Chapter One
The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the models social scientists construct
about the world as they see it. Specifically I am asking "Did Paul Stirling
in his analysis of social change in a Turkish village over a 42 year period 'get
it right'"? "What does it 'mean' to get a 'social model right'"? In
trying to address these questions I will be concerned with the causes and effects
of labour migration22
in Sakaltutan and the 'intuitively obvious'? but highly abstract concepts of causality,
modeling & 'causal change in societies'.
Stirling's data is unusual in its quantity, quality and the time period over which
it runs. For these reasons it is suitable for a range of analyses rarely undertaken.
Stirling has provided not only unusual data but has also brought to bear a consistent
and cumulative analysis of it. He has formulated a set of 'models' of social processes
and, although it is beyond the scope of this dissertation to evaluate them all, I
will attempt to evaluate the descriptive and explanatory power of one of these models.
As this was a preliminary investigative study, far more data was analysed and
supporting materials collected than is necessary for the arguments outlined below.
For these reasons a lot of the Supplementary data and analysis are held in appendices
on the web site version.[1]
of this dissertation.
In Chapter One I will present a review of the relevant ethnographic materials.
I will outline the development of Stirling's ideas on causality and examine the 'models'
he built up to help explain his findings. I will introduce his now infamous 'metonymy'?
"The Wiring Diagram" and look specifically at his models of population
change & migration. Then in Chapter Two I will discuss the use of standard
computer based tools i.e. databases, 3D graphical & statistics packages used
in quantitative and qualitative analysis as well as more esoteric, bespoke, mathematical
modeling techniques such as simulation. I will provide some theory as to why these
methods might be useful. In Chapter Three I will analyse some of the data
in Stirling's Turkish Village database and, producing population demographics, and
other primary indexes of change within the village, present a simplified proto simulation
model of migration. It is the eventual aim of this project to investigate Stirling's
models further by the use of more advanced simulation techniques. In Chapter Four
I will summarise the results, namely that social science models can indeed be
"tested' if the ethnography is good enough. When well done, the art of modeling
can penetrate into the mysts of the social world and a developing 'systems' approach,
although initially demanding of the practictioner, can offer new insights, confirmations
or rebutals of anthropological work. I will conclude by discussing the web site version
of this dissertation and its implications for collaborative research.
The Ethnographic Context
Field Work & General Overview.
When Paul Stirling died in June 1998 he left behind him an extensive and impressive
ethnography of his life's work on Turkish villages including his and other researchers
field
notes, a
book, published articles,
unpublished drafts, book reviews, newspapers and periodical pieces;photographs, four films, a website [2]
and a database.
The following ethnographic review will use these resources, most of which are also
freely available to other researchers via the internet, to trace the diachronic development
of two particular lines of his thought, those concerning labour migration and causal
processes.
On the web site[3]
version of this dissertation there are hypertext links to most quoted documents to
allow for more detailed comparison.
In 1939 Stirling read and was inspired by Ruth Benedict's 'Patterns of Culture'
after an Oxford year of undergraduate Latin & Greek. He saw active service as
a Royal Navy Officer during the war and returned to Oxford in its aftermath to complete
a first degree in Ancient History and Philosophy. Dissatisfied with the questions
raised in these disciplines he decided to become a social anthropologist. He was
fascinated by the idea of comparative studies of societies, especially the concepts
of social systems & social structures. He left to do field work in Turkey, funded
by the British Treasury, in 1949 with this advice from his supervisors:
Meyer Fortes said 'Everything in the village concerns you'. Evans-Pritchard
said 'Find what they are most interested in and study that.'(Stirling 1992b)
He was looking for 'social structure'; groups, networks and hierarchy and has
reflected since that he had not realised how much a 'mildly informed but detailed
ethnography of (the religion -Ed.) might contribute'(Stirling 1992b). Nor did he expect to be able to understand
the way the villagers thought and felt with only an outsiders command of language
(Stirling
1992b). He says that he was 'aware but suspicious of 'culture' and of grand evolutionary
theories' and perceived himself to be 'somewhat arrogantly philosophically cynical' (Stirling
1992b). He also had doubts about 'structure' & 'social system' and about
the way historians and Islamists wrote about history and Islam.
In April 1949 he arrived together with his wife Margaret in Turkey. Their intention
was to study villagers simply because he believed that this was where 'our' greatest
ignorances lay (Stirling,
1965). He had decided to study one village thoroughly and another in less detail.
