All households aim to grow and proliferate. The ideal cycle is already clear: the large, patrilineal joint household which on the death of its head splits into a number of simple households, each headed by one of his sons, and each seeking in turn to grow again into a large joint household.
Anthropologists have traditionally distinguished between inheritance, the transmission of rights to property, and succession, the transmission of offices or roles. In these villages this distinction is particularly clear and striking. The successful man with more than one married son transmits all his property but he cannot pass on his social position as a senior elder and head of a large and wealthy household. Thus, although his material wealth is passed on, his power and prestige are dissolved by his death.
The villagers acknowledged three sets of rules governing inheritance: the Turkish Civil Code, the Seriat, and custom. These sets of rules are not mutually consistent, but they do have some resemblance to each other on general points. The only rules which can be legally enforced are those which are least followed, the Turkish Civil Code.
No single consistent body of rules then governs inheritance. Which rules are followed,
and how they are applied, depends on the state of family affairs, that is, the relative
strength and the interests of the close kin involved. The allocation carried out
at the time of the division into new junior households is usually, in fact if not
in theory, definitive, and although disputes may drag on for years afterwards it
is extremely difficult in practice to upset a settlement once it has been carried
out.
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Both the Seriat and the Turkish Civil Code recognise limited rights of testamentary
disposition. No villager ever referred to these, and I was repeatedly told that men
never concerned themselves with the division of their property after their death.
What happened to their descendants was a matter for God, not for them.
In no specific case in the villages is one of the three sets of rules deliberately and consistently applied. Cases which are referred to the courts are obviously an exception, but in my experience very few village cases are so referred, and I cannot quote one instance. Moreover, to go to court is not to apply the state rules but to employ others to do so. To set forth the formal rules of one or all of these systems would not tell us what in fact happens. Indeed it is difficult to find out what does happen.
People may assert claims under any rules, and every settlement therefore involves ignoring or adjusting somebody's claims. Discussions are not normally public and open, and people avoid questions about specific examples, answering in general terms. Since I did not witness an actual division, and since some of the implications and problems did not strike me until I came to write, I have had to depend to some extent on reconstruction and guesswork. But my guesses are founded on a general knowledge of village society.
The transmission of power and prestige is more complex, and more fundamental for village social structure. The system worked to prevent a stable hereditary hierarchy. I shall deal first with inheritance, a key element in the argument, and then move on to the wider question of long-term mobility in village society.
General questions about division of the land are always answered very simply.
Villagers will draw a quadrangle in the dust, and divide it by lines down the middle.
Each plot they insist is thus separately divided between the sons, in strict equality;
because no two plots are equal in value, every plot must be separately divided. Questions
about the rights of daughters are not so easily or consistently answered. They are
entitled to an equal share but `sometimes they do not take'.
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The general claim of the villagers to live by the Seriat does not affect their conduct
of inheritance. They know that a daughter's share is in Islamic law half a son's.
I never heard of this provision having being applied nor even seriously suggested.
They could give no reason for its neglect; and no one ever argued, which they could
correctly have done, that the land had never been mulk (freehold) but
miri (State land) and therefore not subject directly to Seriat rules.
Sometimes they will refer to the current State law, but again, though some of them
know some of its provisions, they do not normally claim to be applying it. Its provisions
are no more than a convenient argument in certain cases.
A simple division of land between sons seems to have been the normal customary procedure, and is still common in straightforward cases. One result of this is that the layout of fields becomes a kind of genealogical map; although the land is individually owned the holdings tend to lie in agnatic blocks. My questions about the past agnatic connections of village lineages sometimes provoked the villagers themselves into conjectural history based on the relative position of their fields.
Such a simple division is usually achieved by a direct understanding between the
brothers. They are left de facto in joint control of the household lands,
and if they are not at loggerheads it is relatively simple to present the world with
a fait accompli. In the past a deceased brother's sons were sometimes
excluded (p. 104). This practice is now regarded
as inequitable, and is also illegal.
Though I never discussed in detail such a division, I did come across brothers' quarrels
over the spoils. On one visit to another village, I arrived by chance on a day on
which an armed man was in homicidal pursuit of his brother. The version I was given
attributed the quarrel to his suddenly advancing, years after the original amicable
division, a claim that he had in fact been given less than half; undoubtedly he himself
would have given a more plausible account of his case. On the whole, however, relations
between adult brothers who had already separated varied from mutual tolerance to
intimate co-operation. I was told that in fact divisions are conducted by the arbitration
of elders. Fields can be measured and divided into strictly equal shares. Movable
property is valued in cash. If one
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of the heirs claims that the valuation of an article is too low, then he is asked
to value it himself and accept it as part of his share at the higher valuation. The
effect of this rule is that goods go to whoever is prepared to value them most highly,
giving the division something of the nature of an auction sale, and ensuring, so
I was told, that everyone is satisfied, or at least can only blame himself if he
is not. Small differences between the final total value of the shares are adjusted
by cash.
