Nur Yalman

Who is Nur Yalman?

Nur Yalman is a leading Turkish social anthropologist and professor at Harvard University.

Yalman received his high school diploma from Robert College, Istanbul, one of Turkey’s premier private high schools. For his BA and PhD, he studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge University under the mentorship of Edmund Leach and carried out fieldwork in Sri Lanka. At Cambridge, Yalman was a Bye-Fellow of Peterhouse, and subsequently joined the anthropology faculty at the University of Chicago. During his stay at Chicago, he served as Director for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 1968-1972. He then joined the Harvard University faculty in 1972, and is currently Professor of Social Anthropology and of Middle Eastern Studies.

Although his first book, Under the Bo Tree, was on Sri Lankan kinship and marriage, he has since expanded his research to include religion and politics in Middle Eastern and Muslim cultures. Not only has he written about many countries of the world, he has also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Sri Lanka, India, Iran and Turkey. Yalman’s varied research interests are expressed in the wide number of languages he speaks: Turkish, English, French, German, some Persian, Sinhalese, Italian and Arabic. He teaches courses on structuralist and post-structuralist theory and on issues of modernization and social change.