The main resources of a household are threefold: land, animals, and able-bodied ploughmen. The essential equipment for living - the house and its contents - and the farming - tools, ox-cart, wooden plough, drag, - are still relatively cheap and easy to come by. In a traditional more or less self-sufficient household, production depends on a correct balance between these resources. Very roughly one working man, and one team of oxen can plough from fifteen to twenty or so dönüm, (eight to ten acres, thirty to forty decares) a year. By using three oxen, one resting while two worked, a man could improve on his output a little. Water buffalo are more efficient, and a pair of horses can plough about thirty dönüm a year. Most households kept a cow, prosperous ones up to four - a donkey or perhaps two, and some chickens. The number of sheep also is roughly tied to the scale of the household's farming operations, by the need to feed them during the winter, and to a lesser extent by the need for female labour to milk them in spring.
The economic balance in a farming household economy is illustrated by the horses
in Elbashï. The increase of area under cultivation which has taken place in
recent years was partly made possible, and at the same time rendered economical,
by the use of teams of horses for ploughing. But horses are much more difficult to
feed in the winter, and unless a man has enough land to make full use of the extra
work a horse can do in the brief ploughing and harvesting seasons, the cost of feeding
it for the many months of enforced idleness is not repaid. The superior foals sired
by government stallions (p 77) were not retaIned to improve the village breed as
the government
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intended, because, even for the better off, the extra work they could do did not
compensate for the extra food they ate.
Nowadays for many, indeed for most, village households the resources are out of balance.
Some have too little man- and animal-power for their land and so let it out to share-croppers,
or (as in Elbashï), hire men to cultivate it, or even leave it uncultivated.
More households are in the reverse situation. They have more manpower than their
land will absorb. Some go as migrants, others acquire animal-power and take on sharecropping.
But the fragmentation of holdings forces many men to remain in the village and maintain
oxen and equipment when their land is insufficient to make full use of their own
and their animals' labour.
Households range from those which have neither land nor animals, to those with two hundred dönüm or so, three or four teams of draught animals, and a sizeable flock; personal earned incomes range from casual unskilled village labourers, the shepherds for example, earning T.L.500 (£62 or $179) or less a year, to established skilled migrant labourers earning perhaps T.L.2,000 a year. Household incomes - farming income plus contributions from earning members - therefore vary enormously.
The accurate determination of these incomes would be possible only after long and careful interviewing and checking. I found villagers vague and inconsistent about income, partly because no one is willing to disclose details of resources to anyone else, partly because most of them do not think in terms of a recurrent income at all. They certainly budget to meet particular expenses from particular resources. But there is no occasion in village life when a man adds up all that comes in, and sets it off against all that goes out. Moreover, both farming and non-farming incomes are liable to fluctuate wildly from year to year, so that no one has an `average annual income'.
The unit of land, the fertility, the crop, all vary according to plot, to year,
and to informant. Not only does the land cropped alternate from year to year with
the village fallow system; but because of shortages of seed and animals, sickness,
death and
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inheritance, changes in share-cropping arrangements, and land disputes, a man rarely
sows the same area two alternate years running.
According to informants' statements, I calculated normal yields in Sakaltutan at
about fifteen bushels to the acre. 1949 - a year of national disaster - 1950 and
I951 were all years of poor yield, so I may have underestimated. In Elbashï,
equally rough calculations gave a figure nearer twenty bushels, but the difference
may be illusory.
Taking the lower figure, a man with about ten acres (forty decares to work each year, twenty acres in all) would get about 150 bushels in a normal year. Of this, he would need to keep about fifty bushels to feed his household, and about twenty-five bushels for seed and a further twenty-five for animals, village dues and so forth. The balance of about fifty bushels would be sold, and in the years 1949-52, would have realised about T.L.300.
In Table 6, I give estimates, made during threshing, before the final count, of expected total yields of four households. The yields per acre were lower than usual, and the discrepancies in the rate are due partly to variations in optimism, partly to the general vagueness of informants about areas and quantities, and perhaps to actual difference in yields of different farmers and different pieces of land.
