The 'Meaning' of the 'Wiring Diagram Boxes"
Boxes 1 and 2--National Charges
I have already (pp. 194ff.) sketched some of the kinds of national changes which affect villages. I only wish here to agree warmly with Professor Mair that most rapid and important changes in small-scale societies originate outside them. Of course, local internal factors and processes are what external factors affect, so that uniform external causes do not have uniform local effects, and it is these internal processes in which I am interested here. But of course the changes in the villages of Turkey are a response to events, policies and changes in Turkish cities and governments and beyond these in the world at large.
Boxes 3 to 10
I have named seven general ways and one local way in which the two villages are affected by national society. Although I have not joined these eight boxes to each other with arrows, it is obvious that they are not all independent factors, but affect each other. The order in which they appear is purely one of convenience.
Five of them, schools, radio, roads, agricultural policy and health services involve direct official government action: three-- the rise in labour demand, the rise in real wages, and the growth of the demand for carpets are the result of economic growth.
In general, they are all self-explanatory; but I comment on the relation of each to these two villages.
Box 3--Schools: Up to the summer of 1950 Sakaltutan had only a minimal school; a local literate villager taught one arbitrarily selected group of children for three years, concentrating on the three 'r's' exclusively. He had been doing this for about five years. In 1950, as we left, the first trained teacher arrived; in 1971 there were four.
Elbasi had had a school for very much longer, and in 1951 had three trained teachers; now there are six.
In both villages, school enrolment is now virtually total, for girls as well as boys.
Box 4--Radios: The government provides the programmes, the people themselves buy the radios. In 1950, there were none in Sakaltutan, and in 1951 one or two had just arrived in Elbasi. Now most households have one, and everyone who wishes is able to listen frequently. Everyone knows the national news, but neither village had regular newspaper readers even in 1971.
Box 6--Roads: Turkey's national road building has been one of its most successful enterprises. Elbasi already had in 1951 an efficient feeder link to a good main road to Bunyan and Kayseri. But in 1951 the road from Kayseri through Sakaltutan to the small town of Tomarza had only been passable to lorries for two years. It was still a village cart-track, deteriorating rapidly, and restricting speed to 15 kilometres an hour. A few irregular lorries passed through Sakaltutan into Kayseri in the morning and returned in the evening. The road did not touch Talas, Sakaltutan's administrative centre. By 1955, a new route had been opened from Kayseri through Talas to Sakaltutan, and by 1970, a decently engineered and metalled road carried regular minibuses and buses, reaching Kayseri in little over half an hour, against eight hours in 1947 and two hours in 1950.
Box 9--Agricultural Policy: Since around 1930 a government agency, the Office of Soil Products, has bought wheat and other cereals directly from the producers at fixed prices. The price each year was, and still is, decided by the Cabinet and has been consistently above world prices. This policy removed the producers' recurrent problem of fluctuations in price from harvest to scarcity within one year, and from glut to famine between years; and probably did much to encourage cash cropping and thus increased production of cereals. Secondly, through the Agricultural Bank, founded in 1878, the Government also provided substantial credit, even to relatively poor farmers.
Box 10--Health Services: The sharp decline in the death rate in Turkey is, as it is everywhere, largely the result of the availability of world improvements in medical techniques, through national improvements in medical and health training and organisation.
Box 7--Demand for Labour: The growth of Turkey has created a vast and continuing boom in building, with a large demand for building labour. The villages of this area have helped to supply this demand on a large scale. Building provides an unstructured casual labour market with, so far, no State imposed formalities. The men pay no tax, have no insurance, work when they choose; they are subject only to their contracts with employers which in turn reflect the informal arrangements sanctioned by custom and the economic balance of power. This system provides no security; but it has great advantages of flexibility for a peasant labour force whose members have their minds on wives, children and fields back in their villages.
Box 8--Rising Wages: Even in 1950-52, skilled building workers, so long as they could find regular work, seemed well-off compared with a middling or small landholder. Moreover, most villagers have considerable periods during the year when they have relatively little to do. Thus a skilled migrant labourer, especially if he had some land and a family prepared to work it, was decidedly better-off for cash than other villagers, except the few who controlled relatively large amounts of land or relatively large herds of animals. Earnings were said to be about 10 T.L. a day, against 3 T.L. for unskilled labour; village rates for both were half as much.
Since then the real return for a day's employed labour has risen faster than that for a similar input in village agriculture. Hence, quite apart from population pressure on local resources, the absolute amount of cash brought back to the village from this source is vastly greater and still growing; and the proportion of the total village income from non-agricultural sources has risen even more sharply. According to my casual enquiries in 1971, skilled workers could earn from 60 T.L. to 100 T. L. a day, against the unskilled labourer's 25-30 T.L. a day. (Summer 1971: roughly, 15 T.L. = U.S. $1.00, 35 T.L. = #1.00)
Box 5--Carpets: The growth of carpet making as a cottage industry in this area would provide a fascinating study in itself: twentieth-century putting-out (p. 201). This industry is long established in Bunyan and Kayseri. (Geray 1967: 49). The entrepreneur provides the loom, and all materials, and the weavers provide a workshop in their own home and the labour. The conditions are tough. Girls may work long hours in cramped conditions and poor light, which can damage their health. They often work on a large carpet in groups of two or three. For a solid month's work--thirty days in the villages--a girl was said to earn about 600 T.L., or around 20 T.L. a day. People put the annual maximum at 6,000 T.L. for ten months' work, but I doubt if many girls did as much as 300 days a year. A potential 6,000 T.L. compares favourably with the 2,000 T.L. a year which both Kiray (1970:II) and Kapil and Gencaga (1971:15,16, and Table III), give as a minimum family annual income.
