Lunchtime seminar: The political theology of populist people-making: infrastructure, Islam, and popular sovereignty in Turkey

What can examining religion and infrastructure together reveal about populist people-making? This talk addresses this question by exploring state-sanctioned religious practices surrounding two Bosphorus bridges in the aftermath of the failed 2016 coup attempt against President Erdo?an. These monumental infrastructures are not simply presented as material evidence of the government’s service to the people. They are also deployed as symbolic settings in which “the people” are ritually constituted and made present as a Sunni-Muslim political subject embodying and defending the “national will” (milli irade). Through supplications, invocations of Allah’s attributes, recitations honoring the Prophet, and commemorations of martyrdom, “the people” acquire a sensory and affective presence as a political community whose bonds of faith and sacrifice connect the living and the dead in their devotion to God. These religious practices also define the boundaries of political belonging, distinguishing those who defend the national will from those portrayed as threatening it. About the speaker Hikmet Kocamaner is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) and currently a Visiting Academic in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. Before joining UNCW, he held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brandeis University, was a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, and served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston University. About the series The Inter-Religious Research seminar is convened by Professor. It is a joint initiative of the Faculty of Divinity and the Cambridge Interfaith Programme. Guests are welcome. We operate an optional registration system to share information with prospective attendees. Registration will open two weeks before the event.