Table 6
EXPECTED CEREAL HARVESTS: SAKALTUTAN I950
House-
holdTotal land holding
claimed, village dönüm*Bushels Yield
Bushels
per AcreSurplus
for
saleCash
T.L.I 150 (largest in Sakaltutan) 500 13.3 250 1500 z 60 150 10 60 375 3 75 (15 share cropped) 138 8 60 375 4 30 88 12 12 75
*Only half is worked each year
Actual yields were even lower than this. I found the last household weeping together
because the yield was only fifty bushels,
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barely enough for the household needs for food, fodder and seed, with nothing towards
clothes, house repairs, a wedding ue, and very considerable debts.
In Elbashï, the poor households were in much the same position as corresponding households in Sakaltutan. At the other end of the scale the richer households provided a marked contrast. In 1951 and 1952, several households farming something like sixty acres each year harvested about one thousand bushels, and were able to sell, after allowing for their larger populations of both humans and animals, six hundred to seven hundred bushels, thus making a profit of about T.L.4,000. I happened to see an official receipt for one such household for roughly this sum.
Sheep can also provide a considerable cash income, besides providing milk, fat, meat and wool for the household. One informant in Elbashï claimed that each ewe produces each spring a lamb worth T.L.25, cheese worth T.L.20 p.a., and two kilos of wool which pay all the expenses of its care and fodder, giving a net profit of T.L.45 p.a. This was unduly optimistic. It is true that costs are low, since the sheep live on free pasture most of the year, and on straw for the winter months. But not every ewe lambs successfully, disease is common, and insurance unheard of. This informant on the same occasion gave a not entirely logical estimate of about T.L.2,000 income from eighty-five ewes.
Cattle, buffaloes and horses are mainly kept for work, although the cows produce milk which is not marketed, and calves which are. Buffaloes produce more and better milk, and more valuable calves - a mature draught buffalo will fetch T.L.500, but for this a man must face the expense and risk of keeping it for three years or so. Horses are bred and sold in Elbashï; even the family donkey may produce foals. Chickens and eggs are often sold, though chicken rearing is extremely casual; a few households breed pigeons.
To put a figure to the cash surplus from these sources is almost impossible. In general and with marked exceptions, I would guess that the total cash income from farming is between one-and-a-half and two times the cash income from grain.
To make any kind of estimate of total incomes by households is even more difficult.
For Sakaltutan I was able to divide
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roughly each household by its main source of income (p.
69). Forty-nine relied wholly or largely on agriculture, sixteenargely on migrant
labour, twenty on a mixture of these, and thirteen on work inside the village. For
Elbashï, a much smaller proportion, indeed a smaller absolute number, derived
income from outside, and probably a larger proportion earned their keep largely by
work in the village. More than half of the households lived largely or wholly by
agriculture.
The wealthiest of those in Elbashï, who lived by farming alone -had considerable
incomes. If my guess for global cash income is correct, then one purely agricultural
household of six people had a total income in 1952 of about T.L.6,000 (£750,
or $2,100), after having provided directly for much of their household and farming
needs in kind. Another household head, with seven in his household, gave me an estimate
of about T.L.3,000 cash income. 1951 and 1952 were good years, and of the twenty-six
households assessed in the top class for village contributions (p.
53), quite a number must have had incomes comparable with these.
Even in Sakaltutan, the wealthiest household (Table 6, No. I) would on a rough estimate
have in a good year enjoyed an income not far less, about T.L.2,500, but this with
a total population of thirteen, including two middle-aged heads of growIng families.
Another villager who had enough land claimed that in a good year, on the side of
the village on which more than half his land lay, he would make T.L:3,000, though
he was immediately contradicted. In answer to direct questions several people in
Sakaltutan said that in a normal year, an average household would make between T.L.500
and T.L. 1,000, and this seems to be about right for the majority of ordinary middling
households.
We may compare these figures with the earnings of skilled craftsmen. The most successful and regular migrants made somewhere about T.L.2,000 a year. On the other hand, finding work is chancy, many did not stay the full nine months, and all admitted spending on frivolities in town. Perhaps T.L.600 to 900 for the actual annual contribution to the household budget would be right in most cases.
