NOTES
- Daniel Scott Smith, ‘The Curious History of Theorizing about the History of the Western Nuclear Family’, Social Science History, 17(3) (1993), p. 325. A shorter version of this article was presented at the Annual Conference for the British Society for Population Studies at Leicester in 2004, and an earlier version at a seminar at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in 2002. I am most grateful to Professor Sir Jack Goody, Dr Beatrice Moring, Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie, Professor Pat Thane, Dr Richard Wall and Professor Sir Tony Wrigley for their generosity and help in commenting on versions of this article, as well as the anonymous referees for Cultural and Social History for their constructive observations.
- Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, ‘Marriage, Widowhood, and Divorce’, in David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (eds), Family Life in Early Modern Times 1500–1789. The History of the European Family, Volume 1 (New Haven and London, 2001), p. 221.
- Andrejs Plakans, ‘Agrarian Reform in the Family in Eastern Europe’, in David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (eds), Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century 1789–1913. The History of the European Family, Volume 1 (New Haven and London, 2002), p. 79.
- Peter Laslett, ‘England: The Household over Three Centuries', in P. Laslett and R. Wall (eds), Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, 1972), p. 126.
- Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction: The History of the Family’, in Household and Family in Past Time, pp. 1–89.
- John Hajnal, ‘European Marriage Patterns in Perspective’, in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (eds), Population in History (London, 1965), pp. 101–43.
- Hajnal, ‘European Marriage Patterns', p. 133.
- John Hajnal, ‘Two Kinds of Pre-industrial Household Formation’, in R. Wall, Jean Robin and Peter Laslett (eds), Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 65–104; revised version of ‘Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation System’, Population and Development Review, 8(3) (1982), pp. 449–93.
- Hajnal, ‘Two Kinds', p. 69.
- Peter Laslett, ‘Family and Household as Work and Kin Group’, in Family Forms in Historic Europe, pp. 513–63.
- Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction: The History of the Family’; see also E. A. Hammel and Peter Laslett, ‘Comparing Household Structure over Time and between Cultures', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16 (1974), pp. 73–109.
- Peter Laslett, ‘Characteristics of the Western Family Considered over Time’, in his Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, 1977), p. 16. He also made it clear that ‘no claim is being made that simple family households were to be found exclusively in Western Europe in pre-industrial times, or that no other cultural area has been marked historically by late marriage or by the presence of servants. It can certainly be claimed that the simple family household is to be found in very many parts of the world other than Europe or Western Europe, and that it has existed for very long periods of time … Our hypothesis, in fact, is inclusive and weak, rather than exclusive and strong.’ (p. 14).
- Marzio Barbagli and David Kertzer, ‘An Introduction to the History of Italian Family Life’, Journal of Family History, 15(4) (1990), p. 376; Rossella Rettaroli, ‘Age at Marriage in Nineteenth-century Italy’, Journal of Family History, 15(4) (1990), pp. 422–3.
- Pier Paolo Viazzo, ‘What's so Special about the Mediterranean? Thirty Years of Research on Household and Family in Italy’, Continuity and Change, 18(1) (2003), p. 131. In the original text of this paper as presented at the conference ‘Households and Family in Past Time; New Approaches, New Horizons', University of Balearic Islands, 9–10 September 1999, p. 5, he observed: ‘Italy … has been described as “a burial ground for many of the most ambitious, and well known, theories of household and marriage systems.”’
- Robert Rowland, ‘Household and Family in the Iberian Peninsula’, unpublished paper presented at the conference ‘Households and Family in Past Time’.
- Beatrice Moring, ‘Nordic Family Patterns and the North-west European Household System’, Continuity and Change, 18(1) (2003), pp. 77–109.
- Peter Czap, Jr., ‘“A Large Family: The Peasant's Greatest Wealth”: Serf Households in Mishino, Russia, 1814–1858’, in Family Forms in Historic Europe, pp. 105–50.
