| Kayseri. They talked of living in urban comfort, and continuing to farm their land by contracting and commuting. Another successful migrant had opened a wholesale grocery business in Kayseri, using a younger brother still resident in the village as partner. Several bought urban plots or houses or flats and eventually moved into them, perhaps retaining a village home for the summer months and farming some land by contract or sharecropping or renting. In several cases where a man has several sons, they will set up separate households but still co-operate closely economically in enterprises outside the village. Or they may quarrel and go their own ways. Migrant Households |
| The villages have exported a large number of households. Very |
| roughly, I estimate that if we reckon, as the villagers themselves usually do, patrilineally, then each 1950-52 household is represented now by almost three households. I estimate, pending full analysis, that about a half of the households descended from the 1950-52 households are now in towns. For S village, most of them work in construction, from one rich contractor, and another six or seven smaller contractors, through many comfortable subcontractors, down to housepainters who earn now little more than unskilled labourers. There are also shopkeepers, wholesalers, milk selling businesses, minibus and lorry operators, a sewer pipe manufacturer, and a German trained doctor practising in Hamburg. Many of the urban children are now achieving professional level educations. There are also casualties. There are some alcoholics and compulsive gamblers, at least one disastrously so. Some of the urban born children are unskilled unemployed, or low paid workers in the private sector, renting poor homes and thus joining the urban poor. Interestingly, I have a strong impression that E village not only contributes more educated migrants, but also more households to the 'proletariat' - those with nothing to sell but their labour, and not much skill at that. |
| In other words, people who themselves or whose parents lived in a |
| poor village, with close and intimate if often hostile and certainly unequal relations, now span positions in the national urban hierarchy from a few rich middle class down to a few very poor. All of them are strongly aware of their village of origin, and most of them maintain relations with it, and their village kin, and with their kin and fellow villagers in towns. Yet they are now a heterogeneous network, and certainly do not seem to constitute a working |
| - 10 |
| class, still less a 'proletariat'. Partly, because of this heterogeneity, partly because my analysis is incomplete, I do not here elaborate on the complex |
| issues all this raises. |
| Demographically, my provisional figures for S village show the |
| average household size in the village in 1986 as 5.74 (6.0 in 1950, 6.4 in 1971), and in the towns as 4.25. The number of multiple households (those housing more than one married couple) in the village was one in four, whereas in the town it was one in twelve. At first sight, this fits the almost universal sociological cliche that urbanisation and industrialisation cause a change from the 'extended family' to the 'nuclear' family. Certainly there are major changes in domestic structures, and in the way kinship works and the uses to which it is put. But these changes are complex. In the short run, some of the statistical change is related to the typical age of migrant household heads and the fact that the bulk of the urban households have moved out within the last twenty years.9 In the longer run, we have to distinguish changes imposed by the constraints of the housing and labour markets from changes in norms and images of family life and kinship obligations. Social Relations: The Villages |
| I use this wide heading to enable me to make only a few selected |
| points about the social consequences of the vastly increased prosperity in the villages. |
| Government initiatives, sometimes solicited, have provided a number |
| of new amenities; schools, roads, electricity, piped water, irrigation in E village, access to medical services, village telephones. Private initiatives have brought buses, travelling shops and weekly markets, a huge increase in domestic carpet weaving. Higher incomes have provided adequate diets, decent clothes, far more domestic heating, more, better and larger houses, far more and far more showy furnishings and domestic appliances,l° especially televisions and refrigerators; and a whole range of other commodities and baubles - spectacles, detergents, toys, footballs, cosmetics, nicnacs, gadgets. The poor are fewer and less desperate than their counterparts of 1950, though the general level of hope and aspiration may make their poverty more conspicuous and more galling. In fact, the poor are almost all not 'structurally ' poor, but individual victims of ill health, misfortune or handicap. |
| 9 Gilleard and Gurkan (1986) show that towns have less than their share of the old. |
| 10 Gilsenan (1982) pp.l85-6 with striking insight contrasts the |
| austere traditional guest room with the bourgeois salon, and links it to changes in domestic space and furnishings for rich and middle peasants. |
| - ll |