Where personal incomes of this order came into a farming household they brought
reasonable comfort. One household
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head in Elbashï, with five adult sons, had sixteen members unquestionably in
his own household, and liked to include also a schoolmaster son with his wife and
two children, and a widowed daughter and her three little girls. In fact both these
households were separate but the father farmed their land. In 1951, he sold at least
T.L.3,000 worth of grain, so T.L.4,500 is a modest estimate of his gross income from
farming. Two of his five sons were plasterers, but not regular migrants; perhaps
they contributed T.L.800. Another son was Village Secretary to the Nahiye, in which
capacity he was supposed to be paid T.L.150 a month, T.L. 1,800 a year. In addition,
he ran a coffee shop. Without including the teacher's salary, the total income from
all sources cannot have been far short of T.L.8,000 (£1,000 or $2,800). True
he had many people to care for, but most of the household food supplies and farming
expenses were met directly out of household produce.
Similarly, a senior man in Sakaltutan had five sons. In 1950, three were migrant craftsmen and were already married. The households kept two teams of oxen, so could in a normal year expect at least T.L.1,000 from farming, and somewhere between T.L.1,500 and 3,000 from earnings, if all three sons went away to work for longish periods. This household had fourteen people to feed and support.
In the rare case of a craftsman relying solely on his earnings -to support his wife and young children, without an income from land, these would be no more than sufficient to meet his household needs. In such a case, his wife and his older children, by working for neighbours at the harvest, would normally earn part of the family food supply. Still it is clear that the craftsmen, shopkeepers and others have to be highly successful to compare favourably with a moderate farming household.
The real poor in the village are those who have little or no land or cannot work
their land, and who make all or most of their living by unskilled labour. These include
the watchmen, the shepherds and several other households. The Sakaltutan watchman
was paid in kind, thirty-seven bushels of grain, not much more than enough to feed
himself, his wife and his child. He was probably able to make something by doing
odd jobs and running errands - he earned in this way from me in 1949-50 - but a total
income of T.L.500 (£125, or $350) in a year
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would be a generous estimate. There were in Sakaltutan some ten households whose
standard of living was about the same as this, and another half-dozen who were little
better off. In Elbshï, perhaps twenty households would fall into the same category.
Households at this level, who have no harvest of their own, often work for others
at the harvest and earn grain to store for their staple for the year. The watchman
in Elbashï had a slightly higher wage than that of Sakaltutan, but he gambled
with what money he got, and his wife and three sons were miserably poor. His wife
and eldest son each worked under contract at the harvest for fifteen bushels of grain
of mixed types, worth perhaps T.L.I00. Two brothers in Sakaltutan, included in the
ten poorest households above, worked as operators in the mill; they began at T.L.50
a month, but this was soon raised to T.L.75 and this regular income soon made a conspicuous
difference to their homes and families.
Expenditure is as difficult to estimate as income. Farming households still provide themselves with most of their own food, most if not all their own winter feed, most of their own seed, such fertiliser as they use, all their own fuel for heating, and their own wool. All households own their house and carry out their own maintenance. Non-farming households either enjoy an income in food from share-cropped land, or earn some of their own food in return for services.
Nevertheless, all households must spend some cash, and many households spend a
great deal. The head of household 3 in Table 6 (p. 85)
gave me the following estimate of his cash expenses, for a household of three adults
and three children:
| Food: fat T.L.10 cabbage T.L.5 rice T.L.5 Clothes and shoes Cooking utensils Taxes Animal feed (waste from oil presses) Total |
bones T.L.15 sugar T.L.l5 T.L. 50 TL. 80 T.L. 30 T.L. 40 T.L. l00 T.L.300 |
This estimate is a little less than his estimated cash income of T.L.375 from
grain, but it is extremely modest. The item for
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winter feed is arbitrary, since this would depend directly on the number of animals
and the amount of the village harvest On domestic items, he makes no mention of paraffin,
tea and coffee, which in fact he did without, fruit in season which he would probably
buy on the spur of the moment, and luxuries such as helva, the Turkish sweet made
from nuts and honey which most village households do occasionally eat. More important,
he makes no provision for medical expenses, often a very large item, sometimes ruinous.
Landless households would obviously need to spend much more on food, but, practically
nothing on taxes and animal feed.