- Czap, ‘“A Large Family”’, p. 145. He identified the following characteristics of the type: ‘it should include a large proportion of multiple family households, with a significant number consisting of three or more generations; the units should be relatively large, with mean household size significantly greater than 5.0, and contain an average 2.0 conjugal units. Near-universal early marriage and childbearing would be additional features of the eastern European family type.’
- Tracy Dennison, ‘Serfdom and Household Structure in Central Russia: Voshchazhnikovo, 1816–1858’, Continuity and Change, 18(3) (2003), p. 419.
- Mikolaj Szoltysek, ‘On the Margins of Northwest Europe? Household, Family and Property in an Upper Silesian Parish (18th Century)’, unpublished conference paper.
- Pavla Horská, ‘Historical Models of the Central European Family: Czech and Slovak Examples', Journal of Family History, 19(2) (1994), pp. 99–106.
- Sheilagh Ogilvie and Jeremy Edwards, ‘Women and the “Second Serfdom”: Evidence from Early Modern Bohemia’, The Journal of Economic History, 60(4) (2000), pp. 961–94.
- Rudolf Andorka, ‘The Historical Demography of a Proper Hungarian Village: Átány in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Family History, 19(4) (1994), p. 324.
- Jože Hudales, Od zibeli do groba (Velenje, 1997) (From Cradle to Grave).
- Jasna Čapo Žmegač, ‘New Evidence and Old Theories: Multiple Family Households in Northern Croatia’, Continuity and Change, 11(3) (1996), pp. 375–98.
- Traian Stoianovic, ‘Family and Household in the Western Balkans, 1500–1870’, in Mémorial Ömer Lûtfi Barkan (Paris, 1980), pp. 189–203. One of the missing components of the history of south-eastern European families is the different fiscal regimes for Muslim and non-Muslim households within the Ottoman empire.
- Maria Todorova, ‘Situating the Family of Ottoman Bulgaria within the European Pattern’, History of the Family, 1(4) (1996), p. 449.
- Szoltysek, ‘On the Margins'.
- Dennison, ‘Serfdom and Household Structure’, p. 412.
- Todorova, ‘Situating the Family’, p. 449.
- ‘The identification of Eastern Europe as economic periphery involves, to a certain extent, taking the culturally constructed unity of the eighteenth century and projecting it backwards to organize an earlier economic model … The issues of backwardness and development in Eastern Europe were broached and defined in the eighteenth century, not essentially as economic issues, and they continue to frame our conception of these lands.’ Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe (Stanford, 1994), pp. 8–9.
- Maria Todorova, ‘Myth-making in European Family History: The Zadruga Revisited’, East European Politics and Society, 4(1) (1990), p. 44. See also Maria Todorova, Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria (Washington, DC, 1993).
- David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (London and New York, 1997), p. 91.
- Silvia Sovič, ‘Peasant Communities, Local Economies and Household Composition in Nineteenth-century Slovenia’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Essex, 2001; Hudales, Od zibeli.
- Markus Cerman, ‘Bohemia after the Thirty Years' War’, Journal of Family History 19(2) (1994), pp. 149–75.
- Todorova, Balkan Family Structure, and ‘Situating the Family’.
- Karl Kaser, ‘Serfdom in Eastern Europe’, in Family Life in Early Modern Times, p. 34.
- Kaser, ‘Serfdom in Eastern Europe’, p. 24.
- For example, in The History of the European Family: Volume 2, Plakans, pausing only to remark that ‘generalizations … can be misleading’, states that ‘under serfdom, by definition, land was not accumulated by peasants and what the term “inheritance” actually meant is an open question … the practice of housing retired old people in separate dwellings was neither a custom in Eastern Europe nor were peasants wealthy enough to practice it … there is no persuasive evidence that “retirement” in any formal sense was practiced by the peasantries of Eastern Europe until well into the twentieth century.’ Plakans, ‘Agrarian Reform’, p. 99.
