Abstract
This study investigates Turkish spiritism, as a response to the moral and existential vulnerabilities emerging from Turkey’s modernization and secularization. Against the backdrop of the Republic’s modernizing reforms, spiritism emerged as an effort to harmonize scientific inquiry and spiritual belief, challenging binary narratives that cast modern science and religion as irreconcilable. Turkish spiritists embraced spiritism as a “scientific” approach to spirituality, investigating metaphysical questions through structured séances and documentation while seeking to address what they perceived as a “moral gap” within secular reform. Using a combination of sociological and historical methods, the research analyses a wide array of primary sources, including spiritist biographies, official documents, doctrinal publications, and over 300 coded issues from six spiritist journals. Through prosopographical and qualitative text analysis, this study reveals the motivations and teachings of Turkish spiritists, constructing a group biography of over 200 spiritists and investigating their beliefs and practices within Turkey’s socio-political transformations. Examining how Turkish spiritists challenged dualistic frameworks of science versus religion and secular versus religious identities, the research explores how spiritists negotiated power, identity, and ideology within a dynamic religious field, often aligning spiritist doctrine with scientific methods to counteract secular vulnerabilities. Highlighting congruencies and conflicts in views on the natural world’s design, this study argues for a more nuanced understanding of secularization, one that acknowledges hybrid identities and diverse expressions of secularity. Ultimately, Turkish spiritism serves as a case study on how intellectuals reimagined science and religion to address vulnerabilities in an era of profound social change.
Presenters
Hatice Sena Arıcıoğlu SenaariciogluPhD Candidate / Teaching and Research Assistant, Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities - Department of Sociology, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Science, Spiritism, Secularization, Turkish Modernization, Hybridity, Spirituality