The division between brothers may be complicated by the need to provide for a widow, or even two. The villagers say that the Seriat provides for an eighth-share for a widow and the Turkish Civil Code for a quarter-share, in which they are roughly correct.1 But neither of these rules seems to be applied. Occasionally, the division is postponed until after the mother's death. Otherwise the widow simply lives with one son without taking a definite share - she may of course own land in her own right which passes to the household in which she lives - or in other cases a widow appears to have accepted a non-legal compromise arrangement for her own lifetime. Such a peaceful settlement of the family affairs without a public quarrel carries considerable prestige.
Daughters have often married to other villages, or have a sufficiency in their marital households. Time and again, men said that to interfere on behalf of one's wife's claims was mean and undignified, and that it was entirely up to the wife herself what she did about it. `What my father left me is enough for me', as one man remarked, is clearly the socially approved attitude, even if its expression is at times disingenuous. The fact
Figure 5A number of land disputes from Sakaltutan illustrate my point that brothers divide the land between them, and then are almost immovable. Two old men had survived their third brother and his adult son. Their brother's son's widow and her two boys formed one of the poorest households in the village. The widow rightly claimed a third of the patrimonial land for her sons. This had been divided off once, and then taken over again by the elder brother, who thus worked two-thirds of his father's land. The dispute rankled, and once flared up into an open quarrel at my very door. But the widow could do nothing. No one would support her to the point of violence against her husband's father's brother, and her sex, her poverty and her total lack of sophistication made it practically impossible for her to enlist official or legal support.
In another case, two of the better off lineages of Sakaltutan had intermarried. Abdullah (M), an elderly man in 1950, with a married adult son and several daughters, had married his father's sister's daughter; she was also father's sister to the four brothers of P lineage - Ali, Haydar, Ahmet and Bilal.
Abdullah had given no land to his sisters. The four brothers of P lineage had
divided between them all the land of their father's father. Bilal (P) died, and his
share, together with his wife and daughter, went to his brother, Ahmet. As I understood
it, it was proposed by both sides to redivide the land, so that Abdullah's wife would
receive a share of P land, and Haydar and Ahmet would receive for their wives a share
of M land. Ali was expected to give up his father's sister's share of the land without
getting any compensation, while Kadir of F lineage would benefit through his mother.
Ali and Ahmet quarrelled when Ahmet attempted to move boundary marks. In the heat
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of this quarrel Ali shot, missed Ahmet, but hit his foster daughter, Bilal's daugher,
in the hand; Ali duly went to prison, for a year. This was a serious attempt to upset
a settlement once reached, but in spite of the willingness of most of the parties
in this case, the attempt foundered on the usual rock. No one with insufficient land
is willing to see any of it go to anyone else so long as he is able to use a gun.
A third case puzzled me a good deal at first. Haci Osman (H) of Sakaltutan had failed to produce children of his own in spite of trying four different wives. Finally he had adopted a sister's orphan son, who was also his agnate (a second-cousin's son). He had given no share of his father's land to his sisters, two of whom had surviving sons in the village. Two sons of one sister had spent much time in Izmir, leaving their young wives to share a household, and to work their father's land. Three sons of the other sister had derived very little from their father. One, the eldest, had acquired a sufficiency of land for his household from his wife's father, who was also his father's brother, but the other two were very poor. These three brothers were close neighbours of mine, and I discussed this matter with them. They were positive that they had rights to a share of Haci Osman's land, but they made no attempt to relieve their obvious poverty by taking action to establish them. When one of them lost his wife, Haci Osman helped with advice, influence, and a loan in a negotiations for a new one; and later, when he built and ran a mill in co-operation with other villagers, they became his employees.
The explanation that eluded me at the time was not in fact difficult. As I have
said, inheritance is not so much a matter of rights under a definite set of rules,
as of relative power. If the two poor brothers had pressed their claims, they would
have alienated a useful, important and generally respected kinsman, and probably
have turned other villagers against them. They would, even if successful, only have
been entitled to one-ninth each of the land which Haci Osman had inherited from his
father - and I suspect that he would have argued, probably correctly, that much of
his land had come from other sources, for example, purchase, or simply seizure of
land not in cultivation. This ninth then would have been very little, and would not
have made any great difference to their poverty. Moreover,
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they would have been opposed to an intelligent and sophisticated man who had the
ear of the local officials, and the moral prestige of having made the pilgrimage
to Mecca. Their chance of success was negligible, and the value of their gains if
successful would scarcely outweigh the permanent enmity of their influential mother's
brother.
On a later visit, I was told that Haci Osman had registered all the land of his household in his own name when he was headman of the village at some point in the past, and he himself said that he had formally adopted his informally adopted dead son's son as his heir under the Turkish Civil Code. But neither of these facts seemed to be generally known in the village.
Ironically, the wife of the younger of these two brothers is also formally entitled to land, through her mother, from the comparatively well-to-do family of Haci Omer (D). Her mother's father is said, plausibly, to have been in his day one of the wealthiest and most important men in the village. His three sons divided the land between them and are still comparatively influential and comfortable. Their sisters got nothing. Since there are four surviving sisters, any rearrangement would be disastrous for the three brothers. Yet whenever I asked about this, those who were in a position to make formally justifiable claims would say `of course they will give - it is the law.'