- Kaser, ‘Serfdom in Eastern Europe’, p. 62.
- Kaser, ‘Serfdom in Eastern Europe’, p. 41. However, the legal historian Vilfan stresses that partible inheritance is relatively new in Slovenia, becoming widespread as late as the eighteenth century. Sergij Vilfan, ‘Očrt slovenskega pravnega narodopisja’, in R. Ložar (ed.), Narodopisje Slovencev, Vol. 1 (Ljubljana, 1944), p. 230 (Outline of Slovenian Legal Ethnography in Ethnography of Slovenians).
- Kaser, ‘Serfdom in Eastern Europe’, p. 40.
- According to Dolenc, stem family organization in Slovenia (known as ‘preužitkarstvo’ or ‘kot’) was indeed of Germanic origin, but it was in use only among farmers. Metod Dolenc, Pravna zgodovina za slovensko ozemlje (Ljubljana, 1935), pp. 319–20 (The Legal History of Slovenian Territory). The same pattern was observed in the two communities studied by Sovič, ‘Peasant Communities'.
- Maria Todorova, ‘On the Epistemological Value of Family Models: The Balkans within the European Pattern’, in R. Wall, T. K. Hareven and J. Ehmer, with assistance of M. Cerman (eds), Family History Revisited: Comparative Perspectives (London, 2001), pp. 242–56 (p. 245); see also her ‘Situating the Family’, p. 452, and Čapo Žmegač,’ New Evidence’, p. 378.
- E. A. Hammel, ‘The Zadruga as Process', in Family Forms in Historic Europe, p. 335.
- Maria Todorova, ‘On the Epistemological Value of Family Models', p. 248, and Balkan Family Structure, esp. p. 168.
- Nikolai Botev, ‘Nuptiality in the Course of the Demographic Transition: The Experience of the Balkan Countries', Population Studies, 44 (1990), p. 112, pointed out that the zadruga is often perceived as the ancestral form of social and familial organization which is ‘not usually supported by reliable data, nor when such data are available do they support the presumption … authors tend to claim that the period was not favourable to the zadruga because of state regulations or economic changes, or they even assume that the period they are studying marks the decay of this institution (if one were to take this last assertion seriously, the zadruga will have been “decaying” for the last 600 years).’ See also Hammel, ‘The Zadruga as Process', p. 339.
- Todorova, ‘Situating the Family’, pp. 452–3; and cf. Hammel, ‘The Zadruga as Process', esp. p. 370.
- Todorova, ‘Myth-making in European Family History’. A recent summary of her arguments appears in her ‘On the Epistemological Value of Family Models'.
- Čapo Žmegač, ‘New Evidence’. See also the critical discussion of the zadruga in Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin, Ethnology, Myth and Politics: Anthropologizing Croatian Ethnology, ed. Jasna Čapo Žmegač (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 23–34.
- Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford, 1996), p. 390; cf. his even more trenchant observations in Europe East and West (London, 2006), pp. 28–9. Hammel warned of the ideological dimension of the phenomenon in 1983 (‘The Zadruga as Process', p. 336). Davies’ observations regarding his colleagues are actually borne out in volume 2 of The History of the European Family, where Kertzer observes: ‘The most famous household system found [in south-eastern Europe], zadruga, had its epicentre in Croatia and Serbia. The zadruga entailed the joint ownership of all land and property by the patrilineally extended family’. David Kertzer, ‘Living with Kin’, in Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century, p. 60.
- See, for example, Karl Kaser, ‘Power and Inheritance: Male Domination, Property, and Family in Eastern Europe, 1500–1900’, in Hannes Grandits and Patrick Heady (eds), Distinct Inheritances: Property, Family and Community in a Changing Europe (Münster, 2003), pp. 53–67; Macht und Erbe: Männerherrschaft, Besitz und Familie in Östlichen Europa (1500–1900) (Vienna etc., 2000); ‘Serfdom in Eastern Europe’; and ‘Introduction: Household and Family Contexts in the Balkans', The History of the Family, 1(4) (1996), pp. 375–86; Hannes Grandits, Familie und Sozialer Wandel im Ländlichen Kroatien (18.–20. Jahrhundert) (Vienna etc., 2002).