People said that carpet making had been the salvation of the villages, since many households derive a steady extra income from it. Except that people say a girl will ask her father for a watch and more new clothes, which he cannot refuse, the income involves no cost and no risk, and goes straight to the head of the household. For the first time, adolescent girls are a direct cash asset to their fathers. It is highly convenient since it involves no problems of morality or new ideas; indeed it keeps vulnerable girls suitably busy. Since it goes on in the home, it is not necessarily full time; indeed it is infinitely flexible. Households short of woman power can easily fit the weaving into domestic and farming routines.
Girls often begin at a very early age, but an untrained adolescent girl is said to be able to pick up the basic skill in about two weeks. A really skilful girl is one who can weave fast and with great evenness; her skill may earn her a wide reputation, and become a factor in her eligibility for marriage.
Apart from increasing the village cash income, and giving women a small lever against male dominance in the household, the carpet trade does not appear to have wide ramifications for the village; largely because it requires no new relationships or sources of knowledge for the women, and very few for the men.
Boxes 11 to 21
Ten of these eleven factors (all but Box II) are in principle more or less definable and measurable. They have of course symbolic, cognitive and affective aspects which are hard or impossible to measure, but all have measurable dimensions.
Box 11--Knowledge, Beliefs and Skills: People can only operate with the knowledge, beliefs and skills which they have. New opportunities (Mair 1969, Ch. 10) only change behaviour if people know about them; and they may know about opportunities which do not exist but which all the same change their behaviour.
This box therefore cannot be omitted, and I spell out again (c# p. 195) some of the difficulties of including it. In the first place it is not distinct from other boxes in the way in which say the rise in cash income is distinct from the rise in consumption in the village. This is not simply because of indefinite boundaries; but also because every change must have intrinsic symbolic and cognitive aspects.
In the second place it is vast and heterogeneous yet it cannot satisfactorily be sub-divided. It includes skills of a general kind--for example, reading, writing and counting; it includes detailed everyday information about bus routes, rents, prices, law, hygiene; it includes occupational skills and information about the building industry, how to get jobs and how to recruit labour; it includes social skills--shopping, dealing with landlords, walking into and doing business in a bank; and it includes items of general knowledge essential for the encounters of social intercourse in a new range of casual acquaintances in cafes, buses, jobs, shops.
Thirdly, it is extremely difficult to gather and report accurate data about it either from informants or from general observations and impressions.
Fourthly, it follows that it is extremely difficult even in principle to give a meaningful quantity for this box, or for any important sub-section of it; any measurement in this field is likely to be at worst seriously misleading, and at best highly specific.
Knowledge changes individuals; that is, quite simply, someone who for example has become a skilled tile layer through a visit of several months to Adana is specifically different from a cousin of similar abilities, origin and personality who has not. Knowledge also changes societies. The villages in 1971 stored different kinds of information, and vastly more of it, and with much more range of individual variety than they did in 1950-52. A priori, such great changes in stocks of knowledge modify people's basic assumptions or major beliefs about their metaphysical and social universe-- about man, about God, about good and evil, about suffering and about moral rules. Cognitive changes on this large scale may be gradual or traumatic; unconscious or explicit, understood, partially understood or misunderstood.
Since the 'universe' is almost invariably perceived as absolute and unchanging, people are very often unable to see that the 'universe' of their society is different from what it used to be; and their perception of such changes as they do perceive is seldom clear, articulated or easily checked.
Box 18--Permanent Migration: The number of people who had left the two villages permanently in 1950-52 was very small indeed, if we exclude a large number of women and one or two men who moved between villages for reasons to do with marriage, kinship or property (Stirling 1965:30, 202, 203). The pattern was clear: if a man left the village he did not take a village wife with him, but married a woman of the town to which he moved. It did not occur to me at that time to check carefully the reasons why these few who left had done so; on the whole, those who had left did not keep in close touch with their village kin. Of course, the obligations of kinship may simply be dormant, ready to be reactivated if occasion arose. I only heard of about six men of Sakaltutan origin who were permanently resident in towns. Only three women in the two villages had ever lived in town, and of these only one intended to return. No village household or married couple had ever left Sakaltutan. Most men said firmly that they personally and villagers in general could not migrate permanently because village w omen could not and would not live in town, so that a married man could not migrate permanently unless he abandoned wife and children.
Even in 1952 some of the younger migrants were already showing signs of preferring town wives and town homes to a poor village which was growing rapidly more crowded. Yet in fact, I have no record of any departure from Sakaltutan between 1949 and about 1957. Details on those leaving after 1957 were gathered hastily. Only ten of those for whom I have information left before 1961, and most of these are in some sense special cases. Two or three belonged to very poor families. Three went to Europe as bachelors, one of whom is married to a non-village Turk in Germany, and the other two are now married in Turkish towns; and another went to Saudi Arabia for two years. But from 1961 more prosperous and successful villagers began to join the exodus. Of sixty-five adult men reported to have left Sakaltutan altogether, eighteen were said to have left between 1957 and 1964, and thirty-nine between 1964 and 1971. Although the details of years of departure were not carefully checked, the number increases steadily, and more were talking of making the move during my stay.
