1988 Migrationin Anatolia - Pages 13 thru 16

1l Keyder (1987) criticises me for overstating this point in Stirling 1981;
correctly, if perhaps a little uncomprehending

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Along the very complex networks which these three kinds of members
establish passes a large amount of resources for many purposes; and even
more, an exchange of all kinds of services, such as fostering urban
children in the village, providing an urban home for village children for
secondary or higher education, finding jobs, providing urban lodgings,
providing holidays from the city, arranging patron/client links to officials
and others whose services may be required. Along this network also passes
a vast amount of knowledge and experience, so the whole network
develops a new level of 'social cognition', better adapted to cope with the
growing complexity, exigencies and opportunities of an industrialising
national society. People are no longer members of a community held
together by co-residence and dependence on the land, but of a network
held together by the mutual benefit of the exchanges, and by the moral
obligations of kins men and of fellow citizens. A word heard all the time in
Turkey is hemsehri, 'same towner'. Exchanges depend on mutual
satisfaction; morality depends on sanctions. Both become weaker links in a
society which offers alternative opportunities. But because the society is
still poor and the risks great, those who have less security in wealth and
skill and social relations need those with more of these things. The village
nodule is thus still very important to a lot of people besides those for
whom it is still home. Some emigrants can and do reduce or sever them at
will; but they are replaced by new and still dependent emigrants. So far,
the open ended village nodule is as firmly self reproducing as was the pre-
migration sharply bounded village community.

Households: Social relations

In 1950, the households closely resembled each other, and the

exceptions could easily be accounted for by quarrels and misfortunes.. The
most important change is change itself. The external and economic
sanctions which support customary rules and paternal authority have
weakened, and the number of accidental differences in circumstances
between households is much larger. People who face unprecedented dilem-
mas and problems adopt different solutions. Moreover, the changes,
important as they are, are often subtle.

I identify three main changes. First, the number of surviving children

per mother has increased greatly. So 'nuclear' families have more
members, and the young more siblings. Second, the rules and practices of
separation of younger married couples from the husband's father's

household have changed greatly.

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Thirdly, a large number of young and middle aged wives live without
their husbands for months, even years at a time, some within a joint
household, some separately with their children, with varying degrees of
support and surveillance. These changes are not surprising - they are
familiar all over Turkey (Keyder 1987), and indeed all over the world.

In 1950, a man was expected to remain with his father until his father

died; then in due course, his sons arranged a separation of assets and
domestic units. In 1971, they explicitly said that the rules had changed. A
son still married in his father's house, but after a reasonable period, and
with negotiated dignity, he and his bride might leave and set up their own
household. However, one son should remain with the older couple.
Because the old were living much longer, and because many more children
were surviving to marriageable age, I found both that the number of
household heads separated from living fathers had risen greatly, and also
that the proportion of multiple households (households with two or more
resident married couples) to simple households (households with only one
married couple) in the village had risen slightly.

By 1986, the same processes had gone further. But still roughly a

quarter of all 145 households were multiple. One man with eight grown
sons complained that they had all separated. One rule seems to hold, for
good reasons. A wedding is a very large expense - it may still cost the
equivalent of around two years earnings. So nearly all young men get
married with the support of their fathers and of their brothers, if any. The
bride initially comes to live in the groom's pre-marriage household. In the
village, immediate separation is rare. But separation within the first year is
acceptable, and fairly common. Thus, the total number of multiple
households at any one point includes some that are likely to be shortlived.
As they separate into simple households, new weddings will produce
replacements for them .

The formal rules have not changed. Men and women are still

segregated, the division of labour is strict, and women are firmly
subordinate. Sexual conduct is a maker of honour and shame, and sexual
misconduct an occasion for violence. But much has changed. At the level
of personal impression, I found the women much easier to talk to and the
young women noticeably less retiring and bashful, and with much more to
say; and not only to me.

