| Comments and Conclusions
Do I myself draw any conclusions about Turkey? Yes, with these reservations.
Six generalisations. based on these thirteen excellent articles, and on over forty
years of my own work in and on Turkey; with theoretical and, I regret,
moral overtoncs. And a last comment on values.
(i) Demography
The population of Turkey, as I have said, has increased by a factor of
over 4 since 1923; and sincc my arrival in 1950, by 2.5; from 20 million to
well ovcr 50 million. In S in 1950, 600 people resided in 100 households.
In 1986, we estimated 840 people in the village in some 143 households, and
650 people outside the village in 165 households, all descended
patrilineally from those six hundred.4 These national and local increases are
directly due to falling death rates, especially among childrcn.
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Two points. This growth is both proof and the direct result of a gencral rise
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in the standard of living. Second, in no way could these extra people have
stayed alivc without labour migration from the villages. Some migrants
diversiEled and increased village household
GROWTIIAND CIIANGES 7
incomes by remitting urban earnings; some permanently removed
whole households which the villages could neither feed nor
employ, This huge increase in the numbers of both of urban cash
earners, and of rural and urban consumers, must be an integral part
of any causal model of social change. Without remittances and
departures, rural death rates would have simply continued much as
before.
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Was this increase in people, with all its consequences, a good
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thing or a bad thing? That is quite another - unanswerable?
question. I would not know how to begin deciding, but it is not my
job - our job - to do so.
| The real average standard of living has risen sharply. GNP per
capita increased roughly threefold, 1950 - 1986. What I see among
the villagers and their urban descendants makes these calculations a
plausible index. Food, clothes, heating, housing, transport, health
services, household durables and furniture, consumption for
pleasure and for display, operating capital for farming, investments
in agriculture, real estate and businesses are all incomparably more
plentiful per person than in 1950; three times is not obviously
wrong.
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Agriculture alone nowhere near accounts for the increase. In the
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plateau villages which I know, with poor soils and a dry climate, the
changes in agricultural techniques and crops have brought increases
of around 50 per cent in production per hectare. Tractors and other
machinery have greatly reduced the male labour required per
hectare, and thus given a large increase in agricultural productivity
per man day. As Morvaridi stresses, some agricultural changes
actually increase the demand for, and burden of, some kinds of
female labour, mostly unpaid; and many women suffer directly. But
it does not follow that even their productivity has not risen; and
when household income rises, as he says, women also get some
benefit.
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In other parts of Turkey, technical and crop changes, often
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combined with irrigation - cotton, citrus, vegetables, dairying,
poultry, meat production, and so on - have increased both
production per hectare and productivity per person, on a dramatic
scale; in some cases agricultural labour demand has actually
increased (Ak,sit, Chapter 13 and Sirman, 1988). These increases in
turn depend on industrialisation; on tractors, fertilisers, transport,
packaging, food processing; and on markets.
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The growlh of the urban economy - industry and services - has
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8 CUL I URE AND ECONOMY
created a huge demand for this rural labour surplus. I now realise
that till at least the late 1950s, Turkey had in fact a national labour
shortage, greatly aggravated undoubtedly by local and seasonal
under- and un-employment, by shortages of many much needed
skills, and by geographical maldistribution. In hard fact, no one
knows, or has ever known, real current unemployment rates.5
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Wallerstein (Smith and Wallerstein, 1992) has recently classified
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household incomes into five sources; subsistence, profits, wages,
investment income, and transfers. In 1950, most household income
was mainly subsistence, with some profits, from land and animals;
wages were already important for a minority. In 1986, all normal
households had multiple incomes, of which that from land and
animals made up on avcrage a very. much smaller part; in S, I
estimale less than half the total village income.
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Certainly, still in 1986, some were poor, and a few very poor.
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The most common causes of poverty were illness, handicap, or
premature death. Where a household had no land, or very little, no
adult man fit to work and earn, and no unmarried carpet-weaving
daughters, life could be very hard indeed. In towns, unskilled or
socially unsuccessful men might earn very little; the old might not
earn at all. But in 1986, the handicapped apart, no one we met or
heard about from the two villages seemed to be hungry, cold or in
rags. In 1950/1, many were. In terms of material wealth and
comfort, 1986 is, on average and for the vast majority, a totally
different world from 1950.
(iii) Inequality
Successful capitalism creates wcalth; a very large amount of it. It
does nothing whatsoever lo ensure that this wealth is 'fairly', let
alone equally distributed; nor that the production of it is humane
and environmentally harmless. On the contrary, wherever
capitalism has prospered, it has led to major concentrations of
wealth and power for some, destitution for others; and to all kinds
of skulduggery, exploitation, suffering, social disruptions and
political upheavals; not to mention ecological damage. All
governments exercise a vast plethora of controls over market forces
in the public interest, and by and large with considerable success.
