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APPENDIX VI ON THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL VALUE OF FAMILY MODELS: THE BALKANS WITHIN THE EUROPEAN PATTERN1 The attempt to create a model of the historic European family was a response to the complexity and richness of material, which was difficult to frame in a single grand theory of the family. Already during the nineteenth century, following the practice in the natural sciences, efforts were made to classify existing knowledge about the family and create models based on typological differences. One of the first taxonomical approaches to family history was that of Le Play, a par excellence moralistic taxonomist (Recueil 1956; Brooke 1970). According to Le Play, there were three types of families: the patriarchal, the stem and the unstable. The first was common among Eastern nomads, Russian peasants and the Slavs of Central Europe. The unstable family was supposed to prevail among the working-class populations subject to the new manufacturing system of Western Europe. The stem-family, typical of the French countryside, of Germany, and of Western Europe in general, was a social organization in which only one married child remained with the parents, whereas the rest received a dowry. Le Play postulated a direct relationship between the type of family and social stability , and openly championed the stem family as successfully reconciling tradition and innovation (Le Play 1982). While refuted or surpassed in the particulars ,2 Le Play’s approach has influenced generations of sociologists and family historians, and many of his ideas show up in unexpected quarters. In the past decades a model was proposed by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, which described a fourfold tendency in household composition. This model came to substitute (or rather elaborate ) the previously accepted one of two regions with the symbolic demarcation line running roughly from St. Petersburg to Trieste (Laslett, Wall 1972; Wall, Robin and Laslett 1983). The zone to the north and west of this boundary had been depicted as the region of a unique marriage pattern (defined by high marriage ages for both sexes and a high degree of celibacy) and ergo, a unique family , a unique household and all of the following unique consequences; the rest of 199 Appendices Europe (as well as the rest of the world) was characterized by a marriage pattern , typical for the low age at marriage of both partners and practically universal marriages. John Hajnal, who made this statistical discovery based on turn-of-the-century data, named the first of these two configurations the “European pattern:” The marriage pattern of most of Europe as it existed for at least two centuries up to 1940 was, as far as we can tell, unique or almost unique in the world. There is no known example of a population of non-European civilization which has had a similar pattern. The distinctive marks of the ‘European pattern’ are (1) a high age at marriage and (2) a high proportion of people who never marry at all. The ‘European’ pattern pervaded the whole of Europe except for the eastern and south-eastern portion (Hajnal 1965, 101). The other pattern began immediately to be described as “non-European” and subsequent discussions led to the extrapolation of the marriage pattern as a fundamental European characteristic.3 There is absolutely no doubt that, as far as Hajnal is concerned, he was simply looking for a working label; he himself lamented in a footnote that it was most inconvenient not to have a term for the area where the European pattern obtained and I have felt free (when there is no possibility of misunderstanding ) to use ‘Europe’ to denote this area. It is awkward to exclude Eastern Europe from Europe and it might be thought more accurate to use terms like ‘Western Europe,’ and ‘Western European pattern.’ However, since these concepts had to be referred to so frequently, brevity was a great advantage. Europe in our restricted sense is in fact the area dealt with in many a history of Europe” (Hajnal 1965, 101, note 2). While brevity is an understandable motivation, the last sentence betrays an uncritical acceptance of the structure of “many a history of Europe.” After all, most histories of “Europe” have been based on specific political, cultural or ideological commitments to the notion and have delineated it according to more encompassing or narrower criteria: the Europe of Christianity or, most often, of Western Christianity in its Catholic and Protestant variety; Europe of the Latin/Roman legacy...

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