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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in western Turkey, this paper examines how authoritarian governance reshapes human–olive relations. Ancient trees uprooted through extractivist expropriations are resold as ‘macro-bonsais’, producing new forms of multispecies violence and spectral afterlives.

Paper long abstract

Uprooted ancient olive trees have become a prized landscaping fixture in Turkey. They are renamed as ‘macro-bonsais’, grown in steel pots with their limbs pruned and maimed, their foliage carefully razed to look like trays or balls. With their evergreen foliage, statuesque form and embodied stories, they now serve the wealthy, not the peasants. The most important factor behind this change is the changing environmental protection laws and expedited expropriations for development projects or extractivist operations. As the presidential powers increasingly exceed the power of the legislature and the judiciary in Turkey, these expropriations are common, affecting not only forests but also olive groves and native oleaster bushes. A large number of those olive trees that are uprooted are then re-rooted and sold as macro-bonsais at exorbitant prices.

As much as the displacement of the olive trees reflects the authoritarian turn in Turkey, their emplacement and commodification has also something to do with the same process. While Erdoğan is single-handedly signing the orders of expropriation, his wife promotes the olive as the immortal tree, referring to and rejuvenating a religious mythology around the olive, encouraging the market for its circulation as a looted and displaced entity. The multispecies relations between humans and olive trees change drastically under this neoliberal authoritarianism, while centennial trees are afforded new lives as specters of themselves, being subjected to violent displacements.

This paper is based on ethnographic research in western Turkey, including interviews with nursery owners, villagers and officials.