KINSHIP

Andrejs Plakans

When used by historians, the term "kinship" and its variants ("kinship ties," "kin networks") commonly point to a domain of social connections individuals had by virtue of birth and marriage. In everyday life these ties generated kinship roles (father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle, cousin, etc.) which, if and when enacted, entailed certain rights, responsibilities, and behaviors. The enactment of these roles left various kinds of evidence in the historical record. In earlier research, scholars often drew a line between "family" (parents and children) and "kin" (other relatives), but because of the influence of anthropology on social history, this practice has now faded. Historical researchers usually include within kinship investigations not only family but also types of "fictive" kinship, such as godparenthood. In the study of historical kinship in Europe, most of the questions raised initially about the continent are still very much open: Which persons in a pool of potential kin were socially recognized as such, and how did these practices differ among traditional European societies? What rights and obligations did various kinship statuses entail? Were there "systems" of kinship, and how binding were the "rules" of such systems? Did enactment of kinship roles over time produce a collective "tilt," so that a past society can be characterized as, for example, "patrilineal" or "bilateral"? And how did the kinship domain interact with other social domains such as marital practices, property relationships, friendship circles, and the legal order?

The expectation among historians of Europe that kin ties had significance in historical explanation of both individual and collective behavior is of long standing. With some exceptions, however, prior to the 1960s and 1970s research tended to follow a biographical model, focusing on concrete historical individuals and their kin involvements when the narrative required. Sometimes this thrust was enlarged, as when in prosopographical research (collective biography) a collection of individuals of the same kind were investigated. But in the 1960s the confluence of new research directions changed this approach and produced, within the context of a "new social history," what might be called a new kinship history as well. The research mode identified with the French journal Annales called for an exploration of social (and other) "structures of long duration" (la longue durée); and in England the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure initiated major quantitative projects in what were termed historical sociology and historical demography. A greater openness among historians toward the methods and subject matter of such social sciences as sociology and anthropology (particularly the latter, as far as kinship was concerned) complemented these philosophical and methodological changes. As a result, among historians studying Europe both European and non-European, much more attention than ever before came to be paid to the social relationships that connected people by birth and marriage.

This new "agenda" remained highly decentralized, of course, with some researchers seeking to identify kinship structures that persisted over long periods of time, others investigating the "kinship content" of such microstructures as the household, and still others exploring how long-term changes in fertility, mortality, and migration affected the number and types of kin available in particular historical situations. Much of this work was conducted within other specialties of the new social history, such as family history, the history of women, and the history of children. The new kinship history shared the new social history's interest in nonelites ("history from the bottom up"), though a number of prominent researchers continued their work on nobilities. Historians who did not find these new directions compelling continued to work in the older but still very vibrant biographical mode. One might also observe that these new directions were as fruitful to the study of kinship patterns in the medieval period of European history as in the period after the Renaissance.

In the post-1970s decades, researchers of historical kinship have continued to work largely along the lines established in the founding period, while absorbing yet newer emphases. Among the latter have been the stress on such variables as class, ethnicity, and sex—since kin ties may have been understood and experienced differently by the rich and the poor, men and women, German and Swede—and the injunctions stemming from postmodernism, which underline that all social relationships and accompanying vocabularies must be examined within the context of the deployment of power. There has also been a general deemphasis on the search for "kinship rules" and a new stress on the instrumental nature of kinship ties—on the notion, in other words, that such ties can be bent or ignored or treated playfully when situations warrant. With respect to research tools, historical kinship study has benefited from computers, which are of immense assistance not only in compiling and managing databases but also in producing data configurations with lightning speed. Because historical kinship research normally begins with the scrutiny of complex networks of linked individuals, rapid mechanical reconstruction of such configurations has saved countless research hours.

