INFRASTRUCTURAL DECAY: Maintenance Ecologies and Labor in the Çoruh Basin

A growing ethnographic literature attends to maintenance and repair practices in the face of decay and ruination. This article explores the forms of decay that become an integral part of infrastructure maintenance. In Turkey's Çoruh Basin, hydroelectric dam constructions lead to a concern about the landscape's erosive character, which requires foresters' practices of watershed rehabilitation in the uplands to protect the dams against sediment accumulation in the reservoirs. The work of repairing ecologies for the long-term maintenance of dams, I contend, is undergirded by the gradual decay of another maintenance labor—that is, the villagers' arduous practices of tending landscape through farming and husbandry. Through an ethnographic study of how foresters and villagers experience the landscape under rehabilitation, this article offers a novel anthropological analytical perspective that foregrounds the continuum between maintaining and decaying, tracing the role of labored landscapes in this continuum. I argue that maintenance practices, while intending to counter decay, entail other forms of decay.