| the village and ploughs, Mehmet (DS 2), goes to Ankara for the summer months to sell vegetables. The third example is the household of four brothers, (FB 4). One of the three brothers declares he will always farm, the eldest - - Mustafa - -who has just returned from military service, is vague, the other tow are plasterers. The youngest has been a year in Istanbul without sending letters or money, but they are all confident that he will return to them and bring money. They firmly express their intention of staying together in one household. Similarly in Al village, it is said to be common for brothers to share a house, leaving one at home to farm while the rest to away as ustalar, and I even found an example of this arrangement in Kz village which has practically no migrant labour. In four cases in Sakaltutan, households have divided, but still work the land in common. In one of these, the question of division is complicated by seven daughters surviving to only on e son (BK 3), and delayed because he is at present doing military service. Another group of three brothers (KU 1, 2 and 3) have not divided the land, but though they all go away to do unskilled work from time to time, they do not co-operate systematically. Zubeyr (SI 4) still holds his land in common with a rather dim brother (SI 5), who with this equally dim but lusty son does most of the agricultural work, while Zubeyr works at his trade, or makes trading trips into the remoter villages. I doubt whether the advantage is in this case reciprocal. Selahaddin and Sefer (BA 4 and 5) offer a good example of co-operation. Their grandfathers were brothers, and one of them has married the other’s sister. Both are plasterers, and they take it in turn to go to town, leaving that other to plough the land which they share, and to look after the other’s wife and children. Both Huseyn (BA 3) and Sayit (VT 2) have left their elder |
| XIII.1 | 205 |
| brothers, with the land undivided, but take a share of the crop. In both cases division would leave so little land that it would provide neither house with a living. Huseyn is a herdsman and unskilled labourer, Sayit works in the factory in Kayseri. Galip and Haci Ahmet (FB 2 and 3) have divided their land, but Galip works it all and gives an exact share of the crops to his brother, who is a porter in Kayseri. The difference between theses separate households and those where brothers remain together is considerable. The senior brother in a joint household exercises authority over the household, thought obviously he does not enjoy the control of a father over sons, since the farmer brother and the earning brother are mutually dependent, bot having resources which the other needs, and serious disagreement leads simply to the delayed separation taking place. In |
| the only tow examples, among those quoted, of a stable joint household of this type - Zubeyr’s (SI 4) and Mehmet’s (DS 2) households - the elder brother is the stronger personality, and has definite control. On the other hand, where separation of the households takes place, but some degree of economic co- operation is continued, each household is autonomous, under the control of a single father, and husband. Under these conditions, it is rather a case of co- operation between equals. The new habit of skilled migrant labour seems to effect the separation of households in two opposite ways. First, by giving the young and adequate source of income outside the control of their father, it frees them from economic dependence on him and his land. The acute hardship which results from a young man leaving his father and remaining in the village is exemplified by Mehmet (VA 11), who, instead of being a member of a household with land and man power to spare for going to town, has become the head of a small landless household in which he is sole breadwinner. But when the young men earn good money in town, as the three sons, (VA 7, 8 and 9), of Mustafa (VA 5), or Mahmut (son of AG 1), they are not liable to this fear. One father in Ac village told me that all six of his sons worked in the Kayseri cotton mill, and earned a living wage. Each had |
| XIII.1 | 206 |
| separated from him, quite amicably, shortly after marriage. The last had just married. “In about six months he will separate too”, he said. “What about your old age?”. “They all give me money”, he replied. I find this case surprising, if the information is even approximately correct. I am sure that separation on this scale would not happen in a family which was wholly, or largely, agricultural in occupation. On the other hand, where brothers have bought land to keep one man fully occupied, but not enough to divide among, say, two or three households, there is an obvious economic motive to remain one h, so that, as I have descried above, one brother can farm, and the others can earn cash in the town, at least until they each have sons old enough to earn or plough for them. Such an arrangement depends on the economic resources being neither very small, nor adequate for division, on the resulting joint household not being too large, and on cordial personal relations not only between the brothers, but also between their wives. |
| 2. | Debt |
| No question is more difficult to investigate than that of debt. Not only is it |
| impolite to enquire about such private matters, but also one can usually be confident that the answer received, if one is sufficiently fortunate to receive an answer, has been given for complex motives and has little to do with the true state of affairs. The difficulty of estimating indebtedness was increased by the failure of the harvest in 1949, which increased poverty and made conditions abnormal. |
| Three main types of debt may be distinguished. Firstly, loans from the |
| government controlled Agricultural Bank; secondly, illegal commercial loans at extortionate interest, and lastly personal loans between neighbours and kinsfolk. |
| The Agricultural Bank(1) extends several types of credit to peasants, but |
| the only one that need concern us here is by far |
| XIII.2 | 207 |
