny.edu

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Cult Med Psychiatry (2013) 37:756–759

DOI 10.1007/s11013-013-9338-7

spaces, from popular discourses about secularism, to the iconography of religious

healing centers and to the physical and social topography of Ankara neighborhoods.

The book thus exhibits the strengths of classic and contemporary ethnography,

combining rich insights from participant observation with provocative interpreta-

tions from other, textual, social, and iconographic sources to explore issues of

concern to current debates about secularism, embodiment, affect, political

sentiment, and the state. In particular, Dole proposes that what is at stake in

Turkey’s project of modernity and the world of healing are ‘‘the organization of the

sensible, the ordering of social relations, and the building of alternate constellations

of past limits and future possibilities’’ (10). He adds that ‘‘religious healing offers a

privileged location for examining the constituting force of sociopolitical systems

within everyday life’’ (13).

The first two chapters provide historical context for the ensuing depictions of

religious healers and their clients. Chapter 1 presents the emergence of secularism

and examines propaganda that was intended to promote scientific rationality in

modern Turkey. With Ataturk pushing the agenda, biomedicine rapidly expanded in

the first half of the twentieth century along with discourses of rationality and

projects to build a shared political consciousness. Centers known as People’s

Houses emerged to promote state projects including an attempt to unseat what the

People’s House journal contributors saw as superstitious thinking and link scientific

rationality to the development of the nation. These reforms also involved banning

the fez and other religious clothing, forcibly closing shrines, and replacing the

Arabic script with the Latin alphabet (34). The discussion of this radical makeover

is quite compelling, but I was curious to know more about what the reformists were

reacting to. There are hints that this is a reaction to something in the Ottoman past

and earlier forms of religious authority, but it is not clear (at least to the reader who

is not well versed in Turkish history) what incurred such a dramatic reaction in the

forced rationalization and secularization of the state which leads to what is quite

striking about this ethnographic setting: the wrathful condemnations of religious

healing. Of course, it is not possible in an ethnography to cover all relevant aspects

of local history.

The second chapter provides a historical and ethnographic depiction of Hurriyet

and Aktepe, the two neighborhoods that are the focus of this study, and the reader

first encounters some of the popular condemnations of religious healing. When Dole

enquires whether his informants have ever visited religious healers, they are almost

offended by the question. A woman in Hurriyet exclaimed ‘‘They are ignorant and

stupid, why would I want to go to them? For that, you’ll have to go over to that

neighborhood.’’ She pointed toward Aktepe whose Sunni residents were considered

backward and religiously conservative by her Alevi Shiite neighbors, and she added

‘‘We go to doctors.’’

What it is striking in this ethnographic setting is this aggressive secularism and

the animosity people show toward religious healing. One cannot help but compare

the more mild, bemused, or enthusiastic reactions to religious healing even among

privileged, cosmopolitan enclaves in the US and, as I have seen in my own work, in

India where religious healing is commonplace, celebrated by many, critiqued by

some but rarely incurs anger.

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Dole offers ethnographically rich depictions of religious healers in Chapter 3

‘‘Hagiographies of the Living’’ and Chapter 4 ‘‘The Therapeutics of Piety.’’ Here we

are reintroduced in greater detail to the evliya, or saint-like figure, Zohre Ana. Zohre

Ana claims a special connection to Ali, the icon of Shia Islam, and to Ataturk, the

father of Turkish secularism who Zohre Ana claims was an evliya like herself. At

the same time, Zohre Ana carefully deploys modernist and biomedical discourses

presenting herself as ‘‘a person who believes in the basic principles of a democratic,

secular, and social civil state’’ (120), and we are told of ‘‘her familiarity with

medical and neurological genres of explanation, and the ease with which she

wielded statistical data’’ (123). While depicting her persona and practices as

rational, modern, and pro-secular, she proclaims her opposition to ‘‘regressive forms

of religiosity’’ such as the practices of cinci hoca.

