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New evidence and old theories: multiple family households in northern Croatia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Jasna Čapo Žmegač
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Continuity and Change , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , December 1996 , pp. 375 - 398
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 Some of the best-known anthropologists and historians who have investigated the family and household history of the former Yugoslavia include: Mosely, Philip E., ‘The peasant family: the zadruga or communal joint-family in the Balkans, and its recent evolution’, in Byrnes, R. F. ed., Communal families in the Balkans: the zadruga (Notre Dame and London, 1976)Google Scholar; Hammel, E. A., ‘The zadruga as process’, in Laslett, P. and Wall, R. eds., Household and family in past time (Cambridge, 1974)Google Scholar; Hammel, E. A., ‘Some medieval evidence on the Serbian zadruga: a preliminary analysis of the chrysobulls of Dečani’, in Byrnes, R. F. ed., Communal families in the Balkans: the zadruga (Notre Dame and London, 1976)Google Scholar; Hammel, E. A., ‘Household structure in 14th century Macedonia’, Journal of Family History 5 (1980), 242–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Halpern, Joel M. and Kerewski-Halpern, Barbara, A Serbian village in historical perspective (Prospect Heights, IL, 1972)Google Scholar; Kaser, Karl, ‘The origins of Balkan patriarchy’, Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 8 (1992), 1–39Google Scholar; Kaser, Karl, ‘The Balkan joint family household: seeking its origins’, Continuity and Change 9 (1994), 45–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 See Keesing, Roger M., ‘Exotic readings of cultural texts’, Current Anthropology 30 (1989), 459–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See Žmegač, Jasna Čapo, ‘Patriarchy or seniority in Croatia: regional and historical perspective’, paper presented at the conference ‘(En)gendering violence: terror, domination, recovery’ (Zagreb, 1995).Google Scholar

4 See Todorova, Maria, ‘Myth-making in European family history: the zadruga revisited’, East European Politics and Societies 4 (1990), 30–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin, a Croatian scholar who has carried out a critical review of family forms in Croatia, recently remarked that zadrugas are said not to have existed in Slovenia, not because Slovenia did not have complex family forms, but because the invention of the zadruga served no political purpose there as it did in the case of Croatia.

5 Erlich, Vera Stein, Jugoslavenska porodica u transformaciji (The Yugoslav family in transformation) (Zagreb, 1971)Google Scholar; Supek, Olga and Čapo, Jasna, ‘Effects of emigrations on a rural society: demography, family structure and gender relations in Croatia’, in Hoerder, D. and Blank, I. eds., Roots of the transplanted (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Žmegač, Jasna Čapo, ‘Seoska društvenost’ (‘Peasant social structure’), in Žmegač, J. Čapo et al. , Etnografija Hrvatske: kultura, društvo, način života (do sredine XX. stoljecća) (Ethnography of Croatia: culture, society, way of life (to the middle of the twentieth century)) (Zagreb, 1996, forthcoming).Google Scholar

6 A recently published volume with ethnographic descriptions of family forms in Croatia refers to a zadruga, formed between the two world wars, on the island of Hvar. See Seljačke obiteljske zadruge: izvorna grada za 19. i 20. stoljeće, vol. II (Peasant family zadrugas: sources for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) (Zagreb, 1991).Google Scholar

7 Žmegač, Čapo, ‘Seoska društvenost’.Google Scholar

8 See Todorova, , ‘Myth-making’, 30–76.Google Scholar

9 See Čapo, Jasna, ‘Jedno povijesno-etnološko tumačenje kućanstava, na primjeru vlastelinstva Cernik od 1760. do 1850. godine’ (‘An historical and ethnological interpretation of households on the example of the estate of Cernik from 1760 to 1850’), Narodna umjetnost 28 (1991), 329–48Google Scholar, review of Pavličević, Dragutin, Hrvatske kućne zadruge I (do 1881.) (Zagreb, 1989)Google Scholar, Narodna umjetnost 28 (1991), 434–7.Google Scholar

