Hikmet Kocamaner

Visiting Academic
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
kocamanerh@uncw.edu
 
Hikmet Kocamaner

Biography

Hikmet Kocamaner is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW). Before joining UNCW, he held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brandeis University, was a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, and served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston University. 
 
Dr. Kocamaner is a sociocultural anthropologist whose ethnographic research examines the intersection of religion and politics in Turkey. Since 2012, his work has traced the changing place of Islam in political and social life, with particular attention to the institutions, technologies, and modes of governance through which religious authority is produced, mediated, and exercised. 
 
His first research project investigated the involvement of Islamic authorities in neoliberal forms of governance, with a particular focus on the regulation of gender and family life in Turkey. His second project examines the expanding integration of media and digital infrastructures with organized religion, asking how these infrastructures reshape religious authority and facilitate the incorporation of Islam into contemporary practices of populist governance. 
 
Dr. Kocamaner is completing a book manuscript that brings these two strands of research together, Religiopolitical Infrastructures: The Politics of Islam, Gender, and Populism in Turkey. The manuscript examines how religious and institutional infrastructures mediate the entanglements of Islam, gender politics, and populist governance in contemporary Turkey. 
 
Dr. Kocamaner’s research has appeared in American Anthropologist (2026), American Ethnologist (2019), Anthropological Quarterly (2017), The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Turkey (2024), Middle East Report (MERIP) (2018), and Birikim (2021). His research has been funded by Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. 

Current Projects

'Religiopolitical Infrastructures: The Politics of Islam, Gender, and Populism in Turkey'  

This book-in-progress examines how infrastructural forms mediate the entanglements of Islam, gender politics, and populist governance in contemporary Turkey. Moving beyond accounts that approach religion in populist politics primarily through rhetoric, identity, or symbolic boundary-making, the book shows how religious authority is built into the infrastructures of governance, where it shapes family life and moral order, enables political mobilization, and gives material form to popular sovereignty. 

Educational Background

  • Ph.D.  Anthropology & Middle Eastern and North African Studies (dual Ph.D.), University of Arizona, August 2014 

Research Interests

  • politics, religion, media, infrastructure, gender, Islam, Turkey, Middle East  

Recent publications 

  • Kocamaner, Hikmet.  2026. “Religio-Governmental Infrastructures: Islam, Infrastructure, and Populist Mobilization in Turkey.” American Anthropologist 128, no. 2: 272–283.https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.70062 
  • Kocamaner, Hikmet. 2024. “The Directorate of Religious Affairs, Professionalization of Female Religious Authority, and the Politics of Gender and the Family in Turkey” Oxford Handbook of Religion. Eds. Fabio Viccini, Caroline Tee, and Philip Dorroll. London: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197624883.013.24 
  • Kocamaner, Hikmet. 2021. “Why Do Islamic Television Channels Want to Save the Family? The Family Values Discourse, Neoliberalism, and Neoconservatism in Turkey under the AKP Regime” (Article in Turkish) Birikim Journal, (July-August 2021): 97-107. 
  • Kocamaner, Hikmet. 2021. “Authoritarian Propaganda and Its Discontents.” Society for Cultural Anthropology, Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsights, November 11.  
  • Kocamaner, Hikmet. 2019. “Regulating the Family through Religion: Secularism, Islam, and the Politics of the Family in Contemporary Turkey.” American Ethnologist. 46 (4): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12836 
  • Kocamaner, Hikmet. 2018. “The Politics of Family Values in Erdogan’s New Turkey”MERIP Middle East Report 288 (Fall 2018): 36-39. https://www.merip.org/2018/12/the-politics-of-family-values-in-erdogans-new-turkey/ 
  • Kocamaner, Hikmet. 2017. “Strengthening the Family through Television: Islamic Broadcasting, Secularism, and the Politics of Responsibility in Turkey,” Anthropological Quarterly, 90 (3): 675–714. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2017.0040 
  • Kocamaner, Hikmet. 2017. “Transformation of Islamic Television in Turkey from the Era of Secularist State Monopoly to Family-focused Programming under the Conservative-Muslim AKP Government” POMEPS Studies, Special Issue: Islam in a Changing Middle East: New Islamic Media, 3 (February 10): 27-32. 
  • Kocamaner, Hikmet. 2013. “The Gezi Park Protests and Politics of the Family in Turkey” in Resistance Everywhere: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey. Anthony Alessandrini eds. et al. Tadween Publishing. 

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