Anthropologist Lloyd A. Fallers’ Research in Turkey during the 1960s

Abstract

Due to the influence of the modernization paradigm, as the main axis of the American social sciences during the Cold War, and since the 1950s, the field of anthropology has shown interest in the developing nation-states in addition to primitive societies. Within this context, Turkey was one of the ‘new nations’ to become a potential object of analysis for Western anthropologists as Turkey was already praised as an exemplary democracy in the political science literature. As a result, for the first time in the history of American anthropology, a series of ethnographies pertaining to Turkey were generated in the 1960s. This article brings to light the academic portrait of the anthropology professor Lloyd A. Fallers at Chicago University and his studies on Turkey. Fallers worked on Turkey for more than ten years, did long-term fieldwork during his residences in Turkey for a total of two years, and supervised dissertations about Turkey. Fallers’ work, which has mostly remained unpublished due to his early death, is analyzed by relying on the archives deposited in the Chicago University library and on oral history interviews conducted by the author with people who had known Fallers.