Aci Tatli Yiyoruz explores transformations in gender, kin relationships and marriage in a Turkish village over a forty year period and argues that there is a connection between economic and social change, which is mediated by a local-level politicization of ideas of tradition and modernity. Rather than relying on abstract, unembodied notions of modernity, I provide a close and concrete analysis of the material, emotional and personal interpretations of rural modernity based on twenty months of intensive field study, from 1989 to 2004, using ethnographic methods, including survey, interviews, photography, video and participant-observation. I argue that the villagers are engaged in a deliberate process of creating links to a national and a global Muslim identity through the adoption of infrastructure, secular education, orthodox Sunni Islam, and technology. Furthermore, they have attempted to make their village society sustainable in a women's carpet weaving cooperative. In the cooperative, ideas of modernity and tradition come together as women take on new roles as weavers of "traditional," new-production carpets in an export-only business. Women, therefore, embody an important pivotal position between constructions of gender in a conservative Muslim community, skilled craftswomen in a local cottage industry dedicated to "traditional" weavings, and actors in a transforming economy based on herding. In the context of these realities, I focus the second half of my study on the struggles of young women in making a transition to adulthood through marriage and argue that their experiences demonstrate an imaginative engagement with modernity on an intimate and individual level. While adult women, that is married women, have a position of increased power and agency as weavers, their daughters must embody "traditional" ideals of gender in displaying their obedience and steady labor as unpaid weavers and domestic workers in their natal households. Despite the interest in progressive, modernist ideals, the community maintains conservative notions of gender, which are institutionalized in Islamic practice, formalized by kinship, expressed economically through weaving and other forms of labor, and enacted in the rites of marriage. I explore daughters' agency in marriage practices, including elopement and abduction, arranged marriage and innovations in romantic attachments. Material transformations connect a transforming economic and social world to marriage through dowry/trousseaux, the role of traditional textiles and the commercialization of carpet weaving.
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