Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER FIVE
THE HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY
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intended, because, even for the better off, the extra work they could do did not compensate for the extra food they ate.
Nowadays for many, indeed for most, village households the resources are out of balance. Some have too little man- and animal-power for their land and so let it out to share-croppers, or (as in Elbashï), hire men to cultivate it, or even leave it uncultivated. More households are in the reverse situation. They have more manpower than their land will absorb. Some go as migrants, others acquire animal-power and take on sharecropping. But the fragmentation of holdings forces many men to remain in the village and maintain oxen and equipment when their land is insufficient to make full use of their own and their animals' labour.
Income and Outgo
Households range from those which have neither land nor animals, to those with two hundred dönüm or so, three or four teams of draught animals, and a sizeable flock; personal earned incomes range from casual unskilled village labourers, the shepherds for example, earning T.L.500 (£62 or $179) or less a year, to established skilled migrant labourers earning perhaps T.L.2,000 a year. Household incomes - farming income plus contributions from earning members - therefore vary enormously.
The accurate determination of these incomes would be possible only after long and careful interviewing and checking. I found villagers vague and inconsistent about income, partly because no one is willing to disclose details of resources to anyone else, partly because most of them do not think in terms of a recurrent income at all. They certainly budget to meet particular expenses from particular resources. But there is no occasion in village life when a man adds up all that comes in, and sets it off against all that goes out. Moreover, both farming and non-farming incomes are liable to fluctuate wildly from year to year, so that no one has an `average annual income'.
The unit of land, the fertility, the crop, all vary according to plot, to year, and to informant. Not only does the land cropped alternate from year to year with the village fallow system; but because of shortages of seed and animals, sickness, death and
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