Turkish Village

Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.

Paul Stirling
CHAPTER THREE
VILLAGES AND HOUSEHOLDS

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A Summary of the Social Structure

One major problem in giving or following any ethnographic description is the order of presentation, since an adequate understanding of any one institution presumes a knowledge of other institutions in the same society.' I hope I have overcome this difficulty by offering my summary here instead of at the end. The village itself is the most striking social group. No village forms part of any larger indigenous organisation. All the villages in the area, and indeed in most of Turkey, are self-contained clusters of buildings, separated from each other by stretches of unfenced land. To walk from one to the next may take half an hour to two or more hours. There were two villages within half an hour of Sakaltutan, and another nine within one and a half hours.

Each village is. composed of distinct patrilineal, patrilocal households. Although several households often occupy one block of buildings, the physical and social boundaries between them are never vague. Village and household are the main social units. Newly married women apart, everyone must belong at one time to one and only one village, and to one and only one household.

Every village is divided into a number of quarters or wards (mahalle). These have no clear boundaries and are not corporate People acknowledge loyalty to their quarters, and may speak of fights in the village as fights between quarters. Because close neighbours often intermarry, and close agnates and sometimes other close kin live near each other, these quarters often have some kinship unity as well. In Elbashï, several quarters were actually called after lineages. Close neighbours, whether kin or
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not, will tend to form informal groups for recreation and conversation

Last of the important groups in the village is the lineage. This group consists of a number of households, the heads of which are descended patrilineally i.e., strictly through males only, from a common ancestor generally three or four generations back. These households normally form local clusters. The rights and duties of membership are not precisely defined, and the degree to which members are committed varies greatly between individuals. The main function of the lineage is the protection of members from aggression by supporting them in quarrels. Yet not all household heads are members of lineages, nor do all lineages that could be defined genealogically constitute significant social groups. Most of those who are not committed lineage members are among the poorer and less powerful stratum of village society.

Apart from membership of these groups, a person's position in the network of interpersonal relationships is mainly determined by the obvious factors - sex and age, kinship, occupation and wealth; and to a lesser degree by piety and learning, by personal honour, and for a man, by the range and strength of his urban contacts.

The sexual distinction is, as one would expect in an Islamic society, strongly emphasised, and for most normal social life the sexes are sharply segregated. Age is not a criterion for any formal groups, but it carries respect and authority.

Kinship relations are both the most intimate and intense and the commonest type of social relations. The personal kin ties of men through men form the core of the lineage groups. Extra lineage kin ties form strong and numerous relationships between both households and individuals. This kinship network extends from village to village and provides vital channels for all sorts of activities - economic, political, religious - and for the arranging of marriages which will in turn forge new kin ties.

Distinctions of wealth are not conspicuous. All households in both villages appear at first sight to live in much the same way. All who can, work. There are no permanent rentier households, though one or two elderly men are supported largely by their sons, womenfolk and share-croppers. The wealthiest and most urbanised households have a comfortable sufficiency, while the
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poor are badly housed and clothed, and underfed in all but good years. But though differences in wealth are not conspicuous in the way of life, they are of great social importance. The rich are the leaders of the village; they receive deference, carry weight in village counsels, employ their neighbours, and are able, by gifts and loans, to exercise influence and even direct control, especially among their own kin.

Religious learning carries high prestige in the villages. Many village boys receive some kind of special religious training either informally from kinsmen, or from special schools in the towns. A few of these may become village imams; others live a normal agricultural life, but with a special reputation for learning and piety. How far a man succeeds in exploiting this prestige for gaining power and wealth seems to depend on personality and circumstances.

Other non-agricultural occupations and skills are structurally of minor importance. Most specialists are part-time, owning or at least wishing to own land; there are no social groups based on occupations such as the castes of Indian society, nor are craftsmen treated as outsiders.

Urban contacts have probably always conferred great influence and prestige in the villages, chiefly, of course, because they imply influence with officials, an influence often over estimated by villagers. Traditionally, it is likely that the main channels for social promotion lay through the official religious hierarchy. Nowadays, in a village like Elbashï, and even in many poorer ones, people have sons, brothers or affines who are traders or officials, sometimes of fairly high standing, in the urban world. These links give great prestige in the village. Where they exist in numbers as in Elbashï, they seem to be leading to the beginnings of a class structure in the village.

But only the merest beginnings. Village society seems in the past to have had a highly mobile ranking system, with a marked absence of inherited rank. In every generation, each household split, dividing its land at least among the sons, sometimes among both sons and daughters. The richer a man, the more wives and therefore the more heirs he would be likely to have, so that in general there was a tendency for each young married man to find himself on his father's death with a fairly modest amount of land, and thus bound to start building up afresh on his own
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account. In a situation so open, one would expect that occasionally a particular man by skill and luck would establish considerable personal pre-eminence, and stories about the great villagers of the past are current in most villages. But it seems equally true that the successful men did not found dynasties. Their sons normally began again with, at the most, a short lead over rivals.