His choices of villages were more or less accidental. When the staff of an American
school and clinic situated near Kayseri offered them a base, he accepted. The village
he 
chose to study with the most detail was called Sakaltutan
which means 'beard grasper'. The villagers tell the story that: 'a man caught
his beard in a narrow pass on the road across the bowl from the village'[4]. He later discovered that Sakaltutan was the name of
a tribe / lineage from Asia and that beard grasping is quite an aggressive act. However,
the village is thought to be less than 200 years old and it is likely that is was
settled after having been used as a pastural summer camp by people from villages
near Kayseri.
He was in Sakaltutan from November 1949 to August 1950. Margaret joined him in
the March of 1950. Sakaltutan had 'an excellent water supply, more or less regular
lorries into Kayseri, and eleven other villages within an hour and a half's walk'
(Stirling
1965).
During their time they managed to collect a simple house by house census &
make notes on genealogies. Both he and Margaret produced comprehensive field notes
and took B&W
Photographs
In 1951 they returned to the area and from August to November lived in a second
village called Elbasi some five hours walk east of Sakaltutan. Elbasi was studied
because it provided a contrast to Sakaltutan, being richer, more agriculturally dependent,
more sophisticated, less isolated and in the center of the main district of Nahiye.
He reflected later that it was the similarities between the villages that in
fact that were the most striking.
At the end of 1951 he returned to the UK to take up a post at the L.S.E.but returned
to Elbasi alone for two months during the summer in 1952. His fieldwork monograph
'Turkish
Village' was finally published in 1965.
In 1971 he returned for the first time to Sakaltutan for two months but because
of the military government, was only able to do two weeks work in the villages with
the help of an official 'guide'. He only had three days in each. He managed to collect
information on every person in his 1951 census in Sakaltutan by questioning a constantly
changing room full of people who came to greet him. In Elbasi he was only able to
check up on every person in every third household from his 1951 census. His records
reflect his astonishment at the changes in village life he encountered.
Fig 1.
From 1974 onwards he was able to visit Turkey every year apart from 1977. From 1983
to 1986 he was visiting Professor at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara.
He held official research permission from July - October 1985 at which time it was
suddenly rescinded without any explanation, however from March 1985 he was able to
collect data on all individuals and households in Sakaltutan and about half from
Elbasi by driving 14 miles by car from Talas every day armed with specially printed
interview cards. In 1989 he returned to Turkey for six weeks between June and July,
and from April to June 1990 to check on and expand his data. His last publication
directly concerning the villages was in 1994.
The Material[5]
In this section I will try to outline some of Stirling's ideas on social causality
and illustrate the kinds of data he was collecting.
Stirling's early work reflects a strong interest in structural analysis. In his
first articles 'Social
Rank in a Turkish Village' (Stirling, 1953) and 'Land, Marriage, and the Law in Turkish villages '(Stirling1957)
which are based on his 1949-50 field trips, he gives basic statistics on population
and household numbers & estimates of landholdings in the villages. He describes
village ownership of land, marriage and inheritance(see
Appendix B), details of staple crops[6] grown44and
times of harvest5 approximate yields and available agricultural technologies, transport
and communications.
In his analysis of 'rank1'
(Stirling, 1953) he comes to the 'general' conclusions that within Sakaltutan there
were:
1. No formal hierarchical schemas.
2. No hereditary stratification.
3. No marked etiquette of privilege.
He states that the most important ranking 'scale' is wealth, in this case land
and animals.
- Money is quickly and easily spent, and a salary may cease at any moment, but
land and animals are permanent assets, permanent security against hunger and poverty
(Stirling, 1953).
Stirling's paper published in 1963 The
domestic cycle and the distribution of power in Turkish Villages is a seminal
paper. It offers valuable structural generalisations of the village and is fundamental
in that he outlines, giving historical evidence, two possible models of land availability.
He identifies 2 main characteristics of the domestic cycle and 2 main characteristics
of the distribution of power within the village(Appendix
B2).
A full joint 3 generation household type is posited as being the 'ideal' (Stirling,
1963). The average age expectancy he quotes as around sixty for men with an average
gap of about 25 years between father and son. Therefore, an average household head
would have to spend around 15 years after his father died before his grandson was
born leaving him ten years as household head before his own death. So, in an average
village at any one time less than half the households would be full joint ones. (Stirling,
1963). In reality he reports that only 15 out of 105 house holds fulfilled this ideal.
