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Rethinking complex households: the case of the Western Pyrenean ‘Houses’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Michel Verdon
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Continuity and Change , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , August 1996 , pp. 191 - 215
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

ENDNOTES

1 As will become clearer as the text unfolds, the Western Pyreneans have developed what I would be tempted to call a ‘House complex’. Indeed, in common parlance they speak of the ‘maison’ not as a dwelling-unit, but as the dwelling-unit, together with its resident members and the patrimonial property attached to it, to the extent that all social identification is linked first and foremost to the house. This is why I chose to distinguish it from the mere dwelling-unit by using the upper-case ‘H’.

2 Which he also calls ‘famille communautaire’, or ‘communal family’.

3 Play, F. Le, L'organisation de la famille, 2nd edn (Tours, 1907), 28.Google Scholar

4 Demolins, E., ‘L'état actuel de la science sociale d'après les travaux de ces dix dernières années’, La Science Sociale 15 (1893).Google Scholar

5 Bourdieu, P., ‘Célibat et condition paysanne’, Etudes Rurales 5–6 (1962), 32–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Augustins, G., ‘Maison et société dans les Baronnies aux XIXe siècle’, in Chiva, I. et Goy, J. eds., Les Baronnies des Pyrénées, vol. I (Paris, 1980), 201–14Google Scholar, and Comment se perpétuer? (Paris, 1989).Google Scholar

6 The Béarnais occupy the Béarn, traditionally a Gascon-speaking area immediately west of the Basque country in France. Although I will make fleeting references to the Spanish Basques, I am in fact writing about their French compatriots.

7 All over the Western Pyrenees, some centuries ago, according to Poumarède, all Western Pyrenean populations transmitted their property to the first-born (or more precisely the eldest of the children who survived to adulthood), be it a boy or girl; see Poumarède, J., Les successions dans le Sud-Ouest de la France au Moyen Age (Paris, 1972)Google Scholar. The French write of ‘aînesse absolue’ or ‘aînesse intégrale’. I shall similarly call it ‘absolute’ or ‘integral’ primogeniture.

8 In French the aîné(e) is the eldest child, all the others being cadets (boys) or cadettes (girls).

9 Rogé, P., Les anciens fors de Béarn (Toulouse, 1907)Google Scholar; Coutumes (Les) de la ville et cité de Bayonne et juridiction d'icelle, approuvées, établies et confirmées par édit perpétuel, et autorisées par arrêt de la cour du Parlement de Bourdeaux du 9 juin 1514 (Bayonne, 1773).Google Scholar

10 Poumarède, J., Les successions dans le Sud-Ouest de la France au Moyen Age (Paris, 1972), 207Google Scholar; Cheysson, E., ‘Epilogue’ in Play, Le, L'organisation de la famille, 266Google Scholar; Bonnain, R., ‘Droit écrit, coutume pyrénéenne et pratiques successorales dans les Baronnies, 1769–1836’, in Chiva, I. and Goy, J. eds., Les Baronnies des Pyrénées, vol. II (Paris, 1986), 170.Google Scholar

11 Viazzo, P. P., Upland communities: environment, population and social structure in the Alps since the sixteenth century (Cambridge, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 There is a consensus on this idea of overpopulation. Soulet mentions it for the whole of the Pyrenees as early as the end of the eighteenth century (Soulet, J. F., Les Pyrénées au XIXe siècle (Toulouse, 1987), 143Google Scholar); Augustins writes that the Baronnies have been overpopulated for centuries, but most especially in the nineteenth century (Augustins, G., ‘Maison et société dans les Baronnies au XIXe siècle’, in Chiva, and Goy, eds., Les Baronnies, vol. I, 13, 21Google Scholar); and, for the county of Bigorre, Berthe speaks of overpopulation as early as the fourteenth century (Berthe, M., Le Comté de Bigorre: un milieu rural au has Moyen Age (Paris, 1976), 41, 46Google Scholar).

