Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE VILLAGE AND THE WORLD
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Page 267
Europe, even those before the industrial revolution. Secondly, they are struck b the wide cultural differences between the westernised and sophisticated Turks of Ankara and Istanbul, the ones the foreigner meets, and the pious, hospitable, often illiterate villagers. Thirdly, they see that often, as I have said, the city dwellers really know nothing, unless it is a little romanticised folk-lore, about the actual life of the villages.
But none of this justifies the simple theory of the two separate worlds. Officials and orders reach the villages in an ever-increasing stream, and villagers visit towns for business, to find work, to make purchases and to sell their goods, and even to seek entertainment, also in an ever-increasing stream. A few even move to towns and marry with townsfolk. The question to be asked is not whether or not town and village are divorced, but how the significant relationships between them work.
The frequency of face-to-face contact through visits is one important measure of urban/rural contact. But it is quite possible for the town to be dominant in shaping village ways of thinking, and symbols of prestige, and even the village social structure, without great frequency of face-to-face contact, without the village being a direct imitation of the town, and without the town knowing much about the village. The most frequent contacts of the villagers are with the lowest ranks of town society; those which affect the village most profoundly are with the top.
The Government in the Village
The traditional Ottoman government, like most pre-industrial governments, was concerned with two main tasks: the maintenance of order, and the collection of taxes. For both, armed forces were indispensable, and were maintained by the taxes they helped to collect. Both also required a political hierarchy, a bureaucratic organisation and, at least in the towns, legal and judicial institutions. To the peasants such a government is a kind of legitimate robber, legitimate because of the superior social rank of its agents, and justified because it is ordained by God. Political obedience and loyalty is owed not to a social entity, the Empire, nor to specific officials, but to a remote individual, the Padishah.
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