These difficulties are increased in the case of Turkish villages by the high wall which quite literally surrounds every household. Unrelated men do not enter the households of other families, private personal feelings are not publicly discussed, sex and anything to do with it is taboo in many social contexts, and this flavour of impropriety, as in many western contexts, makes straightforward information difficult to obtain. In only a limited number of households were we able to observe closely the way people treated each other, and even then our very presence had clearly some effect on the situation. Moreover, some interesting and important types of relationship - those between women of the same generation marrying into the same household, for example - only occur in a small number of households at any one time, so that few cases are available for observation.
Although the quality alters, family and kinship relationships continue for life. But people constantly leave their households and join or set up new ones, and any discussion of the close kin relationships automatically leads one out of a single household. Brothers, for example, begin as children in their father's house, but end as heads of neighbouring households in their own right. At the cost of some overlap with the discussion of kinship (Chapter 8), I shall follow this lead when it is appropriate to do so. Very rarely a household may contain non-kin servants, but I knew none among my acquaintances and ignore these cases in my discussion.
Mathematically, the number of possible pairs of kin relation