13 Fauve-Chamoux, A., ‘Le fonctionnement de la famille-souche dans les Baronnies des Pyrénées avant 1914’, Annales de démographie historique (1987), 253.Google Scholar

14 According to Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, this matrimonial regime came into existence as early as 1650 (Fauve-Chamoux, , ‘Le fonctionnement’, 260–1).Google Scholar

15 Augustins, , ‘Maison et société’ and Comment se perpétuer?Google Scholar Admittedly, Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux's excellent analyses of the census have established beyond doubt both the existence and the frequency of stem families (see Fauve-Chamoux, A., ‘Les structures familiales au royaume des familles-souches: Esparros’, Annales E.S.C. 30 (1984), 513–28Google Scholar; ‘Le fonctionnement’; and ‘Les frontières de l'autorégulation paysanne: croissance et famille-souche‘, Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale 50 (1993), 38–47)Google Scholar. Her work, however, follows in the wake of the purely empirical debates inspired by Laslett: do stem families in this region represent the limit of growth of residential groups? Undoubtedly so. Apart from her more demographic approach, the ethnography of this area nonetheless links the stem family to a host of other practices, all apparently forming a coherent system and therefore subsumed under the logic of ‘House systems’.

16 This Douglass even infers quite explicitly for the Spanish Basques; see Douglass, W. A., ‘The Basque stem family household: myth or reality?’, Journal of Family History 13 (1988), 83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 See Gérin, L., L'habitant de Saint-Justin (Ottawa, 1898).Google Scholar

18 That is, an area opened up to human settlement only in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

19 Verdon, M., ‘The Quebec stem family revisited’, in Ishwaran, K. ed., Canadian families: ethnic variations (Toronto, 1980).Google Scholar

20 Rees, A. D., Life in a Welsh countryside (Cardiff, 1950).Google Scholar

21 Bender, D., ‘A refinement of the concept of household: families, co-residence and domestic functions’, American Anthropologist 69 (1967), 493–504CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laslett, P., ‘Introduction’, Laslett, P. and Wall, R. eds, Household and family in past time (Cambridge, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Verdon, M., ‘Shaking off the domestic yoke, or the sociological significance of residence’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (1980), 124CrossRefGoogle Scholar; this article contains the full theoretical justification of this definition.

23 Verdon, M., ‘Sleeping together: the dynamics of residence among the Abutia Ewe’, Journal of Anthropological Research 35 (1979), 401–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Verdon, M., ‘The stem family: toward a general theory’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 (1979), 87–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 By ‘normal’, here, I refer to the individuals' physical, psychological, economic and demographic circumstances. If the parents are physically or mentally able to stay at home but have to be hospitalized on a permanent basis, there will be no cohabitation. Similarly, if through luck or some unexpected inheritance the children strike it rich, they will most likely abandon the parents to their own fate or pay for their care. Finally, if one or both parents die before the heir gets married, there obviously will be no cohabitation of two couples.

26 Verdon, , ‘The stem family’.Google Scholar

27 This, however, does not mean that parents did not exert control. First, living as a lumberman meant being away from home five months a year. Second, moving either to the USA or to the city involved moving to an unknown situation and often to (as in lumber camps) seasonal and badly paid jobs, and stupefying ones when it involved (as it most often did) working in factories. As for starting from scratch like the original pioneers, this did not appeal very much to sons who could inherit the father's land, a land already cleared, fenced up and ready for production. In brief, some sons brought up on the land would always prefer inheriting an already functioning farmstead to clearing new land, while, to many, the prospect of inheriting the parental property presented a much bigger attraction than did an exodus which, in the context of nineteenth-century Quebec, meant moving to the cities or the USA.

28 Ermisch, J. F. and Overton, E., ‘Minimal household units: a new approach to the analysis of household formation’, Population Studies 39 (1985), 33–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Moreover, within the ‘familial units’ I will also include what I describe as ‘residual’ families or familial units, namely widowed women or men and their dependent children.

30 Since this axiomatique has been devised for the study of Western residence where polygyny is proscribed, it goes without saying that by ‘family’ or ‘familial unit’ I mean the group including parents and their children.

31 Except, naturally, when two ‘residual familial units’ seek to be united through marriage, or when a widowed man or woman seeks to marry an unmarried person.

