| by a dam, in which the village water buffalo wallow in the long dry summer. To one side of the meadow stands the Turbeh, the tomb of Mehmet Miktat. It is reverenced by the villagers, and on occasion the people of neighbouring villages, especially the women, visit it on pilgrimage. Above the village is a large flat area called the “harman” - threshing floor - which grows a little pasture in the spring, but is dry and dusty by mid- summer. This area is also used for threshing, as its name suggests. The oldest village homes, which line the escarpment, have caves hollowed out beneath this, and on the village side it is often difficult to know where terra firma ends and the roofs of these houses begin. Between the harman and the road lies the graveyard, a mass of unkempt mounds marked by uncut headstones. Until recently, the village must have had very nearly a subsistence economy, living off the grain grown in its fields and the milk of its animals. The old men say that when they were boys there was much less money about in the villages. Now many of the villagers go to town for work and bring home substantial cash earnings, and at the same time the cultivation of vegetables, vines, and fruit trees has greatly expanded. For the most part, the agricultural tools in use are the traditional locally made wooden tools, the light wooden plough drawn by oxen, and wooden forks and rakes. Threshing is down by dragging flat boards, studded with flints on the underside, round and round over the crop until the grain is broken out of the heads, and the straw is chopped up fine. The grain is then separated by tossing it into the wind until the fine straw and the husks have all blown clear. The villagers talk about machinery and modern tools, but in the village so far only a type of scythe has been introduced, to replace the sickle for reaping the taller crops, and a few steel ploughs, which are not all in regular use. All transport within the villages is either by donkey back, or by the ox cart. The ox car has two solid wheels fixed to an axle which turns with them, rubbing against the frame of the cart. ‘The “kagni”, as this is called, can be fitted with a framework of poles and rope for carrying the crops in from the fields, or with boards and sacking to take the chopped straw. In some of the richer villages, one may find one or two four-wheeled horse carts, but these would not be suitable for use over the rough terrain of Sakaltutan, with its steep slopes and rocky tracks. Sakaltutan is served by the lorries which run daily from Kayseri to Tomarza, the next administrative centre out. These run “when they are full” - most days there are two to four into Kayseri fairly early, and a like number back in the |
| afternoon or evening. During the winter, the road is closed by snow for three months, and coming and going is confined to foot, unless the snow is firm enough to bear horses or donkeys. The end of threshing, on the other hand, sees a great increase in the coming and going of the lorries, carrying grain to the railway at Kayseri. Such a general description would apply roughly to any of the villages in this area. Sakaltutan is perhaps slightly poorer than most of the eleven villages which lie within one and a half hours’ walk distance. Three of these contained families with more education and closer urban ties than anyone is Sakaltutan. But both in appearance and in way of life, the differences are slight. |
| IV. | VILLAGE AND HOUSEHOLDS |
| 1. | Village and Quarter |
| The villages are strikingly compact and self contained. There are no solitary homesteads or straggling outskirts. This physical unity is paralleled by social unity. In spite of divisions into quarters and agnatic kin groups, loyalty to the village overrides internal dissension. The male population of the village is highly stable. Everyone, from childhood up, knows all the people of the village, knows the detailed affairs, even of his enemies, and sees almost daily most of the inhabitants. By kinship ties, by economic transactions, or by village affairs a man is brought from time to time in contact with even the most distant of his neighbours. The village is a corporate personality. It has joint rights in pastureland and a common interest in the whole area within its boundaries. It has representatives and public servants and owns a common fund, subscribed household by household. It owns the village Mosque, in which all the men of the village join in common worship. At religious festivals and weddings the normal boundaries of intimacy with kin and immediate neighbours are broken down. At the Seker Bayrami, at the end of Ramazan, every man in the village greats with a special festive greeting every other man - on this day, they say, there should be no “kus” - latent hostility. The obligation is not taken too seriously. “Today”, remarked Ali Osman (BK1), “they make peace, tomorrow they get their guns out again”. Every man is proud of his village. Not only are its men more truthful, more hospitable, less quarrelsome, and its women more honourable and more healthy, but the fields are better, the air - or perhaps one should translate |
| “weather” - is better, the water is better. Within the village they tell each other all this in all seriousness; with men from other villages there is bantering rivalry on the same themes, and they are always ready to insult, on any grounds convenient to hand, the morals and amenities of neighbouring villages. The village is quite ready to fight for itself in spite of the law and order established by the Republic, and the punishment which follows taking the law into one’s own hands. Two years ago there was a boundary dispute between Ck village and Sakaltutan. Men of Ck village ploughed land claimed as pasture by Sakaltutan, and the men of Sakaltutan went out in a body and threw rocks on to it. This not unnaturally led to fighting, in which all the village is said to have joined. Abdurrahman, (elder son of T1), was fined during my stay for a leading part in this incident. The villagers recognise within the village a division into quarters. But the quarter is not a clearly defined unit, and has no specific common rights or interest to defend. In Sakaltutan the road (see map 3) divides off about thirty houses of the