Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE VILLAGE AND THE WORLD
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Page 288
For most villagers, and for the village community as a whole educated urban people are best avoided. No one likes the humiliation involved in making visits to doctors and lawyers and everyone is suspicious of and opposed to any official interference in village life. Normally, the outside world is called in only when specific benefits are known to be obtainable, for example the stemming of an epidemic among village flocks; or when specific sanctions are likely to follow a failure to pass on information - about for example serious injury or homicide.
Such an attitude towards social superiors, especially when they are also outsiders, is normal. It has the consequence of preventing all but highly selected information about the villages from reaching the urban world which controls them, and thus aiding the preservation of current illusion and mutual misunderstanding.
The Foreshortening of the Outside World
Understanding is limited by experience. People anywhere can only interpret that part of their society that they do not see or do not live in, in terms of the society they do live in. They are therefore bound to misinterpret what goes on in other parts of their society or in other societies, in terms of what goes on in their own. People in a small-scale society are bound to fail to grasp the size and diversity of the larger society in which the small-scale society nests. The tightly knit, stable rural communities which I studied constantly foreshorten social distance and underestimate social complexity in the outside world.
In the present-day village, the degree of grasp varies very greatly from individual to individual. All village women know that towns exist, and a few of them have been to Kayseri. Yet they normally asked us what village we came from, and many seemed to find it difficult to take in the fact that we did not come from a home like theirs in a village like theirs. At the other extreme the most sophisticated men were used to doing business in Ankara, and knew a great deal about national and international affairs.
The commonest form of this foreshortening is the constant assumption that one educated man knows and can influence all other educated men. I was believed to be able to obtain favours
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