10 See Čapo, Jasna, ‘Economic and demographic history of peasant households on a Croatian estate, 1756–1848’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1990)Google Scholar and Vlastelinstvo Cernik: gospodarstvene i demografske promjene na hrvatskome selu u kasnome feudalizmu (The estate of Cernik: economic and demographic development in the Croatian village in late feudalism) (Zagreb, 1991).Google Scholar

11 This suggestion is similar to one made by Maria Todorova. Yet its argument diverges in important respects. According to Todorova, the term should be eliminated because it is a neologism coined in the nineteenth century to denote family structures which had sprung up in various historical periods for very different reasons: (a) archaic patriarchal traditions; (b) ecological constraints linked to pastoral economy and political circumstances in the late Ottoman empire; and (c) codifications of law. According to Todorova, the ‘retrospective use of term leads … to an ahistorical approach and a nominalism which attributes to the zadruga a structural permanency and the characteristics of a pillar of the Balkan family’ (Todorova, Maria, ‘On the epistemological value of family models: the Balkans within the European pattern’ (manuscript, 1994)Google Scholar, available in the library of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure; forthcoming in Ehmer, Josef, Hareven, Tamara K. and Wall, Richard eds., Family history and the new historiography (provisional title)), 12.Google Scholar

12 Bogišić, V., ‘O obliku nazvanom inokoština u seoskoj porodici Srba i Hrvata’ (On the form called inokoština in the peasant family of Serbs and Croats), in Pravni članci i rasprave, vol. I (Belgrade, 1927), 162–202 (first published in 1884).Google Scholar

13 See Todorova, Maria, Balkan family structure and the European pattern: demographic developments in Ottoman Bulgaria (Washington, DC, 1993).Google Scholar

14 See Hammel, Eugene A., ‘Reflections on the zadruga’, Ethnologia Slavica 7 (1975), 141–51.Google Scholar According to Hammel, complex households became more visible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because of changes in nutrition and public health which increased life expectancy, thereby enabling a higher proportion of households to achieve generational overlap over a longer timespan. This argument was first proposed by Halpern and Anderson (Halpern, Joel M. and Anderson, David, ‘The zadruga: a century of change’, Anthropologica 12 (1970), 83–97).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Gavazzi, Milovan, ‘The extended family in Southeastern Europe’, Journal of Family History 7 (1982), 89–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Gavazzi refers to wills and other documents of the eleventh and twelfth centuries from Dalmatia which deal with the alienation of property.

16 Todorova, , Balkan family, 138.Google Scholar

17 Bogišić, , ‘O obliku’, 162–202.Google Scholar

18 Gavazzi, Milovan, ‘Sudbina obiteljskih zadruga jugoistočne Evrope’ (‘The fate of zadrugas in south-eastern Europe’), in Vrela i sudbine narodnih tradicija (Sources and fates of folk traditions) (Zagreb, 1978), and ‘The extended family’, 91.Google Scholar

19 Pavličević, Dragutin, for example, has recently advanced such an argument (Hrvatske kućne zadruge I (do 1881.)) (Croatian zadrugas (until 1881) (Zagreb, 1989)).Google Scholar The author has analysed legal codifications of the zadruga in Croatia. See Čapo, review of ‘Pavličević’, 434–37, for a critical assessment.

20 Also Gavazzi, , ‘The extended family’, 91.Google Scholar Bogišić opposed the zadruga, either of a simple or a complex family form, to the family organisation based on individual ownership of property (Bogišić, ‘O obliku’, 170–1). As judged by Todorova, his view is very close to that of Bobchev (see Todorova, , Balkan family structure, 135).Google Scholar

21 Bogišić was thus one of the first proponents of a developmental approach to the study of households. This was discussed by Stahl, Paul H., Household, village, and village confederation in Southeastern Europe (New York, 1986).Google Scholar See Todorova, , Balkan family structure, 137.Google Scholar The view that there was no necessary difference between the legal aspects of multiple and simple family households is also propounded by Hammel, E. A., ‘Household structure in fourteenth-century Macedonia’, Journal of Family History 5 (1980), 242–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Such an argument has been made to interpret family patterns of the populations of medieval Dalmatian towns in southern Croatia. See Römer, Zdenka Janeković, Rod i grad: dubrovačka obitelj od XIII do XV stoljeća (Kin and town: the family in Dubrovnik from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century) (Dubrovnik, 1994).Google Scholar