This estimate takes no account of the large irregular expenses, for instance replacing oxen or weddings. Most households would be facing at least one demand of this type most of the time. On the marriage of a daughter, the father usually breaks even, if he does not reap an immediate cash benefit. But the marriage of a son is an expensive business, involving, in 1950, a bride price of up to T.L.500 and perhaps as much again for food, entertainers, presents and new clothes. A new house people reckoned at about T.L.I,000 or more, according to size and style. Timber and hewn stone were expensive items, and the services of a mason and a carpenter, even in the village, cost a good deal. Many households were actually engaged in building. Each new married couple requires a new room, and moreover, many villagers were dissatisfied with the old windowless houses, often shared-with the animals, and often using the natural `rock for at least one wall. Between 1949 and 1955 the housing standard in Sakaltutan rose strikingly.
Even the wealthier households in Elbashï had basically the same items of expenditure, though with larger numbers and higher standards they consumed far more. They were better dressed, built larger houses, gave more lavish weddings, paid higher bride prices, and used far more luxuries - paraffin, pressure lamps to impress guests, fancy coffee cups and drinking glasses, and so forth.
All these figures ignore another important factor - they are based on normal yields.
A partial crop failure immediately reduces the poor to near starvation, the moderate
to poverty, and even the comfortable to stringent economy. For one year, or even
two, housing, weddings, clothing replacements, tool and
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utensil repairs and so on, can be curtailed or postponed, and at a pinch animals
and equipment sold. Almost every villager is in debt, and debts can be allowed to
remain, or even be increased. Butafter a run of poor harvests urgent needs accumulate,
and credit becomes exhausted; serious hardship may turn to disaster.
People remarked to me more than once that no villager ever has ready cash. Urgent cash needs constantly run ahead of current income, and people borrow to meet the immediate situation. Debts are of four main kinds - loans from the Agricultural Bank or Credit Co-operative, loans from moneylenders at illegal and exorbitant rates of interest, casual borrowings among neighbours and kin, and outstanding credit for purchases. Debts of this last kind are mainly owed to village shops, but also less frequently to itinerant vendors of oxen, to kin for land, and occasionally to affines for the balance of a bride price. Accurate information on this topic is almost unobtainable. Even when precise and plausible answers were given to questions one had no means of checking them.
In both villages, a large proportion of households had loans from the Agricultural Bank (p. 75). Although the loans were not large or numerous enough to meet all credit needs, neither village as a whole used the service fully. A few men said that fea of what the government might do if they failed to pay kept them from accepting.
On illegal and commercial debts I was able to gather only superficial information.
The technique in practice for usury is the familiar one of obtaining a signature
for the receipt of a larger sum than the actual sum advanced so that the interest
is concealed and the creditor can enforce collection in a court, if necessary. An
illiterate peasant is easily tricked. One such case came to my notice in Sakaltutan,
and I heard of two other cases of private debts of this kind, carrying about 100
per cent interest per annum. Such loans are for a fixed period, and the interest
is predetermined. It does not grow automatically with the passing of time, but the
debt is stepped up if the date of repayment is not kept. Commercial debts are even
harder to check. People often
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spoke of outstanding debts. Several owed hundreds of lire for oxen. In one case the
ox was already dead. Another owed T.L. 1,600 to his sister in another village for
land which he had taken over from her share of the inheritance. When I, somewht naively,
pointed out that the existence of this debt was inconsistent with the taking on of
other heavy expenses weddings and new houses for his sons - he said quite cheerfully
`Kinsfolk can wait'. In Elbashï, on the day in which the Agricultural Bank Credit
Co-operative Officer paid out the annual loans, the village shopkeepers and the headman
were waiting on the spot to catch each villager as he left the room with money in
his hand. All creditors press for payment at this season.
The network of small personal loans is intricate and far reaching. By the end of my year in Sakaltutan, I had many small loans out in the village, all of which were honourably settled. When a special need arises, a man meets it by calling in loans or by contracting a number of new ones, or both. Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul is common. These loans are personal favours, and do not carry interest. But they do of course count as services rendered in the network of village reciprocity. Often such loans are contracted with kin or friends in other villages, since this arrangement limits communication between creditors, and also general gossip.