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I group my all too compressed comments into four sections; work and

the division of labour, domestic space, sources of information, and absent
husbands. First, the division of labour. The mechanisation of agriculture
has greatly reduced women's agricultural chores, especially at harvest,
though the harvest remains a time of hard physical labour for all the
household members. Moreover, changes in crop patterns towards onions,
potatoes, and other vegetables have increased the amount of hoeing,l2 and
women seem to be responsible for lifting potatoes. The switch from work
oxen to cows, especially stall fed cows, increases women's work. And as I
shall say, some women have to take on responsibility for farming decisions
and managing the annual farming cycle. The arrival of electricity and
domestic gadgets, and especially of piped water, diminishes daily domestic
chores. I could not measure this, but I doubt if it makes much overall
difference. Almost certainly, domestic comfort has increased, and the
amount of effort directed to make do and mend, or plain managing
without, must have decreased. Against this, all girls now weave car pets,
mostly only in winter, for roughly twenty long days a month. One young
bride described a winter day of work from five in the morning to around
eleven at night without rest seven days a week. But actual pressure varies
from household to household with the accidents of demography and
wealth.

One striking difference is in the amount of domestic space, and the

rules that govern its use. In 1950-2, guest rooms were only for the better
off. In S village, only nine guestrooms were heated in the winter 1949-50
for 100 households, and all the men congregated in these after the evening
meal, taken at sunset. Family life went on in the one room which often
served as kitchen, eating room, and bedroom for the senior couple,
unmarried children, and even, rarely, married sons. By 1971, most
households had their own guest rooms, which now served as family sitting
rooms,and bedroom for single males. Young couples all had separate
rooms. By 1986, many households had two comfortable sitting rooms, and
all had one. Many also had kitchens with sinks and taps. One result was an
enormous increase in expenditure on heating, and most households bought
coal and wood, to supplement the home produced cakes of mixed dung and
straw. Women by no means avoided these sitting rooms with the formal
rigour of 1950; when guests came, they would greet them and sometimes
sit. Girls came in to watch the television in the evening, and I came across
several times occasions when married couples paid joint social calls on
other couples;

12 Morvandi (1986) stresses this point in his thesis on sugar and cotton
production in Eastem Turkey.

unthinkable in 1950. These changes were obviously mainly the result of
greater affluence, directed primarily to improving and enlarging people's
homes; comfort and prestige both played their part. But the meanings of
the layout of domestic space were also changing. Doors and walls marked
boundaries between activities, and between people in new ways. Though
visiting men still kept firmly to the guestrooms, the boundaries between
male and female spheres were less sharp.

In 1986, women were incomparably better informed, and better

endowed with cognitive and social skills. Almost all young women and
girls had attended the village school. Not all girls completed by any means,
but a lot of women are now literate, and some of them read for pleasure.
Many can cope readily with money, forms, newspapers, letters from
migrant workers. Secondly, every household has close kin in the towns.
Women and girls go to visit sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. Some
members of all households are familiar with towns, and the whole horizon
of the village is much wider. Since women still form a segregated network
in the village, these sources of information and ideas are widely diffused,
even among those who have not been to town or to school. Moreover,
everyone in the village now watches television. Many older women seem
largely to ignore it, but younger ones brought up on large daily doses
obviously enjoy and understand it. This innovation raises for me a mass of
questions which I cannot answer.

Perhaps as many as 200 men are away from the village for months

every year. Many of these are married, and leave wives and children
behind. Kiray and others point out that mainly3 women left to run their
household and receive the remittances tend to separate from their
husband's father and manage their own affairs, thus learning a new
sophistication and independence. A few cases of this kind occur in our
data. In many cases wives remain with their husband's father, sometimes
they run a separate household in a room in the same compound, sometimes
they live quite separately. Where a husband earns well and sends regularly
and sufficiently, a woman may live a life of reasonable ease. But many
husbands either do not earn well regularly, or do not send money
regularly. One wife had had no news from Germany for 6 years. But
certainly, some women have direct experience of dealing with cash,
investments, bureaucracies in a way inconceivable in 1950.

13 Keyder 1988 p.l22 quotes Kiray 1974 and others

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