In Under the Same Sky, Seçil Dağtaş maps the everyday politics of religious difference in Antakya, Turkey, by following encounters in which spatial, mnemonic, economic, and intimate boundaries are lived and remade. The Introduction sets the central claim: in Antakya, coexistence is produced through everyday relations among Sunni Muslims, Arab ʿAlawi Muslims, Christians, Jews, and state authorities, all of whom unevenly share sacred sites, urban space, histories, and moral claims. Religious difference gains its force not from fixed doctrines or state authorization, but from its instability across relations of race, class, citizenship, and gender. This instability makes difference simultaneously livable, governable, and constitutive of coexistence. Dağtaş’s methods consist of long-term fieldwork with special attention to language as a social index, such as Turkish and Arabic modulating intimacy, teasing, and critique.
The first two chapters set the historical and political frame, before the book turns to everyday domains. Chapter 1 contrasts official pluralism with its fragile material traces. The Hoşgörü Heykeli (Statue of Tolerance), once featuring a crescent, cross, and Star of David, was vandalized and then officially altered to an olive branch in 2014. This swap was widely understood as a signal about the dispensability of minority presence. By contrast, old-city archways layer Muslim haji (pilgrim) plaques over carved Stars of David, and Ottoman houses lean into French-era balconies. These palimpsests index selective remembering and forgetting, as well as the uneven historic production of difference. Here, Dağtaş emphasizes that cemeteries, buildings, and commemorative symbols are not evidence of tolerance but ongoing sites of struggle over belonging.
Chapter 2 turns to the Medeniyetler Korosu (Civilizations Choir), which staged an ideal of “unity in diversity.” Yet this performance relied on a national pedagogy that narrowed and standardized difference: Jewish liturgical prayers were replaced with Hava Nagila (a Jewish folk song) to avoid religious propriety issues, and ʿAlawi (a heterodox Shiʿi Muslim community with deep reverence to Ali centered in Syria and Antakya) musical practices were often substituted with the more recognizable Alevi (a Sufi-influenced Anatolian heterodox Muslim community with deep reverence for Ali) repertoire. Diversity was rendered visible but contained, celebrated as culture but kept from unsettling dominant norms.
Chapters 3 and 4 describe how everyday cooperation among minority merchants, neighbors, worshippers, and kin in Antakya reorganizes when and how religious boundaries matter, rather than suspending them. Chapter 3 focuses on shared commercial routines in the historic suq (bazaar), where exchange depends on long-term familiarity and mutual obligation. It reframes the suq economy by foregrounding teselli (consolation) as the moral substance of trade. Teselli is understood here as everyday companionship enacted through continued presence and loyalty under economic strain produced by neoliberal market restructuring and state-led urban redevelopment. For example, Ismail, the last Jewish textile seller in the Kurşunlu Han (Lead-Covered Caravanserai), remains in the suq for teselli, not money, and Apo, an Orthodox jeweler, insists on honoring a financially risky wedding-day transaction because sustaining trust with known others outweighs immediate profit. Practices like rotating guest reception (gün) and gold-saving circles (altın günü) similarly adapt older communal forms under new market pressures, with participation patterned along Sunni and ʿAlawi networks.
Chapter 4 examines shared worship idioms to show coexistence as relatedness with distance. Here, statements such as “we serve the same God” operate as polite closures rather than theological bridges. Similarly, shared foods such as hırisi, aşur, and keşkek differentiate rather than fuse communities through taste, naming, and lineage. Anna’s multifaith prayer circle illustrates this: blending Taizé hymns with Qurʾanic and biblical readings collapses the distance that makes coexistence workable, and therefore remains largely uninhabited. Coexistence, therefore, is the careful maintenance of difference, rather than harmony or fusion.
The final two chapters move into the intimate settings in which boundaries are most actively negotiated. Chapter 5 examines interfaith love and marriage as the limit case of religious difference, placing religious kinship in tension with local idioms of love (aşk vs. sevgi). Hülya (an ʿAlawi woman warmly included in Jewish ritual life yet never fully recognized as belonging) and Amit’s relationship shows that the burden of crossing falls disproportionately on women. By contrast, Ayla and Nuri sustain a long-term interfaith marriage through secrecy and careful ritual partitioning: baptism in one family, circumcision in the other, without seeking theological synthesis. Here, kin networks and communal authority, not formal law, set the terms of intimacy.