I discussed the problem of moving to town many times with many people in my brief stay. Naturally, the arguments are complex; they can be grouped under two heads,--economic, and those concerned with personal and social satisfactions and comforts.
Few men in Sakaltutan have jobs outside the building industry. In 1950-52, I recorded five men working in the State cotton mill in Kayseri, and returning to the village every weekend. Of these, at least two had moved their families permanently to Kayseri by 1971.
In the building industry daily earnings depend on personal output, through an individual contract system. Employment was still in 1971 inherently casual, and there was no official control, no insurance scheme, and no use of labour exchanges. The pendular migrants have two advantages over permanent migrants. First, by keeping their wives and families in the village they can continue to use patrimonial land, escape rent, and feed their families very cheaply; though they have to meet their own expenses in town, even when unemployed. Second, they can seek work anywhere in Turkey where their friends and contacts report a favourable opportunity; though if they spend two to three months in the village each winter, and work in different cities, they are less able to keep a warm and active personal network of friends and fellow workers to find them work when they need it.
People said that a good and reliable craftsman has a lot to gain from living in one town all the year round. He can establish permanent ties and mutual obligations, he can move rapidly from job to job, and by becoming known for reliability will find himself in demand.
This argument is even stronger for the contractors. The building industry largely consists of small contractors, who through subcontractors parcel out the tasks of building to craftsmen, who may in turn employ their friends and kin as colleagues or apprentices. Quite a number of men from Sakaltutan managed to rise to become small contractors or subcontractors. The advantages are great,--a profit on the deal, and the ability to offer work to kin and friends, and thus like a traditional 'aga', establish a following. But obviously this kind of success depends on maintaining a reputation in one town.
One major factor is economic security. A pendular migrant with land keeps a firm eye on his village possessions, and stays and eats in the village if no work is available. He does not starve. Some permanent migrants also retain rights to village house and land. Many allow kin to use land or houses, and in fact could not exercise the rights they think they have without a dispute. Obviously, if many migrants returned at the same time, they would not be able to survive as farmers. Yet many of them go on believing that if the worst came to the worst they could return to their village property. But a man who has lost his village rights by sale or long neglect faces the prospect ultimately of destitution if the town cannot provide an income. The economic balance obviously varies from case to case. A man with adequate village land and a successful town career must choose between advantages; a man with no village resources and little success in town must choose between evils.
Economics apart a man also has to weigh the advantages of having his wife and children in the village, secure against destitution, cared for, and watched over morally by parents or other close kin, against the advantages of living with wife and children in his own home day in and day out, at his place of work.
The women in 1950 were unanimous: they could not live in town. Many had never been to town at all, and none went regularly. By 1971, all village women as far as I could judge had some close neighbours or kin living in town, and many older women now pay regular annual visits to daughters or son's wives to see their grandchildren. In 1950, they said life in town, with unknown cooking techniques, no store of home-grown food, and no close kin and neighbours, would be impossible. Some still prefer the village, but many are only too keen to be shot of the grinding village chores, and long for the amenities of a town house. Girls are beginning to want town husbands.
The danger of dishonour does not seem to trouble town-based husbands. Village women resident in town are not allowed to go out to work. Indeed they are not allowed to go out at all, not even shopping and it is my impression that although the new situations in which women find themselves vary enormously, mutual observation and gossip relationships between women neighbours develop very rapidly. I was struck by the fact that village-born women with village-born husbands are more restrict house-bound, segregated and socially isolate they move to town than they were in the village.
Permanent migration to town is accelerating. Once again, it is simple to suggest plausible causal factors which promote the movement.
The village population is still rising, and in Sakaltutan is now far beyond the carrying capacity of the village land. Many see themselves as having little to stay in the village for. Secondly, with the rise in the national income per capita, town wages are rising relative to the income to be earned by working the village land even if a man has enough land to work. Thirdly, the arrival of agricultural machinery decreases the number of men needed to work the village lands.
Experience acknowledge contribute enormously to this process. The regularity of pendular migration gave all young men first hand knowledge about how to survive and earn in towns. Once a few village wives had moved to towns without breaking their village ties, the same kind of information became rapidly diffused among the women, radically altering their attitude to moving to town, and removing one of the main barriers to permanent urban migration. This stock of town experiences, knowledge and values is constantly reinforced by the ever- growing intimacy between the village and its own urban residents, who for many purposes, especially economic co-operation and marriage, remain in many ways part of village society. The greater the number of permanent migrants, the easier it becomes for others to follow.
Migration also stimulates migration in a more directly economic way. Most villagers had very little cash to spare, and savings normally took the form of investment in animals. In 1950-52, a few had begun investing in lorries, mills and even an Ankara hotel. Now that they have much more cash people with savings are looking for investments. One new profitable form of investment has turned out to be urban real estate, especially building plots. Villagers become land speculators, and with the current rates of urban growth and of inflation they can hardly go wrong. One profitable use for an urban plot is to build two or more dwelling units on it, and live in one whilst renting or selling the others. The villagers say that to be secure in town it is necessary to own property, not only to avoid paying rent, but also to receive rent to tide over periods of unemployment. A man who sells village property without acquiring town property is, they say, foolish and reckless. The sight of kin, recently neighbours in the village, now living as urban rentiers is plainly another 'feed-back' factor, stimulating others to do likewise.
