RESEARCH SEMINAR: Caterina Scaramelli

Speaker: Caterina Scaramelli, Boston University

Title of talk: What Seeds Carry: Sprouting, Keeping, and Exchanging in Turkey

Abstract: Starting in the early 2000s, Turkish legislators restructured the agricultural seed sector, with an eye towards creating stable commodities for international agricultural markets, produced by private seed breeders and safeguarded by varietal protection certifications. This seed policy also banned the commercial sale of farmer-saved seeds, and eliminated agricultural support to fields cultivated with non-certified varieties. At the same time, the ban stoked a mushrooming of municipal seed exchange festivals, seed cooperatives, and local seed preservation societies, associations, and informal efforts, which are ongoing. Subsequently, Turkish politicians, bureaucrats, and scientists from across the political spectrum have advanced new and often starkly contrasting claims about the cultural and scientific value that “local seed” varieties possess, framing them as key resources of Turkish national heritage, and as central bulwarks of agricultural resilience in the face of accelerating climate change, and raw genetic material for new commercial varietal development. This talk examines how small-scale farmers, activists, and scientists in Turkey’s Aegean region ascribe cultural and political meaning to local seeds (yerel tohumlar), an ever shifting, and elusive category. My entry point is a focus on three things that cultivated seeds do with people (and the other way round). Seeds sprout; seeds keep; and seeds travel. A focus on practice, alongside narrative, shows how meaning is made, contested, and remade through biological forms. This cultural and political ecology of seeds centers the life-worlds of agricultural plants themselves alongside the practices of the people who tend to them, and the institutions, markets, and politics through which people and their cultivated plants shape one other.

Bio: Caterina Scaramelli is a Senior Lecturer at Boston University, in the Department of Earth and Environment and is the author of “How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2021). She holds a PhD from MIT’s History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society Program, and has been a postdoctoral fellow in Amerst College’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and Yale University Agrarian Studies Program. Currently, she is working on an ethnography of agro-biodiversity in Turkey and the Mediterranean.