- See my review of Grandits' Familie und Sozialer Wandel in Slavic Review, 64(2) (2005), pp. 428–9, and my ‘Definitions and Documents in Family History: Towards an Agenda for Comparative Research’, in Social Behaviour and Family Strategies in the Balkans (16th–20th Centuries): Proceedings of a Regional Symposium, New Europe College Bucharest, June 9–10, 2006 (in press).
- Andrejs Plakans and Charles Wetherell, ‘The Search for Place: East European Family History 1800–2000’, in Family History Revisited, pp. 257–81.
- Kaser, Macht und Erbe, and ‘Serfdom in Eastern Europe’.
- Plakans and Wetherell, ‘The Search for Place’, p. 257 (my italics).
- Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other (Minneapolis, MN, 1999), p. 162.
- Russia and the Balkans as ‘an ontological Other for Europe’ is now a familiar theme. The critics of this ethnocentric view, which was influential throughout social science in the past, argued that ‘Western science and philosophy … have established a form of knowledge whereby non-Western societies and cultures are represented solely in terms of the categories of Western thought, and in which Western society acts as a standard against which other societies are judged. This inevitably leads to the silencing of other voices. At the same time the differences between Western and non-Western cultures are rationalized through non-Western people being defined as the “Others“, distinguished solely through their antagonism to the dominant image of the “self”, and against whose peculiarities the self-image of the West is created.’ Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race (London, 1996), p. 220.
- David Reher, who has attempted to reopen the question of geographical divisions within the ‘West’, is one of several scholars who have used the traditional division as a justification for confining his study to ‘Western’ Europe: ‘For the most part, our analysis does not include the Europe lying to the east of John Hajnal's famous Leningrad–Trieste line which set apart fundamentally different marriage regimes, demographic structures and family systems on the European continent …There, forms of familial organization are sufficiently different to warrant their own specific study.’ David S. Reher, ‘Family Ties in Western Europe: Persistent Contrasts', Population and Development Review, 24 (1998), pp. 203–34; revised version in Giampiero Dalla Zuanna and Giuseppe A. Micheli (eds), Strong Family and Low Fertility: A Paradox? New Perspectives in Interpreting Contemporary Family and Reproductive Behaviour (Dordrecht, Boston and London, 2004), p. 46.
- Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge, 1996), p. 203; and cf. his Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 88–91. The theme is now taken up more broadly in his The Theft of History (Cambridge, 2006).
- Todorova, ‘Situating the Family’, p. 456. She went on: ‘given the use of “Europe” in the analytical discourse of contemporary human and social sciences, the epistemological value of European family models becomes problematic, and particularly the posited divide between so called “European” and “non-European” societies in geopolitics. “Europe” is increasingly and effectively defined by politicians, and scholars should be at least aware of this and of how their research can and is being used.’
- Laslett, ‘Characteristics of the Western Family’, p. 13, explicitly acknowledged the enterprise as part of ‘historical sociology’.
- The Cambridge Group, the creation of Laslett and his associates, soon came to lead the British contribution to that approach. The close association of the new style of history with the geographical mapping of household structures has left an equally firm mark on the subject.
- Arland Thornton, Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life (Chicago and London, 2005).
- Kertzer and Barbagli, Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century. The case for individualism was most famously made by the historian/anthropologist Macfarlane, focusing among other things on family and marriage in English villages from medieval and early modern times, and affirming the peculiar, even unique, nature of English society. Although his thesis has not been widely accepted, many family historians have drawn on similar explanations to support their view of north-western individualism. Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford, 1978), and Marriage and Love in England (Oxford, 1986).
