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Kimberly Hart, SUNY-Buffalo

Turkey's contemporary struggles with Islam are often interpreted as a conflict between religion and secularism played out most obviously in the split between rural and urban populations. The reality, of course, is more complicated than the assumptions.

Drawing on a decade of research, Kimberly Hart shows how religion is not an abstract set of principles, but a complex set of practices. Sunni Islam structures individual lives through rituals—birth, circumcision, marriage, military service, death—and the expression of these traditions varies between villages. Why do some choose to keep alive the past, while others want to face a future unburdened by local cultural practices? She speaks to global transformations in Islam, to the push and pull between those who maintain a link to the past, even when these practices challenge orthodoxy, and those who want a purified global religion.

Kimberly Hart is a social-cultural anthropologist whose current work focuses on Turkish configurations of Sunni Islam, rurality, state power, and neo-tarikats.