| I returned to the village about eight months after this event, and found that it had led to an interesting series of consequences. Here again, the details are not certain, but the main events are fairly clear. When I arrived back, I could not occupy the same room as formerly. After much discussion, I was given a room in the school belonging to what I was told was called the Youth Union or Youth Club (Genclik Birligi). This surprised me not a little. Turks are not joiners, not even in the towns. Several commentators (16) have remarked on the remarkable scarcity of any purely spontaneous societies for recreational, social or any other purpose in Turkey. My own experience has confirmed this. Villagers had often told me cheerfully that they could never work together or trust each other, not even for economic gain.(17) Most associations, from national charities to village co-operatives, are begun by official initiative. Why then had this apparently ordinary village suddenly produced a Youth Club, all complete with the blessing of the local administration, a meeting room in the school, and a small library of edifying books on such topics as child psychology and poultry keeping? From various informants I pieced together this account of the events. Winter is the season of weddings, when the harvest is over, and work is slack. Weddings are almost the sole form of village entertainment. At a respectable wedding by a household with sufficient means, the people of the village enjoy four or five days' dancing and tomfoolery, with distributions of coffee and sweets, ending in the climax of the last day's ceremonies. To my knowledge, a considerable number of weddings were fixed for this particular winter—the figure of 25 was mentioned. A death in the village puts a temporary stop on weddings, since singing, drumming and dancing are taboo for a time after a death—a week or two. But not only do people sing and dance at weddings, they also let off fire arms. This is dangerous enough in the ordinary way, but with an implacable lineage supposedly thirsting for vengeance, it positively invited disaster. To have a murder done at one's wedding would be an appallingly inauspicious beginning to a new relationship, so it is not surprising that, even when the normal mourning period had elapsed, still no one dared to hold a wedding. This decision lay of course not with grooms, still less with brides, but with their fathers—the fathers of the grooms having the final say. This stop on weddings was a serious matter. Holding up a wedding is risky— girls are never safe from the danger of scandal till properly married and aging parents need the help of a new daughter-in-law, and want to see grandchildren |
| in the home. The young men were missing their only form of organized merry- making. It seems that it was first and foremost a common desire to find a way to hold weddings that led to the founding of the Youth Club. The president of the Youth Club added another motive. He talked a great deal about brotherly love. The young men, he said, were under pressure from their elders to continue the traditional enmities. He claimed that they revolted from this pressure, and sought to defeat the hatreds of the elder generation by a Youth Club dedicated to peace and goodwill. It is often and plausibly said that inter-lineage feuds are organised and encouraged by the senior members, and that young men are deputed to execute the deeds of violence because they are likely to get much lighter sentences in the courts. But I have not observed any lack of enthusiasm on the part of young men for feuds, and I doubt whether any general antipathy to quarrelling had much to do with the founding of the Youth Club. Whatever the motive, it seems that the young men (gencler) —and that includes men up to about forty -- organized a meeting, and, on the initiative of the man who became president, founded an association which then or later became known as the Youth Club. The main purpose of the Club was to make it possible to hold weddings in the village. They would approach 'the master of the wedding' ( dugun sahibi ), that is, normally, the father of the groom, and offer to take responsibility for good conduct at his wedding if he would hold it. The Club had about 100 members, and they divided themselves into eight groups, each under a leader, who were to take on so to speak, unofficial police duties, for one week each. I found a list giving the rota of duties from the middle of April to the middle of June, a period coinciding with the comparatively slack period from the end of the Spring ploughing to the beginning of the hay harvest; but the scheme may have got under way earlier in the year. This part of the plan apparently met with complete success—at least, weddings certainly took place, no deaths occurred, and no untoward incidents reached my ears. The association insisted on all its members being reconciled, and they claimed that only C lineage refused to come in, or to have anything to do with the proceedings. Indeed, C lineage were not, in the summer, even attending the village mosque, but worshipping at mosques in other villages. On the other hand, B11 had paid a formal visit to AY4, thus effecting a formal reconciliation between B and AY, and AX1's daughter was still betrothed to AY8's son. Once under way, the Youth Club attempted other things. It arranged public labor—some of the village streets were improved, and some of the irrigation ditches cleaned out. It reached official ears, and the Club was duly allotted a |
