Healing Secular Life is an archive- and fieldwork-based account of therapeutic authority at the nexus of science and religion—and their differentiation as such—in Turkey. One of the strengths of the book is that it examines these both at the analytic level of personal experience and in the historicity of institutions, discourses, and practices. The text is based on fieldwork with “healers” and those who visit them, as well as inhabitants of two gecekondu (squatter neighborhoods) in Ankara, and printed sources from the early Republican era. Dole approaches healing as the “remaking of worlds,” not merely an attempt to return to “normalcy,” and his cases focus mainly on two modalities of healing: evliya (sainthood) and cinci hoca (healers adept at working with jinn, or roughly, “spirits”). Both, Dole argues, are marginal figures in contemporary Turkey, but not unrelated to the center.
Dole finds Jacques Rancière's work on what he calls the “politics of aesthetics” to be particularly useful to his analysis. This refers to not only sensory effects of perceptible phenomena but also the material and discursive processes that render some things perceptible, speakable, or possible in the first place, while rendering other things imperceptible, unspeakable, or seemingly impossible. The approach shows that this is an important, pervasive field in which the political is located, though a commonly overlooked one, and Dole's work demonstrates how rewarding it can be to operate on this analytical level. Interestingly, Dole argues that while a great deal of sophisticated and welcome work has been done on secularity and Islamic traditions of discourse and practice, they tend to focus either on secular arrangements of institutions or fairly orthodox (even Alevis would by now be seen as constituting a degree of orthodoxy) Islamic traditions. Although Dole admits that this no doubt covers much of the territory, it is not the whole picture, and such studies obscure life-worlds that flourish at the margins of both formal secularism and Islamic (and Alevi) orthodoxy.
The first part of the book is a fascinating discussion of early Republican campaigns of medical literacy and the development of a “healthcare system,” which involved the establishment of modern medical, religious, and political authority in contrast to the “healer,” who comes to represent everything backward to be swept away by modernization. The nation's biological life and the collective health and hygiene of the nation became central problems of political power. (Dole writes that Turkey had one of the first National Ministries of Health in the world.) State-citizen relations and dynamics were thus set up at the level of health. Dole links this to a very insightful discussion of the Halkevleri (people's houses) and the journal Ülkü, particularly the presentations of recent scientific advances, medicine specifically, as part of an effort to spread a “scientific mentality” and make explicit connections between these advances and the daily lives of (especially) rural Turks. This was part of a broader effort at improvement addressing everything from hygiene and the layout of homes to the standardization of mealtimes and proper nutrition.
The importance of this goes far beyond the medical and health fields; the prestige of modern science and medicine among practically the entirety of the political spectrum of contemporary Turkey arguably has its genealogy here, along with a widespread agreement regarding the collapse and bankruptcy of the Ottoman order. Dole convincingly shows how medicine was thus not merely one area of Republican reform among many; it provided one of the most compelling and pervasive vocabularies for the consolidation of the Republican state and nation through top-down modernization, as well as its “capillary” uptake through internalization on the part of citizens—in a word, Republican biopolitics. Importantly for Dole's discussion, this is the context in which Republican attitudes towards various “nonmodern” healers were formed. One sees this in the demarcation of acceptable and unacceptable forms of religiosity: üfürükçü were listed in the 1925 law that abolished Sufi orders and closed their lodges, while fortunetellers, hocas, shaykhs, dedes, and dervishes became prohibited statuses.
In subsequent chapters, Dole gives us an interesting window onto mutual perceptions of Alevis and Sunnis in two Ankara gecekondus in the late 1990s and early 2000s (with one gecekondu being predominantly Alevi, the other predominantly Sunni). Many Alevi residents expressed a secularist panic about the erosion of secularism—with healers as iconic of a dangerously seductive form of religious persuasion—that deceives the poor and uneducated into acting against their own rational self-interest. Interestingly, Dole found a great deal of overlap in the Sunni neighborhood where there was a general dismissal of healers, only this time in favor of the therapeutic effects of Sunni Muslim worship—if carried out with sincere and heartfelt intent, which, it was claimed, was precisely what had become difficult in contemporary political, social, and economic conditions. It is also worth noting that Dole encountered neither a desire to overturn secularism nor a sense that the state was somehow fundamentally illegitimate.
