The ‘Beanpole Family’: Cultural Aspects of ‘the Demographic Crisis’ in Greece

Abstract

Falling birth rates, increased longevity, delayed inheritance, and the increased need for provision of eldercare for seniors, are well-known phenomena throughout Europe. The specific cultural aspects of these phenomena, which produce different kinds of situations in particular countries, have been less explored. The paper looks at the so-called ‘demographic crisis’ in Greece, as the falling birth rate has been labelled, with regard to practices that link the naming of children to the inheritance of property, and with particular reference to a Cycladic island.

Keywords:

• Family
• Fertility
• Longevity
• Eldercare
• Naming
• Inheritance
• Greece
• Cyclades

Acknowledgements

Research reported in this paper was supported in 2006 by ESRC grant RES 00-22-1641, while earlier research was supported by SSRC grant HR2445 (1973) and ESRC grant GOO232341 (1987). Versions of this paper were given in the Department of Modern Greek Studies seminar series, University of Oxford, October 2008, and as an Upper House seminar at the British School at Athens, February 2009. I want to put on record my thanks to two people without whom none of this research would have been possible: Maria Vafeiadou and Elsa Koppassi.

Notes

 [1] This current negative population growth is perceived as a national problem in the context of an increasing population in Turkey (Greece has a population of just over 11 million, Turkey has nearly 73 million and a higher fertility rate than Greece's at 2.2), and an influx of immigrant workers. As Douglass (2005, p. 6) notes, the perceptions of such ‘problems’ often become ‘metaphors for fears about national decline’, although they ‘may not be so problematic for individuals’ (Douglass 2005, p. 9).

 [2] There appears to be no equivalent term in Greek for ‘beanpole family’. As specific families can be described as monoklonos (single-branched), dhiklonos (with two branches), and polyklonos (many branched), maybe the term spanioklonos (with few branches) could be coined?

 [3] The role of abortion as one of the main methods of contraception in Greece, and therefore as a factor in interpreting the root causes of the declining birth rate, is too complex a topic to discuss here (but see, for example, Halkias 2004, pp. 40–45).

 [4] On Anafi, in the village community office, it is the younger, more computer-literate, junior officials (mostly female) who are the ones who have acquired the skills for making applications for such funds, and the older senior officials (male) now find themselves dependent on them.

 [5] There is not space here to develop a discussion of the critique of ‘Mediterraneanism’ (cf. Orientalism; Occidentalism) but see: Horder & Purcell (2000); Harris (2005).

 [6] When reviewing the material collected during an ESRC funded three-month pilot study in 2006 (Kenna 2007), it came as a surprise to find that some of the most relevant theoretical materials in understanding the changes in family and kin relations on the island and in Greece as a result of modernisation and tourism come from sociological studies carried out in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. This is because many of the same kinds of major social, political and economic changes occurring in Britain nearly 60 years ago took place in the Mediterranean area and in Eastern Europe in subsequent decades. Among the materials found to be theoretically stimulating were Elizabeth Bott's study (1971/1957) of changing marital relationships (joint and segregated roles), and Young & Wilmott's study (1957) of female-focused households in Bethnal Green. See also Harris et al. (2006).

 [7] It should be noted that in the 1960s the island had only a primary school. For secondary education a child had to leave the island, which of course involved expense for the parents, even if the child went to live with relatives in Athens. The island now has a gimnasion (secondary school) and a lykeion (equivalent of sixth-form college in the UK), with a large staff of teachers for very few students.

 [8] Other exceptions occur in the following instances. When a child's parent has the same name as one of the grandparents (for example, a woman and her husband's mother), the name will not be given, as it is considered inappropriate, if not downright unlucky, for a parent and a child to have the same first name. There are exceptions. A young married man was killed in tragic circumstances and his widow named their first-born child, a daughter, unbaptised at the time of his death, after him, with the name in a female form (see Kenna 1991, pp. 110–116). Commemorating the dead husband superseded the obligation to name the girl after her maternal grandmother. Other such cases are known from the time of the Occupation and Civil War, when the name of an unmarried relative, or a married person who had no children at the time he/she was killed, was given to the next child of one of the deceased's siblings, ‘because they could never have a namesake grandchild’, and also as a measure of consolation to members of the family that ‘they could “hear” the name spoken again’ (Sutton 1997, p. 422). To ensure the continuity and perpetuation of the dead person's name was considered an obligation on family members, with no implications in respect of the inheritance of property involved.

 [9] During fieldwork in the 1960s, cases came to light in which a childless person with no living relatives suggested to a couple (usually with a large number of offspring, meaning that all their obligations to name children after their own parents had been discharged) that he or she should act as godparent to one of their children and make that child their heir in exchange for care in old age and for the carrying out of the cycle of funeral and memorial services. The godparental bond, one of spiritual kinship not only between godparent and godchild, but between the child's parents and the godparent (who mutually address each other as sinteknos/sinteknissa, literally meaning co-offspring, indicating that they are co-parents – one physical, one spiritual – of the child), became a means of acquiring a substitute family, an heir and the surety of the afterlife. To have no descendants, to have no one to remember you, and thus to have no continuity, is almost not to have existed at all (Seraïdari 2006, p. 162). Here the symbolic association is of reciprocating the inheritance of property, which is a physical manifestation of the deceased's continuity in the community, by the discharge of ritual obligations which ensure the deceased's spiritual continuity.

[10] The very close relationship between a grandparent and the grandchild who bears the name of the deceased spouse (i.e. the grandchild's deceased grandfather or grandmother), has been documented by Roland Moore (1999).

[11] The term used, prika, is usually translated as ‘dowry’, implying a female recipient, but this transfer of property might more accurately be termed ‘marriage portion’, as on Anafi it refers to anything given by parents to a child at marriage (although the child is usually female, but cases are known of grooms being given what was referred to as prika when they married). As a consequence of this sequential dowering, daughters' marriage portions could vary considerably, depending on the rise or fall of the natal family's fortunes over the years (see Herzfeld 1980).

[12] The songs traditionally sung at a mainland wedding usually contain at least one where the bride sorrowfully bids farewell to her family, friends and neighbourhood. This is a song which, in structure and imagery, is paralleled by some scholars with a funeral dirge. In contrast, Anafiot wedding songs are cheerful – as the bride will not be leaving her own neighbourhood or going to be under close surveillance by her mother-in-law, but to live with her new husband in her own house.