Ethnographics Gallery University of Kent

Turkish Village

Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.

Paul Stirling
CHAPTER NINE
MARRIAGE

previous page

Page 214


couple would normally have a technically invalid nikah performed, and be accepted as married though with some loss of face for all concerned.
In this society, then, a divorce is any separation which terminates a marriage. Whether or not a given marriage has terminated is not always easy to decide. If either party has firmly declared it to be so, or shown a definite intention to marry someone else, then it is terminated. But any eligible woman living apart from her husband is likely to be sought as a wife by widowers and divorces.

Apart from the problem of definition, measures of divorce which could be used for comparison with other societies would require data collected with a systematic care that I cannot retrospectively apply. Barnes (1949) makes clear the practical and statistical complications; and as he says (p. 58) `it (divorce) is a social process which has many aspects, some of which we can measure and some we cannot'. I therefore simply give such data as I have in some detail.

Cases and Causes of Divorce

I knew of roughly 450 marriages in each village, past and present. Whereas in Elbashï I recorded only eight specific cases of divorce, in Sakaltutan, where I was able to gather much more detail, I recorded twenty-six. Besides these I assume plausibly but arbitrarily that one other man, who had nine wives altogether, had divorced at least two of them; this makes twenty-eight in all.

I have more reliable figures for the marital histories of living husbands in Sakaltutan. Including the presumed case just mentioned, of 129 living husbands, eleven had been involved in fourteen divorces; of these nine had divorced one wife each, one three, and one probably at least two. These 129 living husbands had married 178 wives, of whom only 132 were still current wives, so that forty-six marriages had therefore terminated, of which at least fourteen had terminated in divorce; but a large majority of the 132 current marriages were extremely unlikely to end in divorce.

It is probable that a more careful enquiry into the marital histories of these husbands might have revealed one or two more

next page
Contents Page