‘Armenia’s blue-eyed beauty’ is greening. Lake Sevan – a national park, the subject of environmentalist discourses and simultaneously perceived as an important resource with its fish and freshwater, forms a hotspot for contestations over nature management and economic regulation. As the Armenian state becomes more visible in the basin of the Lake, through fishing bans and a new bureaucracy, fishers become desperate in their attempts to remain in their coastline villages and secure their livelihood through their centuries-old craft, one of the few remaining jobs in the periphery of the post-Soviet country. Through an ethnography of fishing, state intervention and nature protection at Lake Sevan, I explore the production and shifting of boundaries between nature use and nature preservation. I treat human labor as being part of nature, and the relationship between the state/capital and nature as dialectical. I analyze the contradictions of the state and capitalism, their attempts at producing nature and their inevitable dependence on it.
Research interests: political ecology, ecological change, nature management, state and bureaucratization, (informal-illegal) labor, fishing communities, (post-)Soviet capitalism