Paul Stirling
Paul Stirling (1920-1998) was a social anthropologist trained in Oxford, who later became the founding professor of anthropology at the University of Kent. My interest in Paul Stirling began when my then supervisor Ernest Gellner sent me to meet him at Kent in 1986, where he had an office though already retired. We spoke for several hours, and fell into the habit of meeting regularly. Paul was at that time also the chair of the Turkish Studies seminar at SOAS, and I would regularly go to that seminar where I also met Andrew Mango, Clement Dodd, Brian Beeley, William Hale as well as Richard Tapper and Nancy Tapper, who were professors in SOAS at that time. The seminar was a remarkable introduction for a student into modern Turkish studies, and Paul an excellent chair.
​
Academically, Stirling was a first class thinker. He hated the use of imprecise language, and came to believe that one of the most important tasks of anthropology was to conduct empirical fieldwork into the processes of social change that resulted from modernisation. He agreed entirely with Gellner that this was a crucial subject for anthropologists to study, but disagreed with Gellner when it came to the level of abstraction that we should use to make that study: for Stirling the abstract models favoured by Gellner were not sufficiently grounded in the ethnography to be useful to him.
​
Stirling could be considered a Radcliffe-Brownian, in as much as he regarded social structure as the foundation of village life – his DPhil thesis was indeed called the ‘Social Structure of Turkish peasant communities’. However, later on I realised that he had come to the position that basic human needs were paramount when considering the emergence of the modern world: eg. in terms of improvements to health, shelter or nutrition, and regarded societal institutions as being built upon such needs. From this point of view, then, he was close to a Malinowskian functionalist position. This pragmatic approach meant that he was certainly out of sympathy with relativism, which he thought, literally, nonsense, and wrote to this effect before his unexpected death.
​
His early work Turkish Village is regarded today as one of a handful of books that make a major contribution to our understanding of the ethnography of Anatolia. His later work on micro-patterns of migration, and the way that modernisation changes village life did not appear in the monograph form that he had hoped before his death, but he did publish a number of important articles on it. Links to many of these can be found here: Paul Stirling's Ethnographic Data Archives.
​
Stirling has influenced much of what I have written, but I have also published two pieces just on his work; an interview which appeared in the Journal of Turkish Studies, and a long article on his past researches on ‘what Stirling might have written’, referring to the promised, but unfinished book at the time of his death.
​​
References
Stirling, P. 1965 Turkish Village, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
​
Shankland, David and Paul Stirling. 1999. 'An Interview with Professor Paul Stirling', in Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 23(1): 1-23
​
Shankland, D. 2023 “Forty-five years of modernisation in Turkish Villages: What Stirling might have written” in Austrian Studies in Social Anthropology, Sondernummer 1/2023 Commemorating Paul Stirling, 53-71 .
​
Available open access: ASSA_Sondernummer_1_2023.pdf (univie.ac.at)