This contained 22% of the population. Obviously achieving a full joint household
was difficult. Prior to 1950 the infant mortality rate had been high, approximately
30% (Stirling, 1998) as well as the infertility rate. Miscarriages were common. Couples
could conceive a run of daughters. Adult men died prematurely leaving unmarried children.
This had been accentuated by events such as conscription into the Ottoman army. The
wars in turkey between 1911 and 1922 had a marked effect and he states that in the
past the death rates had been even higher.
General historical notes of interest are provided in the notes section23.
As a result of the second world war many village men had seen active service and
the village population had again suffered from their absence. This is borne out by
the demographics. Their return however brought knowledge of new medicines. In the
early 1950's the U.S. was pouring aid into Turkey in the form of cash, medicines
and infrastructure i.e. roads for U.S. military purposes. These new roads ran close
to the remote villages whose menfolk, often with picks and shovels, dug feeder roads
to them. The newly elected government was also trying to implement elementary health
care policies. In this way goods such as medicines were making their way into the
villages and being accepted for the first time. Margaret and Paul Stirling were present
in the village when the very first antibiotics arrived. They boiled up the penicillin
in bowls on top of billy cans before administering it to the very first patients
for tuberculosis, bad cuts and fevers etc.
In a prophetic statement Stirling says:
- The recent fall in the death rate and improvement in health conditions has led
to a rapid increase in population34 but so far this has the effect of increasing
the proportion of younger simple households. If the death rate continues to fall,
and the household structure does not change, the proportion of full joint households
in the villages will eventually increase. (Stirling, 1963)
It is apparent with hindsight that Stirling's analysis was essentially correct.
He had managed to analysis the social dynamics to the point of being able to make
simple conditional predictions after having only been there at this stage for less
than a year.
Marriage patterns are an essential component of the village lifecycle and will
be used in more complex analysis in the future.There seems however to have been little
in the way of stratified marriage arrangements. I have summarised the data in Appendix B5.
1950 seems to have been a water shed in the history of Sakaltutan and of Turkey
Generally11 (Stirling
1974). It is probable that the village had being undergoing constant changes over
the last 200 years but its environmental 'constraints' were about to be changed in
ways previously impossible.
After the general election in 1950 the new democratic government showed conspicuous
interest in maintaining the villagers vote by providing services such as roads and
water supplies. Public buildings and schooling were also taken over by the state.
The government provided the village also with a little paid employment. The state
office of soil products which controlled grain prices & agricultural credit was
already taken for granted at this stage and the two areas of 'need' lay in improvements
in technological efficiency and health care - cures for current illness. Around 1950
the government was trying to provide heath care visitors for the villages.
1n 1950 Stirling had classified village households into 4 groups: (Stirling, 1965
p69):
49 depended entirely on their land, or used other sources only to a minor degree
in
emergencies;
16 derived the main part of their income from work outside the village;
22 normally used both these sources;
13 derived their income largely or wholly from work inside the village.
It is clear that by the early 60's this is starting to change dramatically45 (see Appendix C).
By 1965 cash was becoming the preferred means of meeting obligations within the
village. Permanent migration was still however quite rare and by all accounts most
people preferred to stay in the village with people they knew.
From a passage on gender differences: 12
- The contrast between men and women is sharply emphasised in every way. They are
separate in work and leisure. The division of labour is clear, and in full households
is strictly observed. Men do the heavy work in the fields, control all transport,
and conduct all relations with the outside world, including almost all buying and
selling. They make all major decisions, at least ostensibly, and defend the household
and its honour. (Stirling, 1965 p117)
we can see that at this stage only men could ever migrate to work. The women could
only generate income if it was within the village. Since the 1960's Sakaltutan had
been part of the home working sector of the Kayseri hand made carpet industry with
practically all village girls weaving during the winter for very little pay. What
pay they received would probably go towards their 'Trousseau' or bride gift or to
the head of the house hold.
The first permanent migrants, in accordance with national trends, moved out with
their whole households and settled in town around 1957[7] (Stirling,
1988). He argues that the village was being transformed into a small agro-business.
