Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE VILLAGE AND THE WORLD
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ideology and national policy become relatively less important.1
Urban and Rural Social Rank
Social relations between a particular villager and a particular townsman are plainly a matter of the structural position each holds, both in his own section of society and in the larger society of which town and village both form a part. The most important single element in this relation is rank. In some contexts people speak as if the village ranked below the urban system altogether. Even the poorest of established townsmen is proud of his urbanity, and the words köy village, and köylü, villager are used as terms of opprobrium. Villagers are well aware of this collective inferiority, and are often explicit about their lack of civilisation, medeniyet, and their uncouth, kaba, way of life. Yet it is obvious that this simple model of a single scale ending in the town, and beginning its downward path again in the village is absurd. The bulk of the town population, petty traders, artisans, porters, labourers, overlaps in rank the bulk of the rural population. Only the high school and university graduates, and the owners of really substantial property, that is, every one from the middle-range officials to the cabinet ministers and the Istanbul élite, rank unequivocally above the village. Roughly one might say that the village poor correspond to the labourers and porters and the urban unemployed; the better-off villagers, those of middle position in Sakaltutan and Elbashï, correspond to the artisans, the stall-holders and petty traders, and the upper end of the village, especially the upper end of Elbashï to the lower end of the educated stratum, the junior officials, the petty merchants, the contractors, the small hotel keepers.
In spite of this correspondence the ranking systems are very different. The total span of social distance between the top and bottom of the village hierarchy is much less than the corresponding social distance between the corresponding ranks in the towns. This is fundamentally a matter of a shared way of
- Turkish politics since 1960, in spite of the army, have tended to return to the basic division between R.P.P. and the successors of the Democrat Party; this trend strengthens my analysis, in that thetwo-party system is re-emerging in the teeth of attempts to break it up; but national factors are perhaps more important than my model allows.
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