A piece of rubble salvaged from a school building that was destroyed before its inundation under dam waters will illuminate the story of a contestation centered around the question of who is entitled to salvage in the material undoing of the grounds.
Contribution long abstract
This presentation delves into my experience of conducting ethnographic fieldwork on gradually disappearing grounds. In January 2023, I revisited the site of my long-term research, a small town in the Çoruh Basin where Turkey's tallest dam had been under construction for a decade. In those days, the dam began to retain the river water, progressively submerging the grounds where the town's residents had built a laborious life in what they framed as a challenging and distant frontier zone. The process of dismantling the town before the water reached it proved to be as laborious as its construction. With the help of a piece of rubble collected from a school building that was dismantled and razed to the ground, I will tell a story of contestation centered around the question of who is entitled to salvage in the material process of undoing the grounds under submergence.