The Anthropologists is Ayşegül Savaş’s third novel. It traces the lives of Asya and Manu, a young married couple, through their everyday activities, encounters, and rituals. They are seldom joined by some friends or acquaintances, but the anchor of the novel is the relationship between the two, as it also anchors their lives. Tropes of marriage, immigration, and the city weave together in what, above all, is a novel exploring the process of “finding a home” (gradually and sometimes almost unintentionally) with the people you choose from those around you, the rituals you establish and the memories you carry with you and look to re-encounter in an estranged land.

The narrator, Asya, never reveals what city they are living in, nor where they are from. We know that Manu and her come from two different countries, both of their families are still there, and that they have chosen to build their lives away. This reluctance to give the city a name is a deliberate choice that both removes the text from reality and brings it closer to the reader who might have gone through a similar experience. They are the voices of a generation for whom moving away is ingrained and a rite of passage, but also still deeply personal in the reasons behind doing so. The search for a house is an embodied experience, the home a not-so-veiled metaphor for one’s own place in the world.

Throughout the whole novel, though, the city feels estranged, as if Asya and Manu could never actually transcend its walls since they did not grow up imbued in its rituals. The importance of rituals is central in this work –making them, finding them, recognising and recording them– and they manifest differently in the three categories of spaces the novel unfolds in: the park, the bar and the house. At the park, Asia encounters those who have their rituals in place, whose existence belongs in the unnamed city and resonates with the relationships within its system. At the bar, Asya and Manu take out the rituals they built for themselves and with their friend Ravi, but they feel unstable. Finally, the house, or the search for one to buy. This space is about future rituals, it is about those they might form and encounter as their future selves and the ones they used to engage with when home that they look for when visiting the spaces. Buying a house is the symbolic step that concretises the act of “making a home.” It means different things to those in their 30s nowadays and the generations that came before and will come later. Nonetheless, it remains a rite of passage, charged with meaning. By buying a house, Asia and Manu aim to physically make themselves part of this city that is not theirs; to become grounded.

I have lived in ‘foreign cities’ for most of my adult life, and, like Asya, I struggled for a long time to feel rooted; yet somehow, a sense of place gradually took form. Even though at times they might have seemed alien, each city I have lived in has shaped my sense of home, which has manifested differently at different moments in my life. The relationships I have built are what have kept me anchored, just as Asya and Manu’s love does in the novel. The main characters’ search for a house turns more symbolic than literal in the book, and like in real life, it becomes about looking for those details (a niche, pots of herbs, the way light filters in through a high window) and rituals that resonate and help you recognise yourself in people, in spaces and in moments.