- For a summary see Peter Wagner, A History of Theory of the Social Sciences (London, 2001), esp. p. 168.
- David Silverman, Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction (1st edition, London, 1993), pp. 4–6, defined a ‘Trap of Absolutism’ in qualitative research, with four elements: ‘scientism’, ‘progress', ‘tourism’ and ‘romanticism’. Family historians can be said to have fallen into all of these.
- Plakans, ‘Agrarian Reform’, pp. 100, 105.
- This is defined by Kaser as ‘strong blood ties, ancestor worship, patrilineality, patrilocality, bride-price, blood feuds and patrilineal kinship’; ‘Introduction: Household and Family Contexts', p. 386.
- Kaser, ‘Serfdom in Eastern Europe’, p. 45.
- Josef Ehmer, ‘Marriage’, in Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century, p. 308.
- Kaser, ‘Serfdom in Eastern Europe’, p. 60.
- Kaser, ‘Introduction: Household and Family Contexts', p. 376 (my italics).
- David Gaunt, ‘Kinship: Thin Red Lines or Thick Blue Blood’, in Family Life in Early Modern Times, p. 284.
- Kaser is aware of this dimension but does no more than pay lip service to the dangers (Macht und Erbe, pp. 20–6). Todorova has pointed to the way in which Mitterauer and Kaser sought explanations of complex households ‘in patrilocality, patrilineality, and patricentrism, and especially in the ancestor worship and the celebration of the household patron saint, a relic of tribal relations'. Todorova, ‘On the Epistemological Value of Family Models', p. 247. Thornton, Reading History Sideways, Appendix, describes the practical consequences of the value-laden language used in scholarship on families.
- Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997).
- James G. Carrier (ed.), Occidentalism (Oxford, 1995), p. 1.
- Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe; Todorova, Imagining the Balkans; Milica Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review, 54(4) (1995), pp. 917–31, who observes (p. 921) that ‘much of the imagery that Wolff and Todorova analyse in the writings of western travelling through the European East is used to describe Asian lands'. On this theme see now also Božidar Jezernik, Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers (London, 2004).
- Goldsworthy, writing on the imperialism of the imagination of the Balkans, has asserted that ‘it is possible for writers who considered themselves to be advanced exponents of European multicultural ideals to write about Albanians, Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians and Romanians with the sort of generalized, open consideration which would appal them if applied to Somalis or peoples of Zaire’. Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania (New Haven and London, 1998), p. xi. Žižek has gone further, identifying a feature of the Western perception of the Balkans as ‘the logic of displaced racism. Since the Balkans are geographically part of Europe, populated by white people, racist clichés which nobody today, in our Politically Correct times, would dare to apply to African or Asian people can be freely attributed to Balkan people.’ Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute or Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting for? (London and New York, 2000), p. 5. It is true that some scholars from the area are complicit in this, often, it can be argued, because they are not in a position to contest the models in all their technical complexity. On this see Čapo Žmegač, ‘New Evidence’, p. 375.
- See Maria Sophia Quine, Population Politics in Twentieth-century Europe (London and New York, 1996), p. 112.
- Serbs and Montenegrins left Kosovo because of the extremely poor economic condition of the province, which was famous for being the least prosperous and the most undeveloped part of the then Yugoslavia. Furthermore, if the socio-economic status of women is taken into consideration, it becomes apparent that there were enormous differences between urban Albanian women, who had an average of 2.7 children in 1981, and rural Albanian women, for whom the figure is as high as 6.7. In addition, the traditional way of life, in which religion plays an important part, made Albanian women much more hostile to abortion than, for instance, Serbian women, who were more urbanized, and among whom abortion had become much more accepted. The abortion rate among the Serbs in Kosovo was apparently among the highest in Europe. Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (London, 1998), pp. 330–3.
