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Abstract

This dissertation examines boutique (small-scale and quality-oriented) wine production in Turkey. In this study, I seek to understand how moral ideals and sentiments regarding modernism and rural development undergird new forms of agrarian entrepreneurialism that have transformed the structure and composition of agrarian society in Turkey’s northwest amid increasing religious conservatism and hyperinflation. I explore how boutique wineries’ secular, well-educated, and (upper-)middle-class owners reinvent themselves as post-industrial entrepreneurs. Though Turkey is not widely known as a wine-producing country, these entrepreneurs aim to be a part of the global fine wine circle despite the country’s authoritarian regime, which increasingly forces religious norms through excessive taxation and strict alcohol-related legislation. During my thirteen months of ethnographic research focusing on post-industrial entrepreneurs, grassroots farmers, and state institutions and their control, I primarily collected data as a resident anthropologist in post-industrial wineries in Turkey’s Thrace, the region adjacent to Greece and Bulgaria. Focusing on the Thrace Wine Route, Turkey’s first wine trail established in 2013, my project theorizes how “taste” and “quality” are situated vis-à-vis the political climate in the country. The dissertation advances two parallel concerns: It uncovers how the market for quality wine in Turkey has emerged through the country’s developmental and secular aspirations, and it considers how bureaucratic and legislative complications stemming from Islamist neoliberalism create an “anxious modernism” amongst the bourgeoning post-industrial wine producers.

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