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| With rare exceptions, the income unit is not an individual but a household. These changes, in size and sources of income, obviously affect the balance of household incomes, and thus the internal balance of power between earners within households. Most households in 1950 were agricultural firms. Fathers organised the resident men, women and children as a productive team to run the land and the animals. Now the sources of income are many. Smith and Wallerstein [Smith and Wallerstein, 1992] have recently published what they claim is a universal classification of household incomes; with frank discussions of the fuzzinesses and complexities involved. They name five kinds of sources. Subsistence includes any activity for own use; farming for the household needs, cooking for family and guests, DIY in San Francisco. Profit includes selling anything produced in the household, or profits from trading by members of the household. Wages is working for cash or kind for others. Rents include all unearned income from investment. Transfers includes gifts, inheritance, pensions, and State handouts. In these terms, most households in 1950 had only subsistence and a meagre profit from agriculture and animals; about half of them augmented this with wages, but explicitly unwillingly. Now all but small and fragmentary households enjoy income from at least three sources. Many have income from subsistence, profits from agriculture, profits from other sources, wages from girls weaving carpets, wages from pendular migrants, rents from village or urban houses, and quite a few have pensions, some on a European scale. One major advantage of this multiplicity of sources is security. If one source fails, the household is not destitute. The most vulnerable now are the least successful urban migrants, those who have only their labour to sell. But these are few. (iv). Occupations |
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| Most S village men work in building. So do those from most nearby villages. One village at least has been noticeably more successful than S village, producing many successful contractors in Ankara. Another village supplied far more workers to the Kayseri textile factory in 1950, and later sent many children to live with their kinsmen in Kayseri and attend secondary school. This village now has a lot of lawyers, teachers and government officials. In S village and its emigrants, outside the building industry, I can count fourteen or more separate occupations, plus some shopkeepers of different kinds; including one medical doctor practising in Germany, with a German wife. Not many, but growing, as the new generation growing up in towns, look for new ways to make money. The structure of the building industry in which the villagers operate is loose and casual. Boys go off to learn a craft, in S mainly tiling, as an apprentice, çirak, from a master, usta. Without any formality, he works until he is ready to take on work as a master himself, which is simply a matter of someone giving him a break. It may take three months or two years. If he does it well, fine. Most jobs are short lived, and an usta needs to maintain a network of friends to keep him informed of job openings. Maintaining a regular income depends on reputation and social networks. I have the impression that most do not work on average more than 15 days a month, but some are more successful and manage to go straight from job to job. Being sociable and reliable seem more important than being skilful. The next step is to become a subcontractor, tasaron,for a particular skill. A subcontractor undertakes a fixed amount of tiling or whatever for a given price. He then employs his friends to do the work. This involves risk and experience. Most subcontractors do not employ more than five to twelve masters at a time. They said recently that the |
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| margin it is possible to achieve, is between 125% and 150% of a master's daily rate, so long as nothing goes wrong; even twice in the past. Since most subcontractors also work with their team, they can make good money. Many of the tilers and painters oscillate between working as a subcontractor and working as a master. But one painter told me how he used to subcontract six or seven different jobs at a time, employing 30 to 40 people, and supervising them by driving round in a car, not by working alongside them. He now runs three separate businesses, one of them wholesale. A few experienced subcontractors may make a larger leap, and become contractors. This involves considerable capital, and people often make partnerships. In 1989, we counted seventeen individuals or partnerships from S acting as building contractors. In that year, several were hit by inflation and cash flow problems, and the number fell. Three are wealthy; one apparently very successful man overreached his resources, and was hiding from his creditors. Besides these, some household migrants from S have gone into retailing or wholesaling paint or other building materials; or into manufacturing them, - for example, cement blocks. One man makes sewer pipes, and had for a time a monopoly in the Kayseri area. One man in Antalya is a graduate in Civil Engineering. He gave up a government post as underpaid, and now runs a private practice, and collaborates with successful building contractors from S, including his own close kin. The pendular migrants are never the most successful. It is hard to run a business from a village home. The successful feel secure, and have much to gain from residing in town. But it is safer and cheaper for the less successful to keep wife and children in the village, and combine pendular migration with household farming. |
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| (v) Organisation Of course, the pre-1950 villages and their households were organised. They had to plan ahead, and to co- ordinate all kinds of activities [Stirling 1965]. Individually, men had the experience of military organisation, and many had experience of employment at the bottom of the urban pile. One or two were already tasaron. Since 1950, children of both sexes have learned subordination in school. Moreover, many village people had experience of the urban world and of the government through all kinds of contacts. All the same, by and large the villagers lacked knowledge of and experience with the myriad organisations of a modern urban based industrial and commercial society. Even the unskilled migrants of 1950 had to learn to cope with many new organisations in order to work and live in town. The skilled, the educated, the entrepreneurs have to learn a great deal more, including forward planning and managing equals and subordinates, and learning how to cope with State and private organisations for supplies, permission, markets, and such by persuasion, or by obeying, evading or ignoring complex rules. They also had to learn to manage cash flows and inflation. Coping with organisations is partly a personal matter of skill and personality. But it is primarily social and cultural. Any society must have accepted sets of information, ideas, and moralities for dealing with or running organisations. Faced with new organisations in new circumstances, people have to learn, often by bitter experience; and many villagers did. Within their own field of social interaction, these problems were and are constantly discussed, and new public sets of such information, ideas and moralities are created; including information about where to find information. Of course, all such information carries a value, and is often exchanged as a commodity. But this does not prevent the |