| regret the old days, when most village households used to keep a horse, and games on horseback were played at weddings against other villages. When I arrived in the village there were three horses in all. If, as is said, and seems consistent with the present age distribution of the village, there were only sixty households in the place of the present hundred a generation ago,it may well be that in many ways the villagers were better off. What is important, however, is not the rise or fall in the standard of living, but the change in the source of livelihood. |
| XV.2 | p. 247 |
| The land ceases to be so important when there are other ways of earning a living. Children have now a way of becoming economically independent of their fathers. Poor men can, by becoming ustalar, raise themselves both in wealth and in status. Families are left without heads for long periods. The cultural contact at least from the village end, with towns, especially with Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir, where European ways have been most conspicuously adopted, is greatly increased. So far these changes are in most cases barely beginning, and it is rash to forecast how they will work out. 3. Political Changes It is not only the purely technical advances of the West which gives it the advantage over other cultures of the world, it is also the advances in administration. Turkey, aiming as she does at becoming a modern state on western line, has been learning the art of administration. As I have already said, this has meant a great increase in the official interference in village life. In part this aims at extending the central power, imposing law and order, checking tax abuses and evasions, and making some effort to enforce the reforming legislation of the Grand National Assembly. At the same time, it has aimed in some respects directly at assisting the villagers, extending loans, stabilising prices, building roads. The process will clearly continue, with the provision of social services, the improving of statistical information, the carrying out of cadastral surveys, the extension of schooling, the arrival, in time, of agricultural demonstrators. I have already analysed one consequence of this tightening of control, which has lead to a fall in the prestige attaching to the office of muhtar, and hence and absence of political leadership in the villages. It is quite possible that higher standards of education may lead to the muhtar’s office regaining some of its importance, as men better equipped to take advantage of the power to be gained from acting as the government representative are produced by the new school system. For the moment, there are no signs of such |
| XV.3 | p. 248 |
| a development. Even if it does take place it will not mean a reversion towards the old state of affairs of rule by the elders of the more powerful kabileler, but rather an entrenching of the power of the younger and more modern minded, with more emphasis on personal qualifications than on status in the village, or kinship affiliations. The villagers today are conscious of their membership of the Turkish nation. I have mentioned confusion between the legal and cultural criterion of the word Turk, and the religious criterion. Under the Ottoman Empire, the villagers thought not in terms of a nation, with a national territory, but of themselves as a group distinct from their neighbours on grounds of language or religion or, or both1 . To what extent the villagers of those days identified themselves with the rulers of the Empire as against the subject peoples, I cannot say. According to the authorities, Turkish nationalism was the last to develop, and did so mainly under the stimulus of the 1918 defeat, and the Allies attempts at dismemberment in the years immediately following. Whatever its origin, the present villagers are decidedly nationalist; proud of Turkey’s military prowess, interested in her mechanical achievements, touchy about unfavourable comparison with European countries. No European invention seems to spread more readily than nationalism, and if Turkey was a late starter, she has proved no exception in the long run. Undoubtedly, consciousness of being part of the whole nation is greatly strengthened by the compulsory term of military service which all young men seem vastly to enjoy, and by migrant labour which wanders all over the country. The introduction of a two party system of elected government with a direct and full franchise, would seem to be a fundamental change. But although the villagers seemed pleased with the idea of having some say in the choice of government, it does not have any direct impact on the village. The important political relationship is that with the local administrative |
| XV.3 | p. 249 |
| authorities, and this does not change because there has been a general election. The democratic constitution was not, after all, demanded by the villagers. They did not agitate for reform, the whole business was imposed on them from above, and they treated it much like any other government order, as something to be accepted without question. To speak of the development of a 1cf. e.g. Arnold Toynbee “Western Question in Greece and Turkey”. |
| sense of responsibility, or of a fundamental change in attitude to government, seems to me, to say the least, premature. Similarly, changes in political outlook have taken place in the village view of the international politics. They are aware, at least the more knowledgeable ones are aware, of the existence of other countries, they know that America and Britain have given Turkey assistance and are at the moment their friends, and they have heard of U.N.O. Undoubtedly the village horizon has expanded vastly in the past generation. Not only are they now, through the operation of economic aid, international price agreements and so on, directly effected by international events, they are conscious of the connection. Knowledge of western countries has one unfortunate effect. Hand in hand with nationalist pride and aspiration, awareness of the technical achievements of the west breeds a feeling of inferiority. The villagers apologise for their backewardneass, referring constantly to their poverty, and the more educated they are, the more they apologise. It may be that this sense of inferiority may become a definite sense of dissatisfaction and lead to a greater readiness for at least technical changes. But this is speculation. All these political changes, except perhaps those within the village, are obvious to casual observation. The democratic institutions the widening horizon, the nationalism, do not seem to have any obvious or direct impact on the every day life or on the social order of the village, on which an anthropologist might comment. But I think the absence of any such impact is worth recording, especially since so much effort is made in political circles to achieve these results, which are, of course, politically speaking, an end in themselves. |
