Paper Short Abstract:

Focusing on a particular case in the mountainous Northeastern Turkey, which involves the transition of pastures from commons to a private farm in the 1930s, then back to commons in the late 1970s, this presentation problematizes (un)commoning in the more-than-human worlds of pasture-cheesemaking.

Paper Abstract:

This presentation analyzes a particular case in the mountainous Northeastern Turkey, which involves the transition of pastures from commons to a private farm in the 1930s, then back to commons in the late 1970s. Counter-insurgency measures of the Turkish state to achieve national security in the borderlands and dairy infrastructures in the pastures affect the everyday life of agro-pastoralism, circumventing the movements of cows, sheep, shepherds, and farmers on alpine grasslands of Kars. Based on the narratives of the former farm owners and pasture-less peasants on the attacks to the “pasture-farms” in the late 1970s, and on my ethnographic research in these pastures, I discuss the concepts of commons and uncommons in relation to the more-than-human worlds of pasture-cheesemaking. Can the violent attack and occupation be understood as “commoning”? Does the afterlife of the pasture-farm suggest a process of “uncommoning”? What would this imply for our understanding of “common pastures” and the more-than-human communities that make them? How were these processes affect the other-than-human worlds in the mountainous alpine grasslands? And how did the latter circumvent these processes?