This disconnected rush of pictures is not surprising, of course, if you are a Westerner, used to the wild conflation of images and messages that pour out of the mediasphere. But for these women in the small Turkish village of Emirimkoyu, this is their first moment at home with a television set, an instant of wonder and confusion and fear.

For Hayriye Balci, it's different. The 31-year-old was born and mostly raised in Emirimkoyu, but she was educated in Belgium, where she became familiar with media-generated culture and computer technology. Her return to Turkey to manage a hotel in the small town of Kas, on the Mediterranean coast, is "a bit like returning to the Dark Ages," where fax machines are still largely considered cutting-edge technology.

She has returned to a torn country, neither West nor East, rooted in Islam but yearning to be European. The Turkish military, which considers itself the guardian of the secular state, has engineered three coups since 1960. The civil war in the eastern provinces drains the treasury and boosts inflation to over 100 percent. Besides demanding controls on Islamic dress and the removal of pro-Islamic officials from the bureaucracy, military commanders also suggest that the government keep a close watch on television and radio stations that support Islamic causes.

A good deal of Turkey no longer lives in villages like Emirimkoyu. Over the past few decades, 3,000 villages have been emptied, and Turkey has a displaced population numbering in the millions. The new urban poor are mostly unskilled workers and farmers, the most religious of all Turks. And by offering aid to the poor and the dispossessed, Islamic organizations create widespread support for Islamic political parties. Thus the country's problems cycle onwards like tides.

Although Emirimkoyu is a conservative agricultural village, the women do not adhere to the custom of the purdah, but wear colorful head scarves, loose blouses, and pantaloons. In the hot summer months they cook outside at open ovens, and year round they wash clothing in tubs set out in the yards. In the evenings they gather on porches to work at pieces of embroidery, while small children play at their feet.

Men in old suit jackets, all of them with hats or caps, stroll about the village doing odd chores, but mostly they tend to the animals. Every day they herd their sheep and goats into the hill pastures, following a stream bed that cuts through the rocky soil up past the olive groves and patches of ploughed earth.

Hayriye's father, Abdul-kadir Balci, is a licensed poppy grower. He has done well, making enough to settle his family in Belgium and buy a big house there. But Bahar, his mother, refused to join them, preferring to stay in the village of her birth. She developed Alzheimer's and nowadays she prowls the village streets muttering to herself. Finally, Abdul returned one spring to find his mother living in the shed with the goats. He remained.

The first evening in Emirimkoyu is spent in the warm kitchen area of the traditional two- roomed home, where Abdul was born and which he now shares with his wife Hatice. The room contains no furniture. The adobe-like walls are decorated with a few cooking utensils, a photograph of the Balci family, and a small carpeted bag containing the Koran. Guests sit on kilim pillows and drink glasses of tea. Hayriye acts as the official translator, fielding questions back and forth, while her mother prepares a meal of poppy seed bread, goat cheese, olives, green peppers, and onions.

After a while, a few curious villagers stop by to visit. Abdul lights his pipe and sprawls across two pillows to savor his evening smoke. Conversation is lively and Hayriye became hard-pressed, often losing track of whom she is translating for, but everyone is good-humored about it.

The pace is obviously too much for Bahar. She spends most of the day crouched in a near- fetal position on the roof of the shed. Hayriye and Abdul tried to coax her down, but Bahar won't budge. She even refuses to come down for dinner, which, although Abdul has slaughtered a goat in honor of his foreign guests, is a hurried affair. The table is not put away for ten minutes before two village women arrived with their children. But the warmth and conversation of the previous evening is lacking. There is no circle of people facing each other. Everyone faces the TV.

Hayriye flips to the music station, and the screen opens on a half-clad vamp crawling across a long table laid out with a feast, red wine dripping from the corners of her mouth. A long-haired, muscular man at the end of the table beckons the woman onto his lap. Bahar, who has finally come down from the roof of the shed to join her family, pulls her head scarf over her face and yelps like a wounded animal. Abdul says something and Hayriye changes the channel.

Hayriye had brought the television mostly as a gift for her grandmother, but after the short and obviously frightening experience with the music video, Bahar leaves the house and begins to prowl the porch, every so often peering in through the window. Soon she will be just another ghost walking the stone alleyways of Emirimkoyu. Meanwhile, back in the new reality, it's time for a commercial break.

Turkish television ads are reminiscent of American versions from three decades ago -- with washing products and processed foods offered as an end to the drudgery of toil. The suburbs of Ankara and Istanbul are choked with villagers who envisioned a better life. In the end, they usually have to take up residence in huge shanty towns built of recycled shipping materials that once contained the very goods that were supposed to make their lives easier.

If they're lucky, they still have their television sets, and they can watch budget versions of American game shows, situation comedies, and pot-boilers. They might find a documentary focusing on traditional Turkish music and lifestyles, or flip the channel and watch the latest news report about the Turkish military's efforts to destroy these things.

At night in the village, wood smoke curls up from the open-ended clay pitcher that serves as a chimney. It might be nice, and a bit arrogant and naive, to think Emirimkoyu should stay just as it was -- a village of peasants engaged in work that, like the air, is clear, untainted by the mediascape. Raise crops, tend to the herds. It's an absurd notion in the age of global capitalism, of one world and a few corporations. Still, you can't help but think about Bahar crying out as the music video played. Some of her lament is the age-old Islamic rage at the corruptions of the West, to be sure, but perhaps it is also a technophobia that has its roots in the loss of community, or the fear of that loss. Then again, she doesn't have e-mail -- yet.