Ethnographics Gallery University of Kent

Turkish Village

Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.

Paul Stirling
CHAPTER EIGHT

KINSHIP

previous page

Page 176



Over one-third of the marriages I recorded in Sakaltutan crossed village frontiers (p. 205). Each of these would create or renew a number of affinal and cognatic ties. Quite often ties between two lineages in different villages were maintained over number of generations by cross-cousin marriage, full or classificatory. Thus G Lineage had exchanged women for at least three generations with a lineage in another village, with whom they had thus established a complex set of personal kin ties.

Agnatic kin ties between villages are rare. Men seem to move normally between villages in only three types of situation. The first, of which traces survive, was probably common in the past. A poor boy or young man may become a servant, çirak, p. 56, and remain permanently in the village of his master. Secondly, if a widow marries to a new village or returns from her husband's to her own, she may take a small son with her, and he may then remain as a member of his mother's village of residence. Thirdly, an adult man may occasionally marry into and move to another village, if such a move offers better prospects than remaining in his father's house. In almost all cases of this type I came across, the man moved to his mother's village and married a close agnate of hers - very often a girl with no brothers. No adult man had moved into Sakaltutan for two or three generations, and only three had left as adults to settle permanently in other villages. Even Elbashï, an administrative centre with land in plenty until the end of the Second World War, had had to my knowledge only eight immigrant households in two generations, apart from the wartime refugees from eastern Turkey. Most of these had married in or come in as stepsons. One was a stranger, and another was a Kurd who was married to a woman of the area, whose sister was also married in Elbashï.

Even where agnatic ties do exist between villages, the primary duty of defence and revenge seems to lapse. No quarrel or feud between lineages ever crossed village frontiers, and while brothers might maintain very close ties, including an annual sharing of the produce of the patrimonial land, their rights and duties were not different in kind from inter-village ties of other kin.

A kinsman in another village is not, as in one's own village,

next page
Contents Page