Scholar Spotlight: Professor Serkan Yolaçan, Anthropology

Each month, we will be spotlighting an Abbasi Program affiliate on campus. This month, our spotlight shines on Professor Serkan Yolaçan from the Department of Anthropology.

Congratulations on your new position as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stanford! The Abbasi theme for this year is Memory, Heritage and Cultural Production. Your work aligns with this theme. What do you wish more people knew about your area(s) of study?

Thank you for the warm welcome. My scholarship straddles anthropology and history to broadly investigate questions of human mobility, historical practice, and sovereignty. My current work in the Caucasus looks at how old trans-imperial routes of trade, scholarship, and pilgrimage have reemerged in the wake of the Soviet collapse and how people treading these routes have cultivated new historical sensibilities. These sensibilities find their expression in the return of old textual genres such as the biographical dictionary, or tazqirah, as the genre is known in the Islamic tradition. A closer look at these texts opens a vista on a rich history of empires and diasporas as well as mobile individuals (saints, rebels, scholars, pilgrims, etc.) who navigated them. I study these longer histories to understand what makes them speak to the present experiences of Azeris I follow in Iran, Turkey, and Russia. Doing so helps me build geo-historical frames that place puzzling contemporary developments within the transnational histories of Muslim societies in the Middle East and Asia.   

You did your PhD at Duke in Cultural Anthropology, correct? What was your dissertation on and how does it affect your current research trajectory?

In the early years of my graduate studies, I became fascinated by the world of empires. Unlike nation-states, empires could expand and shrink. Their borders were porous, and their capacity to rule depended on their partnerships with societies that went in and out of their domains, be they traders, pilgrims, rebels, mercenaries, or scholars. One place I observed this vibrant scene of mobility and interdependence was the Caucasus. A three-way land bridge between Iran, Turkey, and Russia, the Caucasus changed hands among empires from these three directions. Just as empires used this multiplex borderland to reach into the backyard of their neighboring rivals, the Caucasus also became a breeding ground of ideological currents that would threaten those empires from outside in. For instance, at the beginning of the twentieth century, activists from the wider region found refuge in the Caucasus, where they rubbed shoulders and cross-pollinated constitutionalist ideas and movements that shook Russia in 1905, Iran in 1906, and the Ottoman Empire in 1908--not unlike the serial uprisings that shook the Arab world a decade ago. In my dissertation, I studied such historical and contemporary episodes of political change to show how the Caucasus, though in the geographical periphery of powerful states, is central to their shared histories.

Tell us more about your book, Time Travelers of Baku: Conversion and Revolution in West Asia and what got you interested in Azeri history?

My book asks how ideas and ideologies travel between culturally disparate regions and what gives them force in places where they arrive. How, for example, do liberal constitutionalist ideas penetrate a centuries-old monarchy, and even topple it? Or, how does ethnic nationalism overrun a cosmopolitan city at a bewildering pace? Stranger yet, how does religiosity take root in a country after seventy years of communist rule? I show in my book that behind such large-scale revolutionary transformations are everyday conversions of mobile individuals who have a change of heart upon rediscovering a shared past that may be forgotten on one side of the border but is alive and well on the other side. Travel in space inspires travel in time, and places become repositories of different pasts. Time-traveling individuals relate to these pasts and places as their own and find new spirit to cast the future in their image. I have developed these insights through conversations with mobile Azeris I have been following over the past decade. During my fieldwork, I joined Azeri study circles in theological seminaries in Qom and Mashhad (Iran), hearing stories of them leaving behind a communist past in former Soviet Azerbaijan and discovering their Shi’a roots in Iran. I then traveled with these young clerics back to Baku (Azerbaijan), where I met their friends and relatives—some of whom, to my surprise, went to Turkish boarding schools and embraced a Sunni Muslim outlook, looking to make their careers in Istanbul. These mobile Azeris saw their transformations not as conversions to a foreign faith or ideology but as returns to a forgotten past that they rediscovered. Shrines they visited, rituals they picked up, saintly stories they heard, and family genealogies they traced conjured different temporal orders, in which they could place themselves alongside known Azeris of earlier times. Exploring these histories with my informants broadened the temporal horizons of my research from the contemporary moment to a deep, sedimented history of migrations, revolutions, and religions. My goal in the book is to convey how that broad history reverberates into the present.

You also work on cults and messianic movements. That sounds really interesting! Any particular region/period?

Yes, this is a new project that expands the ideological landscape of the Caucasus to study how this frontier became fertile grounds for messianic projects, past and present. The critical move here is to recognize this frontier as much a place of myth-making as history-making. In the Islamic and pre-Islamic folklores of the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia, the Caucasus has a reputation as the boundary space between what is familiar and what lies beyond—the farthest point of the earth where one could encounter the peris of Persian mythology, Gog and Magog of Abrahamic traditions, nomadic hordes of Central Asia, or the Communist Red Army until more recent times. I draw on this layered mythology to situate the Caucasus as a place of encounters and transformative possibilities, where leaders could cast themselves in a messianic mold by repelling foreign threats or conquering evil forces. Moving forward, I want to use this research as a basis for a much larger, comparative study of messianic and millenarian movements from around the world. I teach an undergraduate course on cults to develop a global perspective on messianic movements with my students. 

How would you describe your methodology as an anthropologist?

As it might have been clear already, I approach issues of contemporary relevance within a temporally and geographically broad perspective. One way I do it is to deploy mobility as a method. Following things on the move allows me to discover long-lasting social lives and cultural practices obscured by state-centric perspectives. Another way I do it is to deploy history as a vast resource of cultural models, conceptual ideas, and counter-examples that can illuminate present questions and dilemmas. In doing so, I only emulate my informants who understand their present in light of their many pasts distributed across empires rather than ordered along a linear timeline. This temporally uneven, spatial view of history opens my investigation to a wide array of material—texts, objects, built landscapes, oral legends, venerated images, religious rituals—that lend themselves at once to ethnographic inquiry and historical examination.

What are you most looking forward to for the academic year 2021-2022? Are you offering any classes this year?

I most look forward to experiencing the campus culture at Stanford after spending my first year overseas and teaching remotely from Istanbul. I am teaching a graduate course titled Time Travel: Pasts, Places, and Possibilities in the Autumn Quarter. The course explores diverse historical practices worldwide to develop a critical perspective on the basic tenets of Western historicism, such as chronology, the taboo of anachronism, and the separation between past and present. I will also teach an undergraduate course titled Cults: Mystics and Messiahs of the Modern World in the Winter Quarter. The course demystifies cultic formations to discover fresh insights into enduring forms of human sociality and thought. We will explore the themes of embodied authority, millennialism, cosmology, eschatology, charisma, solidarity, and protection.