Nur Yalman

Harvard University’s Nur Yalman, Professor of Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies Emeritus, has been involved with the Center from the very start, when, in 1993, he joined fellow professors John Kenneth Galbraith and Harvey Cox in inviting Daisaku Ikeda to deliver what would become the Center’s “founding lecture”: “Mahayana Buddhism and 21st Century Civilization.” After 9/11, he was an important advisor to the Center on matters pertaining to intercultural and international conflict and resolution. In 2009, he brought several of his Harvard colleagues to the Center for a seminar exploring the complexities of dialogue in a world filled not only with power imbalances but all manner of differences. The occasion for the seminar was the publication of Dr. Yalman’s dialogue with Daisaku Ikeda, A Passage To Peace: Global Solutions East and West. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is Yalman’s application of the principles of structuralism, as developed by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Yalman also spoke at the Center’s 2008 panel on intercultural understandings of death and in 2011 engaged in dialogue with Winston Langley on “The Age of Soft Power.” Time and again, he would share Andre Gide’s saying that “the individual is the most irreplaceable of beings.” This was one of the sentiments he explored in a 2009 interview with the Ikeda Center.

Photo by Marilyn Humphries