One Anthropologist, Two Religious Revivals: Lloyd A. Fallers and his Theologically Engaged Anthropology on Turkish Islam in the 1960s

ABSTRACT Lloyd A. “Tom” Fallers was an anthropologist at The University of Chicago known for his political and legal ethnography of East Africa in the 1950s. Because of his very early death, however, his senior research on Turkey in the 1960s and his late interest in comparative religion have largely been left buried in the archives. This article reconstructs Fallers’s decade-long preoccupation with Turkish Islam, situating it within the context of postwar religious revivalism in the US and Turkey. In addition to shedding light on an unknown endeavor in the history of anthropology, it argues that Fallers’s work on comparative religion contributes to contemporary discussions about how to do an ethnography of everyday religion while engaging with theology on a theoretical ground.