How to Make a Wetland

"Caterina Scaramelli is a deeply informed guide to the wetlands, whose very ecological richness and complexity make them an ideal lens for understanding what humans have done with and to the environment. How to Make a Wetland is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship, nuance, and lucidity."-James C. Scott, Yale University
"How to Make a Wetland is a nuanced analysis of the competing moral ecologies that go into the making and maintaining of Turkey's wetlands. Caterina Scaramelli's lucid ethnography is a crucial addition to studies of lived environments and environmental infrastructure-a refreshing new take on anthropocentric development processes in Turkey and beyond."-Elif Babuel, Mount Holyoke College
"How to Make a Wetland offers a model for attending to the making of value in environmental politics. Swamp drainers, iridescent birds, a contested fishing lagoon, and water buffalo biopolitics are just some of the highlights in Caterina Scaramelli's vivid study of Turkey's deltas."-Tim Choy, University of California, Davis
"[How to Make a Wetland] makes an irrefutable case why ethnographers of Turkey can no longer treat the natural environment as a mere backdrop to human culture. Horses, flamingoes, buffaloes, egrets, and swamphens populate its pages as stakeholders in wetland management plans. Whether knee-deep in mud, on a dinghy boat, or in a university office, Scaramelli shows how environmental conservation in modern Turkey has evolved in dialogue with those colorful creatures and the boggy ground under their feet."-Faisal Husain, Critical Inquiry
"Through insightful analysis of the processes and effects of environmental transformations, this fascinating and original ethnography shows how the work of creating wetlands is central to moral ecological claims made by the author's diverse interlocutors (famers, bureaucrats, scientists, activists, developers, etc.) in two delta regions of Turkey.Stylistically, the book is almost lyrical, as the ebbs and flows of water (and the stickiness of mud) are used as a metaphor for the larger project making this a most engaging read."-Committee for the Albert Hourani Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association
"How to Make a Wetland is a fine-grained and rich ethnography of a politically and materially muddled terrain, and Scaramelli provides several compelling ideas to enrich understandings of varied people in their variable environment."-Gabriel Urlich Lennon, Anthropology Book Forum
"By conducting exemplary ethnographic fieldwork with buffalo farmers, fishers, and rice cultivators, as much as with scientists, ornithologists, and conservationists, [Scaramelli] unveils the material, political, scientific, and cultural processes that underly the transformation of water-saturated environments into 'wetlands'."-Paolo Gruppuso, Conservation and Society