| The advantages of intermarriage with kinsfolk are considerable, especially within the kabile. It is cheaper because the scale of ceremonies and entertaining, and the bride price, are both less. Further, it means that if the daughter inherits, the land will remain in the kabile, and there is less likelihood of a difference of opinion over inheritance between the parties concerned. More important than these economic considerations, the girl, instead of being lost to her family, will be close at hand, under a friendly and familiar roof, and married to a man with whom she has had intimate ties from childhood. For both sides there is much less risk of unknown troubles and difficulties. Sometimes cousins themselves wish to marry each other. Ali Osman (BK 1) told me how, when ploughing his father’s land one day, by a subtle adjusting of the speed of his oxen he made an opportunity to embrace his father’s brother’s daughter who was ploughing on the next plot. She was angry at the time, but he subsequently approached his father for her hand and obtained her as his wife. This form of kinship marriage, that within the male line, is the commonest and the most preferred. In one case of such a marriage in the village during my stay, there was no public celebrations at all, and the couple simply moved into a vacant house on the courtyard on which both their fathers live. There was no wrench for the girl’s household, and the young man, who had been living with his grandfather, his father being dead, got a wife for only 200 T.L. with few expenses. Marriage between matrilateral kin has many, but not all of these, advantages. Mainly, it avoids new contact with, and saves one sending a daughter away among, strangers. Yet marrying with strangers is by no means a dead loss. It was pointed out to me that such marriage meant new friends, an important consideration. As I have said under the heading of kinship, households related by marriage, especially outside the village, regarded each other as kin, and provide each other with mutual services such as hospitality, help in marrying other members of the family, and small loans and services outside the orbit of the village, within which nothing escapes notice and discussion. Any marriage outside the kabile and close matrilateral ties may fulfil this function, even if there is a slight connection already existing. In fact, a man would prefer to take a wife for his son from among kinsfolk or acquaintances, than from among complete strangers. If one asks a man how he came to marry his wife, after one has parried the reply “kismet”, he will often explain that there had been some friendship based on trade or military service or common experiences working away together. Equally a large number of the marriages between kin, especially not very close kin, take place simply because this is the most convenient channel for contact with the father of a suitable girl. Thus Ali (CS 1) gave his daughter to his sister’s husband’s sister’s son; a marriage between Sakaltutan and Vk village thus came about through a go-between in a |
| third village, Ac. A girl is thought of as something precious, to be given away only as a favour - quite apart from the bride price, the father of a girl is doing the father of a boy a service by allowing him his daughter. Hence the onus is on the father of a boy to find a girl for his son, while the father of a girl sits back and waits for an offer he considers worthy of his daughter. A boy’s father is thus forced to look around among his kinsmen and friends for someone who will do him this favour, and an analysis of the village marriages shows how he sets about it. He begins among those closest to him, both socially and physically, and works outwards. this method of approach results in a concentration of marriages in the village, with a circle round it of about twenty miles radius, or five hours as the villagers say, within which the number of marriages varies inversely with the distance. I have information on all contemporary marriages in Sakaltutan and on many of the marriages in the previous generations, in all approximately 360. Of these, 150 were within Sakaltutan; in all about 110 women had come into Sakaltutan about 100 gone out. Eighty-nine married women and widows now living in Sakaltutan are natives, and fifty-three have married in. Corresponding figures on women marrying out are less reliable since informants often neglect to mention the, and I am not always clear who among them is still living. I have plotted the statistical results of this investigation on the diagram on page . on which the decreasing density of Sakaltutan women in proportion to distance shows quite clearly. In some cases, special links are forged between villages, leading to a larger number of marriages between them than the physical distance would lead one to expect. The most striking instance is the connection between CK village and the village of Elmali, seventy miles away on the plain beyond Kayseri. About seventy years ago, so I was told, a high upland village called Elmali, on the slopes of Mount Erciyas (Argaeus), moved bodily to this present site, and with them went about half the population of Ck village. The patrilateral connections between these emigrants and Ck village are still recognised, and maintained by girls from Ck village marrying to Elmali, though none come the other way. Musa (IB 1) also has patrilateral kinship ties with Elmali, and gave one of his daughters thither. Equally, Kolete, about four hours from Sakaltutan, contains patrilateral emigrants of two generations ago from Sakaltutan, and this accounts for the comparatively high total of marriages between them. SI have a special connection with Harsa, also a good four hours away. Zubeyr’s (SI 4) mother is from Harsa, and his brother Suayip married her brother’s daughter and moved there. Another brother married from there, and the connection led to |
| a further marriage between harsa and Sakaltutan outside SI. I came across several cases of marriage ties between families in different villages maintained over two or three generations. The diagram also brings out the concentration of marriages in an easterly direction. To the north, there is a small range of hills where the villages are more scattered, and beyond them the country slopes down towards Bunyan, and the villages tend to be richer. To the south and south-west is the mass of Mount Erciyas, where there are fewer villages, and those that are there are poorer, and more inaccessible. In kayseri itself, and in the villages to the north-west and west of Sakaltutan, which are readily accessible to Kayseri, the marriage customs are noticeably different. In particular there is no bride price, but instead the father of the boy must provide for the girl a number of gold ornaments, which become her personal property. The value of these is, I gather, usually a matter of bargaining, analogous to the bargaining over the bride price. The trousseau is also larger and includes articles of household equipment. The boundary of the areas of the two types of marriage custom is marked on the diagram. Marriages do take place across this boundary, and in such cases the father of the groom, since he is receiving a favour, must conform to the custom of the girl’s village. In addition to this