The incurring of debt is a privilege of wealth. Those who have no visible resources cannot borrow, either from the State or from their neighbours. It is the haves, not the have-nots, who borrow. The largest loan from the Credit Co-operative in Elbashï was taken by one of the most prosperous men in the village. A man in Sakaltutan who announced publicly and unprompted that he had a T.L. 1,000 of debts was boasting, like the man in England who talks about his overdraft. All households can make use of credit. Even if they have no desperate needs in the way of houses, animals or wives, they can always, for example, buy animals to sell at a later date at a higher price. Debt carries no stigma. Most people are or have been in debt, and it is nothing to be ashamed of.
Yet, as I have said, many people do not take up all the credit they can get, and
I had the decided impression that most of the households in Elbashï were less
in debt than those of Sakaltutan
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because it is a more prosperous village, and therefore the urgent needs are fewer.
If this is true, then in spite of the profit to be made by using credit wisely, people
prefer not to have debts, and mos of them are unwilling to risk raising a loan for
speculative enterprises.
In many peasant populations, dealers and money-lenders are said to dominate the village economy. Constant relationships to their clients enable them to exercise political as well as economic influence. In the Turkish villages, since government agencies buy the grain and provide credit, there is no class of merchants or money-lenders who have permanent relations of this kind with particular villagers. Possibly such a system existed in the past. The tax farmers may well have exercised some such hold over some villagers. But most large private debts of which I knew were borrowed from men in other villages, and it may well be that for villages as remote and independent as Sakaltutan, the risks were, for political reasons, too high to tempt urban money-lenders into becoming their patrons.
Except when they become involved in illegal and usurious loans from professional money-lenders - and these cases now seem to be rare and becoming rarer, owing to government credit - the chronic indebtedness of the villager is not a social evil. Generally, those who are heavily in debt are those whose assets in land and animals give them both an overall solvent position, and great hope that they will be able to recover. Most villagers accept a certain degree of indebtedness, to neighbours and to the Agricultural Bank, as an ordinary and permanent part of their lives.
The household, as I have said, is a group of people who produce and consume in common (p. 35). It shares all resources belonging to members, it shares out the work according to sex, seniority and convenience, and it distributes the total income amon its members according to need and social position.
The household is practically the only organised economic unit in rural society.
Each household is in fact a firm engaged in agricultural production, and, excluding
one or two newfangled enterprises, such as diesel mills, no other comparable economic
{94}
] unit exists. All agricultural production is organised through these `firms'. In
other areas, modern farms exist and are increasing, but there were none near my two
villages.
This economic unity excludes the exercise of the rights of individual members against the group, represented by the household head. We do not, for example, find women exercising rights to specific pieces of land; nor, if a young kinsman is brought up in a household, are any rights which he may have to his own land acknowledged until he leaves the household.
Even when members of a household are quarrelling more or less openly, they do not seem to think of dividing the produce between them. Haci Ismet (T), head of the richest household in Sakaltutan, was more or less senile, and the household was run by his eldest son. The second son - both were middle-aged men - was not on good terms with his father and brother, and in anticipation of trouble over the division of the land, rights to certain pieces had been established in advance. But even so the household was still run as an economic unit at least as far as farming was concerned, if not personal earnings. On the other hand, the younger son's first wife and her grown son, who had left altogether and set up a separate household, took with them the land owned by her in her own right.
The village is an economic unit only in the sense that it imposes the alternations of crop land and pasture, and in the sense that it provides essential communal services. But it is in no sense a unit for production. Moreover, organised and traditional cooperation between the households of a village do not seem to exist. Households in trouble may be helped by their neighbours and kin, but normally each household arranges its own work entirely on its own.
This household unit, provided its resources are more or less in balance, is a
relatively tough and flexible concern. When times are good, it can build up resources
in animals, by buying or by keeping more of the natural increase than usual. In satisfactory
years, it has money to spend on clothes, replacement of equipment, even weddings
and housing. In less fortunate times, through illness of humans or working animals,
or poor harvests, it can easily postpone heavy expenditure, and if necessary sell
animals to meet a crisis. Because the techniques are so simple, and the village relies
so little on the outside world
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for productive resources, recovery from misfortune can be rapid, so long as the household
has enough land to employ and support its membes.