To sum up, the permanent migration of whole families to town is new to both these villages. From a trickle in the late 1950s, it has grown in 1971 to a still accelerating flow. Its causes include the growth in urban real wages, the fall in rural resources per head, the~ fall in labour needs per unit of land, the educational opportunities of the town, the vast and continuing improvement in road communications and the still accelerating growth of the villagers' knowledge.
Box 21--Investment in Agriculture: In 1950 the Sakaltutan headman reported on an official form that all villagers were, by occupation, farmers. This summed up the village view in both villages. The basic skills were agricultural skills, and in this virtually all adult men were the same. Other skills and crafts were seen as extra, supererogatory, and therefore not worth official mention. A proper adult man should own land and farm it; if he had none, he farmed or herded for someone else.
At the traditional technical level for the village, farming required very little operating capital. The greatest needs were oxen and seed, and in a normal year every normal household had these; landless households were few and even these sometimes owned oxen and seed and took on land as sharecroppers.
Since 1950 yields have increased. In Sakultutan people spoke of a rise in an average year's yield from 5 for 1 of seed in 1950 to 8 for 1 in 1971. Similarly in Elbasi people spoke of an increase in yields of from 10 to 1 to 15 to 1. These crude measures at least indicate some increase in yields per hectare for cereals; and by implication in productivity per unit of labour. The increased yields have been achieved by using selected seed, by more fertilisers, and by the use of machines, making for better timing, more effective ploughing, and less wasteful harvesting.
One interesting effect of the increase in the use of machinery is the decline in the village population of draught animals. In Sakaltutan I was told that oxen have declined from about 200 to about 80; people have switched from oxen to cows, which yield milk to improve diets, to sell as cheese, and to produce more calves for sale as meat. In Elbasi, work oxen have disappeared, though the number of horses remains high.
These changes in agriculture have two consequences. First, since the necessary operating investment in each year's crop has risen, the disaster of a crop failure is more serious. If a man has spent cash or credit on ploughing, fertiliser and good quality seed, then if the crop fails not only is he hungry, but he has also sustained a loss in money terms, and has nothing for his next year's investment. Second, as costs increase, the emphasis switches steadily away from growing the family food supply, with cash income perceived as almost incidental, to a business enterprise with costs and income carefully calculated, and some food for the household perceived as almost incidental. With soil as poor as that in Sakaltutan, people will one day discover that even with the most efficient techniques, farming does not offer a return on a year's work comparable with work in the other sectors of the economy; but that day is not yet.
Thirdly, the pattern of farming and land use has already begun to change, and I see this change too as likely to accelerate.
In Elbasi, several households own tractors, and one man owns two. All have fairly sizeable holdings. In Sakaltutan, although the largest holdings are much smaller, two households have managed by complex manoeuvres and by investing earnings from household members migrant in Turkey and in Europe to acquire a tractor and the relevant equipment. In both villages households with machinery are willing to buy or rent land, to take on sharecropping, or to work their neighbours' lands for a fixed fee. This last arrangement is rapidly becoming the most common. The owner is responsible for harvesting. Thus for one brief sojourn in the summer of three or four weeks each year, he derives full benefit (less the fee) from his land.
Box 20--Occupational specialisation: A few households thus commit themselves to agriculture, enlarge their operations, and become specialists. The enlarged operation enables them to mobilise resources to face higher costs and higher risks, and by yielding higher average profits enables them also to keep up with rising consumer needs. It requires of them new skills; knowledge of fertilisers, varieties of seed, marketing, machinery, and farm management.
Many village household heads have consequently given up working on their own land, except perhaps for harvest. Instead, migration enables them to earn wages, and agriculture becomes a side line. Thus a basic new division of labour is growing up in the village between farmers and the rest. So far, this division is not conspicuous, because all older men still regard themselves as competent to farm whenever necessary. But many boys no longer learn farming from their fathers and already many young men live by their crafts and cannot and do not wish to farm.
This trend, accentuated as the old die and the non-farming young grow older, suggests a prediction. As this division of labour grows, the non-farming households will have little stake to keep them in the village, and perhaps quite soon permanent urban migration will overtake the village population growth and these villages will become depopulated.
One extremely interesting development in Elbasi is likely to provide a temporary brake on this process. In this whole area, village land is allowed to lie fallow every other year (Stirling 1965: 48). For the first time in 1971, in Elbasi some of the land due for fallow was planted, allegedly with success. Such a development--resting of course on crop rotation and the cropping of animal feeds,--could greatly increase the demand for labour in the villages, the productivity per hectare of village land, and the animal carrying capacity of the land. But with the rapid growth of mechanisation the cropping off allow will accelerate the process of agricultural specialisation in the villagers, which must eventually end with some rural depopulation.
