ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the genesis of the Keban Dam in the 1950s and 1960s through a series of interlocking discourses. It examines not only the statements and actions of the engineers and politicians who designed, built, and funded the project, but the writers, poets, and journalists who generated a new literary discourse to support environmental transformation. The Keban Dam’s physical properties made the construction of additional dams on the Euphrates River more plausible because of its control of the river’s flow. The notion of “frontier” operates in the chapter in two ways, relying first on the idea of eastern Anatolia as a frontier region, and, second, on the concept of the Keban Dam project as an inception point or boundary, as the necessary project for further imagining and engineering. Biography provides one way to analyze how science and engineering connected to bureaucracy and government in the Turkish Republic in the period following the Second World War.