32 On this matter, however, caution is called for. By supposing that familial units ‘naturally tend to residential autonomy’, we still assume that their existence demands explanation, albeit in terms of the absence of impediments to residential autonomy. As we have already explained, residential autonomy represents the familial units' ‘inertial motion’, so to speak, and either hindrances or constraints to that motion will bend it this or that way, towards various forms of coresidence although, as with the movement of objects on earth, hindrances and constraints which affect a household normally operate simultaneously.

33 Play, Le, L'organisation, xx–xxiii.Google Scholar

34 Ibid., 29–30.

35 Ibid., 101; italics mine.

36 Fauve-Chamoux, , ‘Les frontières’, 41.Google Scholar

37 Bonnain, , ‘Le mariage’, 170.Google Scholar

38 Soulet, , Les Pyrénées, 385.Google Scholar

39 Douglass, W., Echalar and Murelaga: opportunity and rural exodus in two Spanish Basque villages (New York, 1975), 40.Google Scholar

40 Zink, A., L'héritier de la maison (Paris, 1993).Google Scholar

41 On such implicit atomistic postulates in contemporary ethnography, see also Poumarède, , Les successions, 313Google Scholar; Fine-Souriac, A., ‘La famille-souche pyrénéenne au XIXe siècle: quelques réflexions de méthode’, Annales E.S.C. 31 (1977), 484Google Scholar; Bonnain, R., ‘Nuptialité, fécondité et pression démographique dans les Pyrénées, 1769–1836’, in Chiva, and Goy, eds., Les Baronnies, vol. II, 98Google Scholar; Bonnain, R., ‘Le mariage dans les Pyrénées centrales, 1769–1836’, in Chiva, and Goy, eds., Les Baronnies, vol. II, 134Google Scholar; and Augustins, G., ‘Maison et société’, 54.Google Scholar

42 Soulet, , Les Pyrénées, 418.Google Scholar

43 Castan, N., ‘La criminalité familiale dans le ressort du Parlement de Toulouse (1690–1730)’ in Crimes et criminalité en France sous l'Ancien Régime (Paris, 1971)Google Scholar; Castan, Y., Honnêteté et relations sociales en Languedoc (1715–1780), (Paris, 1979)Google Scholar; Collomp, A., La maison du père, (Paris, 1983).Google Scholar

44 Burguière, A., ‘Pour une typologie des formes d'organisation domestique de l'Europe moderne’, Annales E.S.C. 41 (1986), 639–55.Google Scholar

45 Zink, , L'héritier, 137, 181–2, 197, 264Google Scholar; Ott, S., The circle of mountains (Oxford, 1981), 39.Google Scholar

46 Zink, , L'héritier, 127.Google Scholar

47 Ibid., 181–2, 187, 188, 485.

48 See Sandra Ott's interesting monograph for an ethnographic (and contemporary) demonstration of this equality (Ott, The circle).

49 Zink, , L'héritier, 236.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 191.

51 Ibid., 223.

52 Ibid., 51, 189.

53 Ibid., 189, 389, 483.

54 Ibid., 223.

55 Poumarède, , Les successions, 287.Google Scholar

56 Etchelecou, A., Transition démographique et système coutumier dans les Pyrénées Occidentales (Paris, 1991).Google Scholar

57 Bonnain, , ‘Droit écrit’, 167, 170.Google Scholar

58 Zink, , L'héritier, 158.Google Scholar

59 Ibid., 223, 225.

60 Always taking into account demographic constraints, in a demographic regime in which life expectancy at birth was much lower than in the present day.

61 See Ermisch, J., ‘An economic perspective on household modelling’, in Keilman, N., Kuijsten, A. and Vossen, A. eds., Modelling household formation and dissolution (Oxford, 1988), 23–42Google Scholar; Burch, T. K. and Matthews, B. J., ‘Household formation in developed societies’, Population and Development Review 13 (1987), 495–512.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62 If to my knowledge all cases of stem families are found in areas with impartible inheritance to a single heir, the obverse proposition is not true. There are regions practising impartible inheritance to a single heir where stem families are absent. We may thus conclude, as I did in 1979, that this type of impartible inheritance may be a necessary condition for the emergence of stem families, but it is not a sufficient one.

63 See Augustins, , Comment se perpétuer?Google Scholar