| misleading. I have not made great use of the term, but have in places used “social order” or “social organisation” where I might have used “social structure”, not with any definite plan but according to which seemed to be more appropriate in the context. Nevertheless, the word “structure” can readily be interpreted to cover the ground which I have covered in this thesis. I must also plead guilty to a shift of ground in the use of the word “system”. The absence of formal rules of association, the freedom of contact between all members of the village, provided only that they belong to the same sex, lead me to say that the society has no system. Yet later as in writing I thought more deeply about the material, I found it appropriate to speak of the social system of the village. I think it fair to say that this inconsistency reflects the village life. Compared with other societies, for example the caste system of India, it is unsystematic; yet behaviour does in fact follow rules, it is possible to predict with a high degree of success how people will react to given situations, and it is, therefore, legitimate to speak of a social system. In this sense, indeed, there can be no human society without system. The lack of any single pattern of analysis or definite criterion of relevance makes the arrangement of the chapters somewhat arbitrary. I have begun with a historical and general introduction to Turkey, because it seems to me essential to the understanding of much that goes on in the villages. The absence of any such historical background seems to me a serious shortcoming, for example, in Arensberg’s study of Irish peasants. (4) Next follows a brief description of the setting and the material environment of the villages, equally necessary, if not to the comprehension of the social system, at least to forming a concrete picture of the social life. But after this I found it difficult to know where to begin on the details of this description. Whatever institutions one turns to, it seems that it is first necessary, if the reader is to understand it, to describe some other. Moreover, every topic seems to lead one on, not to one, but to several others. On the other hand it is not true, as Professor Malinowski maintained, that one can describe the whole society as a framework and a starting point. Although marriage and weddings are of fundamental importance in the village social system, there are many topics a full account of which could hardly be held relevant to marriage, for example, relations with the government, or the defensive solidarity of the agnatic kin- groups. The order on which I have eventually decided was that which seemed to follow a course of development from the institutions which seem to stand best on their own, towards those which interlock most with the rest of the society, preserving at the same time a division into general subjects. The chapters on kindred and marriage, chapters V - IX, form a whole, being of a series of |
| related and overlapping topics. The political and the economic organisation of the village follows these, because they can only be understood in the light of the kinship structure. This arrangement leaves unsolved problems - for example, inheritance, which is both a kinship and an economic matter, has in fact been treated in full in neither place, and the discussion on the household becomes divided into three parts. It also involves arbitrary transitions at the end of chapter IX and of chapter X. Religion and social change, which both relate to every aspect and are, therefore, left to the end, also make somewhat sudden entries. These difficulties could have been avoided only at the expense of creating others, and in defence of the order adopted I would claim to have achieved the least of possible evils. Finally, a word on my use of Turkish words. Although clumsy in an English account, it seems better to Turkish words for concepts for which there is no convenient English word, rather than to give a complex definition for an English word which normally means something else, and then to attempt to use it only in the defined sense. For example, for the men’s club rooms, I use the word “oda”. I could have explained the institution, and then used for it either the English word “room”, or “guest room”, or possibly something else. But any English term has misleading associations, which no amount of defining will remove, and if one happens to need the word in its ordinary English sense, ambiguity arises. But while the word “oda” in the account is not English, it is not for that reason Turkish. That is to say, I have made the word my own, and use the Turkish word to supply a need in English, not exactly as it is used in the village, let alone as it is used in Istanbul. Another example of this practice is the word “kabile” which is vague in the village, and not in frequent use, but which I have used in most contexts to refer to the groups which I distinguish in Appendix C. It must not be assumed, then, that the precise meaning and contextual associations of the Turkish words I use can be grasped from my use of them. For the pronunciation of Turkish words, and for relevant remarks on their grammar, the reader is referred to Appendix A. |
| I. | HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL BACKGROUND |
| 1. Geography The Republic of Turkey forms a compact rectangle, with an area of some 300,000 sq miles, stretching from the Aegean Sea on the West to the highlands of Iran in the East, with European neighbours on the West, Arab states in the |
| South, and Persian and the USSR in the East and North-East. Within this territory are considerable differences of climate and ecology. The south and west coastal fringes have a heavy winter rainfall, with hot, fairly dry, summers, while the north coast has rain all the year round. Except for the plains round Antalya and Adana, the coastline is mountainous on every side. In these well watered and fertile coastal areas grow Turkey’s main commercial crops - tobacco, sultanas, nuts and figs for export, and sugar, cotton and even tea for home use. The land rises from the western coast to the edge of the plateau which stretches east for about 300 miles, bordered on the north by the forest clad mountains of the Black Sea coast, and on the south by the Taurus. This plateau averages about 3,000 feet, gradually getting higher as one goes east, until it reaches higher and more mountainous country as it approaches the Persian and Soviet Union frontiers. The plateau area has a severe climate, with bitter winters, hot summers, and low rainfall, most of which may fall in violent downpours, which damage crops and wash away the soil. To take the figures for Kayseri, situated fairly centrally on the plateau, temperature varies annually between about 98.5 and - 20 F. It has about 100 sunny days a year, and about 80 overcast days. Between 1931 and 1944 annual precipitation varied between 458 mm and 262 mm, very little of which falls in the summer. (1) Snow lies in Kayseri for anything up to two months. The plateau for the most part is rolling