By the early 70's agricultural labour had dropped dramatically with the introduction
of tractors and fertilizers and there was more surplus to sell.
By 1988 he states that a patrilineal reckoning of household growth gives a figure
of 3 households for every one in 1950 and estimates that about half of these descended
house holds are now in town. (Stirling, 1988)
He gives the average house hold size for 1950 as being 6.0. 6.4 in 1971 and 5.74
in 1986. In the towns in 1986 this was 4.25, up from 1971 and climbing.
In Labour Migration in
Turkey: Thirty Five Years of Changes, 1991
He continues his analysis of the census data and includes a table for Sakaltutan
showing the increase of population and the rate of migrant households outflows from
1950 - 1986. (Appendix C)
Stirling reports that by 1993 the outflow of households from Sakaltutan had increased
and only about 110 were left.
By working with his new database - still not completed at this point, he was able
to compute other useful indexes such as income breakdown estimates for households
from 1950 - 1986. (Table 2, Appendix C)
Stirling & Áncirlioglu, (1994) are able to give a diachronic breakdown
of villagers with migration experiences over the periods of his census(see
Appendix C). This shows a rise from 48.6% in 1950 to 86.9% in 1986 for males
over 14 years of age and a rise of 24.7% in 1950 to 50.7% in 1986 for females over
14 years of age. Marriage to first cousins has been and still is common in Turkey[8] but Stirling's
field work from 1971 to 1986 shows a '24 per cent in 1951 to 1960 to 29 per cent
in 1980' (Stirling, Áncirlioglu, 1994) and it was still increasing in 198628-31.
They suggest that this is more to do in risk evaluation and changes in social cognition
than any form of Straussian alliance theory26.
Land in the village had always been of principal importance. Not only land but
Oxen to work the land. After having argued that legal changes at the national level
regarding land reform are only indirectly relevant to the village (Stirling, 1957),
and therefore that he is justified in modeling the recent village history independently
of national reforms, he outlines two models of land availability. The conditions
for ploughing are similar in each.35
Type 1. Surplus of land - More land is available for cultivation than the
village population with their technical resources can use. Hence anyone who has the
necessary manpower, draught animals and seed, can plough land freely. What emerges
is a self regulating social system, constrained by its natural environment, with
little in the way of hereditary social stratification in which it is the hard work,
vitality and 'luck' of each household as to how they fair from generation to generation.
Type 2. Scarcity of land - All cultivable land is under cultivation, except
for essential meadow land for pasture. In this situation prestige and wealth can
no longer be obtained by simply being able to 'plough more land'. Other avenues have
to be sort in which a household can be 'successful'. It is no longer the begetting
of sons that necessarily leads to status and wealth and reluctant migrations to more
fertile pastures soon follow.
I summarise the relevant details for Type 1 Surplus of land in Appendix B3. (Stirling qualifies his statements here carefully6).
A summary of the details of model Type 2, Scarcity of land is in Appendix B4.
Stirling claims that by 1950 land was already scarce and the possibilities for
increasing 'wealth' limited.(Stirling, 1953). He suggests that the possibilities
for earning cash outside the village were increasing and by having sons as migrant
workers the household head could still become wealthy. This is important as status
was not hereditary (Stirling, 1953). Each man had to rise from the 'poverty' of his
share of inherited land from his father to a position of wealth 'on the backs of
his own sons' (Stirling, 1953).
Migrant workers however were not dependent on their fathers for their earnings
and could leave home if totally dissatisfied. So migrant workers could both help
increase the status of the household but at the same time undermine the authority
of the father.
Stirling has identified two influences on the dynamic of the village as being
the need of the sons to find their own wealth and status, and the availability of
resources that allow them to do it.
He was fully aware of the exceptions to any general statement he could make but
nevertheless in doing so he came up with some 'rules' & 'constraints' implicit
in these two situations. The analysis of them lead to his first explicitly stated
'cyclical feedback model':
- As a household grows with the birth of sons, its needs and its manpower grow
also. The household head takes over more land, which his sons plough for him. With
more manpower and gun power his household becomes more important. The household income
per capita will also increase, partly because the young men have few if any children
of their own to support, partly because the coordination of several workers and several
teams of oxen increases efficiency. The household head can run a guest room, provide
hospitality, and acquire supporters. His household reaches a peak of wealth and power.
