| explosion (Stirling, 1974). In order to earn, a farmer goes to town and learns a new skill; he may even go to a new country. Even to go to town, he needs information. When he gets there he needs to know how to survive. To earn, he needs to know not only what the job requires, but who gives jobs, how they can be persuaded to choose him; and so on. Those who enter new skilled occupations - the building trade, contracting, shopkeeping, manufacturing cement sewer pipes - need to know a lot more. Young men in the village learn to repair tractors, operate videos, mend refrigerators, wire houses. All who do not, go and talk to those who do. Everyone watches television and listens to the radio. I was constantly asked about Thatcher and Liverpool (football). The State, through schools, colleges and universities, and through the Office of Religious Affairs is pumping out vast quantities of new knowledge and ideology. In short, the increase since 1950 in 'knowledge' in Turkey, in the sense of all the bits of information and misinformation, facts, ideas, theories, dogmas, stories, cannot be measured; but it is certainly huge, vast; and underestimated, under-researched and under-discussed. Of course, everyone knows about the need for formal knowledge, for science and technology. What is not discussed is what I call social cognition (Fischer,1991). Humans seldom stop talking. Out of this continuous conversation is created a shared world of ideas and beliefs built - now - round the multitude of new experiences and new learning and new purposes which arise from new social contexts. All this is linked to the new occupational structure, and to the growth of new organisations; greatly augmented by formal education, television in almost every home, and an active press. But it is also part of every social encounter in the land. (11). The words 'information' or 'knowledge' imply feeding blocks of truth into a vacuum. But this new socially shared construction of reality is grounded in existing experience, and existing cognitive structures. People, as they pass it on to others, add home-made logic, plausible connections, misunderstandings, and that quintessential human gift, fantasy. This vast arena of possible ideas is flexible and kaleidoscopic. The people who are doing new jobs, operating in and manipulating new organisations and social networks, are also living in new cognitive worlds of their |
| own shared constructions. These constructions are of course constantly trimmed by real - or imagined - experience. Some ideas, new and old, take a long time to change; some never do. Moreover, these cognitive processes are not homogeneous; they generate cognitive proliferation, and open fierce arguments, even violence. That is, in time, people, within the cultural unity derived from, imposed by the nation state, become, more or less fortuitously, more and more culturally distinct. (l2) A digression. Social cognition seems to me highly relevant to the 'Islamic Revival', and to the academic and political discussion about it. Islam provides most Turks with (among other things) a cosmos, a guarantee, an ultimate Legitimation of social order, morality and purpose. But people's cognitive worlds are in complex flux, from science and Darwinian evolution in schools, and a secular, elected government which controls religion and pays all imams, to an international world, seen mainly as hostile, dominated by Europe, the USA, Japan and the multinationals. Of course, not all Turks live in the same Islamic universe in the first place (Tapper, 1991; Shankland, Chapter 4). But making sense of their new worlds in terms of their old cosmos gives people a whole spectrum of different constructions of reality and of morality. I find it consistent (notice that I am implying causal connection) with this generalising impressionistic description that some of these new constructions proclaim new fundamentalist certainties, which, though seen as grounded in the old unchangeable revelation, in fact provide a new social and political programme to cope with the new situations and new threats. (vii) Causal Complexity Each of these five headings is shorthand for a whole set of further points; and they are not independent. Isolating topics for research is essential. But it is both difficult, because of the seamless tangles which are social reality; and dangerous, because the simplifying essential to comprehensibility is likely also to mislead. This brings me back to the theme of complexity. Many models, for example, the argument for a distinguishable set of 'paths of transformation' (Keyder, Chapter 12; Aksit, Chapter 13) are not wrong. They are too |
| simple. We need to work out more complex models; much more complex. I know that I am not able to do so. Others may be more confident. Values Again All these changes cause new, sometimes intense suffering, and a host of perceived injustices and grievances. So did similar changes in Europe and the USA; and have already (with worse to come?) in former socialist countries now attempting a market economy and democratic polities. For Turkey, the suffering apart, there are those who lament the Mercedes culture of the idle rich, the nationalisation of local 'folk' music, the transformation of the five days of village weddings into an evening in a hired hall with the bride in a white European dress, the arrival of western symphony orchestras, and nouvelle vogue films in Turkish elite 'culture'. Not to mention discussions of the 'peripheralisation' of the Turkish economy; its subordination to western based multinationals, international banks, and the interests of the G7; the 'forced' rural urban migration, consumerism, sharp and growing inequalities, and secularism, agnosticism and anti-secularism. Not surprising that some of Delaney's village informants share her suspicions of modernism and progress (Chapter 10). But I do not want to reverse it all. I would not want my best village friend's gelin, who was saved by caesarian in the Kayseri University hospital, to have died with her child, as she would have in 1950. Nor do I want people to be walking in the snow without shoes, shivering because their supply of cattle dung cakes has run out before the end of winter, nor seeing their children weedy from malnutrition. The extollents and the denouncers of modernisation, or capitalism, are both highly selective. How can anyone make an overall moral judgement on all these processes of change? They have happened: the results are there. As an anthropologist, I am part of a collective effort to understand them. I find the complexity incredibly difficult to analyse. As a moral person, I have my own views and I hold that understanding social processes is relevant both to judgements, and to framing successful policies at all levels. But I also hold that understanding achieving |
| 'trust', that is, less misleading models of social processes is a separate and morally neutral task. Notes 1. I first realised the startling speed of growth in the first two decades from tables 3.2 (p.46) and 4.5 and 4.6 (pp.76- 7), in Hale 1981, based on Bulutay et al. 1974. See also tables 5.10 (pp. 108) and 7.2, 7.3 (pp.1323), based on DSI 1973, and more recent official sources. See, e.g., Turkey Economy, Aug. 1992, p.47. 2. All school children in Turkey declare daily in unison how fortunate they are to be Turks; to the surprise of visiting foreign children - recent personal communication from foreign children. 3. 'The poor are not just living off the crumbs from the rich man's table, they are being asked to put the crumbs back', David Bryer, Oxfam director, Observer 11 October 1992. 4. Of course I am not claiming any demographic rigour. My reasons for not following up the households of married daughters, and daughters' daughters, as well as those of married sons and sons' sons, were largely pragmatic; but also related to the perceptions and knowledge of my largely male informants. The decision was taken in 1950, and irreversible. 5. All published numbers are calculated from economic models. Hard empirical evidence that unemployment is now serious and growing rests on widespread personal impressions. Certainly in 1986, the greater part of the village and migrant households which I knew had at last an adequate income, and many were comfortable. I knew of very few adult men who could be called 'unemployed', on a long term basis. The majority worked intermittently; and except at harvest, most men present in the village at any onc time had little to do. By contrast, David Shankland commenting on this note, reponed personally a large amount of unemployment in the Alevi village which he studied, and among its migrants (Chapter 4) 6. Notice that Turkish has no word for 'peasant'; koylu - villager - is not 'peasant,' though most peasants are koylu, and most koylu peasants. cf. Keyder (Chapter 12). |