Village Solidarity

People belong to their village in a way they belong to no other social group. On any definition of community, the village is a community - a social group with many functions, not all of them explicit, and to which people are committed by birth or marriage, and bound by many ties.

None of the geographical or administrative units larger than a village is in any way comparable. The villagers do, of course, see themselves as belonging to a vaguely defined district, and to the Province of Kayseri. Men in the army or working away in the cities often form friendships and groups along the lines of locality of origin, but the actual units of administration, nahiye, kaza and vilayet as such have no social relevance outside their administrative functions.

The virtues of the village are an eternal topic of conversation with outsiders, and of banter between men of different villages. Every village has the best drinking water, and the best climate. One village, which stored winter snow in large deep wells, and drank all through the summer the stagnant water which resulted, pleaded the superiority of their water as an argument for my moving in at once. Every village is more hospitable, more honourable, more virile, more peaceable, gives better weddings, than any of its neighbours. Other villages are savage, mean, dishonourable, lying, lazy, cowardly. Neither Sakaltutan nor Elbashï found my choice of themselves surprising, but everyone else found it quite incredible.

Each village possesses a territory, recognised by the State as its administrative area, over which it exercises de facto pasture rights. Villages normally own common land, and sometimes meadow or crop land which can be let; but in the Civil Code it has no rights to land within its territory owned by individuals, and unoccupied land belongs to the State.
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For the village, this territory is much more than an administrative area, - it is a symbol of village identity (de Planhol (1958) p. 340). If any other village attempts to use land lying within the village boundaries, people mobilise rapidly and are quite prepared to fight, with fire-arms if necessary. Even incursions by other villages' flocks or herds cause at the very least militant indignation. On one occasion, Sakaltutan animals crossed the frontier to Suleymanli, and the Suleymanli headman who happened to be passing on a horse, struck the shepherd in charge with his whip. Many Sakaltutan men talked of immediate armed attack. However, they were restrained by wiser counsel. I never witnessed mobilisation of this kind, but it is clear that all members are expected to defend the village regardless of the quarrels which constantly divide them. Not even lineages cross village frontiers, so that the village from the outside presents a solid front of loyalty. Its members are ready at all times to defend both its reputation and its territories.

This outward solidarity is matched by what one might call internal intensity. Village populations are highly stable. Almost all men and more than half the adult women in a village were born there. If we could measure the intensity of social relationships in terms of emotional strength, of the number of rights and duties involved, and of the frequency of contact, we would find that all residents except the more newly arrived wives had their more intense social relationships almost exclusively inside the village. Of course, many indispensable and controlling economic and political relationships lie outside, but these are not intense in the same way. Even beyond their own immediate circle, all the villagers belong to one another. Even enemies inside the village are intimate enemies.

Village Organisation

Since the village is a community - a group with a multitude of functions and involvements for its members - it is not surprising that a number of offices and corporate rights and duties are attached to it. Roughly, these are of two kinds, the formal institutions laid down by the State, and the informal institutions run by the village for its own purposes to meet the actual needs of its members.
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The actual power relations within the village, and the relations between State and village will be analysed later (Chapters II and 12). Here I only set out the organisation of the village.

Administratively and legally, the village is ruled by a headman, elected every four years up to 1950, now every two, nominally by secret ballot; all persons over eighteen can vote. He is expected to receive all public visitors, especially officials; to help keep order and bring criminals to justice; to take care of public property - for example the school; to draw up electoral lists; to countersign all official applications for government seed, bank loans and such; to see to the registration of births, deaths and marriages; to report the arrival of strangers, the occurrence of epidemics, and other untoward events, and so on. He is in short the agent, guarantor and communication channel for all village business with government. This post is not sought after.

The council of elders is elected with the headman, and its size depends on the number of the inhabitants. Sakaltutan had four councillors, Elbashï six. Each council is covered by a like number of reserves, also elected, who take the place of the full members if they are unable to attend meetings. The elder who receives most votes in the election is automatically deputy headman, and so on down the list. The council is supposed to meet at least every month and to discuss all village business.