Cinci hoca use prayer, amulets, and other media to heal the afflicted. It is a

profession that is learned as opposed to the evliya whose special ability is granted or

compelled by the divine. Chapter 4 ‘‘The Therapeutics of Piety’’ depicts the

practices of a cinci hoca named Ibrahim and his interactions with patients. The

focus is not so much on specific healing methods but rather on how Ibrahim must

navigate the various adverse community and state discourses and opinions about

cinci hoca to burnish his public image. We are told of Ibrahim’s meticulous concern

with preparing his taxes and maintaining financial transparency out of concern that

cinci hoca are often suspected of fraud and financial manipulation.

While these two chapters are analytically sophisticated, productively exploring

the politics of presentation in this marginalized world of healing, a shortcoming is

that claims about the practices of these key styles of religious healing in

contemporary Turkey, evliya and cinci hoca, are based on one example of each type

of healer. We are regularly told of what ‘‘cinci hocas like Ibrahim’’ (pp. 157–159)

do, how they deftly negotiate and straddle the intersection of religious piety,

healing, secularism, and capitalism, but we are only presented with Ibrahim. We are

told how the styles of evliya differ and that no case can represent the archetype, but

we only really get to know Zohre Ana. These two examples may well be

representative, but it would help if Dole said why he thinks this is so, perhaps

offering more sketches of other healers. Similarly, a later chapter depicts two

discourses of loss relating to secularization, each represented by one informant.

These are interesting cases, but I would like to know more about the degree to which

these reflect larger patterns of discourse about loss among others.

An intriguing question comes to mind toward the end of the book in relation to

the apparent broad condemnation of religious healing and the perspectives of those

who use this form of healing. We are told that people in Turkey condemn practices

of ritual healers—and there are multiple examples of these views—but then we see

that many flock to these healers (at least to those presented in this book), which

raises the issue of how expansive the condemnation of religious healing is and what

the motivations of clients of religious healing are. Do the same people who

publically criticize these healers secretly patronize them? Or is there a counter

discourse of supporters of religious therapy that reacts to those who are dismissive

of religious healing? In other words, given that the religious healers are meant to

represent clandestine or suppressed contradictions representing the tensions of

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contemporary society, I was curious to know more about what is said overtly and

what is unsaid, how broad the condemnation is and how pervasive the support.

The latter part of the book features a rich portrayal of the life and struggles of a

devotee of Zohre Ana, her struggles with her husband, herself, and her work, and

her complex relation to Zohre Ana, and we are presented with two intriguing

discourses of loss in secular Turkey via two informants Aydın and Nihal. Aydıncelebrates the decline of what he sees as the backward practices of cinci hoca that

distort the meaning of Islam. Aydın adds that his own village hoca was an

exception, a more enlightened healer, reflecting a recurring theme in this

ethnography: that the irrationality always seems to be elsewhere, in the religiosity

of the other neighborhood, or in the other hocas. Nihal is a devotee of Zohre Ana

who mourns the loss in contemporary Turkey of a certain intimate and emotional

experience associated with religious practice that could still be found ‘‘in spaces that

eluded the homogenizing forces of both secular modernity and orthodox Islam’’

(205). Dole then calls upon Georges Bataille to help make sense of Nihal’s

experience, not in the usual manner of deploying a prestigious European

intellectual’s insights to explain our ethnographic subjects, but by showing us

how Nihal and Bataille are both reacting to similar situations of disillusionment and

disenchantment in their respective historical and social contexts (pp. 210–211).

Overall Healing Secular Life is a rich and thoughtful ethnographic study of

compelling figures caught in changing discourses and practices relating to health,

healing, modernity, and rationality. The hostile environment in which religious

healing operates is unique, and this important context is provocatively and

productively explored in this book. Medical anthropologists know that practices of

health and healing are about much more than health and healing, and yet the work of

so many medical anthropologists remains ensconced in this domain with limited

forays into political contexts. This book is an important departure from this habit

showing us how the ruptures in the world of modernity, religion, and nationalism

can be read in discourses of healing and the self-presentations of healers.

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