Though four decades of development seem a long time, the operations of kinship in most of the societies of historic Europe still have not received systematic description. Most of the newer research has been conducted in the history of western and northern Europe (England, France, the Scandinavian countries), with central Europe (the German lands, the Habsburg monarchy) next in line. The Balkan Peninsula has long held a special place in European kinship research because of the work of anthropologists on its complex patrilineal household formations (the zadruga); similar work in other areas of eastern Europe did not begin until the 1990s. (Here, the Marxist-Leninist paradigm that controlled historical research for many decades pictured kinship largely as a feudal matter, that was being left behind by a society evolving toward socialist modernity.) Nonetheless, in spite of the unevenness of research, the study of kinship has become an inextricable part of European social history.

THE QUESTION OF EVIDENCE

In moving from the study of concrete historical personages and their kin to an examination of kinship as a structuring principle of communities and entire societies, historians turned their attention to new ways of merging primary sources. Those that had been used earlier—such documents as wills and testaments, autobiographical accounts, marriage contracts, retirement contracts, letters, and land and court records—had to be supplemented in order for coverage to include not only the classes of people who used such instruments but the common people as well. The new sources included household lists and registers of birth, death, and marriage. Listings frequently contained a profusion of kin terms, while vital registers, if integrated through nominal linkage, by definition could yield examinable networks of related people.

In the analysis of these newer sources, historians were at a disadvantage when compared to anthropologists, who had studied kinship in living communities for about a century. First, anthropologists could question the people whose relations they studied and obtain from them the meaning of kin terms and information about rights and obligations kin statuses entailed. Also, true to the imperatives of their discipline, anthropologists had elaborated a vast body of theory about kinship phenomena, so that results of fresh studies could be, in a sense, fitted into and made sense of by reference to an existing corpus of propositions about how kinship worked. Historians, by contrast, had no such theories about the past, though they were aware of the quasi-historical theories put forth by nineteenth-century sociologists about long-term changes in kinship relations on the European continent—that with increased migration kin networks had become diluted, that kinship had become a spent force with the onset of modernity, that the typical kin cluster of the modern world had become the two-generational nuclear family. These ideas, as it turned out, were, at best, hypotheses to be tested continually; certainly, given their generality they could not help in organizing the close-to-the-ground information to which historians now turned their attention.

The problems of dealing with the new evidence were numerous. To begin with, the most useful sources for kinship research about common people—household listings that used relational terminology, vital registers that listed kin-connected persons over time and in separate volumes—not only did not state the names of all possible kin roles a given configuration could yield, but they also rarely supplied evidence about how kin behaved toward each other. For example, a configuration of terms such as "husband, wife, son, daughter"—all that was usually needed for an enumerator to produce a household list—stated only four role labels but implied at least as many others—father, mother, brother, sister. In evidence culled from vital registration lists, the problem of implicit roles became even more serious because careful linkage of, for example, a series of father-son dyads could implicitly yield such role labels as grandfather, grandson, uncle, nephew, and so on, even though the terms for these roles would not actually appear in the source itself. Moreover, these sources yielded static relationships rather than direct evidence about behavior, leaving it to the historian to impute social significance to an uncovered relationship. In other words, when it came to kinship, even the smallest data set required much inferential thinking, as well as necessitating the linking of these genealogical constructs to sources that would yield evidence about transactions among the named persons.

Continued research at the level of individual persons also raised the question of the representativeness of the communities being researched, in two senses. First, there was the question of how many examples of an enacted kin relationship were needed before the relationship could be judged to be a significant one for the community in question. Second, the question arose of what kind of hierarchies of kin relationships existed, so that certain of them could be judged to be more important than others. Clues to the questions that needed asking could be obtained from anthropological research on kinship, but historians could not—as anthropologists could—ask the people being studied for their views on the matter. Beyond that, it was not at all clear what kinds of kin relations had to be identified as socially significant before an entire community could be described as having an operative kinship rule, or how much variation could be permitted without losing the ability to characterize a region as one that had, say, patrilocal post-marital residence (i.e., newly married couples coming to live in the husband's father's household).