But when he dies and the households land is divided, each son will receive roughly
as much as one man can plough. In most cases, each heir will have to face the period
of early married life with young dependent children on his own, and he is unlikely
to count for much personally in the village. He will be unable to produce much surplus,
nor vein he need to do so. Only those who succeed in begetting and bringing up a
number of sons will in turn become heads of important village households, and on
their death, these will again divide into small and unimportant ones. Thus there
is a tendency for the sons of large and powerful households to start roughly equal
with the sons of more modest households. A father's importance is less relevant to
the importance of descendants than their own hard work, health, fertility and luck.(Stirling,
1963)
From these models Stirling forecasts in 1963 the following:
- Since the population is now growing with no accompanying growth in overall production,
the village standard of living is likely to fall. Increasing underemployment and
poverty can only be offset by a rise in the demand for profitable migrant labour3.(Stirling,
1963)
To the extent that these two model might hold, he suggests that the important
transitional period between them was in the late 1940's when there was a 'land rush'.
Villagers vied with each other to claim 'common land' by ploughing it up. Stories
abound of competing lineage and household members ploughing strips alongside each
other in order to render claims useless. (Stirling, 1965).
These two forces collide when land is in shortage. If migration is an option
and land is scarce then here is a motivation for a son to take that option - even
if the land can still carry the population.
If we try to ask then what really was going on in these villages at that
time37, Stirling's
observations that the state's new system of land and marriage registration4 was not
taken seriously by the villages (Stirling, 1957) renders the official statistics,
at best unreliable, and at worst useless. In order to go further we need the kind
of data that only an immersed longitudinal study can provide.
Stirling is obviously already used to 'manipulating' his mental models when he
speculates about the consequences of a later or earlier division of the household9 and about the
relationship between inherited power and this domestic cycle10. From these 'simulations' he can see
how the system oscillates and he makes an important remark concerning social stability.
- This system, as I have described the model, was self-adjusting. Even the rare
case of a man whose success grew beyond the bounds of his own village was confronted
both with increasing difficulties in the maintenance of equilibrium within his empire,
and with its extinction at his death. (Stirling,1963)
His ability to analysis such complicated systems were not without reward. In his
1963 article he projects his analysis towards the future and anticipates much of
the development of the next 20 years & he felt that he understood the situation
well enough to make the following theoretical observation.
- The village migrants in no way form a proletariat as such. Some do find themselves
with nothing to sell but their labour; mostly those with serious misfortunes, or
low skills and little village resources. But the great majority manage, as I have
said, to own their dwellings, to invest in real estate, to run shops or businesses.
Most of them have ambitions for themselves or at least for their children, whom they
send to town secondary schools, and higher education. I found nothing I would call
'working class culture'. So far, urban financial success does not of itself self
isolate the village migrants from their village kin.Turkey is certainly an extremely
unequal society, and analysis in terms of social class is, to say the least, plausible.(Stirling,1994)
There is evidence that Stirling's thinking has been increasingly occupied with
notions of causality in his 1970 article for The New Atlantis:
- The third task attempted in these papers may be called prediction, plausible
guessing, forecasting or divination, according to taste. Successful analysis should
make this possible. Some forecasting is simply statistical extrapolation from the
present, but some depends on the assumption that social processes in train at present
have been correctly identified, and without serious omissions. (Stirling, 1970)
and in an important passage he says (my bold print):
- One way of bringing home the difficulty of systematic and cogent study of the
problems is to look at the variables which the papers have implicitly or explicitly
discussed. Much sociological literature is full of references to variables, -- dependent
variables, independent variables, intervening variables, interdependent variables
and so on. In practice, the possible variables in any given social event or social
situation are legion; a finite list is never possible; and, moreover, the variables
on any list are hardly ever mutually exclusive. It is often a relatively arbitrary
matter whether we divide the "variables" into three or five or seventeen.
Even if distinct variables can be listed with confidence, the relations between them
may be so complex that to weigh their relative contribution in a causal sense may
be impossible. Advances in conceptual analysis are almost invariably in the direction
of correcting simplifications, -- as Garbett and Kapferer's paper [9]illustrates. (Stirling,
1970)
He is trapped between 'knowing' on the one hand that a good analysis has a degree
of prediction in it, and having the understanding that the social world is so complex
that any attempt to represent it in terms of relationships and variables seems absurd.
