Religious, Ethnic and Cultural Ambiguities in the Late Ottoman Empire and Turkey

How should we understand the religious, ethnic and cultural complexity of the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey?This open-access volume addresses this question by mobilizing the concept of ambiguity as a critical lens to examine identities, relations and everyday practices that resist near categorization. It shows how attention to ambiguity opens up new modes of reading and sustains interdisciplinary dialogue. Organized around processes of conversion, Islamization and assimilation, the volume foregrounds social and cultural configurations of individuals and communities, often described as hybrid, liminal, syncretic or heterodox. Through compelling case studies of communities such as the dönme, Kurdo-Armenians, Hemshinlis and Yezidis, as well as individuals with non-Abrahamic and agnostic orientations, the volume demonstrates that ambiguity plays a constitutive role in negotiating identity and belonging in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft, German Research Foundation