| migrant labour. I knew several really poor men who were very much better off for having two or three adult sons. But the more successful the father in producing sons, the poorer in land will be the sons when it comes to a division. Thus in Sakaltutan, as in many neighbouring villages, most households, including many with only one working man, owned less land than they could comfortably have worked with their available working population; most households, agriculturally, were underemployed. This shortage of land leads to ad hoc arrangements for share cropping. No household is willing to leave land uncultivated if an alternative arrangement is possible, and conversely plenty of people are anxious to cultivate more than they own. Year to year agreements are made, but these change constantly with changes in manpower and ox-power in village households. Even so, many of the villagers have less than a full year's work to do on the land, and, except at harvest, cheap casual labour is always in good supply. Since the population is now growing with no accompanying growth in overall production, the village standard of living is likely to fall. Increasing underemployment and poverty are only offset by the rise, in very recent times, in the demand for and profitability of migrant labour. Sakaltutan, for example, certainly could not support its population without a large income in remittances from its sons in the cities. Establishing and maintaining rights to specific pieces of land is of much greater importance under these circumstances than when land is freely available. Moreover, the claiming of rights through women is one of the few ways of expanding a limited patrimony. The increase in claims of this kind is therefore not merely due to the influence of modern, urban ideas, but to a change in the landholding situation. Since frequently land arrangements in the recent past have been ad hoc, non-legal and unsystematic, opportunities for argument are unlimited, justice in an abstract sense an impossibility, and litigation - increasingly popular as a weapon - is useless as a method of achieving a satisfactory and sensible settlement. No household can now re-establish large enough land holdings to keep several sons fully occupied, but a household with a moderate sized holding which has only one heir may be able to maintain a position of relative prosperity over more than one generation. In Sakaltutan, and in other villages of similar structure, internal political power was divided between a number of these moderately endowed households, none of which was in a position to dominate. Where there was more than one heir, a division of the family holdings usually made it impossible for the heirs to remain among these leading households. One way by which in theory a man might re-establish power in the village is by purchase of land. In fact, in my observation this never seems to be attempted. Sale is rare except among close kin. If an inheriting sister or a brother leaves the village, he or she will sell to her agnates. Other sales are regarded, except on a very small scale or in special circumstances, |
| as immoral. Properly registered legal sale is of course perfectly possible under the Turkish Civil Code, provided one can prove title. But most villagers would have difficulty in establishing legal title, although most village holdings are known to the whole village and are not in dispute. The cost of getting the necessary documents and the involvement with lawyers does not appeal to villagers. In fact, sales in the village have customarily not been sales at all but pawning. No legal document is executed; at the most a piece of paper is signed by the villagers themselves. The vendor retains the right to reclaim the land at the original price whenever he wishes, unless other conditions are specifically laid down. In any case, the demand for land is heavy and the supply hardly exists. By concentrating on two somewhat a priori models, both referring to the past, and illustrating them with selected field material, I am certain to have given a false picture. Recent political, economic and technical changes have made both systems out of date. Since the Second World War, partly due to the extension of price stabilization through the government Office of Soil Products, and partly due to a number of more direct measures, cash cropping has received a tremendous stimulus, reflected in a jump in the land under grain, between 1944 and 1956, from 7,000 hectares to 11,600 hectares.(10) Tractor ploughing is now possible, making feasible holdings larger than the traditional ones, and once legal rights are established they can be defended by the legitimate force of the central government, not merely by one's close agnates' gun power. Land can be farmed for a cash profit based on a guaranteed price for the crops. Obviously, it is no longer allowed to sit about unclaimed. The recent history of Elbasi illustrates this. In the late forties there occurred a sort of land rush in which those with the means vied with each other to plough up the remaining spare pasture, until the whole village was split into those who thought no more village pasture could be spared, and those who still wanted to take the last chance of expanding their own holdings. The fighting was settled by the authorities in favour of the status quo. At present, several households hold more land than they can work, many have adequate holdings, share croppers are hard to come