| by age, which determines the use of the term. Mustafa would not, however, in his dealings with Ali Osman, use the reciprocal of emme, yigen, (nephew), but emmem oglu, son of my father’s brother, thus putting himself politely on a level with Ali Osman. The terms emme and emmem oglu were used reciprocally between Musa (IB 1) and Osman (AG 1), who could not trace any specific agnatic connection, but affirmed that such existed. On other occasions, the terms were used between neighbours - I heard men with no claims to agnatic ties address each other as emmem oglu, although this is not the usual mode of address, out of intimate politeness. Children call any man who is a frequent visitor to the house emme in much the same way that adult friends in an English family are uncles to the children. Equally, adult men may call senior neighbours emme. VA 1 was often known, not only by his own kabile, as Hasan Emme. The extension of these terms beyond their strict meaning is explicitly recognised as such. If the context requires it, or in response to a direct question, the villagers readily distinguish “oz”, “true”, kinsmen from those who are so called only by extension. Beyond the range of the use of emme, more distant agnatic connections are acknowledged by the term, which is pronounced “emmeti”, (not Istanbul Turkish) - used only for description, not for address. Though logically this term might apply within the village, it is in fact used only of distant agnates in other villages. The personal relations of patrilateral kin cannot be given a general description except in terms of the obvious - the close intimacy of people who have life long relationships, free run of each other’s houses and are close, usually next- door, neighbours. I was asking in Ck village whether the households of a certain kabile were separate, whether they cooked and ate together. “It doesn’t matter where we eat”, they replied, “within our kabile we eat in whichever house we happen to be. There are no quarrels in our kabile”. Even if this boast was, in fact, an exaggeration it indicates the ideal of close personal intimacy within the kabile. I have not, in this section, mentioned the father’s sister, “amme”, because she marries out, and does not belong within the group, unless she marry within the kabile. After marriage, relations with her belong rather with those with matrilateral and affinal kin. |
| 3. | Other Kinship Ties within the Village |
| All kinship other than these patrilateral ties involves a link through a woman’s |
| marriage. Even the father’s sister, since she marries out on reaching adolescence, and is never of one’s own household, belongs in effect, if not literally, with matrilateral and affinal rather than with patrilateral kinship. From the point of view of relationships between households, and their heads, all this non-agnatic kinship, since they all stem from marriage, is difficult to disentangle. If two households are linked by marriage, then within the sum of the relationships between them will be found most or all of the two-person kinship ties, apart from the agnatic ones. Kinship in these villages is not characterised by any set of formal rules of behaviour. Even within the kabile, where the obligations are most formal, and the physical and social distances most nearly uniform, it is spontaneous intimacy rather than rules of conduct which constitutes the basis of the group. Since marriage is the source of all other relationships, and since marriage may be with any woman from a father’s brother’s daughter, from next door, to a complete stranger from a village as much as five hours away, the quality of the relationship and its effect on the social structure varies greatly. A natural and spontaneous community of interest springs from a marriage alliance, and the relationship is given, so to speak, impetus by joint participation in the ceremonies connected with betrothal and marriage; but the resulting relationship can only be described in terms of degrees of mutual affection and trust. The two families may visit back and forth constantly, they may help each other economically and act as go-betweens for each other’s marriage affairs, or they may do so scarcely at all. The degree of intimacy depends not only on personal likes and dislikes, but to a large extent on the physical distance between the two households and their relative positions in the social structure. The greatest difference is between households in the same village and households in different villages. Even within the village, there are wide differences. If a man marries from his own kabile, the new affinal ties simply strengthen the existing blood ties, to which at least at the beginning of the marriage they are subsidiary. He may equally marry from an unrelated family, or one already linked by marriage with his own. His wife may belong to a hostile kabile at the far end of the village, or she may be a close neighbour’s daughter. In each case the quality of relationship between the households and therefore between the various individuals composing the households will be different. Within the village, a child has free run of its mother’s father’s home. Grandparents, as in most societies, are usually greatly interested in and indulgent towards their daughter’s children. An old man of Kz village boasted that he daughter’s small son, who are also his brother’s son’s son, and lived next door, preferred his mother’s household to his own. |
| The word for mother’s brother, “dayi”, may be used with the same looseness and disregard for generation as emme. The terms for maternal cousins are also analogous, “dayim oglu” and “dayim kizi” being the commonest, but a word “dayisa” (Istanbul Turkish dayizade) also being in use. The most conspicuous dayi in the village was Haci Ahmet (SA 2). Four wives had failed to produce him any children of his own, and he adopted his orphaned sister’s son, bringing him up in his own household after he second marriage. He and his wife were prostrate with grief when this young man died suddenly of heart disease last May (1950). He left in the house, besides two daughters, a two year old son, whom the old man will probably seek to bring up once again as his own son. Haci Ahmet, as can be seen from the genealogical table on page 167, has still five other sister’s sons in Sakaltutan, two of them (0) half brothers of the dead Ali and the three brothers BA 1, 2 and 3. The children of the sister of these last three, who is married to Osman (AG 1), also call him their “dayi”, and frequent his oda. During the proceedings for getting Mehmet (BA 2) a new wife, Haci Ahmet was consulted at every step, and when at last the search was successful, the money, which I had provided, was