The changes in agricultural organisation I have been describing are changes in the organisation of production and in the distribution of resources in the village. But once again they are linked causally to changes in knowledge. The importance of technical commercial and financial knowledge is relatively obvious; but changes in more basic assumptions are also involved. Most people in 1950-52,-- and surely even more so earlier,--saw the village as home, and its land and its crops and animals as the indispensable moral and physical centre of their lives; relations with the outside world were ultimately temporary and dispensable. Wages and commercial profits were directed to the village household in its village social arena. At the other end of the process, by no means yet reached, agriculture becomes a business like any other, a source of income to buy manufactured necessities which come from town; home and land are merely assets to be sold for cash if and when it pays to do so; and resources are directed to power and status in a national or at least regional arena.
Boxes 22 to 25: Household acid kinship
At first glance, changes in household and in kinship are unimpressive. The same or apparently similar people live in the same or similar houses with very similar arrangements. Nevertheless the changes that have begun are fundamental, complex and accelerating.
I have selected four points which seem to me crucial. Box 22 (women's knowledge) concerns the effect on women of a whole new segment of experience, and thus the relations between men and women in general. Box 23 (generation gap) concerns the new modes of socialisation and the results for the relation between young and old in general; Box 24 (decline in father's authority) concerns control and power in the domestic group; Box 25 (separation of sons) the structure of domestic groups and the working of the domestic cycle.
These changes are so far no more than adjustments to the basic pattern which I described for 1950-52 (Stirling 1965: Chs. 6 and 7). Very briefly, domestic units were agricultural production units as well as consumption units. Income and property were pooled under the direction of the household head, and cash incomes were still subordinate to subsistence farming. Every man aimed by late middle age to become head of a household consisting of his wife, his married sons and their wives and children, and his unmarried children. In practice, mainly for demographic reasons, relatively few households at any point conformed to this ideal; the few sons who had separated from living fathers were objects of explicit disapproval. Within this unit, the head's authority was in theory absolute. Within it also, men and women experienced the only social and sexual intimacy permitted. Women were segregated as far as possible, and markedly subordinate; their sexual propriety was important not only to themselves but to their whole household; a man was judged on the fair name of his mother, sisters, wives and daughters, and even a threat to their reputation called for violence.
Box 25--Separation of Married Sons: I found one striking change in this pattern. It is Slow perfectly acceptable for a married man to separate from his living father and set up an independent household. In Sakaltutan, I was given a new set of rules. A man should still bring a new bride to live in his father's household. He may then separate in a year or so without disgrace or gossip, but he ought not to do so unless his parents have other sons still at home. One son must keep his wife in the paternal home to take care of the old people, though no rules say which it should be. Once therefore one son has married, at least one daughter-in-law is likely to be living in the house. I do not have the data to test either how widely this new formulation of the rules is accepted or how far it is observed.
Demographically the average size of the households has increased, and the proportion of joint households (households containing more than one married man) has also increased, in both villages. This is surprising, since the formal rules have changed in the opposite direction. In Turkish Village I explained that the paradoxical gap between the universally stated ideal of the large three generation patrilineal household and the actual preponderance of simple one-marriage households was due to demographic factors. Similarly, the present inverse paradox is also due to a reversal of demography. Once it was relatively difficult to produce living adult children. Fertility was a problem, and the child death rate very high: in Elbasi perhaps as high as one third or more of all children born. Now most children survive and grow up reasonably healthy. But the unqualified village assumption that children are desirable is only now beginning to change. Men expect to have more than one son, and most young married couples have several children each. At the same time, the life expectancy of adult men is also rising dramatically, so that most fathers live long enough to see their Soils marry and beget children. Great grand children are not uncommon.
This demographic change has two results. Far more of the surviving older couples have one, or several, living married sons which increases the number of joint households. At the same time overcrowding becomes a major problem for many households, and a major factor in the change which I have just reported in the explicit rules. Moreover, the new division of labour between agricultural households, and those which simply harvest their patrimony, or let it out altogether, has diminished the number of households with land resources sufficient to hold together and employ an agricultural joint household.
Two further changes seem predictable. The genuine old-fashioned joint households with sons and grandsons under the control of an older man will persist only in those households which specialise successfully in agriculture, need a large labour force, and can offer economic resources to members. On the other hand, a new household type will emerge in which, effectively, the income from a pendular migrant supports unproductive old parents, so that households with two married couples are likely to continue to be common, but with a reversal of their traditional internal economic and authority structure.
Box 24--Decline in Father's Authority: Traditionally, fathers commanded, sons obeyed. Sons did not speak publicly, nor smoke in their father's presence. The whole weight of village morality was behind a father. Sons were watched, gossiped about, and reminded constantly of breaches of the rules. A father's prestige, wealth and power depended on retaining control of sons as a source of labour, income and fighting power; Loyal adult Soles were, and perhaps decreasingly still are, a man s greatest asset.
Father's authority rested not only on the informal sanctions of village morality, but on two other powerful sanctions. First, by controlling land he controlled virtually the only resource which could provide a son with work and income. Secondly, every young man needed a respectable wife to bear him respectable sons on which to build his own position in the village; father provided the necessary resources and reputation; and indeed ostensibly chose the bride.
