Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER FIVE
THE HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY
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who cannot raise a few lire for a bottle of medicine may nevertheless be accustomed to thinking in terms of quite large sums - on whih of course a household may have to survive until the next windfall, generally the next harvest. When they discuss wage-earning they talk about rates per day, or how much they can save in a month away, never about weekly and rarely about monthly wages. Most migrant labourers regard wage-earning not as a provision for daily needs, but as a way of raising lump sums when need presses, to clear a debt, to meet famine, or to finance a wedding, a house or an ox. In most cases, in the rare intervals when no such special need hangs over a household, men much prefer to stay at home.
This thinking in lump sums is precisely opposite to that of western urban workers, who prefer to have their lump-sum purchases converted to weekly outgo by hire-purchase and mortgage arrangements. This difference in outlook is surely related to levels of saving. In the village economy the notion of regular accumulation of cash or bank balance is largely absent. Saving normally takes the form of increasing the household stock of animals. Beyond a certain point, the accumulation of animals increases problems of feeding and looking after them so much that loss by illness becomes likely. This point is not often reached, largely because special demands face most households fairly frequently and use up spare resources.Formally, the direction of economic activities in any village household lies with the household head. In a small household, the head will normally himself perform most of the major farming tasks and leave his wife to her recognised duties in the home. In larger households, the father directs his sons, and although exceptions came to my notice, in the majority of cases the authority of the head is unquestioned. Even adult sons are directly dependent on their father for cash - no one ever suggested making a son an allowance. So long as the household owns sufficient resources to be able to maintain itself by farming, the undisputed control of resources by the head makes it very difficult to challenge him, short of splitting the land. The cash which junior members earn by their efforts outside the household and often outside the village is a very different matter. A priori, the solidarity of the household as a `firm', and the authority of the head as dispenser of all income is threatened
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