| 25 |
| building of a cultural pool of entrepreneurial and organisational knowledge and experience of many kinds. (v). Social Control Social control is at the root of organisation, because it is at the root of everything social, which is to say human. The word control seems to arouse moral disapproval in some people, just as authority arouses approval in others. But social control is built in to all social interaction. Human conduct is controlled far less by formal rules and formal punishments than by the subtle innuendoes and implications of other people's reactions. By and large, and with complications, - feuding, for example, is a form of social control - small communities like S in 1950 are more tightly controlled by informal interpersonal sanctions, than towns, especially rapidly growing shanty towns. Pendular migrants have more freedom from such controls in the towns, and this migrant experience makes them less subject to such informal controls when they are back in the village. Households which migrate have even more freedom. So labour migration is directly correlated not only with far greater experience and awareness of formal organisation, but also with a profound change in the mechanisms of informal social control, both in the villages and even more in the towns. [Stirling 1957, Stirling 1981, Shankland 1992, 1993] (vi). Social Cognition I have already argued that daily conversation contains and implies a vast amount of information, and of assumptions and values, that make social life and successful activities in any given society possible. Here, I simply wish to repeat in the concrete context of the village and its emigrants that much of the social cognition which was fairly uniform in 1950 |
| 26 |
| has been lost; that vast new quantities of new social cognition have arrived, covering a multitude of topics from a multitude of sources; and that such social cognition is far less even and uniform than it was in 1950. Main sources of new ‘cognition’ are of course formal education and literacy, and television and radio, which together open huge new possibilities of knowledge. But people do not necessarily believe what they are told. The testing and validation of ideas and information rests on personal interaction and discussion. It is migration, because it is constantly bringing new information back to the villages, whence it is often passed on again to migrants elsewhere, that is the most important factor in this testing of new social cognition. Moreover, social cognition is in turn a main factor in chain migration, in job finding, in helping migrants with home finding and other practical problems, and above all in entrepreneurial and investment activities. Equally, labour migration is the main factor in mixing people up, and providing personally validated information across all kinds of social frontiers of states, communities, occupations, social classes, often through common membership by birth, or parents’ birth, in a village or a set of villages. Thus, the decisions which villagers make about migrating, about education, about jobs, about homes, about investments, are the result not of the reality as seen by planners or economists or ethnographers; but reality as the villagers - or migrants - themselves perceive and experience it. And this perception is in turn directly controlled by informal social controls; by social cognition validated in and by the social networks in which they live. The Village and its Townspeople. The variations in the ties between the urban migrants and their villages make brief description unsatisfactory. A few lose touch, many have very |
| 27 |
| little contact. The number of these will presumably {must} increase as a new urban generation grows up. But most keep close ties. Many visit at least once a year when they can. Many have formal rights to village land. These vary from minute theoretical fractions too small to matter, to sizeable holdings. A few run their land by contract, or even by frequent visits; a few give land formally to sharecroppers or tenants, usually close kin; many receive presents of food from fathers or brothers who farm as yet undivided inheritances. Some own houses which they use for summer holiday, or to supervise harvesting. Some couples keep closer ties with the wife’s family than the husband’s. Reciprocally, some subsidise poor village kin; many house village children who are attending town schools, or provide lodging for pendular migrants, especially apprentices. Two main links tie many tightly to the village. First, marriage. The vast majority of marriages arranged for the young adults growing up in the town so far (1986) have been with close or distant kin, or other village partners; or with migrants already in town from the village or from neighbouring villages. The children of these marriages thus have kin links back to the village, or to neighbouring villages, through both parents. Already, such marriages are becoming less dominant, and surely the trend to marry strangers in town will grow with new generations. But to date (1993) many marriages renew kinship and help to keep village ties and village consciousness alive for at least one more generation. Secondly, in many cases, village households and migrant households maintain close economic cooperation. Fathers give their urban children food in bulk from the family land. People in trouble can expect help in both directions. Men looking for resources to finance weddings, start businesses or meet cash flow problems turn to their parents or |
| 28 |
| siblings or children. The village is thus linked by pendular and household migrants to many urban contexts in many different places. It thus becomes a storehouse of social cognition, of information about conditions, jobs, enterprises, places, possible spouses, through which migrants can discover things they need to know. Thus while the village no longer has clear boundaries, as it did in 1950, between members and non members, it retains at least for the present a strong identity as the active centre of a network with valuable resources of information, marriage partners, and material help and co-operation. The village migrants in no way form a proletariat as such. Some do find themselves with nothing to sell but their labour; mostly those with serious misfortunes, or low skills and little village resources. But the great majority manage, as I have said, to own their dwellings, to invest in real estate, to run shops or businesses. Most of them have ambitions for themselves or at least for their children, whom they send to town secondary schools, and higher education. I found nothing I would call 'working class culture'. So far, urban financial success does not of itself isolate the village migrants from their village kin.Turkey is certainly an extremely unequal society, and analysis in terms of social class is, to say the least, plausible. In 1973, the top quintile of households enjoyed 56.5% of total household income, the bottom quintile 3.5%, at that time one of the most extreme imbalances in the World Bank table for 1986. [World Bank 1986,Table 24, p. 226] The evidence suggests that in recent years this imbalance is increasing. [Keyder 1987, Keles 1985] But the village migrants move into a wide variety of places in this hierarchy, and moreover, they see the society as open, as one in which they are free to compete. Migrants belong to social networks covering a wide sector of hierarchy; they do not form a social class. The rapid process of urban |