Migrant labour undermined the strongest of these sanctions. It has become increasingly simple,--and is now customary,--for young men to provide their own income by learning a building skill. In moral theory, all earnings should still go to the household head, for his disposal in the overall interest. But once a son is not working as a member of a household team under his father's orders, but earning cash from an employer outside the village, he can decide both what he tells his father, and what proportion of what he says he earns he is willing to hand over. A father can no longer starve a son into submission.
Men, especially young unmarried men, spend freely in town and resent paternal pressure to save and hand over their earnings for the household. Fathers resent their sons' fecklessness and insubordination, and suspect them of deceit. This theme recurs constantly in reports of tension and open quarrels between fathers and sons.
The second sanction,--the arranging of a marriage,--remains. The values surrounding female modesty and purity have changed little and it is impossible even in town for a man to court in person a respectable and eligible girl. Honourable marriage, which gives the essential status of head of a respectable family whether in town or village, must still be arranged for a man through someone else, preferably through his father. Young village men, even those now resident in town, want to marry village girls whose background they know to be pure. Marriage is expensive, costing around a year's earnings. For social respectability and for the necessary cash a man still depends on the support of his father and his household.
A father will sell animals and contract debts in order to marry a son, and will do so as prestigiously and as lavishly as he possibly can. He equally wants a respectable daughter-in-law and grandchildren. But he also expects an earning unmarried son to contribute to the household resources, that is, to his own wedding in advance. I discovered one father who refused to help a son, resident in town, with his marriage as a punishment for the son's failure to contribute during his adolescence. Others, I suspect, faced with the dilemma may be more lenient.
Even this sanction is likely to weaken, partly because the strict rules of rural sexual morality seem virtually certain to be relaxed in practice in urban conditions--some evidence supports this guess,--and partly because men can acquire new networks which provide them with urban-born wives of acceptable respectability.
I cannot measure quarrels between fathers and sons in 1950-52 against those in 1971; but I can assert that fathers have decreasing control over sons, that both illustrative instances of and village comments on the change are common.
Box 23--The Generation Gap: This decline in the control of fathers over their own sons is clearly part of the widerfield of relationships between young and old. Traditionally, village society exacted a high degree of deference and of specific obedience from the young. Children began to work for their households as soon as they were able. As sons obeyed and deferred to fathers, girls obeyed their own mothers at home, and their husbands' mothers after marriage. So long as the total stock of highly valued knowledge in the village consisted of traditional religious knowledge, and traditional agricultural techniques and skills, the old people did in fact know best. In 1950-52 this monopoly of knowledge, respect and power by the old was already under attack, and changes were under way, but the formal rules remained and the conspicuous exceptions were seen as breaches, as any social rules are sometimes breached. By 1971, the situation had changed radically.
I have already written of the new and heterogeneous flood of knowledge and skill into the village between 1950- 52 and 1971. This knowledge and skill was so to speak stored not like traditional knowledge in the elders, but in the young. 'We', one man remarked, 'are like our fathers were, but our sons are not like us.' What I have said about the decline of father's authority applies more generally. The young are less deferential, and less obedient, because it is they who are able to exploit the new opportunities. But what is important is not only that they are able to reject the power of their elders, but that they are different from their elders.
The differences are superficially conspicuous. They dress in town-bought clothes, some go bare-headed, and their mannerisms, conversation and consumer habits are different. Two differences are fundamental. First, as I have said (p. 216) they are no longer committed to the land. They do not want to emulate their farming fathers. Secondly, they have been to school, and are literate in the new secular script. What is important about literacy in this context is not merely individual competence; the village is becoming a literate community, aware of and able to draw on the vast stored memory of the written word. Such a community must in time come to make new and different assumptions about the sources, nature and use of knowledge. This theme is vast and complex; for example, truth rests not on the oral authority of the elders inside village society, but on written authorities from the modern urban world. Modern discovery and invention rivals eternal revelation as the source of truth.
The generation gap then is not only a matter of conflict and relative power; for the first time ever, the young are radically unlike their predecessors. They are not therefore recruits for replacing and reproducing the statuses of the elders as they die off; village society is no longer self-reproducing.
Box 22--Women in town: A parallel revolution is taking place in the still separate world of women. In discussing permanent urban migration I have already remarked on the opening of the village women's world to information about and from the towns, through the growing number of daughters and daughters-in-law who live or have lived in town, and through the now customary visits of village women and girls with their urban kin.
Three effects are already noticeable. First, teachers reported that most villagers are eager to send daughters to school. One elderly villager expressed his continued opposition to schooling for girls above eleven years of age, but clearly already most young girls are literate. Secondly, as I have said, some girls want to marry town husbands. In 1950 a wife shackled a man to the village; wives may soon be driving their husbands out of it. Thirdly, almost all informants reported that within the village women are already less submissive and actively demand more comfort, more consumer goods and more personal freedom.
In Elbasi, girls moved about with more freedom., and for the first time I saw village girls with bare heads and wearing clothes noticeably though not strikingly different from the once strict village traditional costume. I was told that population growth and family planning are now discussed in the village by men and by women.
So far, these changes are mere beginnings; but then urban contacts and literacy for girls are very new. Changes are bound to accelerate as the young grow older and the new influences grow. Mothers with less village-bound beliefs and customs will in time treat their babies differently, and transmit different rules and assumptions to their growing children.
