UC Davis

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of pasture-cheesemaking in Kars, Northeastern Turkey, amid politicized boundaries and transnational connections. It investigates cheesemaking within the larger agro-pastoral worlds molded by the everyday practices of animal care, dairy crafts, and technosciences, and regulated by the nation-state politics of food safety and national security. Focusing on a farmers’ association in a village in Kars, I question the ways in which pasture-cheesemaking enabled farmers to organize for “a better life” for their more-than-human community. Cheesemaking is not a mere economic opportunity or a milestone industry; it is also a process through which local communities can reimagine places to make a better life in a depopulated village in rural Turkey. Throughout the dissertation, I explore how cheese has become an unexpected agent to remember the shared violent past and circumvent the spatiality of state and ethnopolitical boundaries, while it also makes new places, communities, and technosciences through material practices of composing archives, doing scientific research and sustaining dairy production in Northeastern Turkey. I approach cheesemaking from practices that precede and remain as the underpinning of the dairy craft, namely mera hayvancılığı (agro-pastoralism) and processes of arranging pastures for dairy production. I focus on two kinds of trademark cheeses of Kars: gravyer and kaşar. I argue that appropriating the Swiss cheesemaking heritage of the early 20th century as Boğatepe Gravyer cheese and composing the archive of cheesemaking in the village ecomuseum entailed place-making through reconfiguration of dairy arrangements in the everyday practices of agro-pastoral livelihoods in Boğatepe pastures. By analyzing a nascent collaboration between small farmers, cheesemakers, and a group of dairy scientists engaged in the Geographical Indication certification process of Kars Kaşar cheese, I argue that the collaborative efforts have been challenging the Pasteurization procedures imposed by the industrial dairy standards, and “pasturing” the dairy arrangements of kaşar cheesemaking in the last fifteen years. Lastly, I investigate the dynamics of the collaboration between cheesemakers and scientists. I suggest that this collaboration entailed pasture-cheese diplomacy, which not only obliged scientists to question the conventional approaches in dairy science research on traditional cheeses but also paved the way for new technoscientific interventions that would ensure crafting pastures into cheeses.