Brothers divided their land in this way in many cases, indeed in most, unless there were more complicated factors. Nevertheless, the right of daughters to inherit equally with their brothers was publicly acknowledged, and in some cases they do so inherit. Omer (G), for example, told me that he had a large outstanding debt to his sister, who had married to another village, for her share of the land.
Where women inherit, they often do so because they have no brothers. In most cases,
where a girl has left her natal village, she sells any land to which she is entitled
to her closest kin, but if the land is near the village boundary with the village
to which she has married, she may keep it. Enough cases of this type existed for
much land close to but within the village boundary to belong to households of other
villages. Very rarely, rights to more central plots will be retained, and worked
on a sharecropping basis, or rental for cash.
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Figure 6
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One striking but complicated case illustrates female inheritance, and at the same
time the opportunism of village inheritance. Ismet (T) had come to the village as
a boy with a widowed mother. He had thus no agnatic rights to land. He had married
a daughter of a prolific lineage, all the men of which were victims of the wars from
1911 to 1922. Among them was her brother, who left an infant son Yakup, the only
male survivor of the lineage. Ismet managed to arrange for the widow, Yakup's mother,
to marry his second son, who was only a boy and very much her junior. Ismet was thus
in a very strong position. His wife's rights to inherit her lineage lands were naturally
recognised. Yakup, the only surviving male of the lineage, was a member of Ismet's
household, being step grandson (son's wife's son) and nephew by marriage (wife's
brother's son) at the same time. Four other women of the lineage appear either to
have been ignored or bought out. In 1949, the immigrant Ismet was the largest landowner
in the village, although Yakup was by then married with a reasonable sufficiency
of land of his own, and his mother and another son also formed a separate household
with a little land said to belong personally to her. How the details of what land
passed to whom were worked out, and how customary rights, de facto possession
and plain seizure were blended, I do not know and cannot reconstruct. But plainly
Ismet took his opportunity with both hands.
Figure 7
A case from Elbashï illustrates a similar disregard for formal and complicated
rules. Sükrü, a man with a sufficiency of land, died in the winter of 1952.
During the summer, shortly before my departure, his heirs were disputing the division
of inheritance.
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Sükrü had kept together his father's land; neither his brother's daughters nor his sister's daughters had ever received a share. Moreover, his senior surviving wife had been separated from him for years, and was living with her son by a former marriage, Celal. This particular argument was complicated and rendered urgent by the fact that Sükrü had left a debt to the Agricultural Bank of T.L.400. I met his sons, Duran and Celal, and his sister's daughter's husband, when they were invited by the headman to his guest room to discuss the matter. The headman argued with them that the whole estate was not large enough for them to `stuff lawyers', so they had better settle it between themselves. The discussion was complicated, involving short-term problems about the debt, the work of harvesting, and the division of the crops, as well as the long-term difficulties about the land. He suggested seven equal divisions - one each for the widows, and one each for Sükrü's children - not a legally correct decision, but at least equitable. I had the impression from a general interchange of cigarettes that this solution had been accepted by the three men, but I gathered subsequently that Sükrü's nieces were claiming shares and that even the main disputants were not satisfied. The case was not settled when I left, but clearly no one was going to take the matter to court. I am sure in fact that Shükrü's two sons would never agree, unless compelled, to a sevenfold division of the land, let alone to giving a share to female patrilateral cousins. No one even thought, as far as I know, of dividing the land according to the genealogy - that is, giving one-third to be divided between each of the groups of siblings descended from Shükrü's father. Duran's obvious course would be simply to divide the land with his brother and then stick it out until people got used to the idea.
All these examples point to the same conclusion. The distribution of any given estate is largely a matter of relative power and influence. Rules both customary and legal are used rather as weapons than as principles for right conduct.
Customary morality gives men a decided advantage in the struggle. Daughters may
be theoretically entitled, but their rights are unimportant, and should never be
allowed to prevent a man from possessing enough land to care for a family. A man
ought properly to derive his wealth from his
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agnates, and not look to inherit through mother or wife.
Decreasing village autonomy, the decline in the power and importance of lineages,
and the increase of administrative control and interference have increased the chances
of establishing and enforcing a claim to female inheritance. At the same time, the
universal recognition in the village that sisters ought to receive a share seems
to reflect growing urban influence and perhaps the slow acceptance of the new Civil
Code of the country. Moreover, the motives for claiming female inheritance grow stronger
as land grows scarcer. While therefore female inheritance in special cases has always
occurred, inheritance by daughters when there are living adult sons is probably fairly
new, and increasing.
The rule is clear. On the death of a household head, his sons are expected within a reasonable period to divide up the property between them and establish separate independent households.
Separation is accepted rather than approved. It is a subject for comment and joking; it is as though people felt that families ought to be able to live together in peace, even though they do not expect them to do so. For those who stay together longer than usual, there is no adverse comment or joking.
