ABSTRACT
Kestanelik translates from the Turkish most roughly as chestnut-ness, but of course, that does not translate it at all. The work of this chapter is to show why this is and to explain how the resolution of this non-translation looms over humanity’s struggle with a kaleidoscopic whorl of environmental danger. Getting to chestnut-ness, hereafter kestanelik, will require twin and parallel conceptual tracks. On one side, my chapter’s content must bind to actual trees and their relationship with actual, particular people. On the other, it will be necessary to note the flashing implications of this content for the broad practice and rhetoric of environmental conservation, way beyond these trees and these people. The evidence I will present for this task will be a weave of ethnographic observations – made during months of fieldwork across Turkey between 2015 and 2017 – and more flowing and personal narratives of learning, insight and discovery, which I experienced as I sought understanding of the value and esteem for the chestnut species in Turkey, not just in chestnuts and chestnut trees, but around kestanelik.
