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| Paul Stirling | Jan 94 |
| University of Kent at Canterbury, United Kingdom. {This article was published in Humana: Bozkurt Guvenc’e Armagan Serpil Altuntek et al. (ed.) Ankara: Ministry of Culture 1994. ISBN 9751714613 } |
| Labour Migration in Turkey: Thirty Five |
| Years of Changes |
| Paul Stirling |
| Note: The main recent research on which this article is based was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council of the U.K. (Grants G000 232121, 1985-6,and R000 23 1955,1989-91), for which I am most grateful. I also wish to thank the Republic of Turkey for permission to carry out fieldwork. An earlier version of it was presented to the International Scientific Conference: The Problems of Migration, Department of Social Demography, Institute of Sociology, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Moscow, 17th -21st June 1991. Migration as Process Labour migration is a process of complexity and variety. I argue that this simple point has interesting and serious implications, and I illustrate some of them both from a brief model of the history of the Turkish Republic, and from my own research in Turkish villages over a period of forty years. By labour migration, I mean a move by individuals or |
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| households, not by larger social units; people who migrate in order to work and earn somewhere else, because they perceive it to be to their advantage; they expect to gain, or to avoid loss or suffering. Such a move is affected by and affects the context from which the migrants move, the situation into which they move, the migrants themselves, and the relations between the two ends of their move. To put it more abstractly, in society, every ‘cause’ is already itself an effect of several causes, every effect is in turn one causal influence in a number of further effects. This cross cutting network of multiple causes and multiple effects includes some `negative feedback', that is, controls tending to stability, and some `positive feedback', that is, escalating changes. For example, some authors have argued that labour migration actually enables an agriculturally based rural community - a village- to continue its way of life in new circumstances, by inhibiting some of the potential changes [.Watson 1958.]; but at the same time it is obvious that such migration must also produce continuing - escalating - changes in the exporting community. This complexity of social processes makes our task as social scientists enormously difficult. If we ask what are the causes of labour migration in Turkey, there can be no simple answer, nor even a list of answers. There are many causes, and the relations and the quantitative balance between them is messy and controversial. If we ask what are the effects of labour migration in Turkey, the list is likely to be long and inconsequential, with overlaps and imprecisions. If we try to fit these two lists into a more complex `systemic' model of wider social processes, this model can only be partial and provisional. Moreover, each phenomenon, while it is itself both a causal factor and an effect in the field we are analysing, is also interacting with a whole set of other phenomena outside that field. |
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| Time is a further complication. The factors affecting, and the consequences of, Turkish labour migration from villages to towns operate differently at different periods - in 1940, in 1970, in 1994. So disentangling the network of causes and effects in labour migration is in principle immensely difficult. Two or more (three? four?) centuries ago, some unprecedented changes took place in northern Europe and the USA, which produced further, startling changes, at unprecedented speeds. These changes are normally called the rise of capitalism, or the industrial revolution; the fashionable intellectual cop-out is ‘modernisation’. Similar kinds of changes have taken place in Turkey in the last seventy years. I argue that one necessary and central part of this process is the massive migration from villages and agriculture to towns and other occupations. In this article, I only claim to make some relevant comments towards unravelling its role in this process. Research and the Villages I came to Turkey with my wife to do anthropological field work, in March 1949. We lived and worked in two villages near Kayseri. I lived in Turkey on and off till September 1952, spending about ten months in S village, and about seven in E. In 1971, I attempted a restudy; but for political reasons I was only permitted two weeks research, in which, with massive help from my official protector, I recorded a swift census. I was able to visit the villages for a day or two at a time most years from 1974 to 1983. From 1983 to 1986 I joined the staff of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. I did serious field work, with the collaboration of the late Mehmet Arikan, Emine Onaran Incirlioglu and others briefly in 1985, and from February to August 1986. I would like to thank with all my heart the people of the two villages for their generosity and friendship, over forty years. It astonishes me how willingly so many people bear with being studied by |
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| academics, and indeed share with them their homes, their food, and their affection. In this article, I use specific data from S village. S is roughly 30 kilometres east of Kayseri; in 1949, the village mud road had just become passable for very infrequent lorries, which were destroying it, and which took two hours to reach Kayseri. Now there is a metalled road with regular buses which take thirty minutes. The village was poor; the largest household land holding was about 30 hectares; 10 out of 100 households had none. Land was fallowed in alternate years. Yields of cereal were less then 5 to 1 of seed; roughly 100 kg per dec. . E village was a District administrative centre further east. It owned more land per head of its 212 households than other nearby villages. In spite of its greater importance, greater contacts, extra land per head, and the greater sophistication of a few top households, it was the similarities in the way of life and the standard of living that surprised me. My more general model fits E equally well, but I have drawn no ethnographic illustrations from it here. S Village |
| Village Migra |
| nt Year |
| Pop Hhs |