As I have said, many households do not have a proper balance of resources between land, people and animals. But the household is flexible enough to meet this too. Labour that is redundant can be sent away to work, if only for the seasons of agricultural lull, from April to June, and from late August to the first snow. In a family, one brother usually remains a farmer, often the eldest who was called upon to help his father as he grew up, and the others become regular migrant craftsmen. In a few cases, brothers maintain a joint household on this basis after their father's death; there was one such household in Sakaltutan, and I came across several in other villages. In other cases, brothers may separate, but maintain special collaboration, often through share-cropping arrangements. Two men who were at the same time father's brothers' sons and brothers-in-law, and were both migrant plasterers, took it in turn to stay at home and look after each others' household and to do each others' farm work, while dividing both the crop and their cash earnings between their separate households.
Unless well provided with land, small and especially defective households are much less resilient and flexible. A man with young children and barely enough land to work single-handed has no margin for misfortunes. If he goes away to work, his wife and children are likely to suffer in his absence, since his wife alone cannot cope with both her own work and with the care of the land, let alone with crises such as children's illnesses - one man who had been away for two years returned to find his eldest son had been drowned in the village well. Yet if he stays in the village, he has nothing for medical and other special expenses, and no resources against the inevitable years of famine which will leave his household hungry. A widow with young children may be in an even more difficult position.
Planning ahead for a household economy is not a matter of setting a more or less
predictable income against more or less regular outgoings. Most households have capital
resources; expendable resources in the form of animals, non-expendable in the form
of land. Against these they have to set debts. Income arrives not in small weeKly
amounts but in windfalls. Villagers
{96}
who cannot raise a few lire for a bottle of medicine may nevertheless be accustomed
to thinking in terms of quite large sums - on whih of course a household may have
to survive until the next windfall, generally the next harvest. When they discuss
wage-earning they talk about rates per day, or how much they can save in a month
away, never about weekly and rarely about monthly wages. Most migrant labourers regard
wage-earning not as a provision for daily needs, but as a way of raising lump sums
when need presses, to clear a debt, to meet famine, or to finance a wedding, a house
or an ox. In most cases, in the rare intervals when no such special need hangs over
a household, men much prefer to stay at home.
This thinking in lump sums is precisely opposite to that of western urban workers,
who prefer to have their lump-sum purchases converted to weekly outgo by hire-purchase
and mortgage arrangements. This difference in outlook is surely related to levels
of saving. In the village economy the notion of regular accumulation of cash or bank
balance is largely absent. Saving normally takes the form of increasing the household
stock of animals. Beyond a certain point, the accumulation of animals increases problems
of feeding and looking after them so much that loss by illness becomes likely. This
point is not often reached, largely because special demands face most households
fairly frequently and use up spare resources.Formally, the direction of economic
activities in any village household lies with the household head. In a small household,
the head will normally himself perform most of the major farming tasks and leave
his wife to her recognised duties in the home. In larger households, the father directs
his sons, and although exceptions came to my notice, in the majority of cases the
authority of the head is unquestioned. Even adult sons are directly dependent on
their father for cash - no one ever suggested making a son an allowance. So long
as the household owns sufficient resources to be able to maintain itself by farming,
the undisputed control of resources by the head makes it very difficult to challenge
him, short of splitting the land. The cash which junior members earn by their efforts
outside the household and often outside the village is a very different matter. A
priori, the solidarity of the household as a `firm', and the authority of the head
as dispenser of all income is threatened
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by the existence of direct private sources of income for membes of his household.
Independent incomes may lead to friction over the disposal of them, and in a few
cases make it possible for a recalcitrant son to survive independently, without his
share of the household food supply (p. 103). Nevertheless,
what s remarkable is not the division and disputes, but the fact that normally sons
and younger brothers hand over to their fathers or elder brothers a large share of
their earnings and both sides are apparently content. The tradition that the household
shares its resources seems so far to survive in the new and less appropriate situation.
In another way, new economic factors have altered the traditional picture of the
household economy. The regular market for grain, and the possibility of earning reasonable
wages have combined to give the wealthiest village households incomes in good years
well beyond normal expenses. In 1952, much of this was going into housing and into
more splendid weddings. By 1955, it was said in Sakaltutan that villagers had opened
bank accounts. Two young migrants had houses of unprecedented luxury for the village,
and one of them had invested in a lorry. But the problem remained unsolved. If in
a modern economic and political context a villager achieves wealth beyond his immediate
needs, what can he do with it? Village society and the village heritage of knowledge
and experience offer no solution.