| Two negative and polemical points. First, exploitation. Neither within |
| the villages, nor between more successful and less successful migrants is there any increase of exploitation. There is no tendency to concentrate land holdings, and indeed the landless and unemployed are less exploited by powerful fellow villagers, who not long ago could and sometimes did use violence; more sons, more guns. Second, dependence. Obviously, the villages are now far more 'dependent.' They never were independent; but now they are closely integrated into the national economy, and directly dependent on national and international labour markets. Economic policies control the profitability of agriculture, the opportunities for investment, the terms of trade, the rate of inflation, the viability of the carpet industry.( Are they in fact more vulnerable than subsistence peasants or pastoral nomads, who have to cope independently with weather, disease, enemies, and governments?) In return, they enjoy a much higher standard of living, a much greater range of economic choice, and above all they and their children are much more prone to stay alive. And many of them have some cushion of reserve resources against calamity. |
| Next, I discuss two large and difficult issues, which are related; the |
| villages as social units, social entities; and inequality and hierarchy within them. I was struck in 1950 with the self conscious unity of the villages, and the fact that movement of men between them was rare. Most men belonged very sharply to, and remained for life in the village of their birth. Though about half the women changed villages at marriage, they too remained firmly members of their village, or of their two villages. |
| Obviously, regular pendular migration, and much more strikingly, |
| household migration blurs this sharp frontier. Individual members develop loyalties and ties outside the village, and later even people who reside entirely in towns continue to regard themselves and to be regarded as members of the village. Many of them contribute cash and labour to village households, and many of them receive produce, and at times financial help or capital from the village. But obviously, the degree of 'membership' varies from case to case, with personality, circumstances, time away from the village; and for the town born children the ties are much weaker and even more variable. We are dealing with something not measurable. 'Membership' of the village depends partly on material commitment - land, remittances, houses, loans, - and partly on identity, moral commitment, and time allocations in people's social networks. Even for those who remain |
| Iy. |
| - 12 |
| in the village, the 'meaning' of belonging to it changes. In 1950, the village was the main arena for success, power, achievement. Now people see a very much wider and more complex world of competition and success. How much the village matters varies with the individual and with her or his circumstances. |
| Secondly, the village hierarchy. In 1950, opportunities to accumulate |
| resources were extremely limited. Those who owned land, and had sons and animals were at the top. Those with little land, little domestic labour and fighting power, and few or no animals were not in position to acquire them, except gradually by good fortune, hard work, and sharp judgement over a long period. (Stirling 1965pp. 13446). Urban earnings, and especially foreign earnings, altered this stability. By and large, those with both material resources, and with sophistication and social networks, are likely to do best. But success in the new ways of accumulation is only loosely related to previous positions in the village. One set of brothers from a very poor father, an old man still living austerely in the old 1950 house, were all prosperous contractors and subcontractors in 1986. Such a continuing series of changes in what was a fairly stable social order complicates relations of inequality in the village. Instead of an agreed hierarchy of force and ownership, the new hierarchy is far less homogeneous or consensual, depending on a display of consumer symbols rather than on the unspoken, agreed reality of village power. (Gilsenan 1982 p.186). |
| One final point about social relations. The villages, by sending out |
| labour migrants, take on a new organisational role. They become colonisers of the towns, centres of a web of relations from Europe to Saudi Arabia. The village now has three kinds of members. First, it has its residents, whose daily work is concerned with with the day to day maintenance and survival of the people (cooking, mothering, house work), with the land and animals, with village services, or with carpet weaving. Second, it has, as formal but absent residents, workers who work outside it, but spend their vacations in and their earnings on the village; they belong to village households as household heads, or as sons and brothers. Thirdly, there are households of village people in Kayseri, Adana, Antalya, Ankara and so on; and in Europe. These do not normally contribute money, though many do; but they do visit, they often use the village or migrant fellow villagers to find spouses for their young, and they turn to the village at life crises and in troubles and disasters. |