| receives all visitors, especially all officials. He passes on orders and regulations, makes statistical returns, makes out the electoral roll, reports crimes, conveys special requests, certifies the identity of people and the truth of their statements for state marriage ceremonies, bank loans and so on, is responsible for seeing that military conscripts answer the call, and for assisting tax collectors. He is also responsible for collecting the village local tax and administering village funds. In all these duties the council should advise and assist him. It might be thought that such an office would carry high rank, and being thus desirable, be in the hands of the highest ranking men of the village. In practice, this is not so. It seems likely that originally the muhtar was the leading villager, and all the evidence indicates that, until the effect of the Ataturk revolution reached the villages, it was so. The situation has changed. The office still gives a man considerable power, which he is likely, to a greater or lesser extent, to wield to his advantage, and makes many of his neighbours dependent on him. Perhaps the most coveted privilege of the office is that of entertaining all important guests. But in spite of this, the office carries little or no prestige, and the holding of the office has little effect on the rank of the holder within the village. Unless an election is imposed from above, the village men simply decide among themselves who is to hold the office—often there is no competition. The reasons for this paradox would themselves provide material for a full article. Many of the muhtar's duties are regarded as irksome and menial, and their importance is not understood. Many of them irritate his neighbours, and force him to act as the agent of the hostile " they ". Few men want to be muhtar, and those who do may want the office for the wrong reasons. Very often it falls to a young man. There may sometimes be competition to control the office —in two cases in other villages the choice of muhtar was the occasion for a fight between hostile lineages—but none to hold it. The muhtar in S during my stay was the son of a moderately well off old man, and was aged about thirty, with low prestige on the moral-religious scale. The council of elders does very little to check, advise or assist the muhtar. In many villages, it seems never to meet, and the muhtar simply stamps all documents with the seals of the members, which they give him for this purpose. Membership of it carries little or no prestige or power. The result of the divorce of the formal political scale from the other scales of ranking in the village is that the village has no effective leadership at all. There is no one who can initiate corporate action, no one who can resist effectively anti-social activities, such as ploughing up common pasture land, no one who has the necessary power and prestige to settle disputes within the village, or to enforce traditional customs. The muhtar cannot rule the village because he has |
| no prestige, the village elders, who have wealth and religious and moral standing, cannot rule the village because they have no political power and no backing from the government. The result tends to be stalemate. All that happens happens by direct orders from above, which often fail to win any spontaneous support from the village. As a result, very often the effectiveness of government measures is lost or greatly diminished when they reach the village level. The village, on the other hand, takes no initiative on its own behalf. I am not maintaining that this is universally true, it applies in different degrees in different villages—very little in some, especially the more or less suburban ones—but it certainly applies to all the villages which I visited in the area in which I worked, and some in other areas also. If there is no effective political leadership, what do I mean by " public authority " and " leadership " which I attribute to those who rank highest in the village? I have mentioned many of the symbols of respect, such as forms of address, station in the mosque, and positioning in the odalar. Prestige is open and easy to observe. The use of power outside the formal hierarchy is not open, and direct questioning often meets only with denial. The village leaders exercise a minimum negative influence on public affairs, the choice of muhtar, important decisions, and so on. When the village accounts were found to be unsatisfactory at a change of muhtar, I found almost all the village leaders gathered in the new muhtar's oda, although many of them would not normally have darkened his door. Another large gathering assembled when the order to prepare an electoral roll for the 1950 election reached the village. The village leaders also have influence over a wide circle in such matters as marriage, housing arrangements, sale of land, and so on, because their advice carries weight, and in some cases their help may be a decisive factor. Another matter decided by informal authority of this sort in S was the choice of the " imam " or " hoja'',(5) who changes frequently. But for each leading figure, the circle of influence was limited, and there was rivalry between them. It is, therefore, justifiable to speak of the senior, religiously respected and better-off villagers as leaders, and yet to say that there is no effective leadership for the village as a whole. This discussion of the effect on the village ranking system of the formal political hierarchy is largely a digression, necessary in the context in order to establish a negative reading. Aside, therefore, from this political scale, I have distinguished three sets of scales of rank in the village; or to put it in the other vocabulary, I have distinguished three groups of factors determining rank. These are age and position in one's own family and lineage; wealth and occupation; and morality and religion. There is no single scale of rank, but many scales which differ slightly from each other. Every man would rank the village differently. One might even say that each man has different scales for different contexts. The |
| single composite scale of ranking to which we are committed, if we speak of " factors determining rank ", does not, speaking strictly, exist at all. But the many separate scales are so near each other as to justify the fiction of an overall scale, so long as we recognise it as approximate and not fixed. The fact is that the village, like all human groups, has leaders, men who rank high in all spheres. The position of a man on the three scales is not equally within his own control. A man's age and his position in his own family and lineage are fixed for him. His wealth, especially now that there is no spare land in S,. depends only to a limited extent on his own efforts. To a large degree it is a matter of inheritance and good fortune. On the other hand, the religious and moral conduct of a man is his own choice. The interaction of the scales is limited by these facts. High rank in a scale outside a man's control tends to make him behave so as to maintain that rank in scales dependent on his own efforts. It is a commonplace that the old become more pious. This is usually attributed to fear of approaching death, and concern for welfare in the next world. I suggest that to some extent and in some cases the piety of the aged may be an attempt to live up to the higher rank in the community which their seniority automatically brings them. In the same way, the better off in S were noticeably more careful of the moral and customary norms than the poorer families. Similarly, within the wealth scale, I found also that the majority of the skilled migrant labourers from the village were not, as one might expect, the poorest whose need was most, but that they usually came from households with a fair amount of land, while the poor and landless households supplied unskilled labour. On the other hand, obviously no other scale of rank can affect a man's age, nor high rank on the religious-moral scale than a man's wealth. A bad score, so to speak, on one scale, drags a man down in the overall scale. Here again, the degree to which he is felt to be responsible makes a difference. A poor man of senior years, and of high moral and religious rank is treated with general respect, but a man of wealth and seniority of known unreliability may receive little. Although wealth is the main source of public authority and power, a bad reputation will destroy a man's power. On the other hand, high moral and religious rank does not bring power of itself. All three, wealth, moral reputation and seniority are necessary for a man to carry serious public influence. I have attempted in this article to describe the system of ranking in the village I studied in as abstract and formal terms as possible, but without any sacrifice of accuracy or precision, and without introducing any concepts or theoretical distinctions which did not seem to me to be absolutely necessary to my purpose. For this reason, I have not given the ethnographic evidence, much of |
| which can be found in my thesis on the village, and I have not made any attempt to elaborate theoretically the concepts I have used. Since my aim has been description, it seems legitimate to conclude without stating any conclusions. NOTES 1 G. C. Homans, The Human Group, 1951. 2 Turkish, " buyukler ". 3 £T10 approximately equals £1 5s. od., or $3.50, at present exchange rates. 4 Turkish, " haci ". 5 Turkish,“ hoca ". 6 " The Social Structure of Turkish Peasant Communities," a dissertation submitted at Oxford University in 1951. |