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| migration contributes to keeping Turkey a highly unequal but a highly mobile society, with strong vertical ties between strata. Again, this situation may not be stable; many of the less successful may find their children caught in a typical urban poverty trap. At the same time, the frontier between rural and urban, which even in 1950 I found less sharp than others found it, has become very much less so. Since nearly every rural household has its own urban migrants, and or at least friends and neighbours in the towns; and since most villages except some in the east, or in mountains and forests, have regular bus services, electricity, television, telephones, village daily life is not cut off from the national life, and is much more like town life than it was forty years ago. So one of the most important effects - and causes - of labour migration is the much much greater integration of Turks as a nation, within the new frontiers of 1923. And of course, ‘integration’ is itself another complex idea, with complex implications. Conclusions This limited report on the ethnography of one village omits a mass of anecdotes, special cases, exceptions, which would both illustrate and qualify my generalities. And this is only one example. In many ways it is a paradigm of much of what has gone on, and is going on in Turkey; but there are also many other villages, some with very different stories [Keyder 1983, Keyder 1993, Aksit 1993, Sirman 1988, Hann 1985, 1990]. So complex as it is, it greatly underestimates the complexity of the national processes. Three final comments. First, in a situation of changing processes of change, innovations abound; people invent different ways of coping with unprecedented problems, and combine and deduce |
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| new “social cognition” from the new variety of sources. So, even though local and various “social cognition” is lost with national standardisation, new varieties are developing. Even if most such innovations perish rapidly, some persist. {In this sense, ‘culture’ is constantly growing out of new forms of interpersonal relations}. Second, those who present Turkish change and growth as some kind of unwelcome ‘capitalist penetration' seem to me mistaken, both because their vocabulary usually presents a simplistic, even at times false, view of these complex processes, and because they underrate the astonishing economic growth of the last seventy years. They seldom talk about a nation of villages, as late as 1950, in which many suffered malnutrition every time the harvest was poor, in which the poor shivered through the winters, in which people were short of clothes and shoes, in which children, and even adults, constantly died in large numbers. The crucial word is ‘some’. It is not true that villagers were driven out of the villages into miserable poverty in the shanty towns. It is true that some were; proportionately, not many [Hinderink and Kiray 1970]. Most people left the villages because of their carefully researched knowledge that the opportunity for a higher income and a better life was waiting for them, and most of those got it right. But of course some villages have not developed detailed networks which guarantee most of their young members a niche to earn in town, as S has done. Some for example migrate annually from poor eastern villages to pick cotton in Adana or the Menderes valley [Sirman 1988]. But, third, equally the ‘modernisers’ do not emphasise the suffering and misery that such rapid mass movements cause. People exploit each other; some employers pay cruel wages or cheat their employees; some cheat less sophisticated compatriots of their German savings; some migrants do end up in |
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| grinding urban poverty; illness may be disastrous; families are divided by migration; lonely spouses, especially men, find new partners. Meanwhile, nationally, it seems that a lot of rich get richer, and many poor stay poor. A few people are worse off; most people are much better off; but nationally the gap between the very rich and very poor widens. Modernisation, capitalism is not a universal bed of roses, and it most certainly involves individual and social suffering and injustice, quite apart from environmental damage. If we try to evaluate what has happened in Turkey in the last 70 years, if we ask whether the colossal movement of people out of villages into the towns has been bad or good, how do we balance the huge national and personal benefits against the miseries, losses, and fresh injustices? And what is the point in denouncing what has happened anyway? What we can do is to try to understand. But I am saying that understanding is perhaps a great deal more difficult than most of the available social science models seem to imply. LIST OF REFERENCES Abadan-Unat, N. et al (ed.) 197 :Migration and Development Abadan-Unat, N. (ed.) 1981: Women in Turkish Society. Leiden: Brill. Abadan-Unat, N. 1993: The Impact of Migration on Village Life. In Culture and Economy: Changes in Turkish Villages. (ed.) Stirling, P.. Huntingdon: Eothen. Aksit, B. 1993: Studies in Rural Transformation in Turkey: 1950-1990. In Culture and Economy: Changes in Turkish Villages. (ed.) Stirling, P. . Huntingdon: Eothen. Ayata, S. 1982: Differentiation and Capital |
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| Accumulation: Case Studies of the Carpet and Metal Industries in Kayseri (Turkey). Canterbury: PhD Thesis University of Kent at Canterbury. Berkes, N. 1974: The Two Facets of the Kemalist Revolution. Muslim World LXIV 4, 292-306. Fischer, M.D. and A. Finkelstein 1991: Social Knowledge Representation: a Case Study. In Using Computers in Qualitative Research. (eds.) Fielding, N.G. and R.M. Lee. London: Sage. Gellner E.A. 1983; Nations and Nationalism. Cambridge, C.U.P. Giddens, A. 1976: New Rules of Sociological Method. London: Hutchinson. Hale, W.M. 1981: The Political and Economic Development of Modern Turkey. London: Croom Helm. Hann C.M. 1985; Rural Transformation on the East Black Sea Coast of Turkey; a note on Keyder. J. Peas. Studies, 12, 4. Hann C. M. 1990: Tea and the Domestication of the Turkish State. Huntingdon: Eothen. Hann C. M. ed. 1994: When History Accelerates Athlone Press: London Hinderink J. and M.Kiray 1970: Social Stratification as an Obstacle to Progress. New York: Praeger. Incirlioglu, E.O. 1993: Marriage, Gender Relations, and Rural Transformation in Central Anatolia. In Culture and Economy: Changes in Turkish Villages. (ed.) Stirling, P.. Huntingdon: Eothen. Kandiyoti, D. 1991: End of Empire: Islam, Nationalism and Women in Turkey. In Women, Islam and the State. (ed.) Kandiyoti, D.. London: Macmillan. Keles, R. 1985: The Effects of External Migration on Regional Development in Turkey. In Uneven Development in Southern Europe. (eds.) Hudson, R. and J. Lewis. London: Methuen. Keyder, Ç. 1983: Paths of Rural Transformation. In The Sociology of Developing Societies: The Middle East. (eds.) Asad, T. and R. Owen. London: Macmillan. Keyder, Ç. 1987: State and Class in Turkey: A Study |