Dole then describes two genres of what he calls “exilic formations” of religious lives: a relatively high-profile healer and “living saint” to her followers, Zöhre ana (mother Zöhre), and a cinci hoca, practiced in formulas for helping people struggling with effects of jinn. Zöhre ana takes on the persona of unknown or forgotten saints, bringing them to life. It is their having been unknown or forgotten that is a symptom of the Republican secular order of things; they were submerged, but now they “return,” and in the process highlight the violence of their erasure. Dole thus argues that secularism, as it has formed in Turkey at least, while relatively tightly circumscribing the spheres of the legitimately religious and medical, also became among the conditions of possibility for a certain kind of “religious” healing. Interestingly, he does not argue that these practices of healing are a form of counterhegemonic resistance to the power of the state; citizens’ experience of state power is more often rather suffuse and mundane, Dole claims. This “banalization” of state power, which has (among other things) differentiated the medical, the religious, and the political in ways that have been and remain immensely prestigious and are widely seen as legitimate, created the conditions of possibility for healers like Zohre Ana. Dole's diagnosis is that there is something of the traumatic that has gone into this differentiation.
Dole argues that there is a pervasive structure of loss pervading and enabled by secularism's politics of aesthetics. He plausibly writes in several places that secularism's politics of aesthetics reorganizes the sensibilities attending relatedness, and that the relationships that form in and through healers need to be situated in the history of secular reform and its sometimes violent reworking of authority in the spheres of the political, the religious, and the medical. However, he finally gives us the specifics and fleshes this out in Chapter 5. The visceral rejection and abasement of such healers by the vast majority of Turkey's population, Dole argues, betrays a certain “political paranoia about forms of social obligation, indebtedness, and relatedness that are seen as threatening to the state's efforts of making and remaking the interpersonal grounds of its own reality” (p. 185). This is one of the book's main arguments, and I find it both interesting and plausible. Dole hastens to add that he thinks this paranoia is exaggerated, for the kinds of interpersonal bonds of religious obligation and therapeutic possibility he is describing are, he claims, especially unstable and fragile. But to the extent that healers “rummage” through patients’ pasts to recover them in order for a new future to be possible, Dole sees parallels to the work that many early Republican historians were doing, sifting through historical materials to write a narrative of Turkishness and identity that was indebted to neither the Ottomans nor to Sunni Islam, so that a new future could be possible.
Dole's work is thus an intimate account of a pervasive structure of loss, enabled by and embedded in Turkish secularism's politics of aesthetics. Dole is careful to state that he is not arguing that Republican reform involved the loss of what was “authentic” in people's subjectivities and in their relationships with one another and to themselves. But it did, he reminds us, involve changes that many people experienced as loss: for example, people would no longer relate to themselves in the same ways (through the same categories, in terms of the same options, etc.); they also would no longer relate to their past in the same ways—in a short time the reading of written documents from that past became very difficult for most people, while practices of commemoration and visitation became restricted. The “positive” Republican project sought to modernize institutions, knowledges, worldviews, and lifestyles, and did so by (deliberately or not) undermining inherited models of social authority, habits of thought, and forms of social relatedness. While the passing of time can always be conceived and experienced as “loss,” Dole argues that Turkey's secular modernity has a particular—not inherently “good” or “bad,” but particular—structure of loss built into it, especially visible through attention to its Republican politics of aesthetics. It is this structure, Dole argues, that has created spaces in which healers exist and people seek them out, and we have a much better understanding of both thanks to his work. The book ends with a useful appendix of brief descriptions of popular genres of healing in Turkey.
