Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GROUPS, FEUDS AND POWER
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Page 236
Groups
Nothing about these villages surprised me more than their apparent amorphousness. People did not seem clearly to belong to distinct groups nor was there any clear hierarchy of power or authority. Village households are largely economically independent of each other, and none is dominant. Most adult men are proud and egalitarian, at least in theory, and unwilling to take orders. Competitive intriguing and manoeuvring in such a situation is complex, and since I did not know the full details of their own intimately shared past, and since the current moves are kept as secret as possible, unravelling is not easy. Because of the complexity, the discussion necessarily embraces a number of topics: formal and informal groups, violence and feuding, and village leaders and their followers.
Only two types of group in rural society are corporate, exhaustive and mutually exclusive, namely the household and the village itself. The tiny percentage of individuals whose membership is temporarily uncertain is insignificant. As I have already shown, the existence of a unilineal kinship ideology gives rise to a third set of groups which theoretically could be of this type, but in practice are neither corporate nor exhaustive.
The remaining types of group are few in number and all vague in their criteria of membership; none provides an exhaustive or a mutually exclusive set. The two villages contained only three types of voluntary associations. First, the religious orders, the dervishes, had some members in the area. They had very little importance in one village and none in the other. Secondly, in theory, every village had `hearths' (sing. ocak) of the main political parties, but none of them had a fixed body
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