To avoid the problems of imperfect historical sources, some researchers, aided by the computer, made use of the technique of microsimulation. In this the starting point was either a real or an imagined population, the development of which over time was simulated rather than followed in the historical record. The technique required the stipulation of rates of birth, death, marriage, and migration, as well as the stipulation of the mean ages at which these events were likely to have taken place. The exercise was useful for answering such questions as, for example, how many different kin of certain types could a person have in a given demographic regime. Moreover, by comparing real-world findings with simulated results, it was possible to gauge whether a particular community was "normal" or somehow extraordinary. The technique did not call for the substitution of simulated populations for real ones, but it did improve the chances of evaluating the findings about real populations.

A final problem pertained to the evidence that presumably was needed for documenting kinship change over long periods of time—a goal of prime importance to historians. Several choices presented themselves. One could study kinship cross-sectionally at several points in time in many communities and infer long-term change from the nature of the structures present at these points. One could also follow the kinship domain in a single community for as long as the sources permitted, thus obtaining a more reliable record of changes but sacrificing geographical coverage. Beyond that, one also had to choose among the configurations that best manifested long-term kinship change—the lineage, the coresident kin group, the shifting meaning of a particular dyadic relationship—and make the case that these and not others were the best indicators of kinship change in the long term. Alternately, one could invest all research effort in analyzing a community at a single point in the past, in the hope that others would complement the effort by studying similar communities in later and earlier time periods. None of these alternatives has shown itself as being easy, nor as the clear path to unchallengeable characterizations of long-term kinship change.

KIN TIES WITHIN AND OUTSIDE THE HOUSEHOLD

The origins of the new direction in kinship research during the 1960s and 1970s are to be found in the work of, and the research engendered by, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. In some respects, its innovations were inadvertent, because the group's concerns were focused not on kinship per se but on the comparative long-term history of the domestic group (or family household). In the course of laying out an agenda, researchers found the need to create a system of classification that counted, among other things, the kin of the household head—relatives who were not the spouse and offspring of the head (coresident kin). Though in household listings from northeastern Europe (including Great Britain) the proportion of coresident kin turned out to be comparatively low, in listings from other European sites (particularly eastern Europe), the proportion was much higher. This information provided an important clue to how domestic groups differed across the European continent. In some places, kin-linked groups dispersed, while in others there was a pronounced tendency for kin groups to stay close together—even coreside—as long as the resources of the holding supported them. These differing characteristics were judged to be important because they provided a clue to how groups perpetuated their structures over generations. It was hypothesized that children growing up in groups of certain structures—ranking from simple to complex—were likely to internalize the values of such groups and to recreate the same structures over the course of many generations.

Moreover, anthropological theory suggested that the "coresident kin" were an important clue to general kinship principles active in the community under study. Where no coresident kin were present in the household, the practices of the community endorsed "neolocal postmarital residence" (i.e., newly married couples set up households separate from their parents). By contrast, the presence in the household of married sons and married brothers of the household head suggested patrilocal postmarital residence principles at work. In the developmental cycle of the household, sons upon marriage remained living with the parental couple, but married daughters went to live with the parents of their husbands. Somewhat later in the cycle, after the parental couple had died, a listing of the group would show a structure consisting of married brothers. Moreover, the types of kin who coresided indicated other kin preferences in the community. Coresiding married sons and married brothers (as contrasted with coresiding married daughters and married sisters) suggested that the community, and perhaps the region, valued patrilineality (i.e., males in the father's line staying together as long as possible). The presence of only one married son could be considered a clue to the active use of the stem-family principle, which means that a designated male heir stays with the parents while others disperse. The presence of sons-in-law suggested that in times of crises (no sons, death of designated heir, underage sons), the family could violate postmarital patrilocality and allow a married daughter and her husband to coreside with the current head. In areas where there were no coresident kin or the proportions were very low, the question of how domestic groups worked to perpetuate themselves would have to be sought in other evidence, but where coresident kin did exist, they were an important interpretative resource. In their work anthropologists readily moved from findings about the characteristics of domestic groups to statements about general kinship principles underlying group structures, and researchers following the Cambridge Group's approach tended to adopt this strategy as well.