steppe land, devoid of woodland. The staple crop is wheat, with barley, rye and other grains found to some extent. In a few areas rice is grown extensively. Potatoes and other vegetables are planted in most areas, and vines and fruit trees are also common. The population of Turkey, according to figures based on the 1935 census, the accuracy of which is not entirely reliable, is densest also the Black Sea and Western coastline and in the North-West corner of Turkey, including Thrace, also in the Hatay, the hinterland of Iskanderun (Alexandretta), which Turkey acquired from Syria in 1939. The density per square mile for the rest of Turkey, that is including the plateau, was under fifty, except for the Vilayet of Kayseri, the population of which was just over fifty. Outside the towns, the population of the plateau lives in compact villages. No one lives alone in the open country, for fear of brigands, still a real fear, though no longer a real danger. The population of these villages varies from about twenty homes upwards; in 1940, only 1.2% of the population of Turkey lived in villages of less than a hundred people, and most of these would probably not be on the plateau. The villages are built mainly of stone or mud |
| brick; the houses are flat roofed, and often situated on the side of a hill, into which they blend - the new red-roofed school building, which one sees in some villages, standing out in sharp contrast. The majority of villages are Turkish speaking, and profess orthodox Sunni Islam. No Christian villages remain, but there are Kurdish and Circassian speaking villages, and villages which belong by religion to shiite sects. Near us there were also Avakars, who, though recognised as distinct by themselves and by their neighbours because of differences in custom, dress and dialect, nevertheless speak Turkish and intermarry with the Turkish villages. In all these villages the household is patrilineal and marriage patrilocal, though undoubtedly there are considerable local variations in social organisation. 2. The Ottoman Empire Any attempt to consider Turkish history from however small a scale forces one to an examination of the process by which the successful, of itself falling into decline, became exposed to the pressure of Western Europe, which was its final undoing. The events which led to the establishment of the Republic and the westernising revolution of Kemal Ataturk have their roots in the series of reforms and changes which are conventionally said to begin with the new model army, formed by Selim III (1789-1807), following on the serious defeats of Turkey at the hands of Russia in the wars of 1768-1774 and 1788- 1792. During the nineteenth century, partly under the influence of the spontaneous spread of ideas through personal contact and study, partly under direct political pressure from the Western powers, the central government made periodic attempts to imitate Wester political and social institutions in the name of reforms, by the naive method of passing laws or promulgating decrees which there was little or no machinery for implementing. It is important to realise that the model itself, Western Europe, was in a state of violent and accelerating change. The concepts such as universal suffrage, education for all, equal rights for minorities were developing in Europe spontaneously and indigenously, in response to the impact of the new technology on the existing social structure and cultural patters. These ideas, wrapped up with, and based on, other Western notions, such as secular legislation, and secular justice, were to be applied from the top downwards, by order of a centralised authority, to a society whose social institutions, from the family up to the state, and whose morality and religion, were fundamentally different from those of Western Europe. Considered as an act of conscious policy, the attempt was so far from any hope of success as to appear futile. The Ottoman Empire decreed an extensive and complete educational reform (1) two years before the Education |
| Act of 1870 in England, a law which has today, eighty years after, been fully implemented, neither in the Turkish Republic nor in most of what were then the provinces of the Empire. But it is not in terms of the wisdom or otherwise of the people responsible that we should look at these reforms, but as symptoms of a social process. The splendid confusion of ideas of the Committee of Union and Progress, which, after a successful revolt against the reactionary regime of the Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1908, ruled Turkey until the end of World War I, embraced pan-Ottoman parliamentarianism, rights for minorities, pan-Islamism, pan-Turanianism, (3) together with a flavour of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and a particular admixture of Prussian absolutism. The political unit to which these ideas were to be applied contained numerous violently nationalist minorities, Islamic as well as Christian, each as much against its neighbours as against the Turks, and in many cases muddled up territoriality in such a way that once the system of the independent “Millet” of the Ottoman Empire was abandoned, no satisfactory political substitute could be found. Moreover, the vast majority of the inhabitants on whom this hotchpotch of political and social ideas was to be imposed, were illiterate peasants mainly living in places inaccessible to wheeled transport, for whom government meant the tax collector and the drafting officer, both foreign and hostile interferers with village life. Few of those minor officials who would be responsible for the detailed administration and application of the “reforms” had any knowledge of the models on which they were founded, or any comprehension of the purposes they were intended to achieve. The founders of the Republic, headed by the great figure of Mustafa Kemal, were the heirs of this confusion in more ways than one. But historical events had solved some of their problems and given them the means of solving others. The subject peoples were no longer their concern, the defeat of the Ottoman Empire had removed the political backbone of Pan-Islamism, sufficiently weakening the Caliphate for Ataturk (Mustafa Kemal) to be able to abolish it, the revolution in Russia had destroyed any immediate hope for, or point in, pan-Turanianism, and the agreement with Greece on the exchange of populations removed the last serious nationalist “Millet” from inside the boundaries of the new Republic. Nationalism became the driving principle of Ataturk’s party, a nationalism directed at raising the prestige of Turkey by efficient Westernisation rather than by an attempt to recover the Empire. Many contradictions remained - between, for example, the glorification of everything Turkish, carried to the point of xenophobia, on the one hand, and an open admiration of the technical achievement of the West, with an avid desire to imitate them, on the other; or between an anti-religious secularism, and a pro-Islamic, anti-Christian attitude. The administrative and social |