| he is used to ploughing without a struggle, and all these claims were disputed, but never on the grounds that the sale of the land involved the surrender, for the price accepted, of all rights to the land in perpetuity. In fact, although the villagers never called this transaction anything but sale,(9) not at least when speaking to me, it is obvious that this is pawning of land, and not true sale at all. Similar practices in peasant societies are world-wide (10). In Turkey it may be that traditionally no other form of sale existed. If so, then I would connect the custom with the strongly patrilineal attitude to land, the same feeling which tends to exclude sisters from inheritance, that land which belonged to a patrilineal ancestor should never be permanently alienated from his patrilineal descendants. This view is, I think supported by the violent moral condemnations of those who 'ate their patrimony’, that is, who sold their land and spent the proceeds; and one should perhaps add, made no effort to recover it. This form of sale makes it possible, owing to the combined effect of inflation and the very great increase in the use of money in the villages, for a villager to reclaim land for a tiny fraction of its present day value. In two cases of which I have details, the heir of the original purchaser paid a considerable sum to be allowed to continue in possession, in one case with an agreement that this should be the last time. In the other, the seller subsequently tried to force the heir of the original purchaser to pay more, and threatened to go to court. Unfortunately, I do not know what happened, but I very much doubt whether this threat was more than a bluff. One informant told me that the courts would order the return of property at the original price if no entry had been made in the land register, but Turkish lawyers whom I asked denied this, and I now regard this statement as an attempt by my informant, under pressure of questioning, to reconcile logically the existing formal and traditional informal systems.(11) Article 597 of the Code provides that if there is among the goods of a deceased person an agricultural holding, it is, in so far as it constitutes an economic unit, to be given to whichever of the heirs asks for it, or appears capable of undertaking to look after it. I have never heard anyone in Turkey suggest applying this article, though it may be applied in cases involving educated owners of whole farms. But most village land in Turkey is held in small patches and strips. When land is divided, traditionally each plot must be divided, to ensure an equitable division and avoid quarrelling. Many households already own less than enough land to support themselves, and make up their income by working as shepherds, car labourers or craftsmen in the villages, or by visiting towns as migrant labourers. Moreover, though they do sometimes manage to agree among themselves to maintain a holding, or some of its constituent plots, as wholes; no villager questions the right of everyone to demand his share not |
| only of his father's holding, but, if he so wishes, of each separate plot. So far, therefore, this provision of the law has remained a dead letter, and I see little prospect that it could in the near future serve its obvious purpose of restricting the fragmentation of holdings. Who, in any case, is to decide what in a Turkish village constitutes 'an economic unit'? I have tried to show that the existing way of life, the informal system, in the villages makes the strict application of the existing laws of inheritance and sale extremely difficult. Nothing short of the direct intervention, every time an adult dies, of an official charged with distributing the estate, would ensure that people do not carry out ad hoc division of property to suit their own convenience. So long as a man can exploit the land with the consent of his neighbours he has little motive for raising the question of registration, especially if, in fact his formal rights to the land he is working are somewhat doubtful. But of course inheritance laws are not in any case something to be 'enforced' as the payment of taxes is enforced. It is like the horse and the water. One can by legislation give people rights, and set up a system for enforcing them; but one cannot force them to use it. It is only when people come to court with a dispute that officials can ensure that the provisions of the law are carried out, and though there is no shortage of litigation, obviously only a small fraction of all the cases of sale and inheritance in the villages reach the court. MARRIAGE In Turkey, a marriage is legal only if a civil ceremony has been performed and the marriage registered by the State. Professor Timur (12) has quoted figures to show that the 70,000 marriages registered each year in Turkey are probably less than a half of those that take place. The vast majority of these unregistered marriages are certainly in the villages. These unregistered marriages are marriages in all but a strictly legal sense. Such couples and the families they rear are regarded by all their kin and neighbours as perfectly respectable and decent, so long as the traditional religious ceremony has been performed at the marriage. This ceremony can be performed by anyone who knows the formula, though it is normally performed by a recognized imam, (13) often, but not always, the village imam. In the area in which I worked, in contrast with the public wedding festivities which may last up to a week, the marriage ceremony is always performed in secret,usually on the last day of the wedding with only the imam, two representatives of the couple, normally fathers, and two witnesses on each side present. The imam recites in Arabic from the Koran, asks the consent of the parties in Turkish, and recites further Arabic prayers. If this ceremony is not performed, then the couple are guilty of the sin of fornication; if it is done, the marriage is acceptable |