In fact, the separation of brothers is sometimes delayed for long periods, even, in rare cases, for their lifetime. In such cases, the elder brother is usually a dominant personality. One household, in a neighbouring village which I visited early in my field work, was shared by two old brothers. In some of the rare apparently stable shared households of this type, one brother farmed, while the other worked as a craftsman, usually a migrant (p. 38). In one village I was told of a stable houseold shared by three brothers - twenty souls in all.
If a father dies prematurely, leaving unmarried sons, all the sons normally remain
together until all are married, the elder shouldering the father's responsibility.
But they are apt to separate as soon as this operation is complete. Haci Omer and
his two brothers told me that they had remained together eight years after their
father's death, and had been separated sixteen. They must therefore have separated
when the youngest brother
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was nineteen, that is, as soon as possible after his marriage. Zbeyr and his three
brothers (F) in Sakaltutan were in process of making their marriage arrangements.
The second already had a wife, the eldest married during our stay, and marriages
were being arranged for the two younger brothers. They declared their firm intention
of remaining together until all were married, and had completed military service.
In fact, of course, a young unmarried man cannot live alone, so that they are normally
bound to live with and marry in the house of their closest kin. One young widower
had returned to the household of a married brother, pending remarriage. Households
of orphaned siblings cannot therefore very well split until all are married. Occasionally,
a son will set up an independent household while his father is still alive. I came
across only one case, in a neighbouring village, where the separation of a married
son was said to have been arranged completely amicably, because the household had
become too large. This family boasted to me of their co-operation and intimacy, claiming
that they had no quarrels.
Most cases of sons leaving the paternal household prematurely were due to quarrels. People were never willing to discuss details of these quarrels in cold blood afterwards - they were always rather ashamed of them. The separating sons were stepsons of their father's current wife; I only knew one who had left his own mother. His quarrel was so serious that, when he was dangerously ill with pneumonia, his parents took no notice, and it was his father-in-law who took him in, to give him the warmth and shelter that his own hovel could not provide. In one other case a son had accompanied his mother when she left because his father, her husband (T), who was her junior, took a younger wife (p. 196). In all the other three cases, relations with the parental husehold continued, warm in two cases, and slight in one. One father, still vigorous, was helping his three adult married sons to build houses alongside his own, and the whole family was still co-operating closely.
In Elbashï there were only two cases; one was the school headmaster, whose
separate house was provided in the school building, and whose father included him
in the total population of his own large household. The other was the usual case
of a
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stepmother. Faher and son were neighbours and on good terms.
The accepted rule that brothers divide the household after their father's death avoids the need for a build up of pressures to explosion point as, for example, Srinivas describes for joint households in an Indian village (Srinivas (1952)). The great insistence on absolute equality between recognised heirs prevents very much jockeying for advantage among brothers, unless exceptional circumstances give one brother an opportunity. Nevertheless, as households grow, the pressure to fission increases. Where a father lives to an old age and leaves more than one mature family of grandchildren in his house, division is likely to be much more rapid than with a less mature family, and in a few rare cases fission may begin before the old man has passed on. Men blame quarrels of this kind on the women. Srinivas's arguments (1952, p. 30) could be applied here. The tensions between one elementary family and another inside the households probably reflect as much the rivalry of the brothers as the incompatibility of the women. Disputes are very often at basis disagreements about relative rank; not so much about the pecking order - seniority settles this - as about how hard the pecking should be. Relative rank among the household women turns very largely on the relative rank of the brothers. The closeness of brothers, their mutual dependence and their opportunities for avoiding each other socially when angry, may enable them to avoid among themselves the open quarrels of which they are the underlying cause among their wives.
Srinivas's analysis is so plausible that it cannot be altogether untrue. Yet it is also plausible to argue that the tension between the women of a joint household, often born strangers to each other and brought together by chance, must be in some cases the result of their personal incompatibilities. It would be impossible to prove either explanation false; and it is also impossible to state in general any precise weighting of the two factors.
This cycle of domestic growth and fission is at the same time an economic cycle.
The resources under the control of the
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household head grow with the growing population of the household, and then on his
death are divided among the independent housholds of his heirs.
I shall turn later to a more detailed account of village rank. As I have already said, there is considerable mobility from generation to generation. This social mobility between households and lineages is clearly systematically connected with the domestic cycle I have outlined. Exactly how the cycle works out will vary with the type of social situation, and especially with the resources available, the possible uses of spare labour, and the control of the household head over married sons. To analyse this adequately would require detailed histories of a number of villages. Instead, since written records for villages barely exist, and since I devoted too little of my time in the field to reconstructing in detail the history of the two villages, I must rely on argument based on the material available to me.
I distinguished two types of land situation: two models. Real village situations were obviously always far more complicated than the models indicate; yet these models correspond approximately to two stages in the social history of a large number of Anatolian villages; and they make possible illuminating deductions about the changes which have taken place.
In the first situation, land is freely available. Any household is able to take over land so long as it has the manpower and the draught animals to work it. Land not worked reverts to pasture. In the second situation, all cultivable land that can be spared from the village pasture is owned and cultivated. Households can only increase their holdings by taking land from other households.