| XV. | p. 250 |
| 4. Family and Kinship Without any detailed data with which to compare my own findings, it is hard to say anything which is not guess work about how the kinship and the family organisation has changed and is now changing. Three institutions impressed me as being basic to village social life, the kabile, the household, and the division between the sexes. It seems probable that all three are being modified to a limited extent by the economic and political changes which I have listed. The kabile, in spite of its lack of formal or ritual leadership or membership, and its vague boundaries, seems originally to have had as its main political function the protection of its members from robbers and violence. Even at |
| present, this function is still important. The other characteristic behaviours towards one another of members of the same kabile - personal intimacy and economic assistance - belong to the relationship as a kin tie, and are also found between matrilateral and affinal kin. But with the increasing efficiency of the state, this political function is becoming less and less important. Already the weak talk of appeal to the state to protect their rights. The widow Fatma (AK 3), powerless within the village against her husband’s father’s brothers (AK 1), is actually taking legal proceedings against him to recover her land. The village do not explicitly recognise this weakening of the kabile, yet it must have already moved a long way if, as seems a reasonable guess, there was originally an organ of feud, or of blood compensation for homicide. The patrilocal village household, on the other hand, shows little sign of weakening. There are two possible factors which might cause such a weakening. Where a son is earning or is able to earn his own keep independently of his father’s land, the hold of father over son is weakened. The son is not only free to leave his father without suffering acute poverty as the sons of purely farming families do, but he may resent his father taking what are clearly all his earnings, and no one elses, and prefer to establish his independence. At the same time, the |
| XV. 4 | p. 251 |
| migrant head of a household is likely to be away from his home and children for nine months out of every year, and to spend a good deal of his earnings on himself in the cities. again, the effects that this absence has on family life is a matter for speculation. It removes the main source of discipline from his sons until they are old enough to accompany him, and then they will attain economic independence. It is bound to leave more responsibility in the hands of the wife, and while it calls for more ability on her part to cope with money, with buying and selling and with official matters, it is likely to reduce even further the intimacy between husband and wife. Change in the existing pattern if inter-sex relationships may have already occurred. The villagers say that the women are freer than they used to be. Certainly some of the younger women, the bolder ones, go about with their mouths uncovered, and talk publicly to groups of men. An American nurse who visited us with bare head and arms was not approved of, but the women who visit Kayseri occasionally discuss the phenomenon of Turkish women similarly clad whom they see in the streets there. The spread of schools, and education with boys up to a similar standard, may have some effect on the status of women in the community, may give them more common ground with male topics of interest, and enable them to assert themselves with more confidence, Any rise in the position of women relative to the men will come |
| entirely from the women’s own efforts. There are unlikely to be male sympathisers with the cause of women. Form the point of view of the field worker it is changes of this kind which would be the most significant and interesting. So far they appear to be slight. There is no sign of a breakdown in the traditional system of marriage and all that goes with it/ My guess is that the kinship and family structure will survive, with no more than minor modifications, so long as the villages remain as residentially stable as they are at present. |
| XV. | p. 252 |
| 5. Cultural Contact I have dealt only superficially in this these with the culture of the village, and have endeavoured to make my approach rather from the point of view of social organisation. Consistent with this, I wish to mention as briefly as possible under this heading, the cultural changed which are visible in the village. The main bringers of cultural innovation are the migrant labourers, and it is for this reason that I insert this section here, although it means a slight digression. In fact all the men go to Kayseri on business from time to time, and are able to see for themselves the new buildings, the new women in short western type dresses, the airport and the factory. But it is the men who go to Ankara and Istanbul for long periods, who bring back knowledge f western ideas, news of international affairs, suede shoes and wrist watches. Some of them go to American films, some of them even learn to dance in western fashion. The importance of these contacts is easily over-estimated. The trappings of wrist watches and Primus stoves are not more than straws in the wind. so far they are not even accepted as symbols of social statu. moreover, it seems to be the case that socially the villagers in the towns like Ankara form a group on their own, and largely ignore and are ignored by the more sophisticated permanent inhabitants. Hence the trappings may in some cases represent the extent of the contact. Those who find the town ways attractive and establish personal contact with the townspeople end up by marrying in town and settling there, which means the severing of all but remote ties with their native villages. The attempt to assess the working of these contacts on village life leads one into psychological guesses, which may be or may not be sound, but which seem very hard to verify of disprove. The contemporary villagers have |