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had severely disrupted the traditional agricultural and craft production
systems of an agrarian society, and almost destroyed its tiny modern industry.Wars
and then the exchange of population with Greece had caused what Keyder (Chapter 12)
calls a demographic catastrophe. But from 1923 on, the Second World War apart, the
2 CULTURE AND ECONOMY
Turkish economy grew by almost 7 per cent till l978, and resumed
growth at around 5 per cent in 1980.
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Changes on this scale at this pace over decades are |
unprecedented in human history, and almost unparalleled even in recent
times, except perhaps for Japan, one or two other contemporary nations, and countries
with mineral windfalls. Certainly, both nationally and in local detail, they are
breathtaking; and extremely complex. 'Ihey are of course part of world capitalist
industrialisation, which, for all the great minds, and billions of words, still defies
description, let alone explanation. But even in the context of the 'world economy',
they are exceptional; and a set of facls which virtually no one seems adequately
to take into account.
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Such a speed of economic growth imposes speed in numerous |
other changes. The movement and the uneven accumulation of old and
new capital in dozens of different ways and thousands of different hands; uneven
increases - and some decreases - in income, some very large; a new national occupational
structure; the migration of millions from villages to towns and cities, and abroad;
the introduction and invention of new ways of organising people,
both in the private sector, economic and otherwise, and in a hugely
increased state sector; masses of new legislation; vast new stocks of unevenly distributed
'social knowledge' - information, science and technology, alternative world views,
political and religious ideas, familiarity with other societies. And so on and so
on.
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In the first years of this growth, when the economy was still |
recovering its former levels, Ataturk carried though his renowned
and astonishing political reforms. The central provinces of the heterogeneous Islamic
Ottoman Empire, legitimated by God, became a sovereign, national, secular Republic,
formally legitimated by the Will of the People (Berkes, 1974). The pragmatic, now
'sacred', boundaries of this newly enacted people nation enclosed a population, following
exchanges and departures, almost wholly Islamic - the majority Sunni of the Hanefi
rite. Over three-quarters spoke a form of Turkish as their mother tongue; the rest
were conveniently decreed to be Turks also.2 Ten per cent were literate, and about 80 per cent were villagers. The basic
State services, and the formal basis of orderly social relations - law and the judiciary,
education, the constitutional status of Islam, the script, even clothes, names, and
the calendar - were transformcd from the top down; in a European and secular direction,
which explicitly rejected the
GROWTH AND CIIANGE.S 3
Ottoman and Islamic past.
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It is one thing to pass laws, and impose conformity on the elites
in the |
main cities. It is quite another to set up the institutions necessary
to provide courts, lawyers, police, schools, teachers, medical services, government
offices, all with adequately trained and loyal personnel. It is even more
difficult to get people all over the country to change their personal habits, talk,
thoughts, customs, moralities. The reforms took decades to put into effective practice.
The interactions between the demographic and economic growth, the new ideas, and
the new laws and institutions are immensely complex. One very general link; it was
economic growth, and especially the migration of the villagers to towns and cities,
that integrated the new nation, by gradually forcing people to apply the reforms
in daily detail.
Theme and Contradiction One theme is complexity. Almost
all refutations of specific social science 'theories' amount to establishing that
the theory or model is too simple. Usually rightly, because none of the models or
theories discussed or proposed so far, measure up to the complexity of social
processes, still less to the scale and speed of the changes in those processes. Not
only the 'ordinary' people, the educated elite, and the politicians, professionals,
and business men who make decisions for others, but we the accredited social science
experts cannot do other than use models which are too simple.
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The opposite is often claimed, and is highly plausible. Simplicity
is the |
essence of scientific advance; atoms, viruses, the double helix. A
major controversy. The great simplifiers in the social sciences are less precise,
and less accepted; the hidden hand, the class struggle, false consciousness, reciprocity,
segmentary structures, binary opposites, power and prestige, clientelism. And while
simplifying is a necessary condition for working at all, we are not ready enough
to recognise that simplifying also - inevitably misrepresents.
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In practice, all social scientists, even those who deny it, use the
idea of a |
| complex set of related processes which enable a society both recognisably
to continue its existence and at the same time to change. I cannot see how to conceive
of 'process' if not as a set, a tangled web, of interacling causes and effects. When
the changes are rapid, the devising of adequate 'models' is prodigiously difficult. |
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The title of this book is a simplification. By setting 'culture' and |
4 CULTURE AND ECONOMY
'the economy' side by side, I suggest, fallaciously, two entities
between which causes and eftects are possiblc. The same fallacy is implicit in distingulshing
between culture and social structure, as I also did in my the first invitatlon to
the Conference. I was restating the one time anthropological orthodoxy - 'substantivism'
- that purely economic models of social processes grossly underestimate both 'culture',
in the anthropological sense, and social structure, in the sense of the whole intricate
pattern of social relations. But if culture is defined as everything learned, it
cannot strictly be separate from, and opposed to, the cconomy or to the social structure;
it must include them.
