| Women are lenient and protective towards children, especially young children, and men are the source of authority and punishment. A boy does not lightly question the command of his father. As the son reaches maturity, it is his father’s duty to find him a wife, and to pay the expenses of his wedding. Often, sons themselves help to earn the money for the wedding by going away to work, - but though they may, in practice, express a desire for or a revulsion against some particular girl, the main duty of choosing the bride falls upon the father. Open friction between father and son seldom occurs until after the son’s marriage. An old man is respected on account of his age. A middle-aged son, even when running the day to day business of the household, generally consults his father and defers to him. Thus, the muhtar, who was about thirty-five, behaved as though he was in charge of the household, but in fact his father, although an old man of about seventy, exercised a good deal of control. Melik whose eldest son was thirty years old, was undisputed head of his household of five sons. The most serious quarrel between father and son that happened to my knowledge, during my stay, was economic in origin. Musa (IB 1) wanted his son to go away to learn a plasterer’s trade and earn money, but Saptri, the son, did not want to go. This matter came up several times in the Muhtar’s oda which they frequented, but it did not become serious until Sapri helped himself to some money from his father’s money box. His father accused him, and in the course of the quarrel Sapri drew a revolver upon his father. Such behaviour is not pure bluff. During the winter, for example, a man from Sn village, with a bullet in his stomach, received accidentally, it was said, during a quarrel with his father, was carried through Sakaltutan on his way to hospital in Kayseri, where he died. Musa and his son were separated without tragedy by the intervention of Musa’s brother. Sapri complained that he did all the farm work, yet his father controlled all the income from it. I found Mustafa, the Muhtar, in their house, trying to make peace between them. My entry temporarily stopped proceedings, but suddenly Musa burst out again as though I were not there into a tirade against the ingratitude of a son who thus threatened his old father; he was obviously deeply moved. Sapri was crouching against the wall away from the main group around the tandir, which included the women of the household and one or two other kinsmen. I did not stay, feeling that I was unwanted on such an occasion. I afterwards learnt that Musa declared himself quite willing to work the land, if only Sapri would go to town to earn money. Sapri promised to do so, and in the spring went off, with other young men from the village, to Adana, returning at the harvest already a plasterer and bringing money. |
| In this quarrel the cause of the trouble was the young man’s unwillingness to go away to find work. In the next example, it was a son’s unwillingness to stay in the village. Osman (AG 1)’s second son, Mahmut - the first was away on military service - was a skilled plasterer, highly skilled if he himself is to be believed. He worked in Adana, and apparently found it most agreeable to live in town with plenty of money in his pocket. His father, who owned plenty of land by Sakaltutan standards, was a true peasant who had never been to town except when absolutely forced to do so. He arranged a marriage for this son with the daughter of the Musa in the previous example, and Mahmut duly came home for the wedding. However, instead, as is customary for any craftsman, and more or less obligatory on a new husband, of waiting in the village until the spring and the melting of the snow, he went back to Adana after only a fortnight, leaving his bride a grass widow. No amount of pressure from his father or other kinsmen could dissuade him, and it became obvious that he had strong motives for his return. We were not surprised to hear in due course that he had been involved in an elopement - unsuccessful, as it turned out - in Adana. He failed to come home for the Seker Bayrami, when almost all the village migrant workers came home to their families, and then, - turning up immediately afterwards - he gave his father very little money, having spent most of what he had earned in town on a gay life, and departed again forthwith. Ten days later he was back again, this time ill. His father was very angry with him and told me how disappointed he was in such a son. During the harvest Mahmut did little to help. “I cannot make him work”, Osman said to me. Mahmut was unrepentant, and announced to me his secret intention of settling in Adana, and marrying a wife there, abandoning his village wife. In neither of the above cases has the friction so far led to separation, but in the village there were two sons separate from, and on bad terms with, their fathers. In one case the stated reason was bad relations between step-mother and wife; the father (VA 10) was a poor man, and has given no economic aid to his son, and it was probably this that has precluded the re-establishment of cordial relations between them. The other case also involved a poor family (VK), but whatever the reason for the original quarrel, it was not in this case due to a step-mother. Even when their son had pneumonia, his parents did not come to visit him. He depended for assistance on his father-in-law’s household (IB 2). The three brothers, who, because of disputed between their step- mother and their wives, her gelinler, had separated economically from their father’s household, remained on excellent terms with him working with him both in Adana and at home during the harvest. Their father was still engaged on building one of them a house on the end of a line already containing the |
| houses of the other two, all three being very close to his own. The economic problem in this case had been settled by a written agreement by which the sons received each a share of the paternal lands, and renounced any further claim on them. The whole family worked together at the harvest, a younger half- brother having ploughed the land, for as yet the brothers who have separated have no oxen of their own. |
| Brothers. Brothers, especially brothers whose ages are not widely |