23 Literally these terms denote a house, but they also refer to a household.

24 See Bogiˇić, , ‘O obliku’, 190–4.Google Scholar It is interesting that Todorova (Balkan family structure, 146) refers to the same evidence to support a quite different thesis, though in my view not incompatible with the view propounded by Bogišić. Bogišić claims that since only the adjective was different, the inhabitants perceived no structural difference between smaller and bigger households. Todorova, on the contrary, claims that the adjectival difference implies a difference in perception. She raises this point to support her argument that size must have been an important feature of the zadruga. My own view is that adjectives added to the generic term for a household imply only that the inhabitants differentiated households by size, but not much more. Therefore either of these arguments is valid, depending on what is taken to be the basic structural feature of the zadruga – its legal nature as proposed by Bogišić, or its size as proposed by Todorova.

25 This is not to say that the legal aspects should not be studied: quite the contrary, where they are available, the legal sources make it possible to establish the existence of the zadruga.

26 Certain authors complain about the impossibility of analyzing form: see Hammel, E. A., ‘On the *** of investigating household form and function’, in Netting, R. McC., Wilk, R. R. and Arnould, E. J. eds. Households: comparative and historical studies of the domestic group (Berkeley, 1984), 29–43.Google Scholar

27 Čapo, , ‘Economic and demographic history’, 175–96Google Scholar; Čapo, , Vlastelinstvo Cernik, 89–100, 146–80Google Scholar; Čapo, , ‘Jedno povijesno-etnološko’, 331–4.Google Scholar

28 Blum, Jerome, ‘The rise of serfdom in Eastern Europe’, The American Historical Review LXII (1957), 807–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Adamček, Josip, Agrarni odnosi u Hrvatskoj od sredine XV do kraja XVII stoljeća (Agrarian relations in Croatia from the middle of the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century) (Zagreb, 1980)Google Scholar; Blum, , ‘The rise of serfdom’, 822, 835.Google Scholar

30 Adamček, , Agrarni odnosi, 488.Google Scholar

31 The analysis that follows is based on the parish records (libri stati animarum or ‘lists of souls’) of Cernik (Archive of the Franciscan monastery, Cernik, stati animarum, 1778–1787 (used in this article only to calculate the growth rate of the population), 1815 and 1854–1857), and on various state censuses of population and property in the Croatian State Archive in Zagreb. The 1760 list of households is found in the Archive of the Archbishop, Zagreb, Acta ecclesiastica LXXXIX.

32 Čapo, , ‘Economic and demographic history’, 183, 280–8Google Scholar; and Vlastelinstvo Cernik, 164. Calculations of rates of population growth are based on various village-level counts of population, mainly libri status animarum.

33 A ‘session’ or a full peasant holding was fixed at 24 jugera of good arable land. A jugerum (plural jugera) was around 0.433 of a hectare; see Jakobović, Zvonimir, Leksikon mjernih jedinica (Lexicon of measures) (Zagreb, 1988).Google Scholar

34 Bösendorfer, Josip, Agrarni odnosi u Slavonyiji (Agrarian relations in Slavonia) (Zagreb, 1950).Google Scholar

35 The number of craftsmen increased in the last quarter of the eighteenth century to 18, then fell, only to rise again. In 1846 Cernik apparently had as many as 131 craftsmen. The decline in the numbers of craftsmen may be more apparent than real, either as a result of unreliable sources or else because artisans were inconsistently counted (Čapo, ‘Economic and demographic history’, 135).