Boxes 26 to 31
I have already covered implicitly much of the contents of the last six boxes. My six labels are--abbreviated-- changes in values, decreased dependence on the village, decline in village consensus, increased articulation with the national society, a decline in village social control, and an increase in inequality both within the village, and, for villagers, in the towns to which they migrate.
Box 29--Articulation with the National Society: The village is drawn into the national society. State intervention has increased steadily since the foundation of the Republic. All men serve in its army. Teachers live in the village, bringing national curricula and national values to the children. The numbers and effectiveness of visits from police, agricultural officers, bank and co-operative officials, judges, health officials, road engineers and so forth have increased steadily. The inflow of cash has vastly increased economic transactions with people outside the village. And now people living outside the village in a different kind of society are accepted by the villagers as part of village society. Sakaltutan has planted urban colonies. In 1950, the village boundary was sharp; it was clear who belonged and who did not. In 1971, it was no longer clear; the boundary was blurred.
Box 28--Decline in Cultural Consensus: The inflow of new information and of alternative ideas and values provides people with a whole set of alternatives for discussing and interpreting the events of other villagers' lives, and their behaviour. Once again the differences are not yet conspicuous. But while explicit statements of certain values, and metaphysical and religious assumptions are virtually unaltered, in a large number of ways people do not share as they used to do the same socially created reality. Alternative models for action and for judgement of actions are known to exist; rules and customs become less specific and less mandatory, breaches of them more defensible; and the area of tacit disagreement grows, that is, increasingly the more sophisticated simply ignore or avoid areas of potential confrontation or argument.
Box 30--Decline is Social Control: A decline in dependence on village society and a decline in normative consensus must diminish the effectiveness of village social control. The empirical evidence rests largely on statements by the villagers. Wedding customs are more easily attenuated; older men can evade their obligations; young men are less assiduous in their religious duties; boys are less respectful and obedient and much more likely to turn dissolute; even girl are more demanding and less demure. A priori also, sanctions from which people can escape are less effective, and rules which they can dispute are less easy to enforce. The sight of some fellow-villagers successfully evading, defying or ignoring customary morals and obligations encourages others to do likewise when it suits them. Decline in social control stimulates decline in social control.
Box 31--Growing Inequality; Village and Town: It is a common-place that 'development' and 'modernisation' at a national level bring vast increases in the division of labour, and radical changes in the distribution of national resources and in the structure of occupation and income. Opportunities for personal upward mobility must increase sharply, and are perceived to do so by the villagers but we cannot reliably measure the increase, nor the village perception of it; still less any gap between perception and reality.
We do know that migrants to the cities move in at very different points in the social hierarchy On the evidence from Sakaltutan, Elbasi and their neighbouring villages, I distinguish, with of course overlaps and complexities, four main groups. A fifth group is not typical of these villages, but is well documented for Turkey,--and other countries.
First the very poor move in to escape village destitution. Very few come from these two villages, but those who do become the urban unskilled--labourers, shoe blacks, porters, street vendors. They are partially employed, the bottom of the town hierarchy. But as has recently been shown even at this level they are likely to enjoy higher incomes in the town than in the villages (Kiray 1970: II).
Secondly, the bulk of the migrants from my villages are skilled men in the building industry. Most of these have some standing in their village, and some land (Stirling 1965:227), and they move because they find that their urban employment offers in their specific case a better way of life or a more satisfactory future than staying in the village.
With these, I include a slightly different group, the factory workers. Some nearby villages had far more of these than did Sakaltutan.
Thirdly, I distinguish from the craftsmen the successful entrepreneurs, though the boundary is not sharp. Two or three men from Sakaltutan have established themselves in Adana as building contractors. One man claimed--and I believe him--to deal in hundreds of thousands of Turkish lira (thousands of pounds sterling). Another ran a business for the machine polishing of new stone mosaic floors. A man from a neighbouring village now builds and owns apartment houses in Ankara. Such families can afford to, and sooner or later will join the prosperous urban professional and business classes. But in 1971 those I met were still basically villagers with village loyalties, village friends, and a village style of life and thought. They were very much self-made men.
Fourthly, there are the educated villagers, those who succeed in continuing their education outside the village through middle and high school, teacher training school, or university. They may end up as clerks, civil servants of various levels, or in the professions. Their education commits them to town and middle-class status imposing a whole set of social relationships, knowledge, assumptions and ways of behaviour radically unlike those of the village. Even those who retain ties with the village no longer see themselves as villagers, and consciously adjust their behaviour for visits to their less educated km.
Finally, in some areas elsewhere, by acquiring land and using new economic opportunities, villagers have built up an agricultural income which provides the means for an urban middle class way of life (Hinderink & Kiray 1970). Some of these move out into town, either switching their capital resources into an urban investment or becoming absentee exploiters of their village property.
By and larger it is still true, even in Elbasi, as I wrote of 1950-52, that villagers treat each other as fellow villagers. Though they are not equals, yet neighbours acknowledge each other; the newly rich cannot escape their poorer past, and the rich and the poor are often linked in kinship' through those of middle rank. Rich and poor share a common culture and a common loyalty.