Wherever the village is small in relation to the territory available, land for cultivation is freely available. Such was the situation in Elbashï until 1946 or so, and such it must have been in Sakaltutan up to the early nineteen-twenties, as I shall shortly show. Plainly such a situation existed in most, if not all, villages in the area in the recent past, and indeed in many other parts of Anatolia.
Other evidence supports this view. Reports from Alishar, a
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village between Kayseri and Yozgat, in I932 state that unirrigated and uncultivated
land bore signs of previous cultivation.
`The considerable area of land no longer cultivated suggests that the peasants of
Alishar are unable with their present equipment to utilise all the arable land within
the village limits.' (Morrison (1938) Chap. II.)
The Village Law of 1924 (p. 27) contained provisions for the fixing and registering of the boundaries of village territories. Before this date, and even after it, boundaries were vague, depending on general features of the landscape (p. 49).ven if, in some cases, villagers knew clearly the boundaries between them, it is plausible that many, cultivating only the land near the settlement, were not concerned with precise rights to the extensive pastures which lay between them and their neighbours.
The situation I have described is not inconsistent with the existence of tax farmers or even of absentee landowners. So long as the dues are paid on the crop produced and not on the extent of land held, the rights of the urban landlords or tax collectors are over villages as social groups, and not over specific pieces of land. Each villager can therefore still be free de facto to take on fresh land whenever he wishes to do so. His tax or rent is in fact personal, a proportion of income due to a political superior.
I have already (p. 83) described the limits of cultivation per ploughman imposed by the traditional techniques. Very roughly, each extra adult man equipped with a plough, seed and a team of oxen would add a possible twentydönüm (about ten to fifteen acres, four to six ha.) to the annual cultivated area of a household.
Quite apart from these physical limitations, many villagers did not in the past strive to increase their cultivations beyond a certain point, because they had nothing to gain by so doing. To market grain was not easy. Moreover, in years of surplus local prices would be low, whereas in years of high prices the villager was unlikely to have any surplus to market.
Transport was a major difficulty. Ox-carts carry comparatively small loads, and
move more slowly than a man walking. Thus even from Sakaltutan a journey to Kayseri
would have taken some ten hours or more. Moreover, many people told me
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that in the days before and immediately after the establishment of the Republic highwaymen
were common. Indeed, some villagers cheerfully told me of their own exploits. Grain
for the local market presumably moved under convoy, which made it difficult for the
small producer to sell except to dealers in the village. The tax farmers, for example,
bought surplus grain from the villagers, a system which would hardly make for an
advantageous deal for the villagers. Mumtaz Turhan reports from his own village in
eastern Turkey (Turhan (1951) p. 95) that cash cropping of cereals was regarded as
dishonourable. In my area it was not that marketing was dishonourable but that it
was limited to the well-to-do with surpluses large enough to justify the trouble
involved.
In general, therefore, no household could cultivate more than a certain amount, and only prosperous households tried to produce more than enough for their own needs.
As sons reached maturity the household was able to expand its land holding. This
would make possible, and require, an increase in its animal population as well. Thus
the wealth controlled by the head increased, the surpluses produced by each constituent
element were pooled in his hands, and the whole unit benefited by efficiency in proportion.
The head might well join the village leaders (a§alar ) or even
become the most influential among them. At this point the marketing of grain would
be both possible and worthwhile. Yet on his death, each son would inherit only approximately
as much land as he himself had been ploughing. Every new household, born out of the
splitting of a large one, would thus start with roughly the same amount of land,
whether it sprang from a household with only one male heir, or one with ten. Each
young household head would depend on his own procreative prowess, skill, hard work
and luck to build for himself a position of prominence in his later years. Even in
cases where the son of an eminent father himself became eminent, the son did not
succeed to his father's position, but built up a new one for himself, after an interregnum
filled by households of other village lineages. Few could succeed completely in the
face of illness, premature deaths, infertility, crop failures, animal diseases and
other hazards. If this model had ever functioned uncomplicated by other factors,
then it would have corresponded to the ideal
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society of some social moralists - perfect equality of opportunity, barring acts
of God. But of course it did not.
Even if land is a free good, the means to work it are not. A man needs equipment
and, more especially, draught animals. There is no doubt that in contrast to many
primitive societies and to some other Middle Eastern areas, these villages contained
landless men, or rather oxenless men. Even now, some richer households have servants
- çirak - who live in their master's household. In the past such
arrangements were quite common. One whole village, called, perhaps significantly,
Çiraz, whose territory formed an enclave within that of a larger village, was
said to have been founded entirely by freed servants of their richer neighbours.
Presumably they had been rewarded by gifts of oxen and the right to plough in their
masters' territory. Casual labour was also said to have been much commoner in the
past. People in Elbashï were quite explicit about this. Once the village was
full of landless labourers, they said, but now they had all got their own oxen and
started to plough for themselves. To judge from stories about people's ancestral
origins, many of these oxenless servants in the past were vagrants, but some must
have been settled villagers.