It would be rash to state that these councils never meet. The council in Sakaltutan did not meet during my stay, and the only function attributed to it by villagers was the supervision of the assessment of contributions to the village chest. People said the Elbashï council did meet, but it did not do so regularly, and it did not to my knowledge supervise assessment. Certainly the councils did not function as the main decision-making body of the villages. No one took the slightest interest in their election, or attached any importance to their activities. Instead, when something called for corporate action in a matter which the villagers considered important, the senior heads of households and lineage segments assembled either spontaneously, or on the initiative of any leading villager with sufficient prestige. Such a meeting has no formal standing, no constitution, no procedures, and no responsibilities. It can only occur if the matter is important enough to draw together important people. It serves as
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a means of thrashing out public issues, and letting the headman know what people think, but the interpretation of what is said and the tactical assessment of what is possible and desirable remains in his hands.

Every village is compelled by law to levy a local tax, Köy Salmasï, and to raise a fund, the Village Chest, Köy Sandï§ï. Out of this, the headman draws a small allowance for entertaining visitors, and meets other expenses, such as keeping school equipment and other village property in order, and clothing and sometimes paying the village watchman. The village households are divided into four tax assessment classes. This assessment is mainly based on the amount of land held, but other circumstances - the number of animals owned, the number of grown working men, and the number of mouths to feed - are also taken into account. The poorest households are excluded altogether.

In Sakaltutan the assessments of the four classes were T.L. 15, T.L. 12, T.L.8 and T.L.5 per annum respectively, in Elbashï T.L.15, T.L.11, T.L.7 and T.L.4. This fund is the only officially imposed institution which arouses real interest, and, with the offices of headman and watchman, comprises the only area of genuine overlap between village institutions and State-imposed ones. It is the subject of continual argument and accusation, and very difficult to collect. In I953, many headmen were still not literate, so that even those who wished could hardly keep adequate records. Accusations of eating the village chest are therefore inevitable, universal, impossible to disprove, but undoubtedly wildly exaggerated, and probably often unfounded.

Villagers claimed that even if the council of elders did nothing else, at least it met to assess the contributions to the chest. Obviously, where the assessing authority, the headman, is a neighbour of no particular eminence or authority except for his temporary office, individuals who feel over-assessed are likely to argue, and any obvious anomaly will arouse jealousy and protest. But I have a strong impression that once established the assessment was changed little from year to year, and that changes were normally left to the headman. In general, the headman consults members of the elected council if they are friends of his, if they can actively assist him, or if they represent sections of the village capable of making trouble if not consulted.
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But very much the same applies to any leading villagers, whether council members or not.

In almost all cases I came across, headman and elders were young or middle-aged men. Senior and outstanding men did not hold office themselves, though very often their sons and younger brothers might.

All villagers must also by law appoint a watchman, a bekci; he is a sort of policeman, supposed to act under the orders of the headman. He is also expected by the authorities to act as a messenger, and is continually going back and forth between the District Office and his village. He is chosen by the headman, for a year at a time, on so lowly a salary (T.L. 300-100, £37 10.. downwards, .in 1949-52) that only the poorest and most incompetent villagers will normally take on the office. The watchman in most villages acts as a servant to the headman, and is often to be found making his coffee, running his errands or even chopping his wood. The Sakaltutan watchman collected his dues in kind himself, household by household.

Apart from this legally required set of institutions, every village has a number of its own officers and servants to meet the needs of a farming community, mostly herdsmen. Two or more special watchmen are usually appointed to guard the harvest for the village as a whole. These are expected to, and do, run foul of the herders, whose animals frequently maraud the standing crops. Elbashï also appointed two men to supervise the allocation of water during the months of June and July when demand is high and supplies are low.

Most of these are chosen by village elders, among whom the current headman has the most say. But the shepherds are appointed by leading sheep-owners. All are paid directly in cash or kind, household by household (p. 58).

The village is then a corporation, with both official and unofficial servants, and an official and in a sense an unofficial income. The state-imposed general village fund is clearly alien, and so far the traditional arrangements for traditional village servants have not been brought into the new scheme. The traditional method has the advantages that village servants are responsible for collecting their own dues, and that people pay in proportion to their use of the services.

People still regard themselves as dependent politically on the
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village for defence against other villages, although the vastly increased efficiency of the national maintenance of order has largely rendered this dependence obsolete. But if political dependence is minimal, economic dependence on the village. is still very real. Shepherds and watchmen and common pastures are indispensable. Refusal to allow a man to use them would cripple him. Moreover, the annual switch from one side of the village territory to the other ties all the villagers to the alternate year of fallow (p. 48). The introduction for example, of a revolutionary crop cycle is impossible without disrupting the whole village farming system. Meanwhile, the legal freehold of land is subject to the de facto common right of the village to pasture flocks and herds on it every other year.

