Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
BILIMNAME, cilt.48, sa.2, ss.111-125, 2022 (ESCI)
Paul Stirling is known to be the first person to have done ethnographic field research in Turkey for his seminal work Turkish Village (1965), a classic in Turkish anthropolgy. Probably, he was also the only anthropologist to have researched the social structure, change and transformation in a Turkish village at this scale (1949-52, 1971, 1986, and 1993). Frequently, the question was raised pondering why Paul Stirling chose this area as his research site where he did fieldwork in full participation for a total of thirteen months during 1949-52. When he decided on a village that was away from urban influences, where Sunni Muslims lived and spoke Turkish, probably he followed his professor Evans-Pritchard's counsel about the significance of the tribal world of thought and the importance of studying small scale societies. Here, too, people who shared an agricultural culture were closed to the external World. Another reason he expressed for his choice, not entirely an academic one, was the fact that the area was close to Talas. I daresay that Stirling was always aware of the sensitivity of this issue and that's why he assiduously stated that his primary goal was academic and that he was committed to the principle of objectivity, when proposed to the University of Kent, where he was affiliated, and his research project for the restudy of the Kayseri villages in 1986. [The Extended Abstract is at the end of the article.]