Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
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claim: a modern European legal system an independent judiciary; women judes, members of parliament, doctors and scientists; a secular outlook free from fanaticism; and the beginnings of industry. All this has been described in a number of books, the titles of which imply renewal and transformation: the Western phoenix springing from the ashes of oriental defeat.1
In these books Turkey is a land of contrasts: the ox-cart beside the combine harvester; the bride in her traditional costume carried to her groom, not on a white horse but in a shiny American taxi. They imply that the quaint and retarding old customs are disappearing before the modern rational revolution. But no author has yet been able to restrain himself from assessing the success of the revolution and perhaps offering advice on how to do it better. No one has asked precisely and objectively what happened to the traditional life of the four-fifths of Turkey's population who work the land and live away from the larger towns and cities and who were forcibly subjected to ideas and reforms modelled on the ideas and institutions of their ancient enemy, infidel Europe.
Social anthropology began as the study of small-scale, pre-literate societies. In these studies, anthropologists learned to place strong emphasis on a long period of intimate acquaintance with one particular community of the society under study. These thorough and detailed studies produced remarkable results, which were not only ethnographically rich and accurate but also stimulated new ways of analysing and interpreting social data. Naive and hopeful, I came into anthropology with the idea of applying similar methods to the study of complex, literate societies with recorded histories, and I chose Turkey for my field more or less by chance. In spite of a training in philosophy and history, I was a beginner in thinking systematically about the problems of society, and I accepted, perhaps rightly, the view of my teachers and colleagues in anthropology that an intensive immersion was the best way to achieve understanding of any society.
How was I, singlehanded, to apply this method to a whole
- E.g. H. Armstrong, Turkey in Travail: the Birth of a New Nation (1925); Edib Halide, Turkey Faces West (1930); H. E. Allen, The Turkish Transformation (1935); E. Jaeckh, The Rising Crescent (144); I. Orga, Phoenix Ascendant(1958).
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