Other Villages

Loyalty to the superiority of one's own village did not prevent the existence of a rough hierarchy of prestige among the villages of the area. This scale was not openly discussed, but was expressed in discussions of marriage, in the respect in the area accorded to the leaders of certain villages, and in the consensus of scorn for some of the poorer and remoter villages. The evaluation is not consistent, nor does it follow a single and simply applied standard. Perhaps the most commonly expressed pair of ideas, or rather those which command most general assent, are medeni, 'civilised', on the one hand, and kaba, `coarse', or vaksi, `wild', on the other. Medeni implies good order, urban manners and style of living, and the absence of violence. It is sufficiently vague to allow people systematically to avoid admitting inferiority in specific cases. Yet in general the villagers often bewail their backwardness and lack of medeniyet.

Villages with a tradition as administrative centres, with greater wealth, and which had possessed distinguished men with urban influence, ranked higher on this scale. The differences between villages were particularly related to the treatment of women. More `civilised' people keep their women more closely confined and give them less work, especially less agricultural work. Where the differences were marked, decent families would not consider letting a daughter go to a less civilised village. For example, women from the villages nearer
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Kayseri spoke of the Sakaltutan area as köy `village' and would not consider going among such people as wives. Differences in standards of formal politeness among the women of different villages were readily noticeable. Of course, every community has a lowest stratum including the very poor and girls whose reputations had suffered, and these might be given to inferior villages.

Differences of prestige among neighbouring villages did not prevent a great deal of social intercourse. People visit, hire craftsmen, seek advice on religious or technical problems, commission magical services, borrow money or food, search for oxen to buy, buy up animals for market, take grain to be milled. In the past, before the petrol engine, longer journeys, especially journeys to town, compelled the traveller to put up for the night with kinsmen or friends on the road. Now people congregate in the villages which serve as boarding points for lorries and buses to Kayseri, gossiping and often visiting as they pass through. The villages are too similar in production for intense economic exchange between them, but social contact is nevertheless constant and lively.

Beyond the occasional conflict over territory, and some traditional enmities, political relations between villages as groups are unimportant. In this area, all the villages were sunni and Turkish-speaking, so that the issue of ethnic or language differences did not arise. No one village nowadays has the slightest hope of dominating others, whatever may have been the case in the past. Fighting is rapidly suppressed by the gendarmerie. Feuds did not seem ever to be pursued between whole villages.

Household Types and Numbers

The villagers say that a house, ev or hane, is a group of people whose food is cooked in common. Common cooking implies a sharing of resources produced or earned by the members, that is an economic unity.

The villagers are right. This economic unity is the most fundamental fact about a household. Only through membership of a household does an individual take part in the economic life of the village. Otherwise survival is possible only by begging.
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Yet this economic emphasis is perhaps misleading. Membership of a household is also a condition of social recognition as a member of the village. Only one or two old widows living alone are not members of households, yet even they are relics of past households; they are able to survive only as dependants of current households.

The household's economic organisation is aimed, next to survival, at providing the means to nurture and train the recruits on whom the continuity of the village depends. Within it, the intensely emotional relationships of the processes of physical and social reproduction are contained and controlled.

Authority and responsibility within the village are also largely a household matter. A man is in charge of his wife and children and their dependants, and responsible to his neighbours for their good conduct. Descent is patrilineal. Sons are expected to remain with their fathers until the father's death. Thus the household ideally contains a man, his wife or wives, his married sons with their wives and children, and his unmarried sons and daughters.

Logically, of course, households need not contain families In fact, almost always and almost everywhere, they do. In these villages all members of a household are always close kin - except, very rarely, for resident servants (cirak). Such domestic groups are often called `families' and distinguished according to their composition into nuclear families, extended families, joint families, compound families and so on. But the word `family' is also needed to refer to the social group of father, mother and children, and sometimes grandchildren, without entailing common residence. It seems to me clearer to use the word family for very close kin, whether or not they reside together and to use the word household for the residential domestic group.

Where others have talked of simple and joint families I shall talk therefore of simple and joint households. Households which contain one married couple I shall call simple, those with more than one married' couple, joint. In this context, I reckon widowers and divorced men whose children are living with them as married couples, partly because such widowers are almost always actively seeking remarriage, and partly because a wifeless man and his children form an autonomous domestic unit in a way that a husbandless woman and her children do
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not. Widowers apart, households which contain no married couple I call fragmentary.

The villagers themselves have no word corresponding to the English word family.1 The standard Turkish for this is aile, but in the village aile was one of the several words used for wife. Instead they used the words for house, en and hane, in the general way in which I use household. These words are of course also used of the physical structures so that a man could say to me, `I have three houses, but we are one house.'

The following tables set out some facts about the population of the two villages, and the distribution of types of households. I cannot claim that small errors have not occurred. Since the