In order to provide a framework for ongoing research, in 1983 Peter Laslett proposed a four-part regionalization of the European continent in light of the evidence that had been uncovered to date about historical domestic group structures. This scheme, consisting of thirty-three criteria, suggested that "tendencies in domestic group organization" in Europe demonstrated the existence of four broad zones—west, west-central, Mediterranean, and east. With respect to kinship within the household, the proposal suggested that the proportion of coresident kin in the domestic groups of the western zone had tended to be very low, in the west-central zone low as well, and in the Mediterranean and eastern zones high. Married brothers in the western zone had been virtually absent from the historical record of households, while in the west-central zone their proportions had been low, and in the Mediterranean and the eastern very high. Subsequent research on household kinship has not overturned this schema, even while scholars dealing with particular communities have found the formulation problematic, especially as far as the eastern and Mediterranean zones are concerned.

Prolonged comparative research on kin within the household necessarily led to questions about kin who were not in coresidence with each other—a line of inquiry that has yet to run its full course. The main questions were whether dispersed kin maintain relations with each other so that they could be conceptualized as a corporate group; if so, what structures these groups had; and what difference the existence of such groups made for the individuals and families composing the group. The main obstacle to systematic research about non-coresident kin was always the nature of the primary sources, all of which—especially household lists and vital registers—required time-consuming and expensive linkage projects before such broader questions could be addressed. The yield of positive links from such linking projects tended to be socially skewed (the propertied and titled classes having much better documentation than the common people) and problematic (names did not match, and in many parts of Europe population turnover was much more rapid than had been believed). Turnover led to the dispersion of sibling groups, sometimes far beyond the borders of the community and thus beyond the reach of reconstruction. There was no warrant for believing that such far-flung ties were always and everywhere broken permanently, because they could always be reactivated. But it did mean that whereas kin configurations within the domestic group could be described comparatively precisely, those that involved different residences and different communities continued to lead a shadowy existence as far as empirical research was concerned. In principle, through the adept use of precise genealogical information it was possible to reconstruct—at least for the higher social orders—all manner of wide-reaching kin networks, but the act of reconstruction was not in and of itself evidence that the network members used their ties or even recognized them. It remains to be seen what use, if any, was made of such ties, whether some were activated more than others, and whether distance tended to equalize all such kin relationships.

Work on these and related questions produced research strategies to overcome the obvious difficulties. One such strategy has been to choose a defining framework and to define kin ties outside the frame as irrelevant. This strategy is an expanded variant of the study of household kinship, where the household boundary provides the frame. A larger frame can be provided by the community—village, serf estate, neighborhood of a city—and the kin ties deemed important are those which play out within the history of the unit. This choice is analogous to traditional anthropological field research, in which the small community was the focus. Another strategy focuses on a particular time-based kinship formation—a lineage, for example, and most commonly a patrilineage—and uses only its members (individual and families) as objects of study. This strategy can produce results at a point in past time when the relationships of all living lineage members are scrutinized, as well as over time, if the lineage is successful in persisting and has an existence over many generations. If a particular community's past is well documented, it is of course possible to study lineage formation and lineage extinction within a community over a long period of time. A third strategy has been to explicate the kinship ties of a single historical person within and outside that person's place of residence, starting with the information in an exceptionally informative historical document such as a diary. Identifying the composition of personal kin networks has been a normal part of the anthropologists' arsenal of weapons in kinship study, but, in the historical context, this strategy leaves unanswered the question of the representativeness of the individual and the community in which the individual resides.