Just how difficult it was to move from oxenless labourer to landowner it is hard to guess. Oxen are costly in relation to a subsistence income, and a man also needs a homestead, a plough and seed. Possibly share-cropping in some form offered a way or the rewards of shepherds and servants occasionally provided the necessary capital. Obviously some people did succeed. But equally obviously it was not as simple a matter to set up initially as a landowner as it was for an established landowner to expand his operations as his household grew.
Practically all village households own sheep and goats. These constitute a form
of inheritable wealth apart from land, and might therefore upset the rough equality
of inheritance between the sons of different households. Villages varied and still
vary sharply in the extent to which they depend on sheep and goats. Even within one
area, as de Planhol (1958, pp. 234 ff.) makes clear, rights to summer or winter pasture
away from the village were fairly common but highly variable. Wealth in animals tends
to follow a similar pattern. Special winter pastures are not normally available on
the plateau, and the flock must be
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fed during the winter from the straw of the cereal crops. The size of the flock is
thus closely tied to the extent of the cultivated lads of its owner. It is also partly
related to the size of the household, since the sheep must be milked in the spring
and this is women's work among the villagers. Sheep, moreover, are easily stolen
and a large flock needs a reasonably large defence, so that sons are as necessary
to the security of the household flocks as are women to its productivity. In fact,
large households probably gained proportionally more from sheep farming than did
small households, thus reinforcing the swing from poverty to wealth and back as the
household changed from small to large and split into small again.
More important, land varied sharply in value. Land near the village is manured and often irrigated. This more valuable land was never allowed to go out of cultivation and was always owned by someone, and moreover, the amounts of it held by different households would vary greatly according to the accidents of past history - how prolific they had been, how many brotherless heiresses their members had married, whether they had been strong enough to appropriate land by arbitrary means. But here again the effect is to reinforce the levelling process of the cycle. The single heir of a less successful father is on balance likely to inherit more of the most valuable category of land than the co-heirs of a more prolific and powerful father.
I have been arguing that, so long as land was freely available, no household was likely to retain a position of eminence in the village beyond the death of the household head, and that therefore there was a continual rise and fall in the relative position of households, and groups of fraternal households. Certain disturbing factors, such as the existence of a lower stratum which had difficulty in getting started on the ladder, and the difference in holdings of sheep and in fertility of land gave some people an advantage over others but did not cancel out the general mobility of the society.
One other factor of disturbance remains - a much more damaging one to my model.
I have already said that the village contained landless people who often acted as
servants (çirak ), either long-term or casual, to their more wealthy
neighbours. In theory, this practice would make possible an expansion of farming
limited only by the availability of labour, and by the
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possibility of making some use of the extra crops and hers acquired, either by marketing
them or by feeding a political or perhaps an armed following.
It is highly probable that on analogies from other parts of the Middle East (Barth (1959) p. 89) the successful did in fact use retainers in this way. The odds against a high degree of success were great. No village is a power vacuum, and once a man's power began to grow, he would face rivals prepared to use violence. Only he himself personally would be able to hold his supporters together, so he would need vigour and good health over a fairly long period. Successful contacts with the leaders of other villages, and - more important - with merchants, officials and powerful people in the towns, would reinforce his control over his own village, and he might even expand his empire over other villages. A man with this degree of success would have several wives and many sons; he would need sons in order to get started and he would achieve more by his success.
No one son would inherit both the wealth and the unique position in the network of contacts and patronage that gave his father power. Of course, the sons of an eminent and wealthy father would start with advantages, and one lineage might be able to claim a number of successful men over the generations. But these would not form a continuous dynasty, but a haphazard series, interrupted by periods when men of other village lineages dominated or at least divided the village. Most villages appear to have contained at least two potentially powerful lineages of this type. A priori then, the possibility of employing labour and even retainers, if it introduced a greater social distance between the top of village society and the bottom, did not prevent a high rate of social mobility between households and lineages. In spite of complications and occasional conspicuous exceptions, the main features of the model seem to hold. As long as land was a free good, a man with a minimum of capital with which to start cultivating, good health and many sons could establish a high ranking position in village society, but without giving any one son more than a slight lead over his neighbours in the new race for wealth and power.
The maintenance of this situation depends on the population of any given village
remaining small enough to allow more cultivable land than the village needs. I have
no accurate and
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detailed information on the population of villages prior to 1925,but it seems likely
that the population, subject to disease, famine and conscription, was growing only
slowly if at all, and may well have fallen during the wars from 1911 to 1922. Thus,
while many households were able to expand their cultivations, others were forced
by loss of manpower or ox-power to abandon land, leaving it free for others ultimately
to take over.
One clear example of this from Sakaltutan has already been given, and to my knowledge at least three patrilineal groups had died out or left the village within recent memory. Morrison (1938, Chap. II) reports that about nine per cent of the whole village territory of Alishar was abandoned fields. He also says, it is true, that some ninety per cent of this abandoned land was still claimed, but by I932, the end of free land was already in sight; and a claim to abandoned land is easily made but much more difficult to establish unless one is able to work it. Neighbours, he tells us, were liable to filch unworked land.