by, and casual labour is scarce and migrant labour comparatively limited. On the other hand, the sharp rise in the demands for, and the relative cash return from, skilled migrant labour has led to a very much larger number of young men from most villages, even Elbasi, going away to work than ever before. They are mostly building trade operatives - painters, plasterers, masons. Their incomes enable them to maintain by village standards a relatively high level of prestige consumption, but without exercising thereby any real power in village affairs. For some of these migrants, the village ceases to be the main theatre for achievement. They measure their standing against a vastly wider background, including sections of urban society. But many others still look to the village, and many middle-aged men give up the annual migration if they can possibly afford to do so. The cycle of domestic growth and fission in these villages apparently inhibited the |
| establishment of hereditary leadership or dominant lineages, by making it impossible for one son of a leading man to inherit control of all the resources on which his father's position was based. It is possible to argue that a later or earlier division of the household might not have these effects. If the division of households had normally taken place later in the cycle, a household head with a dominant position might then have been succeeded in office or in power and wealth by a brother who retained a command of the same domestic resources. If, on the other hand, sons had customarily separated on marriage and farmed separately, all households would have been much on the same economic level, and political leadership would necessarily have rested on factors other than land and food resources. It might then have been possible for a younger man to succeed his father. The relation between the domestic cycle and the distribution of power is not of course simply causal. If the domestic cycle appears to prevent the direct inheritance of political power, it is equally arguable that the absence of hereditary political power is a necessary condition of the development of this form of the domestic cycle. They are part of a single system. This system, as I have described the model, was self-adjusting. Even the rare case of a man whose success grew beyond the bounds of his own village was confronted both with increasing difficulties in the maintenance of equilibrium within his empire, and with its extinction at his death. But in fact I needed here to introduce also outside factors, namely the resistance of those already holding political power above village level. In other words, the maintenance of the system I have described depends on the absence of detailed interference in the village affairs, and also on the existence of a central power able to suppress, or to absorb and draw out of the village, any one who succeeded beyond a certain level in the acquisition of power. The system also depended on the economic isolation, that is, on the near autarky of the village, and the absence of a class with economic resources from outside the village sufficient to introduce more marked and permanent social differentiation. The system in which the domestic cycle and the distribution of power were mutually supporting depended for its maintenance on the existence of a certain type of large scale political and economic organisation. Now with the vastly increased intervention of the national bureaucracy in village affairs and the rapid technical and economic development of Turkey, the political and economic conditions under which the processes described can continue to repeat themselves no longer exist. BIBLIOGRAPHY F.A.O., Production Yearbook 1958 GOODY, J. (Ed.) ‘The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups', Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology No. I, 1958. |
| MORRISON, John A., Altsar: A Unit of Land Occupance in the Kanak Su Basin of Central Anatolia. Chicago, 1939. Republique Turque, Annuaire Statistiaue, 1951 and 1953. STIRLING, Paul. 'Social Ranking in a Turkish Village', British Journal of Sociology, Vol. IV, No. I, March 1953. ‘Land, Marriage, and the Law in Turkish Villages', U.N.E.S.C.O. International Social Science Bulletin, Vol. IX, No. I, 1957. 'A Death and a Youth Club: Feuding in a Turkish Village', Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. I, Washington,January 1960. Turkish News, Turkish Embassy, London, 15th May, 1959. NOTES I. Dr. Maurice Freedman suggested to me the explicit inclusion of this point. I am also clearly indebted to the recent Cambridge symposium; Goody (ed.), 1958. 2. S. is pronounced like sh; l (distinct in modern Turkish from i) is very near the indefinite English vowel er; so Elbasi roughly rhymes with usher in England and cosher in U.S.A. 3. I have given details of the ranking system of Sakaltutan elsewhere. Stirling, 1953. 4. See below p. 207. 5. Stirling, 1960. 6. The population of Turkey has risen from 13.6 millions in 1927, to an estimated 26.9 millions in 1959. (Annuaire Stat, Republique Turque, 1951; Turkish News, Turkish Embassy, London, 15th May, 1959.) 7. In particular, the study of land usage in Central Anatolia by John A. Morrison in 1932 helped to provoke my analysis. My theory is consistent with his derailed data. MORRISON, 1938. 8. See Stirling 1957 for further details of the legal situation. 9. The government officially equates a donum and a decare. But in village language, a |