Following up to this he then argues:
- I am arguing that almost invariably the explanations and analyses offered by
social scientists are too simple and too general. They fail to meet the complexities
of any one specific case, and even more they fail to account for a whole range of
cases. But so long as we recognise and acknowledge this limitation clearly, we can
both argue about particular cases and about the relevance of the analysis of one
example to other, similar, examples. What we must have, and in detail, is the specific
case material. Several papers provide analyses of particular countries or of particular
minorities within those countries. But what is conspicuously absent is intensive
study of a number of particular cases, based on direct personal knowledge of the
people involved."(Stirling, 1970)
and in a hark back to sentiments expressed in his 1953 paper, he asks:
- What guarantee do social scientists have that their own perceptions of social
reality are not limited, as they claim those of others to be, by their own socialisation
and their own social position as career intellectuals in a particular professional
environment? This argument is salutary in that it keeps us suspicious of ourselves,
and tolerant of others. But no one can avoid the assumption that what he perceives
as real is real, and those responsible for decisions have to base their decisions
on this assumption. It is up to us to do our best to see that their perceptions are
as accurate and sensitive as possible."(Stirling, 1970)
His return to the field in 197118
and his dissatisfaction with the explanatory theories he was familiar with seem to
have been the motivating spur for his next and arguably most important workCause, Knowledge and Change: Turkish Village Revisited (1974)
This article appeared four years later in a book dedicated to the anthropologist
Lucy Mair, "Choice and Change."J.Davis (Ed.) (1974).
It is very obvious19
that he felt a real need to address these problems of 'representation'. He goes on
to ask:
- What is it that changes? Or is it more appropriate to make the question plural?
What are the things that change? All things change all the time, including people
and communities and societies. How much change then, and in what, do we need before
we talk of 'social change'? (Stirling, 1974)
By problematising the situation in this way he was able to attempt an answer.
He takes as his baseline Lucy Mair's 1969 article'How small-scale societies change'
and extends her definitions.
- Like others, I, too, felt I needed some kind of classification or summary
or framework in terms of which to think out the changes I observed.(Stirling, 1974)
He proposes four types of change.
1. Social Relationships - role relationships between people living in the village
and in nearby villages, and also those with people outside the rural area--with officials,
employers, fellow workers, bank managers.
2. Knowledge and Beliefs21
- this he concedes is a difficult category to define20
and make the crucial point:
What people believe is....extremely difficult to state accurately. Yet to describe
social change, we must make the attempt, since beliefs certainly change; and change
more than people are normally willing or able to make explicit.(Stirling, 1974)
3. Values
Of this category Stirling says:
If peoples knowledge expands greatly, then there are likely to be changes in the
notions of what to aim for, what is desirable, what is right and good, what is tolerable,
what is acceptable and what is unacceptable.(Stirling, 1974)
4. General Characteristics
In this 'everything else' bag he mentions the effect of the introduction of money
& market principles on traditional reciprocities and the move towards bartering
& profiteering. He notes that if the possibilities of acquiring knowledge, skill
& wealth are greater then changes in the village hierarchy will accelerate and
that external intervention in the form of state and commercial institutions not only
effect the village but blur the distinctions between village and the 'outside'.
He then tries to conceptualise 'Cause'[10]:
- What is clear.... is that notions of cause are implicit in any description. It
is impossible to eliminate from our thinking and writing a whole series of phrases
like gives rise to, means (in a causal sense), stems from or particles like since,
as and for in weak causal meanings. Such covert causal statements are worth attempting
to make explicit.(Stirling, 1974)
and in the next paragraph he states explicitly for the first time his theoretical
aim:
- I would like to be able to present a description of changes in which these
causal connections were made explicit, and accurately weighted, with clear indications
of both the reliability and the general validity of the implied causal statements.
But if societies are as complex as I have suggested, then a causal analysis even
of a 'stable' society is fantastically difficult. To describe such a set of causal
connections when they are changing is far more difficult. Yet I see no easier way
out. So I have attempted to describe at least some of the changes, and to suggest
some causal connections between them. (Stirling, 1974)
At the end of many years of chewing the cud he has started to crystalise ideas
that have been bothering him for years. This paragraph is the key to understanding
his motivation for producing his infamous 'wiring diagram'. It is a transitional
paragraph which in thinking terms leads from the window of the poet to the door of
the mathematician. This diagram will occupy the rest of this dissertation. The boxes
and arrows of specific interest are marked in RED.
