In rural western Turkey, villagers use cultural and Islamic values of economic egalitarianism and
care for the less fortunate to critique exploitation. They argue that cultural Islamic values of community
and mutual assistance clash with the monetarization of kin relationships. In considering
two ethnographic cases, I show how the community interprets daughters’ struggles at the time of
their marriage. When daughters make a move to separate from the natal household, their family’s
economic survival is threatened. To contain the loss of income, fathers attempt to delay daughters’
marriages and daughters sometimes elope to solve the problem. This paper is about how the villagers
analyze these events via their notions of morally correct behavior.