36 Piller and Mitterpacher (1782), quoted in Matić, Tomo, ‘Narodni život i običaji u Požeškoj županiji krajem osamnaestoga vijeka’ (‘Folk life and customs in the District of Poega at the end of the eighteenth century’), Zbornik za narodni život i obicčaje 35 (1951), 5–19.Google Scholar

37 Mijat Stojanović around 1850, quoted in Stojsavljević, Bogdan, Povijest sela (The history of the village) (Zagreb, 1973), 77.Google Scholar

38 Jović, S., ‘Etnografska slika vojne granice’ (‘Ethnographic account of the Military Border’), Zbornik Matice srpske za književnost i jezik 9–10 (1962), 114–65Google Scholar; and Csaplovics, quoted by Pavličvić, Hrvarske kutne, 83, 112. Both authors refer to an unspecified region in Slavonia in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

39 Engel, Franc Štefan, ‘Opis kraljevine Slavonije i vojvodstva Srema’ (‘Description of the Kingdom of Slavonia and the Duchy of Srijem’), Zbornik Matice srpske za književnost i jezik 19 (1972), 289–356.Google Scholar

40 Bogišić, V., Gragja u odgovorima iz različnih krajeva slovenskoga juga (Data in answers from various regions of the South Slav territory) (Zagreb, 1874).Google Scholar

41 Hietzinger, quoted by Pavličević, Hrvatske kućne, 83.

42 Stoianovich, Traian, ‘Family and household in the Western Balkans, 1500–1870’, Memorial Omer Lûtfi Barkan (1980), 189–203.Google Scholar It is not clear whether Civil Croatia excludes Civil Slavonia, and whether Slavonia includes both civil and military zones.

43 Utješenović, Ognjeslav Ostrožinski, Kućne zadruge – Vojna Krajina (Zadruga – Military Border) (Zagreb, 1988), 79–80.Google Scholar

44 Quantitative data for other populations in the region reveal some similarities. In a market town in historical eastern Slavonia (Šid) the mean household size was 6 in 1820 (two-thirds of all households had fewer than 7 persons); see Gavrilović, Slavko, Grada za privrednu i društvenu istoriju Srema početkom XIX stoleća (Data for the economic and social history of Srijem at the beginning of the nineteenth century) (Novi Sad, 1958), 63.Google Scholar In the west, on the estate of Virovitica, the mean household size in the central town was 5.75 and 4.64 in 1812 and 1821 respectively, while in adjacent villages it was between 7 and 9. Unlike the town, the surrounding villages experienced a rise in household size and complexity in the first half of the nineteenth century; see Adamček, Josip, ‘Prilozi povijesti Virovitice (od sredine 18. do sredine 19. stoljeća)’ (‘Contributions to the history of Virovitica (from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries)’, in Virovitički zbornik 1234–1984 (Virovitica, 1986), 157–79.Google Scholar

45 The standard definition of a conjugal family unit (CFU) includes couples with or without coresident unmarried children and lone parents with unmarried children. For this definition see Hammel, E. A. and Laslett, Peter, ‘Comparing household structure over time and between cultures’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 16 (1974), 73–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 In one important respect I have departed from the procedures advocated by Hammel and Laslett in order to classify a secondary conjugal family unit as ‘up’ or ‘down’, which is determined by the generational position of the head (Hammel and Laslett, ‘Comparing’, 93–4). In multiple family households with at least two CFUs other than the head's CFU, I counted each widowed head as a CFU even if the head did not have a wife or unmarried children and secondary units as disposed with regards to it. In this way the principle that a CFU involves at least 2 persons has not been respected. This adjustment of the categorization does not alter the number of extended and multiple households, because all households with a widowed head have been considered multiple regardless of how one treats the head. It does, however, alter the typology of multiple family households, by creating somewhat more extensions downwards and/or downwards and laterally.

47 Poor or inadequate recording also contributed to the high percentage of households whose composition could not be classified.

48 Andorka, R., ‘Family reconstitution and types of household structure’, in Sundin, J. and Södelund, E. eds., Time, space and man: essays on microdemography (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1979), 11–33Google Scholar; Faragó, Tamás, ‘Types of peasant households and work organization in Hungary in the middle of the eighteenth century’, Történeti statisztikai füzetek 7 (1985), 169–87Google Scholar; Plakans, Andrejs, ‘Serf emancipation and the changing structure of rural domestic groups in the Russian Baltic Provinces: Linden Estate, 1797–1858’, in Netting, Wilk and Arnould eds., Households, 245–75Google Scholar; Czap, Peter Jr, ‘“A large family: the peasant's greatest wealth”: serf households in Mishino, Russia, 1814–1958’, in Wall, R., Robin, J. and Laslett, P. eds., Family forms in historic Europe (New York, 1983), 105–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Todorova, , Balkan family structure, 111.Google Scholar

