| So yes, women in general have more freedom, and vastly more |
| sophistication, social skill and awareness than in 1950. But they remain subordinate, they do not own or control much income income or property, and they are still liable to violent sanctions if their conduct is seen as improper. Coda |
| So far, a fairly arbitrary sample of points about the changes which I |
| have personally observed in two villages over thirty five years. |
| I now turn from villages and migrants to the stratosphere. I simply |
| wish to emphasise six very general themes which recurred during the Conference on Mediterranean Migrations, held in July 1988 at the Summer University of Al Charif Al Iddrissi at A1 Hoceima, for which this paper was written. Two of these are vast perennial problems for social sciences, four concern my problems in writing up my research. |
| First, then, the problem of 'values', of good and bad. Plainly, a value |
| free analysis is indeed impossible. Fundamental moral and political beliefs and assumptions affect us all. And in any discussion of changes, the question " Is the outcome good or bad ? " poses itself constantly. In our efforts to sound scientific, and to my mind quite illogically, we substitute, and train our students to substitute, for good and bad, 'positive' and 'negative ', or else words like 'progressive' and 'reactionary'. Were the mass migrations of the 1960s and 1970s, both internal and international, a good thing or a bad thing? Posed thus bluntly, the question, unavoidable as it is, is unanswerable. Adding up non-measurable gains and losses is, to put it mildly, immensely difficult; the more so since it implies assumptions about what might have been if things had been otherwise. When social scientists have strong moral convictions, they misread their evidence, and often offer moral explanations instead of causal ones. So we ought to be constantly questioning our own moralities, and checking and rechecking our logic and our evidence. Secondly, a powerful body of writersl4 argue that social scientists are themselves products of their own society and immediate social context, playing, consciously or unconsciously, their own games with their own ideologies for their own advantages and gratifications. In fact, this is not news, and it applies universally, to the critics as much as to |
| 14 See P.Steven Sangren ' Rhetoric and the Authority of |
| Ethnography: "Postmodemism" and the Social Reproduction of Texts ' Current Anthropology Vol.29.3 1988 pp.405ff, and the comments and list of references. |
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| the criticised. The solution - self awareness and intellectual humility - are not virtues which the world or the academy encourages or rewards. |
| Thirdly, the meeting was interdisciplinary. Important and basic as |
| they are, the economic and political aspects of the recent labour migrations do not exhaust the subject. Moral values, social cognition and symbolic structures and systems are also changing fast. These changes are very much part of the causal chains, the processes, which we are discussing. Moreover, the people directly involved are as much or more affected by them than by the more obvious economic and political circumstances. Problems of socialisation and of identity can be shattering for individuals and for families. Personally, I find these fields very difficult to cope with, and am suspicious of much that is said and written about them. Yet these complex and important changes tend to escape even quite competent ethnographers, let alone the library researchers. Four quick subpoints about the villages. First, the total stock of information and ideas stored in the village has increased many times since 1950. Migrants, urban kin, travellers, schoolteachers, radio, television, have all contributed to an 'information explosion', which has fed into the ceaseless, dissecting, constructive gossip of village life. Second, personal ambitions, life goals, and to some extent morals have changed. People, especially men, are less concerned with and controlled by village public opinion, and much more aware of the possibilities of accumulating capital, or of moving through education into quite unprecedented social positions. 'Once we aimed to get by; now we aim to get rich' one man remarked. And thus village public opinion itself changes, and its controls become less effective. |
| Third subpoint; children are no longer socialised to replace their |
| peasant parents, but through school and a host of other influences, including the greater sophistication of mothers, to operate differently, and with different identities, from previous generations. Models are numerous, choices open, the responsibility more their own than ever before. Of course, this is far more so for those who grow up in towns or in Europe. |
| Final subpoint; the stock of symbols available to villagers has been |
| augmented from all kinds of sources. Even those symbols which remain, even the powerful ones derived from Islam or from Turkish nationalism and the State, are operating in a new arena of meanings, and most have thus to some degree altered their own meanings. These changes vary for different groups and different individuals. |
| - 19 |
| An accurate ethnography of all these cultural changes is an immensely |
| difficult task. Yet they are themselves not only consequences but active causes of yet other causes in the processes which we are attempting to understand. |
| My fourth concluding point; the speed of change. The cliche that the |
| changes currently taking place within one or two generations in most Mediterranean countries are similar to those which took at least a century in Europe and North America, and even Japan, is both true and important. The causal complexities and the social dislocations, and if we could measure them, probably the human sufferings, are accordingly even greater. The situation, the 'conjuncture', in which migration happens changes every few years. Internally, Turkey has experienced rapid changes of economic structure, and with them changes of regime and economic policy. Externally, the internal and external labour markets have been directly affected by the Marshall Plan, the cold war, the European labour shortages, aid policies, oil crises, conflicts and upheavals in the Middle East. The effects of the changes in one say five period alter the situation for the next five years, so that macro analyses and predictions are constantly too simple and out of date. A simple example at village level; once a village has established regular pendular labour to a given town, moving households there becomes possible. Once a colony of village households is established, a bridgehead, the household migration becomes far easier. Meanwhile, in the village self, new experiences bring new perceptions of their situation and of possible solutions to their problems. |
| My two last points are related. Fifth, labour migration is immensely |
| complex. Even a simple list of relevant factors would take pages. And these factors are themselves causes and effects constantly interacting and changing each other. To cope with this complexity, we resort, more or less explicitly, to the idea of a system. We can only operate with simplifying models, but for reasons to do with human cognition, with personal self esteem, and with the rewards and culture of the international academy, we are bound to underestimate the provisionality and inadequacy of these models. Sixth, as I have argued, the systems we confront are not static and self maintaining, but are full of escalations and destabilising elements; and their boundaries are neither clear, nor stable, and are highly permeable. Are these indeed 'systems' at all? Perhaps we should talk rather of unfenced fields of forces. Given these my perceptions of the difficulties of analytical and diachronic ethnography, I have made |
| - 20 |
| it my first task to provide an archive for future scholars, as free as I can make it from my own current ideas. |
| But this altruism is also cowardice, and I must and will attempt a fuU |
| published account. |
| 2~ st ot iGb b; > |