| humans will eventually enjoy human rights, and all will be comfortable and happy, if unequal. Except, of course, sadly, for the inevitable losers at the bottom (20 per cent?); the unfortunate, the incompetent, the undeserving, the unduly unselfish; and the individually bad, or rather, the bad who are unsuccessful. These are taken care of by private charity, by public welfare, and by the police and the prisons.Radicals - mainly (at the time of the conference) varieties of marxists and socialists - stress the appalling and cruel inequalities of modern capitalism, both within and between nations; the ways that the rich and powerful, deliberately or inadvertently, exploit the poor for their own advantage, and prevent them from catching up(3); and, incidentally, are destroying the planet in the process. They advocate or used to - an alternative road to universal happiness, based on rational, egalitarian and selfless co-operation and equality, organised by benign public control. Both sides treat 'culture' as a set of economically irrelevant pleasures and customs, and of traditional, even 'irrational', practices and 'attitudes', which may well inhibit progress. They do not allow for a set of autonomous 'cultural' factors in the social process; still less do they see themselves, their theories, and their political supporters as social and cultural phenomena to be analysed; phenomena which their own theories do not explain.These theories, like most -all - others, advocate or imply moralities, and purposes. People, including academics, see opponents as lost in culpable error, even as morally 'evil'. In spite of endless discussion of 'values' in the social sciences, the damage they do to clear thinking still seems to me seriously underestimated. If my own strongly held and often incompatible moralities confuse my own thinking, I find the same difficulties in much that I read. Four Convictions These papers then confirm four long-standing convictions. First, that the main task, and one which all of us take seriously, is modestly to establish specific causalities; that is, that a factor X has at least some influence on an outcome Y; or that an outcome Y is in part a result of a factor X. Yet authors avoid using the word 'cause' itself, using instead an endless variety of euphemisms. Second, that both the 'facts' and the causal processes about which most of us express some |
| confidence are far more difficult to establish than most of us admit. Third, the central words, the major concepts, are virtually always shifting and fuzzy. Fourth, we claim to study the 'mental maps', 'models' - large scale and small scale, culturally and personally constructed - which other people live. It is fashionable to stress, more than in the recent past, that we too have such mental maps and models, which are likewise constructed by our own cultures and personalities.obviously true and important; implying a duty for 'reflexivity'.But it does not follow that our work is invalid These 'maps' are transmissible, discussable and in spite of losses, errors and misunderstandings, are by and large cumulalivei they do get better as maps over time. To put the point differently, mankind has manifestly in the last 10,000 years, and especially in the last 200, accumulated by logic and evidence an immense store of 'truth', of effective maps of reality; social as well as physical. Yet it remains true (!) that every individual human lives, must live, in a cognitive universe, the main outlines of which rest not on logic, evidence and research, but on faith. And moreover even the myriad practical detailed maps of social reality which describe bits of that universe for daily use also rest more often on faith or on authority than on experience, direct evidence and logic. The ethnography of.these 'maps' is both central to the changes in Turkey, and extremely difficult to record accurately. Comments and Conclusions Do I myself draw any conclusions about Turkey? Yes, with these reservations. Six generalisations based on these thirteen excellent articles, and on over forty years of my own work in and on Turkey; with theoretical and, I regret, moral overtones. And a last comment on values. (i) Demography The population of Turkey, as I have said, has increased by a factor of over 4 since 1923; and since my arrival in 1950, by 2.5; from 20 million to well over 50 million. In S in 1950, 600 people resided in 100 households. In 1986, we estimated 840 people in the village in some 143 households, and 650 people outside the village in 165 households, all descended patrilineally from those six |
| hundred.4 These national and local increases are directly due to falling death rates, especially among children.Two points: this growth is both proof and the direct result of a general rise in the standard of living. Second, in no way could these extra people have stayed alive without labour migration from the villages. Some migrants diversified and increased village household incomes by remitting urban earnings; some permanently removed whole households which the villages could neither feed nor employ. This huge increase in the numbers of both urban cash earners, and of rural and urban consumers, must be an integral part of any causal model of social change. Without remittances and departures, rural death rates would have simply continued much as before.Was this increase in people, with all its consequences, a good thing or a bad thing? That is quite another - unanswerable? question. I would not know how to begin deciding, but it is not my job - our job - to do so. (ii) Economic Growth The real average standard of living has risen sharply. GNP per capita increased roughly threefold, 1950 - 1986. What I see among the villagers and their urban descendants makes these calculations a plausible index. Food, clothes, heating, housing, transport, health services, household durables and furniture, consumption for pleasure and for display, operating capital for farming, investments in agriculture, real estate and businesses are all incomparably more plentiful per person than in 1950; three times is not obviously wrong. Agriculture alone nowhere near accounts for the increase. In the plateau villages which I know, with poor soils and a dry climate, the changes in agricultural techniques and crops have brought increases of around 50 per cent in production per hectare. Tractors and other machinery have greatly reduced the male labour required per hectare, and thus given a large increase in agricultural productivity per man per day. As Morvaridi stresses, some agricultural changes actually increase the demand for, and burden of, some kinds of female labour, mostly unpaid; and many women suffer directly. But it does not follow that even their productivity has not risen; and when household income rises, as he says, women also get some benefit.In other parts of Turkey, technical and crop changes, often combined with |
| irrigation - cotton, citrus, vegetables, dairying, poultry, meat production, and so on - have increased both production per hectare and productivity per person, on a dramatic scale; in some cases agricultural labour demand has actually increased (Ak,sit, Chapter 13 and Sirman, 1988). These increases in turn depend on industrialisation; on tractors, fertilisers, transport, packaging, food processing; and on markets. The growth of the urban economy - industry and services - has created a huge demand for this rural labour surplus. I now realise that till at least the late 1950’s, Turkey had in fact a national labour shortage, greatly aggravated undoubtedly by local and seasonal under- and un- employment, by shortages of many much needed skills, and by geographical maldistribution. In hard fact, no one knows, or has ever known, real current unemployment rates.(5). Wallerstein (Smith and Wallerstein, 1992) has recently classified household incomes into five sources; subsistence, profits, wages, investment income, and transfers. In 1950, most household income was mainly subsistence, with some profits, from land and animals; wages were already important for a minority. In 1986, all normal households had multiple incomes, of which that from land and animals made up on average a very. much smaller part; in S, I estimate less than half the total village income.Certainly, still in 1986, some were poor, and a few very poor. The most common causes of poverty were illness, handicap, or premature death. Where a household had no land, or very little, no adult man fit to work and earn, and no unmarried carpet-weaving daughters, life could be very hard indeed. In towns, unskilled or socially unsuccessful men might earn very little; the old might not earn at all. But in 1986, the handicapped apart, no one we met or heard about from the two villages seemed to be hungry, cold or in rags. In 1950/1, many were. In terms of material wealth and comfort, 1986 is, on average and for the vast majority, a totally different world from 1950. (iii) Inequality Successful capitalism creates wealth; a very large amount of it. It does nothing whatsoever to ensure that this wealth is 'fairly', let alone equally distributed; nor that the production |