Mahir Saul

PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Since 2010 Mahir Saul’s research has focused on international African migration to the countries of the Mediterranean basin and of Asia, within the framework of South-South migration. He spent several year-long periods of fieldwork in Istanbul on West and Central African migration to Turkey. From 2020 on, he directed a project supported by the Outstanding International Scholars Program of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, with a research team that offered graduate and postgraduate scholarships. This project has been hosted by Kadir Has University in Istanbul.

Prior to that, Prof. Saul carried out most of his anthropological research in West Africa. Starting with his dissertation research, he conducted four long periods of fieldwork (1978-79; 1983-84; 1989-90; 1993-96) in Burkina Faso. He also spent extended periods for archival research on the colonial period in Paris, Abidjan, White Father missionary archives in Rome, and in Ouagadougou. He continues to publish on his earlier West African research and on African cinema, as well as on his current international migration project.

The Burkina Faso research of Prof. Saul was conducted first in the Moore-speaking villages of the White Volta (Nakambe River) valley, and after 1983 in Bobo-speaking villages of the west. It concerned the social organization of the rural household and production, household consumption and market sales, kinship relations, gender roles, allocation of tasks and time use, market and trade, responses to development programs, ritual cycle and festivals, the development of Islam, and the broader topics of social organization and economic anthropology. Eventually African cinema, economic history, social history, and the larger historical trends of Islam and Christianity also became topics in his publications.

He published an anthropological history of a violent African resistance movement in the early colonial period, and essays on the polycephalous political order of the late nineteenth century Volta region, economic history, older money, and transition to colonial currency. He participated in a large multi-country project on environmental history, collaborating for the purpose with Burkinabe colleagues. He followed work on rural, urban, and cross-border trade with surveys on the same topic in Mali, Senegal, Benin, Togo, and Ghana. His current sub-Saharan immigrant research builds on this background; it foregrounds trade connections, self-employment, and aspirations for self-betterment against prevailing themes in the literature, such as helplessness, precarious existence, and transitory movements.

The second world area where Şaul conducts research is Turkey in its Middle Eastern and European settings. He wrote on Judeo-Spanish sociolinguistics, has an abiding interest in Turkish oral literature and folklore, and gave lectures on Turkish nationalism and the modernization process. He held teaching and research positions in various European institutions. On the heels of an African film festival in Urbana, Illinois, he curated 2012 a high-profile African film series for the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art in Turkey.