| Apart from these means of livelihood within the village, some of the villagers make a living by buying and selling. Pedlars are the most common of these. The only stock in trade needed for peddling is a donkey or two, and a little money. In Sakaltutan three men, all with little land of their own, Abudllah (PB 2), Mustafa (VT 3), and Halil Ibrahim (FA 1), were engaged in peddling this summer. Mustafa (VY 3), had been a village shepherd the previous summer. The other two were old men, one whose grown son went regularly away to work, and the other whose brother ploughed his land as a yarici. His sons, born of a young second wife, were still very small. These pedlars collected eggs, rag, scraps of wool, and apricot stones in the village, sold them in Kayseri, and bought back cheap seasonal fruit or vegetables, earthernware cooking pots, trinkets and so on. These would make one or two trips a week to the town, often trading in other villages as well. Profits appeared to range from five to seven T.L. a trip. At a slightly higher economic level, villagers may open a shop for a period - that is, they may bring a load of goods out to the village from the town by lorry, the goods being mainly apples, raisins, currants, fat, nuts, paraffin, soap and perhaps cloth, and sell them until the stock is exhausted. In Sakaltutan, Bilal ran a shop two years ago, Surriye (DS 4) also claimed to have run a shop for a year or two some time back, Musa (IB 1) opened a shop early in my stay with a small stock which he did not replenish, and a man from another village with a Sakaltutanli wife (BA) came to the village for the winter, bringing in a good stock of things, which he had sold out by the spring, then went away leaving a number of debts for collection at the harvest. Such unskilled shop- keeping gives uncertain profit. In some of the larger neighbouring villages there are permanent shops, but, owing to the influx of migrant labourers in the winter months, with money in their pockets, these are usually supplemented by temporary competition during the winter. Among all these occupations, there is a correlation between wealth in land and the level of non- agricultural employment. The shepherds, labourers and pedlars come from poor families with little or no land, the schoolmaster, the builders, the |
| carpenters all belong to families whose land alone would give them at least a competence. Of the latter, only the carpenter is dependent to any considerable extent to his craft, and then not for subsistence but for the maintenance of his standard of living as one of the leading households. Finally, these sources of income within the village are limited, covering in all only about 24 households. Of these, the four main share-cropping families, one landless labourer, and the eight herdsmen can all be said to be engaged directly in agriculture; of the rest, the pedlars, the craftsmen and the specialists have land of their own, one or two of them plenty. Only the watchman is both landless and employed on non-agricultural work. Within the village, then the economy is entirely agricultural. |
| 2. | Services |
| The reverse of these occupations seen as sources of income is their function as services. For the sake of completeness I therefore propose to digress at this point in order to list briefly the main economic services to the villages. This list will involve a little repetition. Immediate agricultural needs are usually met either in the village or in the local group of villages. That is to say the villagers’ trade with each other for money, or barter grain, straw, seed for vegetables and so on Vine shoots are given away gratis. Since most households are self-sufficient in all these things, trade is slight. Animals also are often bought locally. If a man wants to by an ox, the news travels around the village and those with oxen to sell hear of it. Sooner or later he finds one to his liking. One man who wishes to buy a pair of oxen went all the way to Adana because he heard a rumour that they were cheaper there, but finding the rumour false he returned and bought one beast each from Kb village and Ac village. Markets are held in Kayseri, and once a week there is a market in Tomarza, the next nahiye centre out from Sakaltutan, which is cheaper than Kayseri for animals and also for agricultural products. Milling was, until recently, done in this town, but this year nine |
| men of Sl village have clubbed together and built a mill, powered by a diesel motor. Their success has been followed up in Sakaltutan where a mill was due to start operating very soon after I left. A miller takes, traditionally, a twentieth part of wheat and rye and one fifteenth of barley, as his fee for milling. The larger and more wealthy villages have shops; in Zk village for example, for two hundred households there were said to be no less than six. These shops sell the obvious things, salt, sugar, cigarettes, fruit, paraffin (kerosene), lamp spares, soap and so one, and an important item, plain white cloth for making shrouds. Sakaltutan had no shop, and when a death occurred someone had to rush to the nearest village with a shop to buy material for the shroud. Other needs in Sakaltutan were met by pedlars, who brought the same range of items, with the addition of earthenware cooking pots, cloth and agricultural instruments, such as wooden forks, shovels and rakes. Apart from these, certain craftsmen, for example, builders, and carpenters, serve the whole area in which