A Death and a Youth Club: Feuding in a Turkish Village

Abstract

The primary aim of this paper is to describe two events which occurred during my second field trip to Turkey,' to offer some analysis of them, and to raise one or two general questions. The analysis requires also a description, which I have sought to make complete, if brief, of the patrilineal groups found in these villages. Folkhead, the village in which I lived on this trip, was fairly large about 1200 people, living in about 215 households. One afternoon in November, one of the wealthier villagers had invited me to drink coffee in his own guest room. Most of the middling and more prosperous households have a room, usually well away from the family part of the house and the women, which is specially reserved for the men of the household; it is generally known as oda, the ordinary Turkish word for room. Here the men sit and talk, and entertain their guests. As we finished drinking coffee, we heard a child crying grievously outside. We went out of the room on to the stone platform at the head of the outside staircase which leads up to it. A girl was running into the courtyard of the next house shouting out, Qocuk vurdular. Literally, this might mean They have struck a child, and I did not at once realize what she meant. Dead, dead, shouted the girl as she disappeared into her house. She had been telling us that a young man had been shot. The victim, head of a household and father of a young family, had recently returned from military service. He had been shot by a young neighbor, and had died within a few minutes, right outside the guest room of the current village headman.2 Women