| room in the school, acquired a collection of suitable books and became part of official village improvement. The club room really appears to have functioned as a meeting place, and expenses were met by collections from members. Unfortunately during my brief stay in the summer, everyone was working on the harvest, and the Club was completely inactive. Some of its members assumed that it would take up where it left off with the return of winter; others expressed doubt. The Club, in spite of its ostensibly beneficial aims and works, was not approved of by the older and more traditional members of the village. One head of a large household, when asked to give reasons for his strong disapproval, said that it was taking the young men away from their homes, where they were no longer available to carry out their fathers' orders. Others also commented that it encouraged insubordination in the young, while some refused to state reasons, simply saying that it was a bad thing. Some members said they had been charged with subversive political activities, though none of the opponents of the association ever admitted to me that such a charge could possibly have any foundation—which indeed it could not. At all events, it seems that public criticism of the club effectively stopped their public works program. It is clear that a Youth Club of this sort is not an indigenous feature of village social structure. The wording of the arrangements for the weekly rota of duty was clearly based on the experience of the army which the universal conscription in Turkey gives to every young man. But was it a completely new attempt to solve the problem of an endless chain of vengeance in a small community or does it reflect some traditional form of social control, using new forms which fit with the new terminology and new values of officialdom? I know of no evidence which would suggest an answer to this question. The blood feud is generally accepted to be a widespread phenomenon in modern Turkey, and the government is concerned to stamp it out. In this paper, I have sought only to illustrate some of the characteristics of feuding, and of the groups that carry it on, in the area in which I worked, by describing a particular case of homicide, and the remedy which the village improvised to deal with the situation created by it. The striking point about all the feuds of which I have knowledge, is that they are conducted between members of one village, who are not territorially separate, and that therefore those who are quarrelling walk in fear of their lives, since their rivals may easily shoot them at any time. In spite of this apparently intolerable situation, no recognized or formal means of reconciling the feuding lineages seems to exist. |
| present. For the past, it seems likely that no adequate records exist at all.(18) Nothing I myself have read to date supplies any information which would solve this problem. But it seems beyond belief that this system of uncontrolled and unrestricted revenge has always existed in Turkish villages, or even in some Turkish villages. On the other hand, if some means of controlling feuds existed, and has now ceased to function and been forgotten, then it is surely probable that it was not an explicit institution of arbitration or compensation, for this would not be easily forgotten, but some indirect form of control, not recognised as such. The power and importance of local leaders has certainly declined sharply with the modernization introduced by the Republic. For example, when a case of stealing occurred in Blackrock, and no action was taken, one of the old men remarked that in the old days the village elders would have forced a restitution of twice the value of any stolen property to the loser. People also often said that litigation in the courts had replaced the headman and elders as a means of settling disputes in the village, a statement supported by my observations. A second piece of evidence points in the same direction. While in Blackrock, I was several times told that if a fight between lineages breaks out, then it is the immediate duty of neutral lineages to intervene, by force if necessary, in the cause of peace. This may be taken as indicating that feuding was as far as possible suppressed by the rest of the village, when the village indigenous political organisation was still vigorous. Another factor which is likely to have been more serious in the less settled days, is the fighting between villages. This still sometimes occurs, but immediately it does so, the gendarmes are brought in, and the fighting is stopped. Administrative action and summonses to court follow. Village solidarity against other villages is not now therefore a motive for preserving internal harmony, though very probably it was in the past. It is, then, plausible to suppose that feuding was kept in check by the strength of indigenous authority within semi-autonomous villages,—that elders not concerned in the quarrel often had enough power to enforce a settlement, aided by the recognised need for solidarity against other villages. If this is true, then, paradoxically, the first results of more efficient control by government of the villages has been, through a decline in the strength of the indigenous political control, an increase in deaths from feuding. The truth or falsity of this hypothesis would be extremely hard to establish beyond doubt. But quite apart from this historical conjecture, it remains a fact that at present Turkish village feuds know no formal indigenous procedure for compensation or peace-making, as far as I can discover. Among a people who habitually go |