If a couple fail to produce a male heir, they may take on the son of a close kinsman, normally a sibling's child of one of the parents. Adoption is not recognised in the Seriat, and villagers do not take formal legal proceedings for adoption, though this is possible under the Turkish Civil Code.1 But normally the inheritance of such adopted children is not questioned. One elderly couple had taken into their house and married to each other two adult grandchildren by previous marriages. The groom was daughter's son to the old man, and the bride son's daughter to the old woman. I knew of several cases of a man giving a son to his brother; in one of these the adopted boy had married the only daughter of his adopter. In such cases, the kinship terms are not changed. The adopter is called `emme, father's brother, not baba, father, by the adopted boy. It might be argued that this is not really adoption; but the adopter takes over full responsibility and thus artificially creates a family. Girls are never adopted; daughters are not structurally necessary to the continuance of the household.
Adoption is never thought of as a means of taking care of orphan children. These are common enough in the villages. They are not normally sought after, though sometimes a household will welcome the increase in the labour force which orphans bring. Since orphan boys normally separate from their foster-parents as soon as they are married, and thus do not provide foster-parents with the basis for a joint family, they are less rewarding than natural sons. In the past, orphans seem very often de facto to have lost their rights to their father's land, but in recent cases this does not appear to have happened. Girl orphans are not wanted and are still sometimes sent away by their foster-parents to middle class urban families as servants, in return for which their employers marry them off to respectable urban working class boys when they reach adolescence.
Only the lame, the blind and the idiots fail to marry, and not even all of these. One girl was married to a mentally defective kinsman to provide a means of taking care of him. Normally the unmarried remain in the household of their closest agnates.
Very rarely, a man may marry uxorilocally. Usually, this