I am a cultural anthropologist whose recent research and writing has been on religion and modernity in Turkey. This work has culminated in a book entitled Islam and Modernity in Turkey. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in Turkey and archival work with late Ottoman materials, the book brings together genealogical (critical histories of the status of the present) and ethnographic work on Islamic traditions of discourse and practice in Turkey. I argue that to an extent unprecedented and unparalleled in the Muslim world a majority of Turks consider Islam to be primarily a matter of personal choice and private belief, and show how such an arrangement came about. In the process I explain why observant, even conservative Muslims in Turkey do not see such a conception and practice of Islam as illegitimate. The book first establishes the nature of contemporary Islamic discourses and practices and the status of modernity in Turkey as initiated by Ottoman reform movements (in contrast to colonialism); then examines Islamic practices as techniques of ethical self-formation and how these are structurally transformed by the mass mediation and liberalization of the social, economic and political environment; and finally analyzes how this liberalization has transformed the religious sphere, the nature of politics, and the place of moral discourse in public life. Continuing to pursue my interests in questions of commensurability and institutional reform, I am conducting research for a new project on statistics and the 'political lives of numbers' in Turkey, as a way of studying the country's liberalizing reforms, the kinds of governmental knowledges and practices they embody, and the selves they are involved in producing. Statistics is one of the chapters in Turkey's EU negotiations, and the collection of statistics in Turkey has taken on a new importance in the country's reforms. This project examines the role of quantification and statistics in political liberalization and institutional reform in the country.

My research interests are in the following areas: socio-cultural anthropology, structural and political violence, medical anthropology, anthropology of development, gender, human rights, ethics, peasant studies, communities and cultures. I teach Introduction to Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Power and Violence in Central America and Mexico, and An Anthropology of Globalization.