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Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER THREE
VILLAGES AND HOUSEHOLDS
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Page 40
The simple households which contain the majority of the population are not deviant from the ideal. They have simply failed so far to achieve it. By the ideal, each household should grow by the birth of children, then by the marriage of its sons, and finally by the birth of grandchildren. On the death of the head, it splits into its constituent families, each of which should then repeat the cycle. Even if this scheme worked perfectly, there would always be a considerable number of households in the village, say half, in what one might call the pre-joint stage. In practice, the scheme seldom works perfectly. Household heads may die prematurely, leaving unmarried children; the child death-rate is high, and so is the rate of infertility and miscarriage among women. A man may beget a run of daughters. And occasionally, of course, a son may leave home on or very soon after marriage, usually because of trouble with a stepmother. Moreover, I was often told that the generation which would have provided the grandfathers and heads of joint households in 1950 had `remained at mobilisation', that is they had not returned from the wars in which Turkey was involved almost continuously from 1911 to 1922.
If the death-rate among the senior generation had been abnormally high, the village, like the rest of Turkey, is now experiencing a population explosion- a sharp drop in the deathrate, especially among children, with no fall in the birth-rate. Thus at the moment, the villages have young people recently arrived at.the age of marriage in numbers which are out of proportion to the supply of senior men. This means that the proportion of simple households is higher than it would have been had the death-rate remained constant.
The Elbashï figures present one other curious feature. Nineteen out of forty-six `paternal joint' households contain no grandchildren. When we compare this with only fourteen simple households lacking children, the figure seems even more surprising. In Sakaltutan, the figures are similar, though less emphatic. Six out of twenty-two paternal joint households lack grandchildren, while only six out of seventy-five simple households are without children. The reason is not far to seek. In all cases in which it is possible, married life begins under the roof of a senior kinsman of the husband, in most cases that of a
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