Nur Yalman facts for kids

Nur Yalman is a leading social anthropologist from Turkey. He works at Harvard University as a senior research professor, studying how people live in societies, especially in the Middle East. He is also the chairman at Koç University.

Nur Yalman's Journey

Nur Yalman finished high school at Robert College in Istanbul. He then went to Cambridge University to study Social Anthropology, which is the study of human societies and cultures. He earned both his first degree and his PhD there. For his studies, he spent time in Sri Lanka, learning about the local culture.

After Cambridge, Yalman taught anthropology at the University of Chicago. In 1960, while teaching at Middle East Technical University, he also worked as a special advisor for the government in a new group called the State Planning Organization. This group helped plan for Turkey's future. From 1968 to 1972, he was in charge of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago.

In 1972, he joined the faculty at Harvard University, where he still works today. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a group that honors important thinkers. In 2010, he helped judge the Infosys Prize for social sciences.

What Nur Yalman Studies

Nur Yalman's first book, Under the Bo Tree, was about how families and marriages work in Sri Lanka. Since then, he has studied religion and politics in Middle Eastern and Muslim cultures. He has written about many countries and has done fieldwork, which means living with people to study their way of life, in Sri Lanka, India, Iran, and Turkey.

He speaks many languages, including Turkish, English, French|French, German, some Persian, Sinhalese, Italian, and Arabic. This helps him understand different cultures deeply. He teaches classes about how societies change and become more modern.

Books and Articles

Here are some of the books and articles Nur Yalman has written:

• A Passage to Peace: Global Solutions from East to West. A Dialogue with Daisaku Ikeda. I.B. Tauris, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-84511-923-2
• Under the Bo Tree: Studies in Caste, Kinship, and Marriage in the Interior of Ceylon. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967.
• "On Land Disputes in Eastern Turkey" in a book honoring Gustave E. von Grunebaum, 1971.
• "De Tocqueville in India: An Essay on the Caste System," Man, New Series, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Mar., 1969).
• "The Structure of Sinhalese Healing Rituals," The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 23, (Jun., 1964).