`chip-on-the-shoulder' society. No one is willing to admit anyone else's superiority,
let alone an inherited right to issue orders. People are always saying that `we are
all the sons of Adam', implying that we are all therefore equal. In daily intercourse
they treat almost everyone with the same formal politeness. If any adult man enters
a guest room he will exchange salutations with everyone in turn. No one is ever barred
from a guest room on grounds of social inferiority. Of course, men normally avoid
guest rooms in which they are likely not to be courteously received. The only exceptions
to this general politeness are one or two of the poorest and most personally disreputable
members of the community.
Formal offices within the village are mainly those of village servants, such as the herdsman, and these carry no prestige, rather the reverse. Even the headman himself was not treated with formal deference. Religious office holders are accorded deference only in certain contexts, and in these villages there are no local hereditary sayyids (holy men) or sheyks (sheikhs) such as one finds in other parts of the Islamic world.
The village roughly divides the male population into four age groups: children, unmarried youths, `young men', and the old. The village terms do not correspond quite to current categories either in Istanbul or in England. The term for youth is delikanli, (lit. `mad bloods'), and the term for married men in their prime is the word normally translated `youth', (genç cf. Lat. iuvenis). The only formal mark of change from one stage to another is marriage, which moves a man from delikanli into genç, although a man married very young might still be called delikanli for a while. The passage from child to delikanli is not marked by any formality except that a delikanli must have a moustache. Circumcision is normally, though not necessarily, held much earlier, and appears not to make any formal difference in a boy's standing or to involve any principle of social organisation, though it is a necessary condition for marriage and for respectability as an adult.
The passage from genç to ihtiyar, (old man), is also vague. The moustache becomes a beard, and if economic circumstances