Sex Roles, Family and Community in Turkey

Cigdem Kagitibai has pulled together a significant collection of articles focusing on the individual, sex roles, family, and community in Turkey. She highlights the key concerns of the volume in her introduction. While Turkey has experienced extensive social, economic, and psychological change, the cultural center of the society remains in the agrarian heartland, organized around kin groups. Nuclear, patriarchal, patrilocal families tend to be the norm. Kinship - as social structure, as networks, as idioms, as morality - is a pervasive principle in Turkish social life. Islam, like kinship, brings individuals into community membership where loyalty is to the group rather than the self. Urbanization has, to some degree, weakened traditional structures, at times leading to a confusion of values and marginalization. -- From http://www.jstor.org (Oct. 24, 2016).