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Familism is a model of a social organization that assigns the family an important role in individual and collective identity. This article proposes a historical analysis and interpretation of the Seder celebrations of Jewish Israelis, in order to explore what is unique about Israeli familism—that it imagines the entire nation as an extended family. This ritual continues to be widely practiced today by Jews of every sector—secular, traditional, and religious. As a result, it has a significant presence in Israeli popular culture. The focus is on two questions: (1) who celebrates? That is, what forum convenes around the table? (2) How is it celebrated? That is, what ritual is conducted during the festive gathering? The historical and ethnographic analysis shows that over the course of the twentieth century, the extended family became the preferred forum for celebration, and that the conformist reading of the Haggadah and the other parts of the ceremony continue on the whole to follow the Orthodox rules, even in secular families. This mode of celebration is analyzed here as an expression of the political image of the entire Jewish people as one large extended family and as a demonstration of the extensive use of Jewish familism in the construction of Jewish identity in Israel today.

The historical study of the intergenerational transmission of surnames in the areas ruled by the crowns of Castile and Portugal, peninsular and colonial, reveals a nearly universal sixteenth-century system of surname transmission that antedates the use of permanent hereditary surnames. Great flexibility in surname transmission allowed a child’s selection of a surname from among those of the extended pedigree, both maternal and paternal, demonstrating that Hispanic society did not, and does not, view the extended family in the patrilineal, male-dominated fashion of Anglo society. In the Iberian perspective, the entire extended family, back on all sides to the third and even fourth generation, is viewed as personally relevant.

Boys growing up in rural Gabon between 1900 and 1940 negotiated with many challenges: the rise of migrant labor, famines and hardships brought on by World War I, the growth of Christianity and African-based spiritual traditions, and the undermining of clans, which had been the main form of social and political organization in the nineteenth century. Parents, extended family members, missionaries, and European businesses recruited boys to serve their varied interests. Boys in turn developed new self-understandings by leaving their homes as students, workers, and clients of older men. This article examines the life histories of four boys to trace the successes and challenges that individual boys encountered in this turbulent era. Interestingly, older biological relatives of boys generally succeeded in maintaining their authority over children living far from home, although the education and wages that boys received forced older men to offer boys more benefits.

This article is drawn from my PhD dissertation, which explores bequeathing practices in the second half of the twentieth century in Ireland. In particular, this article compares the bequeathing practices of childless single and widowed people in Irish society in 1951 and 2000 through a qualitative analysis of probated wills to answer the questions: In the absence of spouses and children, to whom did they leave their property? Did bequeathing practices change in the fifty-year period during which Ireland underwent radical social and economic change? Contrary to Durkheim's prediction, testamentary dispositions revealed the enduring importance of extended family; childless single and widowed people created virtual families by bequeathing to siblings, nieces, nephews, and cousins in 1951 and this practice continued in 2000.

This article examines the short-and long-term influences of African American migration on the development and functioning of African American families and family relationships. Using existing research and the results from an ethnographic study of a large, African American, extended family, this article confirms the findings of previous studies and begins to examine the meaning and definition of contemporary types of migration. The study suggests that family members who have “migrated” with respect to socioeconomic status have many of the same issues as those who have migrated with respect to physical distance.

What were the experiences of daughters-in-law in the patriarchal household? Did they ever resist? By analyzing the life stories of twenty-two “modern” women living in complex households of colonial Taiwan, this article suggests that experiences of daughters-in-law differed a great deal from each other, according to family structures, family life cycles, and life cycles of the individual. It also argues that most of the daughters-in-law did rebel. Whether their resistance could be successful, however, depended a great deal on the rising of modern discourses, employment opportunities outside the home, and the possessed economic resources of the daughter-in-law and her natal family.

