The proposed anthropological dissertation research is an ethnographic study of religious healing among labor migrants in the Altinagac squatter settlement of Ankara, Turkey. As elsewhere in the world, millions of Turkey's rural inhabitants have abandoned the familiarity of the rural homelands and illegally resettled in marginalized urban environments, otherwise known as squatter settlements, where they not only experience a wide range of health problems, but must also forge out alternative identities within unfamiliar social environments. Although past anthropological research has suggested that religious healing plays an important role both as a heath care resource and in the process of negotiating new identities, there have been no in-depth studies to support, contradict, or modify this hypothesis within the context of labor migration and resettlement. The overall objective of the study is therefore to understand the complex relationships among migration, identity, and religious healing within the community under investigation. More specifically, the study will examine how migrants' identity shapes their utilization of religious healing and if religious healing addresses their struggle for health and personal identity within unfamiliar physical, social, and behavioral environments. This will be accomplished through structured, semi-structured, and in depth interviews with the total population of religious healers in the community (15) and 60 religious healing participants, as well as participant observation in a variety of settings. The groundwork for the proposed study has already been lain through four months of preliminary fieldwork. The study will not only contribute to broader medical, psychological, and urban anthropological theory, but will also further strengthen the collaboration between anthropologists and mental health practitioners in Turkey and the United States by specifying why people choose to participate in religious healing and assisting in the deployment of culturally informed mental health care interventions in treating migrant and immigrant populations.
