11 - Reciprocities of labor and property

Summary

Then the father slapped the son on the face and threw him to the ground. Then the mother grabbed old Weiler by the hair and tore him from the son. As soon as the son, Bauknecht, felt some air, he grabbed a stick and struck his father on the head so that blood immediately flowed.

- Gerichtsprotocoll

In many instances over the course of the period we are considering, parents and adult children cooperated in work or shared living areas, storage, and tools. Sometimes they advanced each other cash or covered each other's debts. The manner in which people interacted raises questions about the cultural meaning of property within the exigencies of production. These issues have been at the center of a recent attempt to distinguish fundamental historical differences between various regions of Europe. Those areas which were dominated for centuries by a system of private property have been differentiated from others characterized as peasant. According to the theory, ownership in peasant societies is not individualized, but belongs to the whole family. Children work as part of a joint productive effort, and as co-owners of an estate are quite distinguishable from wage-laborers. The father, rather than being a proprietor, acts as a manager who can easily be replaced by another family member if he is incompetent. In any event, he has to give over when the son becomes capable of leading the enterprise. In a peasant system, land seldom comes onto the market, and when it does, it has such symbolic value that families put great effort into reassembling the pieces.