Lower Quarter from the rest by a clear boundary, but the Upper Quarter has no clear boundary, and in fact the usage of the term varies with context. In some contexts, a third quarter would be recognised, the Mosque Quarter, in between the other two, but I never heard anyone claim to belong to such a unit in the way people claimed to be members of the Lower and Upper Quarters. The houses in the centre of the village are spoken of as Upper or Lower according to the point of view of the speaker, each term covering a wider area in the usage of the opposite came than it does in their own. Quite often the Lower Quarter includes all the village up to the Mosque, and such a boundary coincides roughly with the social line. In the summer, very roughly, the men from near the Mosque and below it congregate mainly by the roadway, the men from the centre in the square by the Mosque, and the men of the Upper Quarter in a small open space a little farther up. Both Quarters spoke slightingly of each other. There was a good deal of joking rivalry, comparison of water supplies, and foolery about it, but underneath this there was a genuine hostility which had from time to time exploded into fighting. Only the year before my arrival a quarrel about female inheritance of land had led to shooting between the Quarters, but apparently no casualties. Where personal ties of kinship or personal friendship linked people, those individuals might be excepted from the general condemnation of the opposite area. But personal hostilities which followed the general line of group hostility were reinforced and kept alive by absence of day to day social intercourse. |
| This year, for the first time, the government insisted on a properly conducted election for muhtar. After much uncertainty, two candidates were put up, Duran (DS3) from the Upper Quarter and Selahaddin (BA5) from the Lower. Although the ballot was secret, people made little secret of their support, and it was quite clearly a matter of Quarters, though the Upper Candidate who won the election by a short head was considered a fair choice even by his opponents, and there were no serious feelings involved. |
| 2. | Households |
| Below the village, the next definite and obvious social unit is the household. Households belong to agnatic groups, which I shall discuss under kinship, but these groups are not clearly defined. The casual visitor would see, not households, but dwelling blocks containing from one to four or five households. Such dwelling blocks usually contain the households of an agnatic group. The village household contains a highly stable patrilocal family. There is no word in the villages for family as distinct from the house in which it lives. The town Turkish for this, “aile”, does not mean family in the villages, but is commonly used in the sense of wife. The word for house, “ev”, is used for home or family. In this sense ev has a clear meaning; it is defined as a social unit which cooks in common, and separately from any other group. The village always puts its negatively - people have separate “evler” if they cook and eat apart from others. In a few cases, brothers share land or have never divided their father’s land, and yet have separate evler, but in these cases the produce will be divided and apportioned. Normally, a separate household is economically entirely independent. Within the ev, everything is held in common. “Ev” is used also in many other shade of meaning, according to context. Two main meanings are directly relevant here. In the first place, ev means, like the English “house”, any building in which people are living. This leads to a paradox, of which the villagers are fully aware, and which illustrates the criterion of common resources. Zubeyr (SI4), who had a large household - seventeen people in all - with two married sons occupying houses not adjacent to the main ev, because there was no room for expansion there, said to me “I have three ev, but we are all one ev”. Within the household, “ev” distinguished the family living room, the special centre of feminine activity, from the oda, and from the stables and the “samanlik”, the straw store. The full household should contain the male head of the family, his wife or |
| wives, his sons and their wives and children, and his unmarried daughters. The father’s death is normally the signal of separation of the brothers, though sometimes this may be postponed for months or even years. The length of this interval depends upon many factors - personal relationships, whether the brothers are full or half, the economic situation, relationships among the womenfolk. The house expands physically with its population; each new incoming bride should be, and almost always is, given a room of her own in which to sleep with her husband and to keep her personal possessions. Rarely, this room may be a separate building at a distance from, but still socially part of the paternal “ev”. On the death of the father, the brothers may divide the old house, or may build beside it a new house; or one or more of them may move out, either to a vacant house belonging to him or his group by a female link, or to a new one specially built on the outskirts of the village. This process is reflected in the village layout. Next door neighbours are often brothers or agnate cousins, often also cognate or affines, since both kinship and neighbourhood are strong inducements to marriage. But while some agnate groups are to be found very near each other, quite often one or two members of the group may be living at the other side of the village. Table I gives the distribution of households according to a classification based on their kinship relation to the head of the household. It may seem surprising that, in a society where children are expected to remain with their fathers until their Figure 1 - Distribution of village population by households: - (INSERT DIAGRAM) Table 1 - Distribution of families according to type:- One or Two Male Generations:- Elementary families (ie. married couple and their children, if any) |
| 43 |
| Elementary families with father’s mother still living in “ev” | 6 |
| Elementary families with children of former wives | 12 |
| Elementary families with other children (ie. nephews, younger siblings) |
| 6 |