Chapter 6 reframes the arrival of Syrians through hospitality and sovereignty. The Turkish state’s designation of Syrians as misafir (guests) enables welcome without belonging, asserting the state as the ultimate host. Minorities recognize this structure because it mirrors their own conditional inclusion. In Altınözü, a rural border district of Hatay, church-based hospitality extends care to Syrian Christians through kinship and service idioms, yet still rests on dependence and hierarchy. Across chapters 5 and 6, intimacy takes distinct forms, such as kinship intimacy and host-guest intimacy, but in each case operates as a regulated proximity through which religious difference is reproduced, negotiated, and made livable rather than dissolved.
The epilogue follows the 6 February 2023 earthquakes in southeastern Turkey and northwestern Syria, which devastated Hatay province, including Antakya and Altınözü. Minority struggles over heritage now risk “museumification” (preserving buildings without sustaining communities) and ʿAlawi protests target expropriation and uneven aid. The Civilizations Choir reassembles with a more nationalist tone; members describe it as healing work. In the suq, Ethem and Nur reopen “not for livelihood” but “to console each other,” returning teselli to its double sense: companionship and consolation. Small acts, such as tea on makeshift tables, shared feast days, and greetings in half-ruined streets, reappear as infrastructures of survival, serving as practices that both bridge and maintain religious difference. The spray-painted phrase bitmedi hikâyemiz (our story hasn’t ended) crystallizes the book’s endeavor: politics unfolds in the labor of continuing to live together.
At its core, Under the Same Sky shows that coexistence is neither the opposite of conflict nor the result of harmonious pluralism. It is the ongoing social reproduction of religious difference under unequal conditions. Dağtaş shows that minority life in Antakya is best captured through the relational labor of hosting, deferring, remembering, withholding, joking, loving, and withdrawing. The chapters collectively develop what Dağtaş calls a “protracted present”: a temporality in which catastrophe and ordinary routine are coextensive. Religious boundaries are neither static nor dissolving; they are continually activated in trade, in performances of tolerance, in the sensory labor of cooking, in the moral stakes of love and marriage, and in the sovereign politics of hosting. Coexistence here is fragile but ongoing, shaped by material traces and everyday ethical negotiations that exceed state-centered accounts of secularism or pluralism.
A major strength of the book is its methodological precision. Thresholds such as door frames, courtyards, suq passageways, and shrine perimeters are analytic sites where difference is lived. Dağtaş’s attention to language extends this threshold method to semantics and affect. The ethnography is carefully paced, moving from macrohistorical context to micropolitical encounter without overtheorizing or romanticizing plural life. Importantly, she refuses the tropes of “shared culture” or “Mediterranean conviviality,” showing instead that coexistence often rests on silence, distance, gendered labor, and selective disclosure, rather than fusion or syncretism. If there is a limitation, it is that the analysis occasionally assumes familiarity with the fine-grained distinctions among religious communities in the region; readers less versed in Turkey’s religious topographies may require additional scaffolding. Additionally, the critique of monumentalized tolerance is incisive, but comparative urban contexts could have been explored further.
The book’s conceptual contributions are substantial. It reframes minority life as constitutive rather than marginal to the political; expands debates on secularism by showing how everyday hospitality, trade, and romantic attachment organize difference as effectively as state policy; and offers an alternative framework to both “antagonistic tolerance” in which coexistence is latent hostility and cosmopolitan idealism that sees coexistence as assumed harmony. Dağtaş instead theorizes coexistence as relational maintenance work, as the slow labor of negotiating difference, proximity, and care in landscapes marked by loss, suspicion, and shared terrain.
The primary audience for this book includes scholars of religion, secularism, Middle East and borderland studies, and the anthropology of pluralism, kinship, intimacy, and hospitality. It also will serve graduate seminars on method and ethnographic writing by offering a model for holding violence and endurance together without flattening either. More broadly, the book advances a quiet but powerful claim: difference is not what threatens social life––it is what makes social life possible. This insight situates Under the Same Sky as a major contemporary contribution to understanding how people live together when neither assimilation nor separation is feasible or desired.