A fourth strategy for examining kin activity outside the household is to focus on social processes that are not by definition a result of kinship activity but do involve kin. Thus, for example, studies of migration have revealed that kin of migrants could be helpful in the move by providing temporary homes at the point of arrival or a set of temporary residences during the move itself. In such studies, it is not kinship itself that is of interest but the uses to which kin ties can be put. Similarly, the workings of inheritance systems have yielded valuable information about kinship ties. Another example is recruitment to political office in premodern governments, since in these nepotism played a substantial role. In these studies, of course, there is no need to identify all existing kin ties, since the only directly relevant ones are those which the evidence marks as having been used. Yet without information on the ties not used, the researcher remains in the dark about why these ties and not others were activated, since the "population at risk" from which the used ties were drawn remains unknown.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, investigations of kinship outside the household moved forward at a slower pace than studies of household kinship. Moreover, the same geographical skewing exists in both subfields, with one notable exception. Generally, we know far more about kinship outside the household in western Europe than in central or eastern Europe. The exception is, again, the Balkan Peninsula, which has fascinated anthropologists for several generations. The kin-focused studies of the English nobility have few parallels—in studies of, for instance, the Russian nobility—and, at a different end of the social spectrum, studies of kinship in the villages of eastern Europe remain sparse in comparison with the numerous village studies in France. In the 1980s, German and Italian scholarship began to turn to questions about social microstructures and kinship as well, but in all cases many of the questions this research direction raised at the outset remain only partially answered.

KINSHIP STRUCTURES, KINSHIP RULES, AND HISTORICAL SHIFTS

Implicit in kinship research efforts has been the assumption that kin ties bind persons to certain behaviors. If generalized throughout a community, region, and society, and if demonstrated to be operative over long periods of time, such constraints could then be thought of as examples of "structures of long duration," predisposing (or binding) people to act in certain ways, even if only half-consciously. Dedicated empiricists among kinship researchers would have liked to wait for sufficient micro-level research before drawing such macro-level conclusions, but, generally speaking, work has proceeded in a somewhat less ordered fashion. Findings about the operation of kinship in everyday life have confirmed, rather than uncovered, the long-held view that traditional European society placed greater emphasis on relatives on the father's than on the mother's side (patrifocal rather than matrifocal), that Europeans who found lineage reckoning of use tended to favor patrilines rather than matrilines, that in postmarital residence decisions it was the groom's father's household that was favored, and that in many inheritance settlements it was sons rather than daughters who benefited the most. In such matters, kinship research about Europe has brought no surprises. To the extent that kinship ties manifested themselves as long-term practices or structures, these favored males while not always totally disadvantaging females. What kinship research has accomplished, however, is to demonstrate how everyday life, when it involved kinship ties, did not necessarily treat structures as sacrosanct, as a set of hard and fast rules. Thus Laslett's concept of "tendencies" in domestic group characteristics is useful in an even larger sense. Even though research on kinship has repeatedly demonstrated that custom and tradition favored males, it has also demonstrated just as convincingly Europeans' readiness not to disfavor females. This emerges when the starting point of research is shifted from "structures" and "rules" to individual-centered networks and to events in the individual life course.

Existing research has shown that such a shift is not simply a matter of changing research strategies but the logical next step in how historical kinship needs to be studied. It is entirely possible to view a "kinship system" from different positions, with structural features being one position and individual kinship another. The principles demonstrably operating in these different realms may seem to be incongruous, but that is evidence that a kinship system may itself contain seemingly incongruous elements. Empirical research on kinship in the European past has demonstrated quite convincingly that great care must be exercised before assuming that there was one European system or that, within it, we can easily delineate cultural areas in which determinative subsystems with certain characteristics operated over time.

Within the general context of male-favoring kinship structures, it has become obvious that when necessary individuals used kin connections on both the father's and mother's side: ego-based kinship, to use the anthropological term, was bilateral. Assistance, favors, support, and other help of various kinds for a person in trouble could just as easily flow from one's matrilineal as patrilineal relatives. At times, this was dictated by necessity, when demographic cataclysms had reduced the number of patrilineal kin; but even when both sides were thriving numerically, Europeans could count on help on both sides when they needed it.

