This paper will explore how different actors involved in Turkish forestry navigate the spheres of law, politics and science. Ideas and practices of nature have been an integral part of the nation-building project in modern Turkey and they have engendered different ways of imagining citizenship and the modern national subject throughout the twentieth century. This paper will focus on the dialogic relationship between three sets of actors, forest engineers, forest guards and forest villagers to investigate the intimate forms of state-making via forest management. Turkey’s forests have been owned and managed by the state since 1945. Forest villagers, who are defined by law as residents of villages in or adjacent to forests, are contracted by the state forestry administration and carry out a big portion of Turkey’s forest production. Forest management and production takes place in forest sub-districts, managed by state appointed forest engineers, who are representatives of a hegemonic scientific discourse in their relationships with forest villagers. Yet, the pervasiveness of this hegemony is often challenged on the ground when these engineers are expected to function as an intermediary between ideals and realities. Moreover, as civil servants, forest engineers also bear the burden of administrative desk duties which create a challenge to their presence in the field. This is where forest guards enter the scene as a liminal category between forest engineers and forest villagers. Since guards spend a lot of time in the forest and due to their rural backgrounds, they develop more intimate relationships with forest villagers. As decision makers at the micro level, forest guards represent the spontaneous, contingent processes of state-making, which depend as much on the context as they do on laws and regulations. As such, they often form a bridge between forest engineers and the villagers and embody elements of statehood and a peasant mentality at the same time. This flexibility, which goes to the heart of the state-society dynamics within the context of forest management, inevitably raises the question of what the state is: Is it a rigid, written set of rules, regulations and laws? Or is the state the actual outcome, the lived experience of these rules, regulations and laws? How do different actors within the state bureaucracy negotiate policies? And how are new forms of personhood formed in the process? This paper will explore these questions based on historical and ethnographic evidence on forest management in northwestern Turkey.