So long then as the population is kept stable by a high death rate, this type of domestic cycle, with its implications of a high degree of social mobility up and down over the generations, can revolve indefinitely.
But once Republican peace and order were established in Turkey, the population was anything but stable. With rapid and steady population growth the supply of spare cultivable land is bound to be exhausted sooner or later. This supply has been drying up in Turkey over the last half-century, and little if any now remains; certainly not in the area in which I was working.
In the new situation, sons are still as much desired as ever. They are still a
source of prestige, religious as well as secular; they form an armed guard for the
defence of the household, and they enable father to take his ease. Even in the past
sons who could not be absorbed as extra labour on the household lands could increase
household income as labourers, servants, shepherds or migrants. But when household
land does not expand in proportion to the male labour force, fission leaves each
son with less land than he is capable of working. One or two may succeed in acquiring
extra by inheritance through women, by
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purchase, or by simple appropriation. But over the whole village, in two or three
generations, many households will be reduced to poverty
In the first model, the balance between man- and animal-power and land was assured by more or less freely adjusting the amount of land. Now the attitude to land rights changes, and land becomes important even if it cannot be worked. Hence share-cropping sharply increases. Anyone who is unable to work part or all of his land will be keen to lease it, while many neighbours, having insufficient of their own, will be anxious to share-crop for others.
I have presented this argument so far as a pair of models. These are, of course, designed to make sense of the material from the two villages. This material does not constitute proof. But proof is not the point, since a model is not true or false but more or less useful and appropriate. The cases that follow conform in general to the model, but in some details diverge from it. They are in part reconstructions based on statements of informants, on landholdings, and on the assumption of a basically agnatic system of inheritance.
Table 3 (p. 53) shows the large number of small and very small holdings of land in Sakaltutan. In every case, the small size of these holdings was said to be due directly to the division of paternal holdings among heirs. The process of division seem to have been under way for roughly two generations. Heads of large joint households in the period 1900 to 1910, that is, the fathers of the oldest living generation in the village in 1950, seem to have had as much land as they needed. As late as the early nineteen-twenties households with adequate manpower seem still to have been able to expand their holdings as need arose.
Hamit (V) (Fig. 8) was about eighty years of age in 1950; the only survivor of
five brothers who had grown up, only one of whom had no living descendants. He said
he had inherited thirty dönüm (fifteen acres, six ha.) from
his father, and fifteen from his mother, making forty-five in all. His father presumably
then held about I50 dönüm ; much more than he
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Figure 8
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is likely to have inherited. It is likely he was able to increase his holding as
Hamit and his brothers grew up, probably somewhere between I890 and 1910
Hamit himself was less fortunate. His eldest son, born about 1895, died about I940;
but his second and third sons' official years of birth were about I916 and I921 respectively.
His eldest grandson was born about I925. Hence at no point before the late nineteen-twenties
did he have much help with farming, and it is not surprising that he did not succeed
in expanding his own holdings.
Two of his brothers had fared likewise. They had both passed on to their heirs about the same quantity of land as Hamit had inherited from his father. One had had two sons, born 1905 and 1910, the other only one. But a third brother had passed on about one hundred dönüm at least, and perhaps more. He had been the most successful begetter of sons. Their official dates of birth were I900, I908 and 1918. Thus in the immediate post war period (1922-25) he would have had at least two sons old enough to plough, and it seems reasonable to assume that it was then that he was able to expand his holdings.
One such example may seem a little thin; in fact similar evidence from other lineages leads to similar conclusions, putting the matter beyond reasonable doubt.
The closing down of the right to plough village pasture must have been gradual. Even now people are accused of surreptitious encroachment on village meadow land, and plainly public opinion in the village against such ploughing would form slowly, and become really effective only when the situation began to look serious. The absence of men in the armies between 1911 and I923 and the loss of many of them, may actually have reversed the process for a time.
Elbashï had a very much larger territory, said to have been fixed by one
of its sons who became the local Land Registration Officer (tapu memürü)
under the Ottoman Empire. Only after the Second World War was free ploughing of village
pasture stopped, and the conflicts generated thereby were still acute in I951. More
and more of the villagers realised that land was too valuable an asset to be left
unoccupied, and as the supply diminished the end came with a land rush. People, I
was told, left their undisputed and more fertile plots near the village
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uncultivated in order to use their ploughing resources to stake claims at the margins.
The hreat to the village pasture led to organised opposition in the village to this
movement. When a man set out to stake a claim, neighbours would follow him, and sit
in rows staking claims to the strips immediately alongside the furrow he was ploughing,
rendering his claim useless and absurd. These situations naturally led to violence.
The administration intervened and ruled that no more land should be ploughed up.
In 1951 surreptitious ploughing of pasture by those whose land was adjacent to it
was still said to be going on, but not on a great scale, and not without the danger
of rousing both neighbours and authorities to intervene.
The effects of the previous regime when marginal land was a free good were still plainly to be seen in the social structure. Well-to-do families often had extremely poor affines, and even extremely poor agnates. One family in particular illustrates my point.