THE 'WIRING DIAGRAM'
Fig. 2
In Stirling's words:
The main diagram summarises some of the ideas that occurred to me while I was
in the field, and afterwards while going over my notes. I can weight neither factors
nor causal links; the factors are not mutually exclusive, nor are the boundaries
around them always clear. These 'factors' indeed are not even things of the same
general order of existence. Equally the causal connections for which the lines and
arrows stand are not of the same kind, and do not reflect similar 'efficacy' or similar
processes. Even the double boundaries which I use to emphasise certain factors as
crucial are selected on my own judgement.....Any two-dimensional diagram must simplify
reality. Even so, the point of the diagram is to illustrate complexity, and these
misgivings I make explicit in order to add weight to this emphasis. In what follows
I shall not discuss all thirty-one boxes, for some hardly need comment; nor will
they always be discussed in serial order, but rather in the order which best suits
the development of my argument.(Stirling, 1974)
A full explanation of the various boxes is available on the website[11] and in Appendix B6.
In the section 'Some Causal Chains' he suggests that the connections be looked
upon as 'hypotheses' and illustrates how causal chains can be extracted from the
diagram.
He extracts three casual chains40
all of which are relevant to migration and population growth.(def. Permanent &
Pendular migrants)39.They
are reproduced below:
Causal Chain 141
Falling death rate
|
v
More people
|
v
Less village resources per head
|
v
Pendular migration
|
v
Higher incomes
|
v
Better nutrition and better medicine
|
v
Falling death rate
Fig. 3
It is this chain that I will refer back to in the later analysis.
Causal Chain 242
Sporadic pendular migration
|
v
Higher incomes
|
v
Higher minimum standards of living
|
v
Aspirations for higher incomes
|
v
Regular migration for all young men
Fig. 4
This model simply shows that, given other factors, once sporadic pendular migration
has begun, it causes a rise in village expectations, which in turn causes migration
to become a normal and regular part of village life.(Stirling, 1974)
Causal Chain 343
Pendular migration
|
v
Permanent migration
|
v
Increased pendular migration
|
v
Increased permanent migration
Fig. 5
These simple chains are examples of feedback loops (Forrester, 1968) in which
a limited number of variables effect an outcome in a limiting, accelerating or stablising
fashion. They are the basics of any form of systems dynamics analysis. Stirling,
apparently with little knowledge of these fields has followed his 'causal instincts'
and come up with pretty much the same basics.
For the first time he has drawn together his thoughts and concerns from the previous
25 years into a theoretical paper but he is still problematised by the result. His
levels of insight & analysis at this point are impressive and so is the manner
in which he choose to encapsulate this 'understanding' 'The wiring diagram' is a
simple 'metonymic device'. A 2 dimensional diagram showing relationships between
conceptual entities abstracted from his own constantly refined, reassembled, reworked
ideas and experiences of Turkey and the villages. The fact that it appears so simple
is both its mastery and its mystery. To the analytically shallow and less engaged
mind its attempt to convey complexity through simplicity is laughable, but to the
initiate it provides a pathway through a very tangled forest of understanding to
the beginnings of a realisation. This sort of causal thinking, now unfashionable
in the social sciences is I feel at the very heart of the scientific endeavour. Not
as a simplistic 'reductionist' hard assertion of reality, but rather as providing
a clear spotlight through a classificatory jungle to the things that matter. It provides
insight by illuminating 'patterns in the mist'. It is all too popular currently to
believe that the mist is all that is. This belief of course, as Alan Sokal [12]points out,
has consequences as well!
In summary then Stirling arrived in Sakaltutan at what is now regarded as a water
shed in Turkish history - 1950. The village had already become partially dependent
of migrant labour but few households had moved permanently. Population was growing
because of a fall in the infant mortality rate whilst the birth and death rates were
pretty much the same. This increase in population was putting pressure on village
resources with the result that households started to migrate out as well as individuals.
Stirling was well aware of the complex and multidimensional aspects of cultural change
and his 'wiring diagram' is a way of trying to represent what he thought the main
factors were that were changing life in the village. The question is does it have
more power than being just one mans subjective map full of his own purely realtivistic
notions? I will now proceed to analyses a small part of this 'metonymy'.