49 The rise in the number of persons per household at the beginning of the nineteenth century does not seem to have been an isolated phenomenon on the estate of Cernik, though so far there are not enough data to permit a more detailed account. Hungarian scholars have also noted a rise in mean household size at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They argue that birth control was introduced in Hungarian villages as a means of population control after the first mechanism for adjustment to population growth – a rise in household size – had failed. See Andorka, Rudolf and Faragó, Tamás, ‘Preindustrial household structure in Hungary’, in Wall, Robin and Laslett eds., Family forms in historic Europe, 28 1–307Google Scholar, and Andorka, Rudolf and Balazs-Kovács, Sandor, ‘The social demography of Hungarian villages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (with special attention to Sárpilis, 1792–1804)’, Journal of Family History 11 (1986), 169–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50 Cernik had 500 inhabitants in 1760 and 1,161 in 1854. However, it was not the number of inhabitants that gave it the character of a town, but rather the occupations of its inhabitants, many of whom were engaged in trade and artisanal activity or wage labour.

51 Parallels of rural areas having larger and more complex households than urban areas can be found in Hungary. See Faragó, Tamás, ‘Household structure and development of rural society in Hungary 1787–1828’, Történeti statisztikai tanulmányok 3 (1977), 105–214Google Scholar, and Andorka, and Farago, , ‘Pre-industrial household structure’, 281–307.Google Scholar

52 However, it is also possible that new inhabitants had brought with them different cultural values in connection with family and household formation.

53 Pavičić, Stjepan, Podrijetlo naselja i govora u Slavoniji (The origin of settlements and dialects in Slavonia) (Zagreb, 1953).Google Scholar The fact that in the earliest census (1698) most of the estate villages, especially the eastern ones, are missing runs counter to that hypothesis. However, it is also possible that we are dealing with an incomplete source, and that the eastern villages, situated in the hills away from the Sava plain, were omitted by the census-takers. The 1698 census is published in Mažran's, IvePopis naselja i stanovništva u Slavoniji 1698. godine (The census of settlements and population in Slavonia in 1698) (Osijek, 1988).Google Scholar

54 Hammel, E. A., Economics 1, culture 0? Factors in early fertility decline in the northwest Balkans, Working Papers No. 34 (Berkeley, 1993)Google Scholar, and ‘Economics 1, culture 0 fertility change and differences in the northwest Balkans, 1700–1900’, in Greenhalgh, S., Situating fertility: anthropology and demographic inquiry (New York, 1995), 225–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55 In the land allocation of the second decade of the nineteenth century, peasants with little land (inquilini) or no land (subinquilini) were favoured so that, immediately after the allocation in all the villages on the estate, except Cernik and Mala, there were practically no more peasants in those two categories. A postponed effect was that those households started dividing, with the result that by the middle of the nineteenth century many had reverted to (sub)inquilini status and to simpler household structures (see Table 5).

56 Hammel, ‘Economics 1’, 248–52.

57 In this connection, Hammel's distinction between institutional and behavioural levels in interpreting family forms (zadruga) is very relevant here (Hammel, ‘Reflections on the zadruga’, 142), as is his observation that it could be an error to assume that the presence of any, or even a substantial number of, nuclear families provided evidence for the weakening of the ideal form as an ideal form. He explains this paradoxical statement by regarding the zadruga as a phase in the developmental cycle of a household. While I acknowledge Hammel's cautionary note, I do think that in the case I am dealing with it is possible to give an alternative explanation.

58 See Laslett's, Peter discussion of these two levels of analysis of family forms (‘Introduction’, in Laslett, P. and Wall, R. eds., Household and family in past time (London, 1972)).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59 There has been debate over these kinds of issues with regard to the stem family in Europe. See for example Wachter, Kenneth W. et al. , Statistical studies of historical social structure (New York, 1978).Google Scholar