Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
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Page 211
Plate 12 force their duties are reciprocity, self-help and public opinion. The way these work in detail will be largely implied in the discussion of adultery and divorce which follows. By reciprocity, I mean the mutual dependence and in some casesaffection between man and wife, and between the couple and the two sets of close kin. By self-help, I mean the use of violence to defend honour and to avenge disgrace. By public opinion, I mean the concern with family reputation and the pressure thus exercised by the community towards conformity with the rules recognised by a consensus of village opinion. The first of these depends on the personal relations between the spouses; the second and third depend on the degree of each family's concern with its honour, and are more effective for those who lay claim to respectability and probity; less effective for those with no pretensions who accept a place at the bottom of the village hierarchy.
Adultery
Self-help is the recourse of any man whose honour has been tarnished by an approach to or insulting of his women folk. The most serious case is adultery. A wronged husband is expected to kill lover and delinquent wife. A man released from gaol in 1950 under an amnesty was greeted and presented to me as a hero because he had done just this. Clearly, the successful execution of this duty requires arms, courage and strong feelings. Not every adulterer is killed, nor does every husband wronged in this way attempt double murder. One man in Sakaltutan had divorced a wife for adultery without violence; and one woman in each village was said to be a runaway wife from elsewhere, with no mention of violence. Nevertheless, the danger is genuine.
People have obvious motives for keeping their own adultery a close secret, and equally obvious motives for concealing known cases from an outsider. Nevertheless, some people also have reasons for denigrating their neighbours, and others are at times indiscreet. I am confident that adultery was in fact rare. This is the more remarkable because some wives are left alone for months, even years. Thus two young wives in Sakaltutan, sharing a household because their husbands were brothers, lived by themselves with their young children. One husband had been away for four years, and the other for one. All questions about the wives were met with the standard answer that adultery was unthinkable, and that it involved the risk of death or at least being run out of the village. In another case, a younger brother was sharing a not very adequate house with his absent brother's wife, yet all questions met an equally steady front of denial. Not even the women, who are much less concerned about preserving the village reputation, breathed a word of scandal to us about either of these two cases.
Scandals about married women do of course occur. After I had left Sakaltutan, two lineages accused each other of making approaches to their own young wives, and this quarrel led to two deaths and one serious injury. On one occasion in Elbashï a child's reported claim to have witnessed a married woman with a lover behind a wall in a field was discussed and rejected as a priori highly improbable, and, in the light of relations between accuser's parents and the people accused, likely to be a malicious fabrication.
The Definition and Measurement of Divorce
In theory, a village marriage is dissolved in village eyes by the husband dismissing the wife, according to the Sheriat. Village informants told me that witnesses were required, though strictly they are not (Vesey-Fitzgerald (1931) p 73). But in specific cases, people do not discuss the formal validity of a divorce. Indeed, the village has no distinct words for the `separation' of married partners and `divorce', the complete ending of all rights and duties. In most cases, separation constitutes divorce, and in those cases where a couple are regarded as still married though separate, it may be necessary to state this circumstance in full to make the situation clear.
The procedure is as simple as it can be. If a man is dissatisfied, he expels his wife, and she returns to her nearest living male kinsman, normally her father. If a wife is dissatisfied, she simply goes home. Quarrels between spouses are often complex, and it may not be clear who is responsible for a separation.
What happens next depends on circumstances. I have not been able to make a reliable count of cases, but village in-
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