M. Fatih Tatari, "Pasture-Cheese Diplomacy" [Voices from the Field: 2025 Spring Anthropology Talks #4]

Speaker bio: M. Fatih Tatari received his Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis, in 2023. His dissertation was entitled "Worlds of Dairy Farming in Northeastern Turkey: Making Boundaries, Cheeses, Communities, and Technosciences." Tatari is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering and META (Social Sciences and Humanities for Science and Technology) at Politecnico di Milano. His research interests include political ecology, agriculture and food, and science and technology studies.

Abstract: This talk explores dairy infrastructures in rural Kars, a northeastern border province of Turkey. Based on an 18-month ethnographic research on dairy farming and dairy sciences of artisanal cheeses, I conceptualize dairy infrastructures as the material web of relations that makes dairy production possible through sociotechnical practices of obtaining milk in pastures and crafting it into cheeses through artisanal and technoscientific practices. Food safety regulations of the early 2000s, grounded in “Pasteurian technosciences”, have promoted the industrialization of dairy infrastructures at the expense of “unsafe” dairy production in pastures. My research focuses on an unlikely collaboration between scientists, dairy farmers, cheesemakers, and public officials in designing and implementing the Kars Kaşar Cheese Geographical Indication, which has altered dairy infrastructures in rural Kars over the past decade through, what I call, “practices of pasturing”. Through scrutinizing how pastures appear in the milk, curd, and cheeses that are crafted in rural dairies and studied in laboratories, I argue that practices of pasturing challenge industrial dairy infrastructures by prioritizing pasture-milk that connects pastures and dairies, as well as by calibrating dairy craft and technosciences to everyday circumstances in pastures. 

In this talk, I concentrate on the recent collaborative processes of dairy science and crafts that made new connections and boundaries between pastures, dairies, laboratories, scientists, and cheesemakers. I analyze the ways in which these processes have altered dairy scientists’ research agenda on artisanal cheesemaking, and also destabilized the epistemic boundaries between scientific and traditional knowledges. I argue that the pasture-cheeses enable a diplomacy that leads scientists questioning the conventional approaches in dairy science research on “traditional” cheeses. Recent attempts of situating microbial ecologies in Kars cheeses, while following the recent trends in global microbial research, point both to the new aspirations that emerge from the collaborative processes, and to the limitations in designing and practicing research in rural Kars and different universities in Turkey. My talk unravels the ways in which cheesemakers’ concerns can sneak into the scientific research, become interwoven with the concerns of scientists, and challenge the conventional practices of knowledge production on artisanal cheeses.