| Universities. The choice of area was determined largely by the kind invitation of the American Mission Station at Talas, near Kayseri, to use the station as a base. In view of the inadequacy at that stage of my spoken Turkish, the proffered help with transport problems, the detailed knowledge of the area which Dr Nute of the Mission was able to put at my disposal, and above all of the solution which the invitation offered of our domestic problems, I eagerly accepted it, and owe a great debt of gratitude to our American friends of their indispensable help in our troubles. The actual village for field work I chose on the grounds that it presented no conspicuously unusual features, was suitable practically, and was both within walking distance, in the winter snow, of our base, and yet well away from the ring of suburban villages round Kayseri. At every turn in Turkey, I was treated with overwhelming hospitality, and at the same time, received encouragement and facilities from all concerned in the carrying out of my work. Especial thanks are due to my friends in Ankara University, and to the Vali of Kayseri and all the members of his staff with whom I came in contact. Although the history of the Ottoman Empire is adequately documented, the vast literature on Turkish social life is for the most part irrelevant to my immediate purpose. Except for recent works in Turkish, there is no serious study of village life. The main source of information on the social life is personal memoirs and travel books. A very large part of this material is concerned only with town life, and then mainly under upper class town life. The reminiscence of travellers and archaeologists on their visits to villages seldom provide details of the sort which are directed comparable to my own findings. This is hardly surprising. They were not looking for the kind of things which interest the modern social anthropologist, and, even if they had been, these things cannot be discovered by the methods they employed. It is easy enough to see, when one is resident in a village, how different the village must appear to visitors, even to the town Turks, who, unlike European visitors, miss none of the conversation that takes place within their hearing. The guest is taken to one of the best guest rooms in the village, and given the best the village can produce in the way of food, much better than the villagers would eat themselves if the guest were not present. The visitors meet in the guest room only a selection of the villagers. From such visits, only general and often unreliable impressions of village life can be formed. Even when the travellers record valuable pieces of information, they do not form part of any social whole, but are taken from different villages, which may well have |
| differed considerably from each other in social organisation. Before one has done fieldwork for oneself, it is difficult to know where, among this unorganised information, to turn one’s attention, and after field work it seems mostly superficial or irrelevant. Histories in English of contemporary Turkey since the great revolution of Ataturk, are even less helpful on the question of the life of the villages. Many of these books are superficial, repeating propaganda of the Republican People’s Party, the governing party from 1923 until 1950, and concentrating on political issues and the life of the towns. One can glean from them a little information of an economic sort, but that is all. There is room for a careful and critical study of the social history of Turkey since the Republic came into being. There is, however, one academic study of a Turkish village in English by John A Morrison, based on field work carried out in 1931-2, and written upon for presentation as a doctorate thesis at Chicago University in 1939. Dr Morrison did not know Turkish fluently and reports that the community which he studied was highly suspicious of strangers, and that, therefore, an intimate relationship was impossible. Partly on these grounds, partly, presumably because of the direction of his interest, the study deals excellently, and in great detail, with the pattern of land holding, and the method of agriculture and animal husbandry. It gives a description of the village itself, but it provides little material on social life. I have also been privileged to see unpublished material of Mr R D Robinson of the Institute of Current World Affairs, New York, who has been engaged on what one might call social fact finding in Turkey. He aimed at an overall knowledge of Turkish economics and politics and social life, and his interest in the village was only one of many, but he did make an effort to go and see for himself. He is a careful and acute observer, and I found his comments, both personal and written, most enlightening. In the introductory chapters, I have made much use of his material on general matters which I myself did not have time to follow up in person. Much material is available in Turkish on the villages, but most of it is in the nature of generalised description. No one, so far as I know, has ever settled in a village for any considerable length of time for the purpose of social research. I have the text of an unpublished study of a village conducted by Mr I Yasa, a sociology graduate of an American university, made when he was teaching at the Village Institute of Hasanoglu, in the Ankara Province. He spent three years on this work, and it contains a great deal of detail. It only came into my hands recently, and I have not yet examined it thoroughly, |
| owing to my slowness in reading Turkish. Several other works based on direct investigation exist, some of which I have read, but I thought it better to preserve the independence of my own account, rather than to attempt to make direct use of this material in writing up my own, so that others may compare and cross-check my account with existing accounts. Since no account of a Turkish village exists in English, and since there is no comparative material available, I have considered it my first duty to present my material as a straightforward description. This thesis is, I hope, a preliminary report, for it is my intention to return for further studies in the same area, at the end of which I hope to be able to give a fuller and a more theoretical account of the social organisation of the villages, with a comparative approach. It was repeatedly pointed out to me in Turkey that the village I had chosen was only one of thousands, among which were many different types. All the evidence I have, including reading, discussion and my own direct observation, suggests that the social organisation of the plateau villages does not vary greatly, that is to say that although there are considerably differences in detail, much of what I found would hold true for most of them. Briefly, for example, although details of marriage customs vary from area to area, the general scheme followed at weddings seems to be similar in all Turkish villages, and in all of them, weddings occupy an important and central position in the social life. The relations of men and women, the