Recognizances have been studied very little as evidence of domestic violence, yet they can yield many insights for historians. Using more than one hundred recognizances for assaults by husbands upon wives in Westminster Quarter Sessions records, 1680-1720, this article argues that wives could prosecute even a relatively minor incident of violence. In contrast, servants and apprentices appear to have been able to prosecute assaults by employers only if they coincided with contractual violations. Adulterous lovers, neighbors, and extended family were present in domestic violence prosecutions at various times and, along with wives, appear to have played a role in limiting patriarchal power.

This analysis of unstudied census materials and Maya-language notarial records explores the nature of Maya familial organization and identity in colonial Yucatán, Mexico. At the intersection of the two primary units of Maya society, the community and the patronym-group, existed the extended family, which was formed through marriage alliances within largely endogamous communities between strictly exogamous patronym-groups, expressed as a multiunit patriarchal household of about ten members, and given cohesion by community and patronym-group identities and by familial participation in working and owning property. Mar riages may have been later, and separate newlywed households less common, than previously suggested.

Within a framework provided by recent Polish scholarship on modernizing social change, women, and the family, the author of this article attempts to answer three basic questions: (a) Are changes in the structure of the family, resulting in the relative decline of the multigenerational family in favor of nontraditional family norms, including the nuclear family, directly related to industrialization? (b) Does the model of the urban family of the industrial era actually differ in a structural sense from the preindustrial urban family? and (c) Do changes in the economic function of the family as a consequence of industrialization lead to corresponding changes in the structure of the family, particularly in terms of gender roles? In analyzing the Polish case, the author points to a number of paradoxical, yet parallel, developments that challenge many conventional assumptions about the impact of modernization on the preindustrial, patriarchal model of the family.

There is an influential strand in the history of the Englishfamily, casting its shadow over interpretations of the nineteenth century and rapidly becoming sociological orthodoxy, which stresses the centrality of what has been termed the autonomous nuclear family. In this interpretation, the nuclear family dominates household structures, kinship is weak, and the community rather than family or kin is the main source of support for the needy sections of society. This article, which employs the technique of total reconstitution, examines the role of kinship in three adjoining rural communities in nineteenth-century Kent to question some of these orthodoxies. It shows that as many households in the area went through an extended phase as experienced only the simple family structure, and that kinship links in the immediate area were strong. Any separation between kin and commu nity would have been meaningless in these rural parishes where kinship was part of neighborhood.

ABSTRACT: This article shows the changing household composition of an Icelandic rural community of isolated dispersed farms as it shifted from nineteenth century tenant farmers who raised mixed herds of sheep, dairy cattle, and horses for their own subsistence to twentieth-century freeholders who produce livestock foodstuffs for a domestic market. The farm population of the community reached its highest level under the subsistence economy with households of nuclear families and contracted live-in servants. The farmers' children replaced the live-in servants at the end of the nineteenth century as opportunities for wage labor opened up in nearby fishing settlements. Extended families became common in the community. After World War II, tenant farmers have become freeholders, the farm households are both extended families with adult children remaining on the farms and nuclear families who still retain the services of adult children who moved away as livestock owners. A range of household structures has emerged as the homogeneous Icelandic rural community has persisted.

This study approaches the history of household patterns in early modern Europe from the perspective of Wallersteinian world-system theory. It is shown that the European core during this time was characterized predominantly by simple nuclear households. By contrast, the European periphery and semiperiphery were far more likely to be characterized by complex households. We explain these relationships in terms of the mode of labor control predominating in each zone of the world-economy. Simple nuclear households become the norm where labor is being freed from traditional feudal bonds and where capitalist labor markets exist. Complex households are most likely to persist under traditional feudal relationships because they constitute adaptations to the labor needs that arise under such circumstances. Complex households are also common, although somewhat less so, where sharecropping is a predominant mode of labor control.

