of supporers, and membership had little influence on village organisation. Thirdly,
in the winter of 1951-2, Elbashï, in response to a special situation, produced
a Union of Youth which I will discuss below. More informally, a number of other groups
exist. All of them consist of a fairly distinct core, with a periphery of other people
attached with varying degree of tenuousness.
First, the villages are divided into quarters, and people use the physical layout of the village socially. Secondly, in the intervals between work, most of the time during the winter, the men sit and talk. In the summer they collect in the open air, roughly by neighbourhoods, but in the winter they foregather inside guest rooms where a stove is burning. Thirdly, even more vaguely, the poorer members of the village depend on the richer and more influential, and the village may be divided into one or more factions with a shifting and overlapping membership.
Sakaltutan had only two quarters, upper and lower, though sometimes the centre of the village was spoken of as the Mosque quarter. This vagueness extended to the boundary; it was not clear where one quarter ended and another began. But the two ends of the long thin village were sharply contrasted and expressed their rivalry in ceaseless jokes, in quasi-serious running down of each other to me, in the hiring of separate shepherds; they even spoke of fighting, though fighting between quarters is in fact fighting between lineages under another name.
Elbashï had several recognised quarters, some actually called after lineages, others by geographical names - the lower quarter, and the karakol quarter (the karakol is the government building which housed the gendarmes). Once again the boundaries were not precise but the quarters were at least distinguished by the division of the village flocks between five shepherds. Fighting here was never spoken of in. geographical terms but explicitly in lineage terms.
Even in Sakaltutan, the distance from one end to another was sufficient to discourage casual visiting between people at opposite ends, and in Elbashï, kinship apart, people's close neighbourly relationships did not extend beyond a circle of nearby households.