they reside. Others travel round, mostly residing in the village as a guest, or setting up a combined workship and living room in an empty oda. Twice during my stay a tinsmith arrived. A larger proportion of drinking cups, pots and pans and water jugs are made of tinned copper, which needs retinning regularly. Both men stayed about two weeks, although owing to the bad harvest they said there was a good deal less work than usual. another common visitor is the shoeing smith, who shoes oxen. The animal is tied up to wheel of an ox cart, and two small metal plates are nailed to each hoof. Once a family of sieve makers arrived, and set up camp in tents on the village meadow. Sieves of different meshes are necessary for several domestic purposes. They stayed only long enough to effect such repairs and supply such orders as they got - two days in this case. Early in my stay, Zubeyr (SI 4), resident carpenter, had brought two youngmen from a distant village to saw up a large balk of timber into planks. These men brought with them a huge saw, such as a carpenter would not normally possess, especially for this purpose. This apparently was their speciality, and they claimed to serve a wide area in this way. |
| Village weaving in this area only comprises the making of rugs and saddle bags, and in some villages pile carpets. I did hear of threads spun in the village being sent to villages some distance to the east to be woven into cloth suitable for making trousers for the men, but almost all clothing is bought. Sakaltutan, being near the town, and provided now with a lorry service, so that coming and going are not difficult, relies for much of its services on the town. Bulk supplies of foods, including cheap vegetables such as cabbage and beet, paraffin, oil-lamps and oil portable stoves (“Primus” type), sheet iron stoves for the men’s odalar, cooper utensils, most tools, clothes, the wooden trunks given to each woman at marriage, and so on, are all bought in town. These purchases are entirely in the hands of the men. The village also goes to town for medical services, medical as opposed to charms and cures administered in the village. No Turkish doctor normally goes to a village unless he is well recompensed, unless the journey is an easy one, and unless his expenses are paid, which means, for all except suburban villages, never. If it is necessary for a woman to go to the doctor, she must be taken by her husband or a close male kinsman. No other professional services are needed. One of the villagers own a pair of dental forceps with which he extracts troublesome teath, and people cut each others hair, apparently for nothing. To sum up, serving one village only, there is in some villages a shop. Serving a number of villages one finds resident craftsmen like the carpenter in Sakaltutan or the smith in Ac village, and wandering craftsmen and pedlars who sell anything which the village is likely to buy and which sell anything which the village is likely to buy and which can be carried on a donkey. Besides these, the villager may go to town for supplementary food and clothes and some services, and must go to town for machines, goods, copper and for medical services. Economics dependence on the town is greater than this description might at first sight lead one to suppose, because almost all the supplies of the shops and the pedlars, and the tools and raw materials of the local craftsmen come |
| originally from the town. |
| 3. | External Occupations - Migrant Labour |
| As with internal occupations, I intend here to confine attention to economic activities outside the village mainly as sources of income. With only one exception, all money from outside the village is earned by temporary labour migration. The exception is trade in animals. Anyone with a little capital may go to the villages more remote from Kayseri and buy animals, usually yearlings, take them to Kayseri and sell them for a profit. But I heard of little of this in the village during my stay, except for the carpenter, Zubeyr, who went regularly on trading trips. He was always on the look-out for opportunities, and once boasted to me of buying a yearling from a man already in the lorry on his way to Kayseri, and selling it in the town for 6 T,L, profit. He would contrast his own initiative in this with the sloth of his fellow villagers. In Sl village, close to Sakaltutan, one of the wealthy villagers told me that in previous years, in company with other villagers, he had taken truck loads of cattle, bought by going round the local villages, by rail from Kayseri to Istanbul, where he sold them at a good profit. In one of the villages nearer Kayseri, I was told that formaly a number of the villages made money by trade in four and animals, but that now these families live by skilled migrant labour. As a source of income in the villages of the area, therefore, trade in animals is of no great importance. Migrant labour includes a whole range of activities, from two or three days reaping in Kayseri, to two or three years in a steady skilled job in Istanbul, the one common feature being the incoming the money from outside the village to supplement the household budget. Out of the 103 households in the village, 28 do not at present send anyone to two. These 28 include every grade of household from the well landed to the two poorest households in the village. Many of these, it is true, would send a member if they could do so easily, and only a few are in a position to do so |