Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Sarıkeçili pastoralists and the Turkish state produce divergent grazing maps of the same forested landscape, foregrounding forests as equivocal, political, and socio-ecological assemblages constituted through competing practices of legibility.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines forests as political and equivocal socio-ecological assemblages through an ethnographic study of Sarıkeçili nomadic pastoralists in the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey. The Sarıkeçili’s grazing pathways follow oak forests, river valleys, and foothill ecologies stretching between the Mediterranean coast and the Central Anatolian plateau, bringing them into sustained interaction with forest ecosystems, state forestry institutions, and sedentary farming communities.

Drawing on participatory action research, the paper focuses on a series of participatory mapping workshops in which Sarıkeçili pastoralists produced their own grazing maps using everyday materials such as stones, branches, pine cones, onions, and potatoes to narrate routes, water sources, plant knowledge, and interspecies relations embedded in their movements. These maps are juxtaposed with official forestry maps and grazing permits produced by the Turkish state, as well as cartographic representations generated by the research team.

I analyze the equivocations that emerge when these different mappings claim to represent the “same” forested geography. Rather than treating divergence as error or misunderstanding, I argue that these cartographic disjunctions reveal forests as more-than-human collectivities constituted through competing practices of legibility, care, control, and exclusion. Engaging debates in forest anthropology, state territoriality, and political ecology, the paper shows how forests are simultaneously constructed and deconstructed through everyday grazing practices and bureaucratic planning. Situated at the margins of Europe and the Global North, the Turkish case offers a critical perspective on polarized forest politics and the limits of state-centered environmental governance.