| explicitly recognised and depends on the goodwill of a number of supporters. It is this second type of power which wealth in the village confers. Although the economic unit is not the individual but the household, wealth is not so much a family matter as an individual one. The wealth, and the rank that goes with it, belongs to the household head, and does not pass as a whole to his heirs. The division of a man's property between his children, by destroying their immediate pre-eminence in wealth, has prevented any general acceptance of hereditary leadership. Formerly, when cultivable land was still plentiful, wealth depended on manpower, and the wealth of a household was therefore largely dependent on its fertility. If a man had many sons, together they could plough fresh lands, and the head of the household would become wealthy. But when he died, in due course, his sons would divide up his land and animals, and might find themselves quite poor, with a young and expanding family to feed. But as soon as their own sons in turn were old enough to contribute to the ploughing, they would themselves acquire wealth and position in the village. It might often happen that of several brothers, one would prosper in this way, and others would, through misfortunes such as the death of wife or oxen, or the birth of girls, or infertility, remain poor. In S now, the absence of spare land makes the matter still more complex. In some families, the single prosperous household of a father with many sons is replaced permanently in the next generation by several poor households, for whom a large family may come to be regarded as a curse as much as a blessing. The possibilities of earning cash outside the village are far greater nowadays than they used to be, so that where the sons are prepared to go away to work, and especially where they have the initiative to learn a skilled trade, a man can still become wealthy by having many sons, but only if he can retain their loyalty. Migrant labourers are not dependent on their fathers for their earnings in town, as they themselves were on their fathers for land, and they will set up their own house if they are not satisfied with their treatment of them; they may even leave the village altogether and go to town. In short, eminence in the village is not hereditary, but each man climbs in turn from poverty at the division of his father's wealth, to a position of wealth on the backs of his sons, and his success is in part dependent on his success in having sons and keeping control of them. The families in which there is only one heir, form an obvious exception to this rule. In the present generation, several of the wealthier villagers owe their positions to being the sole heir. In the past, a man with only one son was unlikely to become a man of much wealth, but land pressure in the village means that labour is available for share cropping or hire, so that a man with a fair amount of land can make use of it even if he does not have enough man power in his own household to work it. Inheritance through women further complicates the rise and fall of families in the wealth scale from generation to generation. |
| I said above that it is wealth in land and animals which carries prestige in the village. I meant by this to distinguish such wealth from the earning of cash by labour, skilled or unskilled. In fact, young men sometimes say explicitly that their aim is to make money with which to buy land and oxen. Possession of a regular cash income is not a village objective, but merely a means to the end of setting up as farmers. There are not two separate ways of life; almost all migrant wage earners own some land and even the richest households send members to town to work as and when they can. It is, of course, true that a supply of cash could, like wealth in land, be used for prestige-winning generosity, but I would say that those who earn cash are less inclined, as well as less able, to be generous, than those whose wealth is in the more traditional form of land and animals. Now another form of wealth is growing in the villages, and will undoubtedly increase in the future. There have always been, of course, a few millers and traders in some of the villages, though not in those I have been visiting. Now investment in some new enterprise has become a more obvious possibility and is much more common. On a small scale, shops or coffee houses may be opened. This requires little capital. Many men buy a stock, sell it out in their own oda, and do not replace it. Others may set up more carefully and permanently. Some of the richer villagers are clubbing together to buy lorries, often a highly profitable speculation, and in S and one or two other villages diesel-powered flour mills have been put up by such co-operation. These activities are almost always carried out by the village wealthy, because they alone have the means to do so. So far, enterprise on this scale is so new that it is not possible to say what its effect on the relation between wealth and rank in the villages will be. It seems obvious that such ownership will carry prestige, and gives the means for generosity, but again I feel that those who speculate successfully in these ways are less apt to use their acquired wealth in the traditional generosity, but rather to turn back to fresh speculation, even to start thinking in terms of a move to the more lucrative markets of the town. Substance in the village carries a title of respect. The better off are known as " aga " (pronounced roughly " Ah ! "). This word is also commonly used as a term of address, as in " Mehmet aga ", " Osman aga ", but when used alone as a term of reference it conveys a connotation of wealth and rank. I was told, as an argument for the poverty of the village, that there was no aga in S. but one man was sometimes referred to as aga, very much more so after he took a leading part in the building of the village motor mill. " Efendi" is used in much the same way, as a common term of address—I was called Pol Efendi—and coupled with names in reference, in recognition of high rank. Used alone it has a special religious meaning. |
