Stanford University
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Kabir Tambar
Associate Professor of Anthropology
BioKabir Tambar has been conducting ethnographic and historical research in Turkey since 2003, primarily focused on the critical study of secularism and semiotic approaches in anthropology. His work centers on questions of temporality in political modernity, or the narrative threads that bind our sense of the present to both an inherited past and an anticipated future.
Tambar’s first book, The Reckoning of Pluralism (Stanford, 2014), explored how Alevis in central Anatolia encounter and interrogate the promises of secular modernity. The book offered a critical study of how state authorities (along with academics, journalists, and intellectuals) seek to define and discipline the parameters of religious difference, such that ostensibly epistemological questions about the writing of history have come to shape governing imperatives to regiment public enactments of Alevi religion. The book is also especially interested to reveal how Alevi engagements with Islamic tradition, including in practices of ritual mourning, enable alternative ways of narrating the religious past and its inheritance in the present.
After completing this research project, Tambar began to study inter-communal expressions of solidarity. Initially, the work developed in response to the massive, country-wide Gezi Park protests, with particular attention to the tensions and misunderstandings that accompany the emergence of new political friendships. From this starting point, Tambar began a decade-long inquiry into the history of irresolute and foiled friendships that have unsteadied the politics of the nation-state for over a century. He is now completing a new book manuscript, tentatively titled The Claim of Friendship: An Ottoman History of Loss, that examines the erosion of friendship as a credible discourse of late Ottoman and Turkish republican politics in the past century. Rather than redeem friendship as a normative ground for understanding political possibilities today, the book excavates the failing of friendship as a historical problem, asking how social actors — especially Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds — have grappled with the attenuation of solidarity and the estrangement of political identification.