Haci Bayram (B) had been a great man, and had served as District Officer under the imperial administration. He had had at least five sons on whom presumably his eminence was built. He had crowned it all by making the pilgrimage to Mecca, in those days a costly trip. Spent up, he had returned to the village a Haci, to die in modest circumstances. His five sons had inherited a modicum of land and one beast each. They began their independence poor.
Of these five, three younger full brothers were still alive in 1951. The eldest survivor had had four daughters, all by this time married. His land was worked by a stepson, who, I was assured, had no right to inherit it. The old man was poor and insignificant. The second of the three had had three sons of his own; his first wife had died after a long illness, and this, he said, had ruined him. Yet his household had a comfortable sufficiency.
The youngest brother, Hayip (B), had five sons, all adult and all but one, the
village headmaster, still living in his household. The eldest, who had a son already
old enough to work, had been headman about the time of the land rush. Hayip had not
been slow to seize the opportunity and his was one of the wealthiest households in
the village. He had an imposing guest room, and was having a new dwelling house for
the family built
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during our stay. But his existing family house betrayed his recent poverty, and his
lowliness was too well remembered for his wealth to earn him much respect. His sons
in turn will inherit only modest-sized holdings, which they will have no possibility
of expanding except by direct purchase.
Haci Bayram's two elder sons had been by a different mother, and were a great deal older. One had left in the village another set of four brothers with sharply different degrees of wealth. The eldest, Mahsud, a man of about fifty, had about as much land as Hayip; the others barely enough to keep the household going. I failed to check on the history of this disparity, but as Mahsud had only three sons, the eldest of whom was only twenty, this case does not fit my model. Possibly it was Mahsud's father who had taken the initiative, and somehow, as elder brother, he had retained the extra land which his father had acquired, and restricted the division to the patrimonial estate.
Elbashï also provided one example of a personal rise to real pre-eminence, and the corresponding extinction of this power with the death of the holder. Kara Osman (Ax) it was said, had `held the whole district in his hand', and had been a friend of Ataturk. Quite what this meant I am not sure; but plainly during the War of Independence and in the early days of the Republic he must have had great political influence in the area. He had had one successful son who must have been born early in his married life, for he had married and left a grandson senior to Kara Osman's other sons, two more of whom must have been adolescent in the mid nineteen-twenties. Thus he had at least four descendants to work for him. He may have had others who died without issue.
In I923 Turkey agreed with Greece to transfer to Greece all Christians of the
Greek Orthodox Church. A large village standing below Elbashï, on the stream
which irrigated a wide belt of meadow and crop land, was emptied of its population.
Kara Osman moved in, and took over a large area of land, said to be a thousand dönüm
. This might mean anything from l00 ha. (250 acres) to 250 ha. (over 600 acres).
He was in any case very much wealthier than anyone else in the village. `At his gate,'
they said, `there were ten labourers.' He was one of the first in this part of Turkey
to own a tractor and a combine harvester,
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before these became familiar sights in the Turkish countryside.
I was told that twelve people claimed shares in his estate and that they had taken
the case to the courts. I have records only of eleven, one grandson, five sons, (two
of them still children), two daughters and three widows, who were certainly not all
married to him under State law. By 1955, four years after his death, the matter was
still unsettled though the brothers claimed to be reconciled. I suspect that in the
end the four household heads, the grandson and the three adult sons, reached agreement
which the rest were unable to upset. But whatever the outcome no single heir could
in any way rival his father's pre-eminence.
In general then, over much of Anatolia, the village social system worked against the maintenance of wealth in any one household or line of households through more than one generation. Broad was the way and easy the path to mediocrity or poverty, through the division of the land, illness, premature deaths, the birth of too many daughters, the barrenness of wives or the death of oxen. But strait as it was, the gate to prosperity was open, through the successful rearing of many sons to provide economic resources and fighting men for the expansion of household power and wealth. Land shortage closes this gate; the downward path is now even easier to tread but there is no way up again. Fathers still profit from large families of sons but the more successful they are in breeding them, the smaller their sons' holdings, and the more hopeless their sons: prospects of attaining importance in the village.
The second model with its prospects of hopelessness applies to the present situation
in Turkey only in so far as the villages are forced to solve their problems within
themselves. But already the villages are part of the national economy, and from the
outside there is hope, at a price. To feed a family, many men must go away to work.
Even the better off can only hope to acquire the extra resources to establish importance
in the village by going outside. But the very need to move out for long periods into
a different world makes the achievement more difficult, and, at the same time, as
the contestants become aware of
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Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
other social arenas, less desirable. The successful migrant spends on material prestige
symbols of a more urban kind, and not on traditional generosity, on building loyalty
and dependence in the village itself. The two most stylish guest rooms in Sakaltutan
in I955 belonged to young migrant craftsmen. But neither were men of importance in
village affairs. In the next generation, the father with little land and an earned
income from his own migration will surely be less able to hold his sons, and even
if he can hold their loyalty, he will be unable to use them in the traditional way.
Updated Friday, October 23, 1998