The social history of the Brazilian family has been predominated by the notion of patriarchal extended family of masters and slaves the "Big House" of Gilberto Freyre. Recent writings found that 45% of households were headed by females in colonial times and they expanded during transition to capitalism. The 1835 census of the parish of Santiago Maior do Iguape Bahia listed 7404 people living in 1019 buildings. 2/3 of the population were mixed-race whites were 8% and slaves made up 53.7%. The sugar mills employed 60% of the people. 41.4% of people lived with female heads of households as farmers domestics or seamstresses. The elite of sugar mill owners constituted 1.7% of heads of households with 1/4 of the population. 68% of laborers were heads with 1/3 of the population. 1/2 of black households were female-headed and female-headed households made up 33.2% of the total. 23% of slaves lived in such households vs. 43.5% of the free population. Most women lived on their own after the age of 25 and the majority aged 40 or over were heads of households. Blacks had a 37.9% rate of female headship adjusted for age and class vs. 16.8% for whites. Only 22.1% of female heads of workers households were ever married vs. 36.5% of elite female heads. The fast economic transformation wrought by the sugar mills between 1818-35 may have been responsible for the high proportion of households headed by females an uncharacteristic household pattern in Iberia during this time (16-17% rate of female-headed households mostly widows). Most women made a living by wage labor and only 5.4% of the population lived off of subsistence farming. Living arrangements from plantation times or discrimination by the elite may have produced the predominance of female-headed households among the low-rank populace.

This article addresses the debate over the peasant household by using the example of a French wine commune to challenge the notion of the universal nuclear family. Household organization and family demographic patterns varied distinctively among laborers, farmers, and landowners in this commune in the nineteenth century. The influence of inheritance, marriage patterns, fertility, and work patterns on household organization is explained. A second finding is that extended households increased in number between 1836 and 1866. Far from dis appearing with "modernization, " extended households enabled some families to adapt to market forces by mobilizing household resources and labor in new ways.

The dynamics of the family and household in the parish of Mishino Russia between 1782 and 1858 are analyzed. The processes by which the main features of the family system were preserved throughout this period are examined using data from a collection of 12 successive censuses of the peasant community. Factors contributing to the tendency toward perennial multiple family households defined as "multigenerational agnatic households in which headship turns over and new multiple family households are spawned and spun off while retaining their complex structure through a continuous sequence of generations" are examined at the individual and conjugal family levels. The influence of landlord interests peasant marriage patterns and the collective interests of the commune is emphasized. (EXCERPT)

Observers of rural Basque society have regularly contended that its basic social unit is the stem family household associated with the baserria system of agricultural production. The stem family household has long been an object of speculation, and its sanctity and preservation was a common theme in Basque literature. A close analysis of the population records of the village of Echalar in Navarre, making use of both synchronic and longitudinal analysis, suggests that the stem family household was indeed realized regularly in Echalar, and the fact of its statistical minority at any one point in time was due more to demographic limitations rather than to the presence of a competing family ethos.

The evolution of the extended family in southeastern Europe during the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries is reviewed. Variations in the number and the size and structure of extended families are described. Factors studied include the relationship of household members determination of a household head distribution of labor and duties property ownership social and economic conditions and divisons into smaller units. Consequences of the decrease in the number of extended families are considered and sources of data concerning the extended family are reviewed.

By focusing on morphological continuity, family historians may be neglecting long-term changes within the family that are documented in non-numerical sources. Evidence from Finland suggests that researchers need to reexamine the history of the suurperhe ("large family"). Similarly, evidence from the Scandinavian peninsula suggests that the early modern centuries witnessed the growth of privacy in generational relations, the emergence of the father-son dyad as the preferred method of land transfer, the separation of landownership from household authority, and the use of the courts to solve family problems. Thus there may have been transformations in family life in the long term that unchanging measures of mean size do not capture.

