Follow the cheese: Pastoralism and rural change in contemporary Turkey

This study aims to examine the relationship between pastoralism and rural change in contemporary Turkey with a particular attention to the production and marketing of two famous kinds of cheese, namely tulum and kaşar identified mostly with the pastoralist tribes. There are many challenges to studying pastoralism, an area that has been largely overlooked by both policy makers and social scientists. In order to overcome these, I used both archival research and fieldwork. I limited my multi-sited fieldwork to Erzincan and Kars, and with the new connections I made, I extended it to Tunceli and Ardahan. In these areas, I interviewed members of the Şavaks and Karapapaks. The common characteristic of these pastoralist tribes is that they are also the main producers of two well-known cheese in Turkey. Since my research is shaped by the discussion of how to understand rural change through pastoralism, I first go into how pastoralism has been analyzed conceptually and historically in the existing literature. Then, I shed light on the social, economic, and ecological characteristics of the region and cities I study. Through an innovative conceptual approach to the data obtained from the interviews I analyze it as complaint transcript and assessed how pastoralists position themselves as subjects and how they conceive the state. Subsequently, the constitution of highlands is examined in their conceptual and legal development; highlands are a prerequisite for the existence of pastoralists. Applying findings from both fieldwork and local periodicals, I address the discrepancy between legal and normative perspectives, specifically the question of what constitutes the reality on the ground. Another original contribution of this thesis is the conceptualization of the cities of Kars and Erzincan as cheese lands, with special attention to the role of these tribes in the urban contexts, using the concept of terroir.