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But the word is a chameleon, overused for convenience. It offers |
multiple escapes from precision. So let me make my point in more verbose
rhetoric. The fund of cosmologies, myths, religious ideas, historical narratives,
political models, private moralities, customs, rites, technologies, scientific ideas,
which exists in any society at any given point in time must profoundly affect the
way that economy functions and the way it changes; and economic growth must in turn
have profound and multifarious consequences for that fund. A truism, but one largely
ignored in practice; which is why economists and marxists get so many things so very
wrong.
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I used 'culture' because it is fashionable, and convenient. The |
notion of 'social structure' as a pattern of social relations - once
called role relations - is less fashionable, but no less fundamental. It covers all
social conduct, from minutc by minute social encounters to the national and international
distribution of power and resources. But who would allow '(Culture-and/or-Social
Structure), and the Economy' as a title for anything?
The Two Theories Let me caricature the two main 'economistic'
ways of thinking about Turkey's experience. Modernisation theories implicitly assume
that, with minor hiccoughs and accidents, all human societies, are being carried
by unbuckable market forces towards a blessed, competitive state of advanced
capitalist industrial prosperity, in a set of sovereign 'nation' states, each with,
sooner or later, liberal elections. All humans will eventually enjoy human rights,
and all will be comfortable and happy, if unequal. Except, of course, sadly, for
the inevitable losers at the bottom (20 per cent?); the unfortunate, the incompetent,
the undeserving, the unduly unsellish; and the
GROWTH AND CHANGES S
| 'individually9 bad, or rallher, the bad who are unsuccesstul. These
are taken care of by private charity, lby public welfare, and by the police and the
prisons. |
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Radicals - mainly (at the time of the conference) varieties of marxists
and |
| socialists - stress the appalling and cruel inequalities of modern
capitalism, both within and between nations; the ways that the rich and powerful, |
| deliberately or inadvertently, exploit the 3poor |
for their own advantage, and |
| prevent them from catching up |
; |
and, incidentally, are destroying the planet |
| in the process. They advocate or used to - an alternative road to
umversal happiness, based on rational, egalitarian and sellless co-operation and
equality, organised by benign public control. Both sides treat 'culture' as a set
of economically irrelevant pleasures and customs, and of traditional, even 'irrational',
practices and 'attitudes', which may well inhibit progress. They do not allow for
a set of autonomous 'cultural' faccors in the social process; still less do they
see themselves, their theories, and their political supporters as social and cultural
phenomena to be analysed; phenomena which their own theories do not explain. |
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These theories, like most -allX - others, advocate or imply moralities,
and |
purposes. People, including academics, see opponents as lost in culpable
error, even as morally 'evil'. In spite of endless discussion of 'values' in the
social sciences, the damage they do to clear thinking still seems to me seriously
underestimated. If my own strongly held and often incompatible moralities confuse
my own thinking, I find the same difficulties in much that I read.
Four Convictions These papers then confirm four long-standing
convictions. First, that the main task, and one which all of us take seriously, is
modestly to establish specific causalities; that is, that a factor X has at least
some influence on an outcome Y; or that an outcome Y is in part a result of a factor
X. Yet authors avoid using the word 'cause' itself, using instead an endless variety
of euphemisms.
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Second, lhat both the 'facts' and the causal processes about which
most of |
us express some confidence are far more difficult to establish than
most of us admit.
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Third, the central words, the major concepts, are virtually always
shifting |
and fuzzy.
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Fourth. We claim to sludy the 'mental maps', 'models' - large scalc
and |
small scale, culturally and personally constructed - which
other people lise. It is fashionable
to stress, rnore than in the recent past, that we too have such mental maps
and models, which are ;kewise constructed by our own cultures and personalities.
)hviously tme and importan~~; implying a duty for 'rellexivity'.
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But it does not follow that our work is invalidn These 'maps' are |
transmissible. discussablc and in spite of 1osses, errors and nisunderstandin,
,s, arc by and large cumulalivei they do get better as rnaps over time. To put the
point differently, mankind has manifestly in the last 10,00(! years, and especially
in the last 200, accumulated by logic and evidence an immcnse store of 'truth', of
effective maps of reality; social as well as physical. Yet it remains true (!) that
every individual human lives, must live, in a cognitive universe, the main out]ines
of which rest not on logic, evidence and research, but on faith. And moreover even
the myriad practical detailed maps of social reality which describe bits of
that universe for daily use also rest more often on faith or on authority than on
experience, direct evidence and logic. The ethnography of l.hese 'maps'
iS both central to the changes in Turkey, and extremely difficult
to record accurately.
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