Households and kinship networks: the costs and benefits of contextualization

Abstract

In Household and Family in Past Time (1972) Peter Laslett explicitly differentiated the study of kin relations within the domestic group from the study of those beyond it. Yet in subsequent decades the latter project – the conceptualization of the domestic group within the larger kin group – has not proceeded very far, even though it can easily be pictured as the ‘next step’ in micro-structural research. In part this is due to the inherent difficulties of recreating the larger kinship context precisely on the basis of available evidence. However, it is also because of changing conceptualizations of kinship and because demographic change demonstrably reduced the number of identifiable kin. If this project is to be pursued, its costs and benefits have to be weighed. On the one hand, the larger kin group may not have been important even if it can be identified as a group; also, migration might have dispersed kin groups so that only a few personal kin remained beyond the domestic group. On the other hand, the significance of kin groups is an empirical question which needs to be tested against historical evidence. Individuals also certainly had personal kin communities that were not corporate groups but still could have influenced the behaviors of persons within the domestic group. It is best to assume about the past that the domestic domain and the kinship domain interacted, creating the starting point for an interactive theory consisting of five propositions and their corollaries, outlined in the article.