ABSTRACT

The newly conceived coercive force required of each prisoner that he sign his own lettre de cachet, for it had established its prisons in the family life, in the professions, in the image of respectability, in the ideas of faith and duty, in the very language itself. In the fall of 1950, three hundred long, exploratory interviews were conducted in Turkey by native interviewers trained by a researcher from Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research. A key to this difference turned up in the reactions to questions which asked the respondents what they would do if they were President of Turkey, or the editor of a newspaper, and where they would like to live if they could not live in their present locality. The Middle East Research defined the grocer and his like as “transitional” Turks, a group differentiated by its at least moderate degree of exposure to mass communications despite lowly social and economic status.