| separate, are closer to each other than any other kinsmen. Even between father and son there is a difference of age, and a son is subject to his father. Between brothers is the comradeship of similar age, an easy going intimacy, which is often maintained throughout life by close neighbourhood. In a household which is fortunate enough to follow the ideal pattern, brothers will be under their father’s authority, common members of one household, until they are themselves fathers of growing or even adult children. Even if the household divides earlier they are likely to be close neighbours, helping and protecting each other, and living in intimate coming and going between each other’s households. The reciprocal of such friendliness is the intensity of fraternal quarrels. This principle applies to all close personal relationships. But in the case of these village brothers it shows most clearly, because, being neighbours who cannot avoid each other, and standing in a relation which would normally mean a constant flow of mutual services and friendly exchanges, the state of non-co- operation and reciprocal silence gives daily emphasis to the hostility and heaps up fresh bitterness. The quarrel has no chance to die as other quarrels do. A conspicuous example of this was the quarrel between the brothers PA, details of which are given below, under land tenure (2). A land dispute lead of Arif, the youngest, shooting at is brother and serving a sentence of some months for so doing. “I have wiped away my brothers”, he said to me. (“Kardeslerimi sildim”). The present state between the families is described by a word I find it very hard to translate, “Kus”, given in the dictionary as a verb meaning to be offended. In the village it is used adjectively to refer to a reciprocal state of sullen anger which involves the severing of all personal relations. This state, common enough in the village, reaches perhaps its most intense form in a quarrel between brothers. Economically, brothers are treated exactly alike. They inherit equal shares of the paternal estate, and while their father is alive receive equal treatment. For example, Mustafa (VA 5) having built a house for one of his adult sons, was building similar houses for the others, although one was only about nineteen and newly married. But the eldest brother carries definite authority and |
| responsibility. He is nearest to his father and is often the most filial and the one to inherit the father’s actual house, and farm the land if the brothers do not all take to farming as their main source of income. Kazim (SI 1), the eldest remaining of three brothers lived on his father’s site, and was a full time farmer, while his two younger brothers were skilled craftsmen, who were away from the village for long periods. Sevket (VA 4) lived in his father’s house, Arif (PB 1) the son of the eldest branch of his kabile, lived on the ancestral site, while his cousins were scattered about the Lower Quarter. Abdurrahman, elder son of Haci Mehmet (T 1), was more respectful and on the old man and found him alone. “My son”, he said, using the singular, “has gone to town”. “Yes”, I said, “and Emin is away too”. “Emin, he replied angrily, “Emin is crazy, he is always quarrelling with me”. And certainly it was always Abdurrahman who attended to his father’s needs. I have already related the friction between Osman (AG 1) and his second son Mahmut. Osman was always receiving letters from his eldest son Ahmet. Ahmet, who had not learned a trade, and did not go away from the village was, he claimed, a model son. Mahmut, on the other hand, declared he wanted none of the household land, but would earn his living by plastering. It is not invariably the eldest son who shows the most responsibility towards his father, but if he fails to do so it is usually the son next in seniority who takes his place. No special word distinguishes full brothers from half brothers, and when it is necessary to do so, the villagers use a phrase which means “his mother (was) separate”. Paternal half brothers are thought of as brothers, and the fact that their mothers were different is not emphasised. The upbringing together in one household, the sharing of the father’s land, the life long proximity, all apply whether or not they have a common mother. Special words do exist for step parent and step children, and those relationships do carry an atmosphere of ill feeling; it is hostility between a man and his step-mother rather than between him and her sons that seems to be socially recognised and expected. The absence of the maternal links that join full brothers is, of course, reflected in practice, especially because it is not uncommon to find very great age gaps between the children of different mothers. a widower will usually take a girl or widow much younger than his dead wife, thus raising up children in his later years. A pair of half brothers, our next door neighbours in Sakaltutan, were forty years apart in age, one venerable, the other a young man whose first son was born during our stay. They lived in separate houses on the same courtyard, but did not get on well together, mainly because the younger one was more or less half-witted, and good for very little. Even when nearer in age, halfbrothers are less close than full brothers - half brothers, for example, never postpone for long periods separation after their father’s death. Since a man normally does not take a second wife unless his first is either dead or |
| divorced or no longer capable of bearing children, half brothers are rarely influenced in their relations with each other by quarrels between their mothers, and are only likely to be close in age in the case of the death of the elder’s mother. Brothers are the closest of any kinsmen, especially full brothers, and are treated equally by their parents and by society in general, except that greater responsibility usually attaches to the eldest. |
| 6. | The Division of Households |
| Any villager will tell you that a household divides on the death of the father, each brother becoming the head of a new household. This seems to be the usual practice, but with no unseemly hurry. After the burial and a period of mourning, the brothers have to make arrangements for each to have a separate dwelling, and to apportion out everything, including buildings down to the last roof timber. Often the division is postponed for a variety of reasons. On several occasions I have found brothers waiting until all of them have completed military service before separation, and equally they wait for the marriage of their number. In many cases, marriage is postponed till after military service. It is, I think, largely for the reason that only one of them has done military service, and only two of them are married, that the brothers FB 4 show no signs of separation. Eyup (KO 2) told me he and his brother had only been separated for one year because he had recently returned from the army. Why he went so late in life, for he was about thirty-five years of age, he would not explain. The three brothers DT said they had remained together for eight years after their father’s death, and had been separate for sixteen years. This would mean that they separated when the youngest brother’s official age was nineteen, before he would have gone to military service, but after his marriage. In other cases the delay may be longer, lasting even a lifetime. In Ac village, two elderly men, both of whom worked on the land, shared a common ev, and declared themselves content to remain thus, and in Kz village I was told of a household of three brothers, with a total population of twenty-three persons. In Al village, I was told by the Muhtar, spontaneously, there are several cases of households shared by brothers. In these last cases, the brothers divided their economic role, one farming, one going away to earn. (3) There was one |