They must and do buck the market, and the market in turn depends
on a minimal political guarantee of order
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Overall, Turkey has currently onc of Ihe largest stalistical skews
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GROWTII AND CIIANGES 9
between rich and poor reported in the World Development Report
(World Bank, 1986). A few people - most had advantages to begin
with - have got very rich; most are decidedly better off; some have
remained poor; a few have even got poorer (Paleczek, Chapter 7).
Some enjoy excellent amenities, even in so called gecekondus; others
live and work in terrible conditions, often away from their families
for long periods.
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Could such a society, with different policies, have achieved this
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growth with less inequality, disruption, and suffering? Or could it
have grown even faster? As a social scientist, I do not know; does
anyone?
(iv) Occupational Change
The population not directly dependent on agriculture went up from
around 4 million in 1950 to about 27 million in 1986, nearly seven
times (Istatistik Y1111gl, 1951, 1986). Four-fifths of these extra 23
million must have been the children, children's children, or
children's children's children of peasant families.
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A 'peasant'6 household is assumcd - far too simply - to farm land
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and raise animals, which roughly employs all its collective labour,
and produces enough in kind and in commodities to provide for all
its collective needs. In a village of peasant households, the
occupation of peasant is not an identity. A man is not what he does
for a living, but the owner of a specific house and specific land,
belonging in a specific way to a specific village. Men, women and
children work as members of household teams. In 1950, in S and E,
direct close links with townspeople were fairly rare (cf. Turhan,
1951, Keyder, Chapter 12).
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Men who go to town, go to earn, that is, to find a job. In these
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villages, it was often a building skill; though I do have a list of
about a hundred different occupations. Whatever the job, the new
job holder has to develop an occupational network to get, keep or
renew it, and to make it comfortable and lucrative. In the town a
man is what he does. People learn all kinds of skills and find all
kinds of jobs, and by doing so, they become new 'persons' with
different identities. They now belong, both immediately and
potentially, to a much more complex social structure, with many
new kinds of social relations; and wilh diffcrent futures (Schiffaucr,
Chapter 5), as most conlributors in this book makc clcar.
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It is a commonphlcc lhat villagcs forgc bridgehcads for finding
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10 CULTURE AND ECONOMY
urban jobs and urban housing. So sometimes people from a given
area are concentrated in parlicular occupations, and sometimes in
particular districts in cities. This is not by any means universal. S
men migrants, for example, are nearly all connected to the building
industry, (most of them are tilers), but they are residentially
scattered. The detailed distribution of people in occupations - and
also by residence - is not decided primarily by market forces,
by a whole set of interacting factors, among which the market is
only one.
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Millions of villagers are now distributed in urban Turkey in
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hundreds of new and different occupations, in a wide variety of
residences and with a wide range of incornes, educations and
statuses; they all live in social nelworks very different from those of
full-time farming villagers, and often from each other. They do not
constitute collectively a proletariat, still less an 'informal sector'.7
Occupational change is central to economic growth; and that
requires radical changes in identities, in social structure, in skill and
knowledge, and a fortiori in 'culture'.
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Because virtually al1 villages, and most village households, have
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now members earning in towns, or former members resident in
town, village social networks and identities have also changed
dramatically (cf. Schiffauer, Chapter 5, Abadan-Unat, Chapter 14).
Their networks are far more dispersed. and integrated with the
national and international society, and with Turks abroad; and far
less homologous with those of fellow villagers. Villagers' village
identities reflect the occupations, incomes, social statuses, and
destinations of both their pendular and their household migrants.
(v) Organisational Change
The co-ordinated arrangements of people in groups to get things
done are central to all activities in all societies. Unfortunately, in
social science literature, 'organisation' often suggests modern
management; and 'social organisation', traditional kinship. Even in
small groups, such arrangements virtually always involve some
hierarchy. Organised groups have problems; control and delegation,
legitimacy, privileges for some, internal competition, incompetence,
and the use of organisational power and resources for private, even
nefarious, purposes; larger groups have more problems. The most
conspicuous form of large organisation is the State itself,
government - which was after all only invented about 6,000 years
CROWTH AND Cf
IANGE.S
11
ago. My own hunch is that the progressive invention of more and
more effective forms of co-ordinating people for an increasing
variety of social purposes is one main factor in human social
evolution. What sets the USA, Germany and Japan at the apex of
the contemporary world is superior organisation. Likewise, the
recent manifest political and economic failure of most of the
world's socialist governments is organisational. The state has simply
failed to run a modem economy efficiently and benignly.
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