How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey with Caterina Scaramelli

Keyman Podcast

In this episode, 2022-2024 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow Ekin Kurtiç has an insightful conversation with Caterina Scaramelli about her book How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey published by Stanford University Press in 2021. Drawing on her longterm ethnographic fieldwork in two deltas in Turkey – namely, Gediz on the Aegean cost and Kizilirmak delta on the Black Sea – Scaramelli’s book shows that politics is not simply projected onto ecologies and materials. Rather, people make politics through them. In this conversation, we discussed the paths that led her to this research, how her work challenges the binary understanding of infrastructure and ecology, the insightful concept of 'moral ecology' that she develops in the book, and the unique perspective anthropology provides in understanding human-animal relations. Additionally, we talked about her new research on the politics and poetics of seed preservation. Caterina Scaramelli is a Senior Lecturer in the department of Earth & Environment at Boston University. She holds a PhD from MIT's History, Anthropology, and STS program. She has also been a fellow in the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, and taught anthropology at Amherst College. Her research asks how and why communities and individuals undertake projects of environmental stewardships, and the political stakes, effects, and multispecies entanglements of these projects. In addition to her book How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey, she has published peer-reviewed articles in top journals such as Cultural Anthropology, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Anthropology News and several book chapters in edited volumes.