In towns and cities, by contrast the rich and the poor live apart. Between residentially 'distinct' social classes, the whole pattern of consumption, etiquette, routine behaviour, knowledge, skill, and assumption is different. Sociologists working in industrial societies have recently highlighted and explored a whole range of social mechanisms which tend to reinforce the perpetuation of social disadvantages. People born to poor parents normally live in poor housing, with poor neighbourhood schools, poor public services, high unemployment and poorly paid jobs. Their children suffer in turn. In newly developing countries where the urban proportion of the population is still relatively low and growing very fast, it might be difficult empirically to prove the operation of such mechanisms. But it seems certain that most children born in the poorest sections of the new cities will be seriously disadvantaged.
The position at which a village migrant finds himself in the urban hierarchy is chancy. It depends on his health, his family's health, his wife, how many siblings he has, where he comes in birth order, what resources in the village his father has and what resources(if any)he has himself; sudden disease among sheep or oxen for example might cripple a family. One set of brothers may in one generation contain a successful contractor, an educated civil servant, a plasterer, a farmer and an unskilled labourer. Brothers may keep in touch with each other, but in the next generation the differences of income, and of domestic style, residential area, schooling and status are bound to hamper the effective maintenance of kin ties; and the social distinctions set up in the migrating generation seem likely to persist, as the urban structure brings its barriers down around the newly settled families.
The changes I have been discussing get also the internal hierarchy of the village. Two examples illustrate the point. First, one man who was a poor shepherd in one village was one of the first men to migrate to Germany, and invested his savings in sheep and land. He is now one of the better off men in the village, and employs his brothers to look after his animals. Secondly, households which have specialised in agriculture by machinery may in time achieve a dominant position in the village.
Neither change is unprecedented. I have argued (Stirling 1965: 146) that changes in the relative fortunes of village families from generation to generation were always common and largely fortuitous; and certainly Elbasi had one dominant self-made man who died in 1951. But the rate and scale of the changes have vastly increased. In general, the number of people who have managed to move fairly sharply from their established position in the village rank order is much larger; and secondly, the general range of income in the village is wider. These changes are both a result of and a contribution to the increase in the gross national product of both village and nation. But they also contribute causally to the decline in village social control.
Box 26--Values: Change and Non-change: On my brief visit of 1970, the great changes in the two villages struck me forcibly. The slightly longer visit in 1971 brought a more sober assessment. The men who were my close friends and rough co-evals in 1950 were still there, grandfathers in most cases, but the same people with the same values and beliefs, if with rather wider knowledge. At what for want of a less overworked cliche I might call 'deeper levels', many 'values' are much the same. To illustrate what I mean, I take three examples: marriage; socialisation; and religion, or 'world view',
I was struck by the strength of assumptions and attitudes and customs surrounding sex and marriage. In spite of the changes I have described, and the opportunities migration offers the men, people still hold the same general view. No one courts a girl directly and openly; all marriages are arranged because young men are still keen to have chaste and reputable wives to give them honourable and healthy sons. Most men in the towns seek girls known to them through the village; that is, girls chosen by father, or failing that by other close kin from the village network. A few are beginning to marry girls from other backgrounds; but the emphasis on wifely respectability is as characteristic of most of the townspeople as of the village. A recent national survey of all Turkey including the urban elite, reported go per cent of village respondents as saying that a son ought to begin married life in his father's household, a 'value' which surely is an intricate part of the values about sex and marriage (Timur 1971).
I argued (p. 223) that children growing up in a village with so vast an increase in available information and ideas, not least among their mothers, must grow up different from their elders. But the visible change in child-rearing so far is slight. People do not yet consciously recognise major differences in the treatment of children. In a society where the adult women are still mostly illiterate, and where neither mass media nor government officials have successfully begun to influence motherhood and babycare beliefs and practices, parental assumptions and roles are those which the parents learned from their own parents. Child rearing practices, the related moral and cognitive assumptions, and the 'values' implicit in and passed on by them change only slowly.
Similarly, the village remains committed not only to Islam but to its own particular interpretation of Islam. There are certainly some changes. People know much more about alternative dogmas and interpretations of dogmas; ideas of causality, especially in relation to agriculture, medicine and mechanical technology, are changing; the young are less traditional in religious observance .But far from declining, formal religion is booming. Increased village economic resources are spent on mosques: societies for religious education of children flourish and increase. Equally, the number of villagers who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca,-- the number that is of haci (haji)--is now in double figures in both villages, and still growing. (This religious duty is less arduous than it once was, now that travel agents arrange package tours.)
All the same, the society is becoming more secular in the long term. The large areas of new knowledge which I have discussed are not, unlike most of the old knowledge, related to religious authority or guarantee, and do not fit into the traditional religious universe of the villagers. Equally, people are constrained by the changes to act in a host of new ways which have no connection with religion, not only in new and old occupations, in using fertilisers, tools and techniques, and institutions such as banks and co-operatives (into which for example interest is built without question),--but in formal education, in health practices, in travel, areas where religion was once highly relevant. And while the
young have always been less attentive to religious duties than their elders, it seems obvious that the present generation ignore the ritual duties and moral precepts of religion on a new scale. None of this, as far as I could judge leads the villagers to religious doubt or to reformism. Religious dogma and practice are still absolute and eternal. But their centrality and their relative importance have already been by-passed by the addition to village culture of new areas and new activities which people simply do not relate to religion. This situation cannot be stable, and though it is barely beginning, the processes of change here too must feed on themselves and gradually accelerate.