handed over to him to take to the girl’s village for payment. Recently, he went to Izmir to fetch home Mustafa (0), who had been away from the village for about four years, and was not expected by his neighbours to return. He is a gentle old man, respected in the village, but he is criticised for leaving his nephews Mehmet and Huseyn (BA 2 & 3) in poverty, in spite of their claim through their mother to a share of his property. Bilal (VT 1) had one married sister in the village. He took a leading part in arranging the marriage of the orphan son of her first marriage, together with the young man’s father’s brothers (KU 1, 2 & 3). Bilal’s sister’s second marriage to a patrilateral kinsman (VA 5) produced a new family, the eldest of which is a lad of about fifteen years. Bilal built himself a small oda last June, and whitewashed the walls on the inside. This nephew of his, without his consent, executed some murals on the inviting white surface, in a cheap blue wash often used in the village for the purpose, not of religious subjects, but of aircraft and motor cars. Bilal was angry saying it was vulgar, but he took no steps to punish the boy. Neither an unrelated boy, nor a son, nor a paternal nephew would have dared to do such a thing, nor got away with it if he had. One last instance - a married girl from Ck village died in Sakaltutan on her way to hospital in Kayseri. The first of her kinsmen to reach Sakaltutan was her father, in whose house she had been lying sick, but not long after her dayi arrived, and the two old men wept and embraced each other, sharing a common grief. Throughout the funeral ceremonies the dayi was second in importance only to the father. |
| In spite of these examples, on the whole I was surprised how little interest many men seemed to take in their sisters’ children. A dayi, except in exceptional circumstances such as adoption, in no way resembles a father, as he is said to do in some societies. Apart from the special obligations of kabile membership in the case of an emme, personal relations with the two kinds of uncles do not seem to differ markedly from each other, at least in the cases I was able to observe. Perhaps it is significant in this respect that in addressing elderly strangers, emme and dayi are interchangeable. I have heard them both used by the same person to a deaf old man in subsequent sentences. What a widow with children remarries, her two sets of children are half siblings, but not necessarily of the same kabile, or household. Divorce rarely leads to this situation, because a man seldom divorces a woman who has borne him children. These half siblings call each other brother and sister without qualification, a practice which I found confusing at the beginning of my work. In reply to questions, they would explain in full “our fathers are different”, or, “on our mother’s side only”. the weight of the word “kardes” is strong, and predisposes its users to personal intimacy. But clearly, since the relationship depends on a marriage, the same wide variations as in other matrilateral relationships are to be expected. The physical and structural distance between the households of the two fathers will largely determine the degree of intimacy between the half brothers and sisters. Where a widow marries her dead husband’s brother, the children will be almost equivalent to full siblings; where a widow, as often happens, marries into another village, the connection may be tenuous, more so than the normal affinal or matrilateral kinship. In such cases as I heard of, a maternal half brother brought up in his step father’s house would as soon as possible marry and set up house on his own, but he might retain personal intimacy with his mother’s household. Thus Ali Osman (BK 1) and Nail (KA 4), whose common mother lived with Ali Osman, were often together, and were proud of their brotherhood. The warmth of their tie is probably the greater because their mother is still alive. Affinal kinsfolk are distinguished by a number of terms, on which, for the sake of completeness and reference, I will comment here. “gelin” (literally ‘the one who comes’). Strictly, this is a married woman’s relation to her mother and father-in-law. Although it is also the word for bride and conjures up a picture of a newly wed, it is used by old people to their sons’ wives, even when these themselves have become grandmothers. In practice, not only the parents of the husband but all the household speak of the girl as “our gelin”. Since all women equal to or junior to the speaker are |
| addressed simply as “kiz” - girl - regardless of age, gelin is not used as a term of address. “guvah” (Istanbul Turkish “guvey”) or “damat”, correspondingly mean both bridegroom and son-in-law, but are used only in correct contexts. “Kayin”, means spouse’s brother, and in general any male kinsman. It has several more precise derivatives, “kayinbirader”, spouse’s brother, “kayina ta”, spouse’s father. “Kayinanne” is the word for mother-in-law. The term kayin may be used to refer widely to the kinsfolk of a man’s wife, even in an appropriate context to her whole village, but the other terms are not normally used in extended meanings. A visitor once told me that Haci Ahmet (SA 2) was his kayinat a, although he was, in fact, his wife’s mother’s brother, but in this case Haci Ahmet was her most important surviving kinsman in Sakaltutan. “gorumce” (literally from the root of “seeing”, and originally connected with the man’s first view of his bride’s face), husband’s sister. “baldiz” (perhaps a term of endearment related to “bal” honey), wife’s sister. It is interesting to notice that the set of terms based on kayin does not include the terms spouse’s sisters. All these terms were in constant use in the villages in which I worked. “yenge”, in Istanbul Turkish, brother’s wife. This term was understood in the villages, but usually a brother’s wife would be “our gelin”, or else the full descriptive phrase would be used. I did, however, hear it used in the sense which it also bears in Istanbul Turkish, of “wife of my uncle”, either emme or dayi. “eniste”, sister’s husband, was in constant use, not only in its precise use, but for the husband of any woman with whom in a given context a person might identify him or herself. Thus, during the winter, a man of a village about three hours to the south east opened a shop in Sakaltutan, living with his wife’s brothers (BA). One small boy, a neighbour, but not a member of the BA kabile, speaking of him, said to me, “Sefali is our eniste”. “bacanak”, wife’s sister’s husband, is in common use both in address and reference. “elti”, husband’s brother’s wife, is used for reference only, “kiz”, or the name, being used for address. |