Certain practices that seemed to favor females over males were profoundly disturbing when brought into play. An example is the in-marrying son-in-law, a kin type that appears in those traditional societies where coresidence of married couples was common. Ordinarily, household succession concerned sons, but when a couple had had only daughters or when sons had died, there was little hesitancy to incorporate into the domestic group a son-in-law as a potential heir. In communities where this was common, the practice was frequently surrounded by loss of face for the parental couple and the son-in-law. In these situations, however, it is clear that it was the survival of the family's base—the farm or holding—that was of principal importance, even though survival was accomplished through a break in the patriline.

A much more direct threat to the perpetuation of kinship structures and rules was the growing significance of the nuclear family unit, a slow process starting perhaps in the seventeenth but definitely present by the eighteenth century. In this shift, wider kin ties were not necessarily severed but were deemphasized. Thus the husband-wife and parent-child ties became more important than the ties between the same husband and his father and other patrilineal relatives. Emphasis shifted from a kind of equality among one's own children and the children of one's siblings and became focused on one's own children. In this situation the wife ceased to think of herself as still attached, even after marriage, to her father's line, and increasingly began to think of herself as the spouse of her husband, irrevocably removed from the father's kin network.

It is very probable that this shift, operating from the eighteenth century onward, gradually equalized kin ties to persons outside the conjugal family unit. Specific kin ties to particular individuals lost whatever force they had had before, and all kin beyond the conjugal family became more or less interchangeable. Such a shift did not invent a new feature of European kinship but simply enhanced the importance of existing bilaterality. In some societies, especially in western and northern Europe, where domestic groups were always small and did not often include coresident married relatives, this shift—judging by the fuzziness of kinship terminology—was already under way before the eighteenth century. Elsewhere, where coresidential kinship was more complex, the specificities of individual links were maintained for a longer time. Demographic trends clearly accentuated the equalization of kin relationships. In the nineteenth century, as levels of intracontinental migration increased dramatically, and as out-migration to North American and other continents increased as well, kin ties were severed and the specificities of relationships lost. Reforms in the law came increasingly to enshrine equal inheritance among offspring, so that it became increasingly difficult to favor sons over daughters.

Several features of these long-term shifts appear to stand out. First, it has not been demonstrated unequivocally that, with the so-called "triumph" of the modern nuclear family, kin ties beyond the family have been permanently abrogated. Repeatedly, research has shown that kin remained an important point of reference, and kin networks could be mobilized to fulfill various kinds of support functions. Kinship obligations to specific persons might no longer be felt as mandatory, but kin continue to be recognized as a group distinct from friends and strangers. This has been particularly evident in European societies in which the twentieth century has brought long periods of social stress. Documentation of familial behavior during the two world wars, for example, shows repeated instances of the use of kin networks for survival, and the collapse of communist regimes and the transformation of state systems in Eastern Europe in the 1989–1991 period has demonstrated again the importance of kin networks for all manner of assistance. Stories associated with continuing insurgencies in the post-1991 Balkan area (e.g., Kosovo) document Kosovo Albanians mobilizing transcontinental networks of relatives to assist in the battle for "national independence." Though there is considerable evidence about the equalization and democratization of kin connections, there is little that suggests that kin have been made equal to friends.

Second, kinship theorists have at times made reference to "modern" European kinship, which carried the implications that "modernity" was a permanently achieved state and that the interchangeability of kin ties had permanently superseded all other kin characteristics. With increasing doubts about the permanence of the "modern," however, it is fair to say that there is no historical warrant for assuming that the present state will last forever. The appropriate assessment would be that the present is a phase—neither higher nor lower—of the continually unfolding social history of the European continent, and that the current configurations do not provide any usable clues to what the characteristics of future phases will be.

Third, some features of "modern" European family life may make kin reckoning more difficult and dethrone lineage reckoning entirely. The high proportion of marriages that end in divorce, the equalization of state benefits to married and unmarried cohabiting couples, the diminishing fertility rate, and the growing popularity of no-child or single-child families all disrupt lineage formation and lineage calculation. The proportion of Europeans involved in such phenomena appears to be growing. If such trends continue, the identification of lineages will clearly become virtually impossible, and perhaps irrelevant.

See alsoThe European Marriage Pattern (volume 2) and other articles in this section.

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