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 269


to a large extent regarded s one. Stories were current immediately after the election about Republican People's Party supporters losing official jobs. It is more significant that these stories circulated and were believed than that, in many cases, they were founded on fact.

From the government end, once elections had become politically important, winning village votes became a major aim of policy. Very noticeably, after 1950, officials in villages became more polite, more concerned to please, more willing to discuss village needs and desires, and less peremptory and paternalistic. In other words, to the roles of maintainer of law and order, legitimate robber and arbitrary universal provider, the government added that of vote catcher.

Peace, Tax and Conscription

A sergeant and four gendarmes (p. 11) were stationed in Elbashï to control seventeen villages. Sakaltutan was over four hours' walk, and in 1950 a good hour by car or lorry, from Talas where their gendarmes were stationed. Most villagers possess fiearms. Yet the gendarmes are able to intervene to end fighting, to arrest murderers when they can find them, to enforce sequestration of property and so forth. The villagers are armed against each other, not against the gendarmes, and respect the forces that they represent rather than their four rifles. They have no direct quarrel with the state as such.

In 1949-50 the villagers had to pay considerable animal taxes, a small land and house tax, and in addition every adult male had to pay a 'road tax' of T.L. 12 a year, in effect a poll-tax. The Democrat Party abolished the road tax and the animal tax; the land tax being a fixed proportion of a 1939 valuation, had become negligible by the operation of inflation, so that farming was left, and remained until 1961, virtually untaxed. But even in 1949 the tax collectors, unwelcome as they were, were treated with reasonable cordiality. I knew two while in Sakaltutan. Both were willing to give the villagers as much latitude as they reasonably could, but both claimed not to be fooled by village pleadings, and both were prepared, indeed I suppose forced, to take measures to distrain on property as a last resort. No one ever suggested they were corrupt or

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