Ethnographics Gallery University of Kent

Turkish Village

Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.

Paul Stirling
CHAPTER TWELVE

THE VILLAGE AND THE WORLD

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Page 268



The War of Independence created for the first time a Turkish nation state, demanding a new loyalty. Many villagers even today speak of this war as a religious conflict, a victory of Islam over infidels, but the Turkish government does now symbolise to the villagers a social entity to which they belong, their nation among the other nations. Nevertheless it is still seen as a legitimate robber and arbitrary interferer in village life.

The Republic added a new function to government; a concern with welfare, a duty to help and care for the people. In so far as such ideas existed at all at the centre in Ottoman governments, they were largely ineffective, and even under the Republic the new function took time to show any concrete effects. But now the state provides a great many benefits: roads, schools, waterworks, credit, seed, stud animals, public health and medical services, hospitals, factories, and so on, and people expect the government to do things for them. Sometimes, of course, what the government regards as welfare the village regards as wanton interference - forestry control, for example.

These government benefits are not seen as conferred by an impartial machine. No villager doubts that officials are all primarily interested in their own advantage. With some notable exceptions they are right; most officials in all bureaucracies are necessarily more concerned with their relationships to their immediate superiors than with anything else. For the villagers it follows that one has to please officials personally in order to get them to use their powers on one's behalf. And it is largely true that in order to get things done in Turkey it is best to use personal contacts.

The relations between village and hierarchy were greatly complicated by the introduction of party politics. Before about 1946 party and government were identified. Most villagers were more or less indifferent or ineffectively hostile to the Ataturk reforms. Some co-operated more actively than others. It was, for example, taken for granted that all officials, headmen, schoolmasters and so on had to be, at least outwardly, supporters. The appearance from 1946 onward of a legitimate opposition party campaigning in the villages, and then the subsequent change of ruling party in 1950, confused the issue. The villager assumed that a system of rival political patronage was about to be introduced. Party and government were still

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