So, what do these descriptions of daily life activities all mean from a methodological perspective? What does the production of cheese and cultivation of rice, the seasonal migration into precarious jobs, issues around gender and education, the multiple living places and the car-bomb all tell us from a methodological perspective? Basically, and this is the central problem addressed, what could be easily preconceived as a spatial identity—the Mount Karacadağ agricultural countryside—has been characterized in terms of various human practices, with our interest focused on extended networks of activities and processes of becoming. While the starting point was a concern with the rurality and the lives of people in spaces defined as rural, the activities people engage with make clear that no preconceived identity can be assumed. Our description did, in fact, take us from the rural to the urban (with the selling of cheese and linkage of roads), as well as to the mountain meadows (the summer encampments) and a further away “beyond” (export of products to Syria), and it pointed toward various socio-economic- and gender-specific activities. Mount Karacadağ is not only a basalt-rich massif, it is also constituted through multiple (sets of) unfolding practices and interactions and their relations with many “elsewheres.” What most transpires from the description of daily activities, therefore, is the intermingling or connectivities of village and city, rural and urban, and the observation that of people calling the village their “home” are not living in the village, or not all the time. That is, the spatial approach taken here facilitates a certain dissolution wherein conventionalized conceptualizations may give way to an alternative reading that arguably better reveals patterns of the social world people contsruct and live in. These developments take various forms, such as the phenomena of semi-absentee urban rural farmers following an agro-social calendar that combines village return to work the land with family visits for important events. Villagers, meanwhile, maintain their small-holdings through a multitude of family-based, age (life-stage) related arrangements, with income derived from agricultural produce supported by or (increasingly) just supplementing that derived from work elsewhere (or from pensions, an important financial input/transfer nowadays). Family farming labor is typically organized around this by casual employment opportunities, which take family members away from the village, and the return movements, which bring them back again to work on the farm (Öztürk, Hilton, and Jongerden 2012; Öztürk, Jongerden, and Hilton 2018). From here, we can draw various conclusions.
