Ethnographics Gallery University of Kent

Turkish Village

Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.

Paul Stirling
CHAPTER EIGHT

KINSHIP

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Page 163


pressions can be misleading (p. 250). Most of the households were explicit about their lineage affiliations, associated with each other a great deal, and were loyal to the lineage in its quarrels. One oer household claimed to belong; the head, a poor, old, and sick man, was an immigrant, married to a woman of the lineage, but did not join in lineage activities.

D Lineage, Ten Households.

Three brothers, including Haci Omer, dominated this group, and were very influential in the village. The heads of another group of four households were sons and grandsons of a man brought to the village by his widowed mother, and brought up as the son of a close agnate of the father of the first three. Two other households claimed definitely to be of common descent with this group, but did not know how, and one other belonged, but its young head was on military service. The lineage claimed descent from one of four brothers said to have founded the village.

G Lineage, Six Households.

All were descended from the grandfather of the oldest living generation, but showed no conspicuous solidarity. They claimed descent from the village founders.

S Lineage, Six Households.

Five of these, including Ziya, were brothers or brother's son to each other, and one young man was attached through a brother of their common ancestor. A very self-conscious and slightly belligerent group, but with its own sharp internal rift. All were close neighbours. They claimed descent from the village founders.

F Lineage, Nine Households.

Divided into two sharply distinct groups, in each of which were brothers and brothers' sons, apparently connected through a common great-grandfather. One segment (five households) was much poorer than the other. Neither was belligerent. Probably also descended from the vi1lage founders.

H Lineage.

Haci Osman, a well-to-do man who had been to Mecca in 1949, was the head of one of four agnatically related households (H). The head of one of these was his old, sick, ineffectual father's

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