For his BA and PhD, he studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge University under the mentorship of Edmund Leach and carried out fieldwork in Sri Lanka.
In 1960, during his time teaching at Middle East Technical University, Yalman also served as a Prime Ministry Special Advisor in the newly established State Planning Organization.
Although his first book, Under the Bo Tree, was on Sri Lankan kinship and marriage, he has since expanded his research to include religion and politics in Middle Eastern and Muslim cultures.
Not only has he written about many countries of the world, he has also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Sri Lanka, India, Iran and Turkey.
Yalman’s varied research interests are expressed in the wide number of languages he speaks: Turkish, English, French, German, some Persian, Sinhalese, Italian and Arabic.