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99 VI FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD SIZE AND STRUCTURE A variety of approaches and criteria (anthropological, sociological, juridical, economical, etc.) have brought about an ambivalence in the treatment of these key notions. This is particularly so in the case of the family, where the traditional ambivalence of the notion of family is reflected in its treatment as a kinship network, on one hand, and on the other, as a household entity (Mitterauer 1984, 6). The 1972 volume of the Cambridge group on Household and Family in Past Time insisted on an important distinction between family and household, namelythefact ,thatthedomesticgroupmightincludenonrelatives.Incertaininstances this might become too rigorous an approach, especially when ideas like the consciousness of belonging to a family are introduced (Mitterauer 1984, 6–8), but, by and large, this distinction is widespread. Ontheotherhandhouseholdpresentslessseriousproblems,itsstrictdefinition is a prerequisite for making “meaningful statistical comparisons of household size and composition between cultures and across centuries” (Hajnal 1983, 99). It is described as the housekeeping or consumption unit, a definition used in the majority of modern censuses. Its major characteristics are co-residence and shared consumption, although some authors insist on work as the central criterion for the description of a family or household (Mitterauer 1984, 7). What interests us in this particular study is how notions like the family, the household, the house, the hearth have been reflected, if at all, in the sources under investigation. The problem that Bulgaria and the Balkans presents is the existence of a variety of multilingual sources. It is extremely difficult to define the exact meaning of a notion in one type of source, let alone correlate it to corresponding terms in sources of a different character or a different language. Ottoman sources throughout the vast period of their existence employed one key notion in their statistics—the hane. Its literal meaning, derived from Persian, is house or home. The Ottoman registers used the term hane as a fiscal unit, in fact as the fiscal unit. As the Ottoman documentation has given no direct and unequivocal definition of the hane,1 its interpretation has been the subject of many studies and numerous efforts to establish its numerical equivalent. Most Balkan Family Structure authors treat the hane as a taxable unit, based on the solvency of a person or of a group of persons (Barkan 1964, 5–7; Göyünç 1979; Grozdanova 1972, 90). However, it is difficult to agree with the suggestion of the last author, that over the course of time the term was gradually estranged from its initial meaning and was transformed into a taxable unit designating a certain share of the total tax. In fact, already in the first centuries of Ottoman domination the term hane was partly or completely divorced from its etymological meaning, and it is impossible to follow up consistent stages in the evolution of the term over time. The analyses of several timar (the cadastre) and cizye (poll-tax) registers from the fifteenth century show that the term hane referred solely to a married man (çiftlu); widows and young men who had come of age, but were still unmarried, were designated differently: as bive and mücerred, respectively (Turski izvori 1964, 21–60; Turski izvori 1966, 53–103; Grozdanova 1989, 60–61). This could lead to the conclusion that by the fifteenth century, for purposes of taxation, the hane was partly divorced from its concrete physical meaning. In fact, families in which the widow was acting as head of a household living in a separate house were obviously not treated as hane. On the other hand, young unmarried men who might still live, and most probably were still living with their parents, were treated separately from the hane represented by their father, the head of the family. This is true for the hane of the timar registers, comprising the whole population , as well as for the so-called cizye hane, i.e. the hane serving as the basis for the collection of the poll-tax from the non-Muslim population. As far as other types of hane were concerned, for example, the hane in the avariz registers (used for extraordinary taxes, such as the avariz and the nüzul), or in the tevzi registers (most probably used to locally redistribute the taxes), such hane were often but not always2 estranged from the original meaning, i.e., the house (Ursinus 1980; McGowan 1981). All attempts at establishing their size have shown that they...

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