| to everyone, and a civil ceremony can add nothing to this acceptance. No girl would ever feel at all abashed to admit that her marriage is not registered with the State. The informal system of social control provides strong sanctions for the performance of the traditional ceremony, but none at all for the performance of a civil ceremony. To put the same point in different language—a rite is in some ways like a language, it symbolizes something, it has meaning. The meaning of a rite cannot be changed by fiat, it changes if at all relatively slowly, over a long period to the villagers, the rite which declares publicly that a couple has been united as legitimate and respectable sexual partners and founders of a family is the traditional religious rite. But the civil ceremony if it is a rite at all, has no social meaning in or for the village. Whether or not in a given case the civil ceremony is to be performed is therefore simply a matter of expediency. Professor Timur has listed the inconveniences which it may involve. The identity of the couple must be officially established, which can only be done if both birth certificates are in order; and if, as frequently, they are not, then this must first be rectified. Moreover, births are very often registered late in Turkish villages, so that the registered age of a couple may still be below the legal minimum, although they are both in fact ready for marriage. A medical certificate is required, involving the expense of taking the girl and the young man to the nearest doctor, usually in the nearest town. Under the law, the village headman can perform the ceremony, but I have never heard any villager in the area in which I worked mention this possibility, let alone of a headman actually doing it. Most of the headmen I knew would not in any case be capable. People spoke of official ceremonies as having taken place in district or county centres, conducted by an official. Since the ceremony involves the personal presence of the bride together with her betrothed, it is immodest by village standards. Professor Timur has suggested also more weighty motives for avoiding legal marriage, namely that men are anxious to avoid conferring legal rights on their wives, especially the right to legal divorce. This suggestion is plausible and it may be true of populations a good deal more sophisticated than the villages which I know, though I would guess that by the time people were sophisticated enough to use these arguments, they would belong to the class which considers unregistered marriages as not altogether respectable. Certainly these arguments do not weigh with the villagers, because the registration of a marriage makes not the slightest difference to their subsequent conduct. Their legal rights and duties remain a dead letter. The women know nothing of the law, and the men have no motive for taking any notice of what little they may happen to know of |
| it. The relationship between man and wife in the village is regulated by the current norms and the informal sanctions of village life, and neither they nor anyone else care whether they are legally married or not, nor what the law says about their relationship. If a man wishes to terminate a marriage, he simply, as in Islamic law, tells his wife before witnesses to go. Both parties are then free to, and usually do marry again, though not, of course officially. In the area in which I worked, effective official pressure was brought on those who publicly celebrated a wedding, to register the marriage. How this pressure was applied, I did not discover, as I know of no legal sanctions which can be applied to people who decide to live together without registering their marriage. The rites and ceremonies of a normal village wedding often last from two to three days to a week, and are conspicuously public. The district office could not fail to hear the news, and hence, so I was told, it is better to register the marriage. But it is only when both bride and groom are marrying for the first time that the wedding is celebrated in this public way. If either party has been married before, the ceremonies are slight, and may consist almost wholly of the religious rite which I have described above. The same austerity is sometimes practised by the very poor, or by two closely related households. These quiet marriages are never registered. The precise incidence of the registered marriages is undoubtedly uneven. Nevertheless, in most of rural Turkey, not only are many people not legally married to their current partners, but since a village couple who have separated after a registered marriage never, in my experience, obtain a legal divorce, some people are actually legally married to someone other than their current partner. Of course, by village standards a man may marry two or more women concurrently. I found only about three or four cases per village where a man had married two wives; no one living had more. Almost all of these second marriages were contracted because the first wife could not or did not bear a son, or became too ill to cope with her work; or because a man married his brother's widow, to keep hold of the property and to take care of the woman and her children. One result of the unregistered village marriages has been effectively remedied by the government—namely, the illegitimacy of many children. Not only is the Code itself liberal on this point, but the Grand National Assembly has passed special laws to make the legitimization of children an extremely simple matter. The absence of legal ties between husband and wife is much less important. No village woman could possibly sue her husband, and no village man would dream of suing his wife. Only when a dispute over inheritance comes into court can registration or its absence make any practical difference. Such cases are too rare, and the interests involved too unimportant and complex, for public opinion in the villages to be greatly affected. |