| the commonest - loans to meet current expenses. These are loans, in theory up to 800 T.L., given for one year from harvest loans, charging six percent per annum, and secured jointly. Any group of three or more from the same village can raise such a loan on security of land, provided they have the headman’s signature, and that of at least two members of the Council of Elders, to certify their statements about their property. No man who has a loan unpaid can raise another, regardless of the size of the loan outstanding, in fact, he cannot raise another loan unless all members of the debtor group have paid their debts. As in practice the group normally consists of all the debtors in one village there is a strong social pressure on defaulters to pay up. There is a way round this difficulty, by which the bettor off can assist those unable to met their debts. Once the old debt is settled they can raise a new loan, so they only need credit from some other source for a short period. The demand for guarantee by the headman puts a good deal of power in his hands. He, like the rest of the village, regards the bank as fair game,, and e is restricted by his fellow villages, and the regulations governing repayment, rather than by any sense of responsibility or regard for truth. The bank has special arrangements for the failure of crops; the situation is reported to Ankara, who then give permission for a general moratorium on all bank debts for one extra year. Of course, this means that bank credit is not available to the villages when he needs it most, since if the village as a whole cannot pay off its debts, no one in it can raise new loans. Just before the harvest this regulation was relaxed, and loans were extended to those in the village who had no personal debts outstanding. One easy way of evading this limitation is to use the name of another member of the household. This loophole in the regulations is due to their being based on the town concept of every adult individual as an independent economic unit, whereas in the system for which they are framed |
| this unit is the household, not the individual. I was unable to see the records of Bank loans to Sakaltutan; my own information is confined to a few families where I was trusted with such secrets. Many |
| XIII.2 | 208 |
| households had debts which ranged from 50 T.L. to 250 T.L. (£5 -£31). The 1950 crops were again below average, the village was visited by a bank official to inspect the deficiency, and a further year’s moratorium was confidently expected. |
| Interest on private loans is legally limited to 12%, but there is no means |
| of enforcing the law. I was told of money lenders, both in local villages and in the more suburban villages, and know of two specific cases where the interest was 6% and 8% per month respectively. One man had thus, for 100 T.L. which he had borrowed in 1949, to pay back at the following harvest nearly 200 T.L. the extent of usury of this type would be very difficult to estimate, but only under serious duress would a villager have recourse to so uncommon a source of credit, and very few definite examples came to my notice. |
| By contras, a network of personal debt to neighbours and kinsmen |
| stretches from house to house and from village to village. Here again details were not easy to discover nor reliable when unearthed. Such debts don not normally carry and interest at all. All real activities in the village were liable to be run on credit, since to refuse a credit for some small need to a fellow villager would be to risk causing deep offence. The shop which was opened during the winter by a son-in-law of BA ran on credit, ant he shopkeeper returned at regular intervals during the summer in hopes of collecting some of his debts before the harvest. He had little success. The carpenters (SI) were making threshing boards on credit for people in neighbouring villages as well as in Sakaltutan and the brothers Mehmet and Ibrahim (SI 2 and 3) claimed to have 2,000 T.L. owing to them. Again Hasan, after his divorce, found a wife in another village, but needed 200 T.L. for the bride price quickly, lest another take her. So he raised a number of small loans from neighbours in the village. More than once men came to me for small loans, saying that a creditor who need money to meet his own creditors was pressing for payment. If the year is normal, these debts are paid off after the harvest. |
| Totals of indebtedness I know only exactly in three cases. |
| XIII.2 | 209 |
| Of these three households, two had debts totalling 280 and 250 T.L. respectively. One of them was a poor man, and again this year his harvest yielded insufficient grain for food and seed for the year’s needs, so that, far |
| from paying back, he needed to raise more credit. The third was a man with over 100 donum. He owed 500 T.L. for various purposes, and besides this, 1,600 T.L. to his father’s brother’s daughter, who had married to a village five hours away, nearer Kayseri, for land which he bought from her. I asked him why, if he was so in debt, he had betrothed his third won, still quite a young lad, thus involving himself in further expenditure that was not immediately necessary. ¸¸Relatives“, he said, ¸¸can wait“. Two other men said they owed about 1,000 T.L. , one in answer to a direct question by me, the other spontaneously and in public. This figure (£250) was obviously meant to sound impressively high, in fact, a boast. I also know that several poorer families had only insignificant debts. |
| Indebtedness is correlated not with poverty but with wealth. Poor |
| households are not in debt because they have no security on which to raise money; no one will lend to a poor man. If a poor man, for example, wants a wife, he does not borrow 100 T.L. or less. If he needs money he must go away to the town and earn it. When the muhtar boasted of his 1,000 T.L. debt, he was in fact advertising his wealth, because, without extensive lands and animals, he could neither obtain nor face such a loan. In fact, one might say that one of the advantages of wealth in land an animals is that it gives security for loans, thus providing a margin against scarcity of special needs. Haci Ahmet was, at the end of my stay, in association with capital from outside the village, building a mill to be run by a diesel engine, and for this purpose he had mortgaged his own property. He hold me he had over 1,5000 T.L. of debt, though I have my doubts about the calculations by which he reached this figure. Any peasant with a fair amount of land can make use of credit; the more animals a man can afford to keep, even if only to fatten them a little and |
| XIII.2 | 210 |
| sell later at a better price, the better. The longer once can postpone selling a lamb to pay a debt, the fatter the lamb and the higher the selling price. Hence debt is not particularly disgraceful, nor, unless there is mounting interest, or compulsion from the Agricultural Bank, is a man in any hurry to pay up. Only Zubeyr (SI 4), the resident carpenter, who had often to wait for his clients to pay for quite long periods, expressed the idea that debt was disgraceful and claimed that he himself always paid promptly. |
| In peasant societies all over the world, endemic indebtedness has lead to |
| expropriation of the peasant owner, who becomes the tenant of the money lender, and is , thereafter, at his mercy, and is allowed to keep only as much as will keep him alive to work the land. In the plateau villages of Anatolia, the conditions of peasant ownership which I found in Sakaltutan are typical; absentee landlords are rare and found only close to the towns, often so close |