How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey
A Crown Seminar with Caterina Scaramelli
Unfortunately, we have had to cancel this event and hope to reschedule it for a later date.
Wednesday, March 2, 2022
11:00am-12:15pm EST
Environmental and infrastructural transformations in Turkey’s expansive swamps and marshes have unfolded against the backdrop of nationalist remakings of land and water, grassroots mobilizations, and the international rise of wetland conservation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with farmers, scientists, and bureaucrats in two Turkish agrarian deltas and archival research, Caterina Scaramelli explores in this talk how relationships between water, sediment, infrastructure, plants, and animals matter in contemporary Turkey and what these relationships reveal about the intersection of moral and ecological concerns in the current moment. Divergent moral claims about ecology, infrastructure, the livelihood of non-human animals, and traditional agricultural varieties have become central to a Turkish politics of livability.
Caterina Scaramelli is a research assistant professor of anthropology at Boston University.
Ekin Kurtiç, discussant, is the Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center.
Co-sponsored by the Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies program, Environmental Studies program, and the Department of Anthropology at Brandeis.