Armand Aupiais (Université de Paris)
Evangelical Protestants in Turkey: Urban Circuits, Religious Labour, Christian History

Antioch Protestant Church, Photo: Armand Aupiais

The project combines the fulfilment of a PhD dissertation in Anthropology, with a complementary research. The dissertation project comprises of two parts: Firstly, it deals with diverse past and contemporary Protestant presences in Istanbul, on the basis of an ethnographic survey of thirty churches. It will shed light on the interdependent and dissymmetrical relations between the parishes and the urban circuits they form depending on whether they are predominantly Western foreigners, Turkish Christians, Turkish converts, or Global South migrants. Secondly, the thesis focuses on the latter groups, based on further investigation in few ‘Turkish’, ‘immigrant’, and ‘mixed’ Churches. It shows how the division of religious labour, intertwined with the believers’ social trajectories, expresses deeply optimistic narratives and tends to define Turkey as a heart of contemporary Christianity. As an extension of this research, Armand Aupiais will explore the participation of both Turkish and Global Southern believers in Turkey’s Christian landscape. On the basis of an ethnographic survey in medium-sized Anatolian cities, he scrutinizes how tiny and marginal groups of believers, who are not the heirs of any recognized minority memory, reconstruct a historical continuity with the Ottoman past, challenging its confessional partitioning, or even building and claiming a local Protestant heritage.