- Todorova, ‘On the Epistemological Value of Family Models', p. 251. Such attempts include Karl Kaser, ‘Ahnenkult und Patriarchalismus auf dem Balkan’, Historische Anthropologie, 1 (1993), pp. 93–122, and Hannes Grandits and Christian Promitzer, ‘”Former Comrades” at War: Historical Perspectives on “Ethnic Cleansing” in Croatia’, in J. M. Halpern and D. A. Kideckel (eds), Neighbors at War (University Park, PA, 2000), pp. 125–42.
- Todorova, ‘On the Epistemological Value of Family Models', p. 251.
- Laslett himself saw the potential implications of the Cambridge theories: ‘The name [Western] itself might even bring to the minds of some people a division drawn out on a map, running perhaps along a line down to the Baltic and passing through the Central European countries, where all to the left of the familial frontier was Western in type and all to the right was something else, perhaps Eastern. There are discouraging echoes here of religious and linguistic hatreds and rivalries.’ Laslett, ‘Characteristics of the Western Family’, p. 15.
- Sovič, ‘Peasant Communities'.
- Silvia Sovič, ‘Families and Households of the Poor: The 19th-century Slovenian gostači’, History of the Family, 10 (2005), pp. 161–82.
- Norbert Ortmayr, ‘Late Marriage: Causes and Consequences of the Austrian Alpine Marriage Pattern’, in R. L. Rudolph (ed.), The European Peasant Family (Liverpool, 1995), pp. 49–63.
- Maria Ågren (ed.), Iron-making Societies: Early Industrial Development in Sweden and Russia, 1600–1900 (Providence and Oxford, 1998); Metallurgical Works and Peasantry: Problems of Social Organization of Industry in Russia and Sweden in Early-Industrial Period. Collection of Research Works (Ekaterinburg: Hayka Publishers, 1992). On Sweden see also Christer Lundh, ‘Households and Families in Pre-industrial Sweden’, Continuity and Change, 10 (1995), pp. 33–68; S. Montelius, ‘Recruitment and Conditions of Life of Swedish Ironworkers during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries', Scandinavian Economic History Review, 14 (1966), pp. 1–17; Göran Rydén, ‘Iron Production and the Household as a Production Unit in Nineteenth-century Sweden’, Continuity and Change, 10 (1995), pp. 69–104; and Jan Sundin, ‘Family Building in Paternalistic Proto-industries: A Cohort Study from Nineteenth-century Swedish Iron Foundries', Journal of Family History, 14(3) (1989), pp. 265–89; on Russia, see Thomas Esper, ‘The Incomes of Russian Serf Ironworkers in the Nineteenth Century’, Past and Present, 93 (1981), pp. 137–59.
- One of the reasons why Čapo Žmegač opposed the use of the term zadruga was precisely that she saw Karadžić's definition of it as applicable to complex households in other peasant societies (‘New Evidence’, p. 378).
- Plakans, ‘Agrarian Reform’, p. 79.
- Czap, ‘A Large Family’, p. 121–2.
- Dennison, ‘Serfdom and Household Structure in Central Russia’, pp. 397, 402, 421–3.
- Hammel, ‘The Zadruga as Process'.
- Christiane Klapisch, ‘Household and Family in Tuscany in 1427’, in Household and Family in Past Time, p. 281.
- Quoted from the English version, David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven and London, 1985), p. 296.
- Viazzo, ‘What's So Special about the Mediterranean?’, p. 123.
- Jürgen Schlumbohm, ‘From Peasant Society to Class Society: Some Aspects of Family and Class in a North-west German Protoindustrial Parish, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries', in The European Peasant Family, p. 196.
- Schlumbohm, ‘From Peasant Society’, p. 199.
- Schlumbohm, ‘From Peasant Society’, p. 202.
- Laslett, ‘Introduction: The History of the Family’, esp. pp. 34–9.
- For a fuller explanation see also my review of Grandits' Familie und Sozialer Wandel, in Slavic Review, 64(2) (2005), pp. 428–9.