| Closely tied in with the wealth scale of rank is the occupational scale. Since almost everyone in the village is partly or mainly an agriculturist, and other occupations are thought of as secondary, this scale is not of comparable importance with that of wealth. Within the village, there are certain public offices which must be filled; namely the herdsmen, of whom in S some nine or ten were needed during the year, and the watchmen—one permanent village factotum and guard, and one or two for watching the crops at harvest-time. All these jobs are considered menial. On the other hand, some men in the village are skilled craftsmen, mainly carpenters, smiths and builders. Any skilled craftsman has a title " usta ", a term of respect, which is quite often used in address. The same grading appears in labour migration. Some of the men are unskilled—" amele "—but many of them are skilled masons, plasterers, and so on. These are not all addressed as usta, but only those of high skill and long standing in their trade. The difference in rank is of course connected with difference in pay. The highly skilled claim to make up to ten or more Turkish liras (3) a day, whereas the unskilled receive only about one-third of this sum. One complex set of scales of rank remains to be considered, namely those centred round religion and morality. Here the artificiality of my attempt to separate out these scales becomes clear. It makes good sense to speak of a single religious scale, yet it also makes sense to distinguish four scales; piety, that is, conformity to the outward rituals of Islam; learning, that used to mean knowledge of the Koran, and other holy matters, and now, in a confused way includes modern education; morality, that is, reliability and good neighbourliness, and lastly magic, that is, a knowledge of spells and cures, which are based on Koranic texts. It is not easy to isolate these four scales in examples because the village does not think of them as separate. I do not mean that they cannot distinguish between them but that they think of them under one set of concepts. The words for " bad " and " good " in moral judgments are those for " sin " and for " pleasing to God " —" gunah " and " sevap ". Learning is thought of as religious learning, and Koranic spells are obviously also a part of religious knowledge. Of course, men are, and are recognised to be, pious but ignorant, dishonourable but knowledgeable about religion. Magic perhaps stands apart, but, on the whole, divorced from religious learning and piety, it brings little rank. The one man in the village who had a reputation for a knowledge of Koranic spells, was a scruffy individual who was wrongfully withholding land from his brother's son's widow. Although consulted quite frequently for his skill he ranked low in the village. In general it was taken for granted that a good man combined all the qualities. A man of religious learning would also be pious in his habits, reliable and helpful to his neighbours, and might even be able to use his knowledge to achieve cures or other special results. |
| One of the conditions of high rank in a small group is conformity to the norms of the group. The moral rules, and the religious rites and doctrines of a group, may plausibly be defined as those rules, rites and doctrines which are felt to be most important to that group. If this is accepted, it would follow that those who stood high on the moral religious scale would stand high in the overall scale of the village. That is to say, the religious factor should be an important one in determining rank in the village. It is not, therefore, remarkable that religious piety and learning, and reliability and neighbourliness carry very high prestige. A man of such qualities will be well spoken of, and may be consulted on private affairs. In the odalar he will receive perhaps a shade more respect than his contemporaries of equal wealth. Highest of all in this scale are those who have been on the holy pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1949, just after my arrival, the three wealthiest old men in the village arrived back from such a pilgrimage. They were feted and inundated with visitors for about a fortnight, and then slowly returned to normal existence, but their prestige, not only in the village, but in the whole area, was greatly enhanced, and they are now invariably given, in address and in reference, the title " haji "—" pilgrim ".(4) So far, I have been dealing with scales of rank which belong within the village society. But in a discussion of rank, the formal political scale cannot be ignored, although in a social unit forming part of a modern state it inevitably carries us outside the village. Turkey is divided for administrative purposes into 63 vilayets, or provinces, each under a Vali. Each vilayet is again divided into sections called until recently " kaza ", or county, under a " kaymakam ", and these subdivided into " nahiye ", or districts, each containing some 15 to 20 villages, under a district officer. These three types of administrative officer are appointed by, or at least subject to the approval of the Ministry of the Interior in Ankara. Although their powers are constitutionally limited, the people think of them as the local ruler, and in practice the running of their area, from the district up to the province, depends very largely on their personal qualities. They are required to have a good modern education—even district officers must have completed high school— and even if of village origins, have become assimilated to the urban way of life. Below the district officer, each village has a " muhtar "—headman—and a Council of Elders at least four members strong, all of whom are in theory elected by secret ballot. Until 1950, the muhtar held office for a term of four years, but resignations within the period were common. In future, it is to be every two years. The office of muhtar is important mainly because he is the official representative of the government in the village. Most official business passes through him. He |