Cyclical and linear time perspectives on family household structures are defined. They are utilized in a case study of the father-son dyad in a central Ser bian village over the past 150 years. This relationship is critical to understanding the transitions in the South Slav extended family household, the zadruga. Data are based on oral recall and on vital, tax, and census records. Linear time measures include vital rates such as declining fertility and mortality as well as decreasing household size. Cyclical time measures, which have not varied in the period studied, include age at marriage and age of parent at birth of first child. All these elements are shown to affect the continued existence of extended house hold structures and condition their alteration from predominantly lateral exten sion including collateral kin to units of linear form emphasizing relations across three, and even four, generations. Analyzing these temporal processes is seen as a way of understanding the dynamics behind notions of stability and change in social structures.

Aspects of the practice of kinship in a Highland Scots community in nineteenth- century New Zealand are examined through archival and oral historical sources. Although the word clann does not appear in the written vocabulary of these settlers there is evidence that the extended family was central to settlement patterns and to support systems throughout the life course. It is further suggested that support extended to those beyond the circle of "close" kin to include friends, acquaintances, and others in need, especially when these were children. The study concludes that a biologistic model of kinship does not fit the evidence from Waipu and that the settlers had a wider and more fluid concept of appropriate people toward whom "kinship" could and should be practiced.

This article examines the structural evolution over the life-cycle of a cohort group ofparental households in the industrial town of Tilburg during theperiod 1880-1920. The rapid demographic and industrial developments the town had been going through before and during this period did not lead to a destruction of the traditional pattern of extended family households, as structural-functionalist theories would assume. A large majority ofthe Tilburg parents developed a household structure beyond the nuclear family at some point over their cycle. Most household extensions occurred during the first developmental stages, but especially during the last stages of the parental life-cycle. These families continued to react in accordance with the area's traditional family values. They constitute an example of a 'cultural lag'that can exist between family patterns and social structural change. A strong social and economic position seems to be related to an extended household structure, particularly in the case of the migrant families in the Tilburg sample. Moreover socially differentiated ex tension patterns have been established as well. Finally, the Tilburg study confirms the importance of kin for migrants in an industrializing society.

One of the lacunae in research on nineteenth-century American households is the relative scarcity of systematic studies on individual-level census data of rural populations. This essay uses individual-level data from the 1860 federal manuscript census of Wood County Ohio to provide base-line data for comparison with similar studies by other scholars whose focus has been on regions other than the rural Midwest. The questions that were asked and the methods and techniques that were used to analyze the data in this essay were selected to increase comparability with other works. The variables analyzed are wealth age sex ethnicity structural type of household fertility rural-urban residence and the occupation of married household heads. The findings are for the most part supportive of other research on the same subjects. Females were more likely than males to head nonfamily households and less likely to head extended family households. The likelihood of heading an extended family household decreased with the age of the head. 34.6% of female household heads had no real wealth compared with only 18.9% of the men. Women were also much less likely than males to own real estate with a value of US$3000 or more: 5.8% of the women fell into the high wealth category compared with 15.7% of the men. For both sexes the likelihood of heading an extended family increased with real wealth. Foreign-born women had higher fertility levels than native women; rural women had higher fertility than town dwelling women in every age group and 19% greater fertility. The differences between rural and urban foreign-born women were smaller and less consistent. Rural foreign-born women ages 30-39 and 45-49 had lower fertility than their urban counterparts. The overall fertility rate of rural foreign-born women however was 4% higher than that of foreign-born townswomen. A larger number of the husbands of foreign-born women had unskilled occupations; the occupations of native and foreign-born women with husbands with farm or skilled occupations was approximately the same. For both groups the lower or less skilled the occupation the higher the fertility.

This article considers from the historical demographic and anthropological points of view the various forms that the...peasant family [in the province of Leon Spain] takes during its development cycle and demonstrates the importance of extended and multiple family households in an area long characterized by partible inheritance and nuclear family households. Two methods of doing family history at times held incompatible are used and are shown to be complementary: a structural analysis of households based on four household lists from 1920 to 1978 and on demographic data from 1739 to 1978; and an interpretive analysis of the lived reality of the Leonese household based on ethnographic data and on locally held notions of proper relations between kin as embedded in stories people tell about family histories. (EXCERPT)