degree of contact with government, the distribution of land, the means of livelihood, the pattern of migrant labour, are all known to vary not only from area to area, but in some cases from village to village, but the rough outlines are repeated all over Turkey. It is plain, therefore, that though I can make no claim that the account given is typical of plateau villages, nor even of villages in the Kayseri area, I can say that this detailed description of one village should throw light on other Turkish villages. When I say that my object has been straightforward description, I mean that I have not attempted to apply directly to the material any theoretical notions, nor, for the most part, to discuss theoretical problems. But the achievement of a straightforward description is by no means a simple matter. It requires first of all a great deal of skill in writing, a struggle with words. Skill in this art is not a matter of embellishment, it is a matter of ability to do the job which one has set out to do. I make no claim to have been victorious in this struggle; I can only say that I am at least aware of constant failure to say exactly what I wished to say. |
| Moreover, a description of anything forces the writer to make constant decisions on what is of interest and importance and what is not. In describing the social structure of a village it is essential to draw on a general background of theoretical knowledge for guidance in these decisions. To put the matter another way, a sociological account is bound to use a sociological vocabulary, and in order to write such an account, it is essential to understand the current usage of relevant terms. The use of such words does not mean leading the account with jargon; rather it should be the aim to use everyday language wherever it is adequate, in order that the specialised vocabulary may be made to do its job of meeting needs that can be met no other way. Nor does it necessarily involve the writer in an attempt to define his terms before he begins. In coping with the complexity of a social description, simple definitions are treacherous because the writer is almost bound to use the defined words in senses other than the defined one, thus creating confusion, and exposing himself to criticism. Some modern anthropologists might do well to take the advice of Aristotle, not to attempt greater precision in any given research than the subject allows. (1) In social description, it may often be wiser to allow context to make clear the intention of a certain usage, thus allowing some elasticity, provided that one is on the watch against serious ambiguity. It is at least a tenable view that at present social anthropology advances, not by discovering general laws, but by evolving more and more acute descriptive analyses of particular societies. These analyses act as models for other field workers, so long as the society which they are studying is sufficiently similar to make such models significant. To quote an obvious example, Professor Evens-Pritchard’s analysis of the Nuer political system has helped to throw light on a number of societies with similar systems, not only in respect of their points of resemblance but equally on points of difference. In tackling a Turkish village, I have entered a field where models of analysis are not numerous. General anthropological knowledge contributes, to a considerable degree, to understanding the village, but it is not a primitive society in any sense except that it was until recently largely illiterate. It has always been a part of the Ottoman Empire, or of the Republic of Turkey, with direct government contacts, and it has also belonged, consciously and piously, to the universal religion of Islam. Published accounts do exist of similar studies. In particular, I read carefully Professor Embree’s account of a Japanese village, Dr Miner’s of a French-Canadian village, and Dr Hsiao-Tung Fei’s of a Chinese village (2). In all of these books, it seems to me, nothing more is offered that a careful account at a descriptive level of what the people do. In none of them does the analysis offer a model, beyond perhaps |
| revealing that analyses of villages which are part of a much larger and more complex social entities are difficult to analyse. The study of Irish Peasantry by Professor Arensberg, (3) perhaps because it avoids direct description of one community, does offer a deeper level of analysis, and succeeds in presenting an account of social life in terms of the particular family structure of the society. But the differences between the Irish and Turkish countrysides are too great for me to use this study as a model for illuminating the society in which I worked. Both in the field and in writing this account, I have felt this lack of any model of analysis, or of any clear pattern coming out of the material. Political and judicial matters are largely taken care of by the state so that there is no political structure to study. There is no marked stratification, no groups depending on formal qualification for membership, no religious groups or secret societies. Hence I have found it difficult to decide what was relevant and what should be left out, and in fact I would be hard pressed to maintain that I have applied to this problem any consistent criterion. I have endeavoured to give an account of the social relations within the village, and between the village and its social environment, including the economic and political relations. I have, therefore, felt that detailed information about ceremony and ritual is not relevant, unless it has a recognisable connection with these social relations. For the offering of such description of social relations under the title “social structure”, I can quote no less an authority that Professor A R Radcliffe- Brown, (Presidential Address to the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1940). “In the first place I regard as a part of the social structure of any society all social relations of person to person ... Secondly, I include under social structure the differentiation by their social role.” Such a definition covers practically everything in this thesis except perhaps some of the details of income and expenditure in the chapters on economics. That it does so is in fact accidental, except in so far as the current ideas of social relations and social organisation are a part of the theoretical background which I bring to the work. I do not agree with Professor Radcliffe-Brown’s views on what a natural science is, nor on the similarity between the natural sciences and social anthropology, and his concept of a network of relationships which constitutes “a concrete reality” seems to me to have no direct usefulness when it comes to coping with a report on field work. Applied to social study, the term “structure” is in fact, in spite of Professor Radcliffe-Brown’s attempt at definition, still analogy, borrowed originally from building, and also now suggesting parallels between society and the study of living organisms. In some contexts it is appropriate, in others it is less so, in yet others it may be |