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 285


do not share a common life. Vertical sociability within rural society is greater than horizontal sociability outside it, and a gulf of mutual strangeness and mistrust is fixed between townand village.

Although, therefore, the village ranking system has a certain correspondence to the dominant urban ranking system, the two systems do not fit together easily. Relationships between individuals on the two sides reflect these somewhat inconsistent elements: the general inferiority of village to town, the rough correspondence of the two systems, and the gulf of unsociability between them.

Villagers and Townsmen

We can divide face-to-face relationships between town and village into two types; the personal relations of kin and friends who treat each other more or less as equals, and the single stranded relations of villagers with officials, merchants, or professional men, where the villager requires one specific service or owes one specific obligation. The first of these two classes of social relations corresponds roughly to relations with the lower strata of the town, where there is the greatest degree of mutual comprehensibility and shared culture; the second to those with the educated, the culturally distant, whom the villagers treat with deference.

Sakaltutan had very few relationships of the first type. One close agnate of K lineage was living in Ankara with an Ankara wife. He visited the village during my stay, bringing her with him. He apparently ran a permanent stall in a street market. He and his wife dressed like townspeople, and he spoke of the blessings of a town education for his children. Otherwise Sakaltutan's social contacts with town consisted mainly of those formed by the migrant labourers (p. 64). As far as I was able to judge, he social life of these migrants in town was largely spent among other villagers. The system of contracting and subcontracting (p. 65) meant that often the immediate employer was another villager. The migrant labourers seem to have formed their own ub-system within the town, and to have lived very largely within it. For the six men who worked in the factory in Kayseri on a permanent basis the situation was perhaps

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