difference of custom, the villages nearer Kayseri are richer, with better built houses, and higher and more town-like standards of internal comfort and cleanliness. An old woman from Enderlik told us how she had come to Sakaltutan full of ideas about housework which she had had to lose, and like her neighbours she was now “kaba” - “coarse” or “common”. Bilal remarked that as a rule women refuse to come from these richer villages to the poorer upland villages. Those that do are the wives of poor men, obtained not by proper negotiation and marriage, but by elopement, and probably, therefore, either very poor, or not of spotless reputation. Several of the women charted as coming from these villages belong to the last generation, and details of the marriage are no longer known. The diagram shows much less marriage in this direction than towards the less rich and more agricultural villages to the east, and this difference is accounted for mainly by the economic and social differences and to a less extent by the difference of marriage custom. The striking absence of hard class distinctions in village society is reflected in the range of marriages between rich and poor households. Marriages tend to follow class only at the very top and bottom of the social scale, and then to a limited degree. At the top of the scale, in some of the surrounding villages, are fairly rich men who exercise a good deal of power in their villages, called “aga”. There was no one ranking as aga in Sakaltutan, but there was one such |
| household in Kanber, and one or two in Gn. These households sometimes intermarried among themselves, and also on occasion with middle-class wife in the town of Mersin in Cilicia, came to her village to stay for a month in the heat of the summer, with her two sisters who had never left the village, an event unique in the village history. Another family in Gn had matrilateral kinsfolk in high administrative positions. The point of such intermarriage was undoubtedly in part political, especially since a generation ago these “agalar” were often the pollication officers in the villages. The only family approaching this status in Sakaltutan were DT. Ali (DT 1) had married first a woman of the aga kabile of Kb village, then a woman of the aga kabile of Gn village. But intermarriage between rich and powerful families does not mean that they are exclusive. Not only will such families take girls, provided they are chaste, from poorer families, they will often give their own girls to poorer families. Inside Sakaltutan, families such as DT would not intermarry with the poorest elements, such as C, but they intermarried with moderate households such as IB 2, PB 2 and CS 4. Such moderate households might themselves intermarry with the poorest of their neighbours, so that affinal or matrilateral ties at one remove might relate the wealthiest to the poorest. At the bottom end of the scale, poor families are often driven by economic necessity to accept as wives such women as they can get without much expense. Mustafa (C 1) obtained his own wife by elopement - almost the equivalent of theft. “I took and fled” would be a literal rendering of the phrase which is used to describe the getting of a wife for oneself by this means. Very often the girl would be a widow or an orphan. Osman (C 3) took to wife a young girl of Sakaltutan who was living with her mother (widow of BT’s father) and sister in a cave. He paid no bride price, but, separating from his father and step-mother, he took into his own house his wife’s poverty stricken family. The sister, who had then been married four times and each time had returned home within a few weeks, was lately married again to a landless orphan in Ck village, and was complaining that her new husband had nothing in the house to eat. Osman’s sister is married to their father’s (C 2) next door neighbour, Mustafa (VT 3) a very poor man. On the other hand, one of Mustafa’s (C 1) close kinswomen was the mother of Osman (AG 1), who, by the accident of inheritance and a little opportunism has become one of the richest men in the village. Haci, the watchman, (BY), the poorest man in the village, and a bit simple, has obtained as his wife the daughter of a well-to-do villager in Ac village, who has already given him land to make a garden near the border between the villages, and is always helping him in various ways. Haci’s mother has some sort of connection with his benefactor, and it is for her sake he helps him. |
| Assessment of the factors which weigh with a man when choosing a wife for his son, can only be judged from general conversations on the subject, and from the actual marriages that happen. Mistakes in such assessment, especially of emphasis, are easy, and there is no criterion to which one can refer for a check outside one’s own impression and interpretation. The first requirement is chastity - there must be no hint of scandal. Normally for the first marriage of a son a father would take a virgin rather than a widow or divorcee. Next, the girl should be healthy and able in her feminine duties, if possible skilled in weaving, and even carpet making. The marriage may, as I have said, serve as the link in a fresh family alliance, especially in the case of the rich, but apart from this, and the slight limitations on marriages between the rich and the very poor, social status and wealth count for little. Osman (AG 1)’s sister, for example, was married to Musa (KU 2), a feckless man who lived in a small semi-cave in the Upper Quarter. What is more surprising, the question of inheritance also seems to enter little into considerations. The villagers say that such matters as inheritance are in the hands of Allah, and it would be both shameful and impious to consider them in choosing a bride. In any case, fathers do not show much concern for their sons’ future, regarding it sufficient that they should bring them up. What becomes of sons after their fathers’ decease is not their fathers’ affair. So that it would be consistent not to give much thought to what a son might inherit from his wife at some point in the indefinite future. Choice of a bride by a widower or a man who has rashly divorced his wife, is usually a matter of urgency. If he can afford to give up to 500 T.L. in bride price, he will have no difficulty in finding a father willing to give a daughter, but if, as often, he wants a widow or divorced woman on grounds of bride price, he may have no easy task, and his standards will be lower. “So long”, said Mehmet (BA 2)’s older brother, when trying to find a new wife for Mehmet last summer, “as she is honourable, that is all that matters”. The villagers do not think in terms of the selection, from a host of possibles, of the best available, but rather of taking the first available girl to whom there is no definite objection. They always declare that marriage is a matter of chance, that is, in their language, the will of Allah. The invariable answer to the question “how did you come to marriage this woman?” is, “There you are - it was fate”. (“Iste, kismet”) |
| 3. | Bride Price |
| It is often said that a bride price system of marriage does not mean that daughters are sold. Whether or not it does so depends on how much of the implications of the idea of “sale” in a given society are carried over to the |