Kith and Kin: Personal Relationships and Cultural Practices, 1830-1980, 20 February 2004, New Brunswick, NJ

Figure 1.

John Gillis.

This well-attended one-day conference was arranged by the History Department of Rutgers University in appreciation of John R. Gillis, to honour his decades of service to the Rutgers community and his significant contributions to social and cultural history. It was organized by Richard I. Jobs of Pacific University and Patrick F. McDevitt of the University at Buffalo and drew on contributions from former students, colleagues and others whom John had mentored over the years.

In his long and distinguished career, John Gillis has produced numerous influential monographs and edited collections covering such topics as youth, marriage, family rituals, commemoration, militarization and the development of European society. His next book, Islands of the Mind, is being published by Palgrave Macmillan.

The conference explored the modern historical roots of personal relationships and, in turn, the interpersonal nature of community and identity on a local level. In other words, how individuals have rendered their lives meaningful through the establishment of relationships with others, within family, friendship, ethnicity, community or polity. As starting point the conference took the example of John Gillis himself, who has endeavoured to write social and cultural history which ignored neither individual human agency nor large structural forces which interacted to give shape and meaning to people's lives.

For twenty years, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities has dominated historical scholarship concerning the development of nationalism in the West. This work, and all that it has inspired, investigated the cultural processes by which groups of strangers come to belong to a national community, albeit still as strangers to one another. While the significance and influence of this history is beyond question, its focus on national communities has obscured the contacts between individuals who create their own communities through the establishment and maintenance of interpersonal relationships.

We as social and cultural historians have had a tendency to focus on masses. We lump individuals of the past into large social groups that would probably look unfamiliar to them. How far are people today as concerned with membership in vast social groups of class or nation or race as they are with the daily details of their workplace, their home, their neighbourhood, their friends or rivals, spouses, children and family? The social world is much more fragmented by individual life experience than we suggest in sweeping conclusions about broad collectivities of class, region, nation, race, or gender.

The conference aimed to consider the primary relationships of the social realm, as opposed to the secondary or tertiary ones of class or nation. Certainly, the secondary relationships have a significant impact on individuals through institutions of the economy, government, social structure and so on. On a daily basis over the life-course, however, it is the direct immediacy of interpersonal contact that most recognizably shapes an individual's world; primary relationships with friends, family and community are the core of an indi-vidual's social network and occupy the bulk of lived experience. Appropriately, the impetus for the conference came of course from a shared personal connection, though one whose nature and meaning—friend, colleague, coworker, mentor, spouse, or relative—varies across time and space.

The historical challenge is to account for the ways in which individuals have acted within the constraints and possibilities of their broader social world to fashion their own sense of place and community through interpersonal relationships and cultural practice—the medium through which individuals interact. And cultural practices, though inherited and learned functions, are not static but undergo change that corresponds to the idiosyncrasies of individuals and the groups they comprise. This is another way to consider the agency/structure dynamic: the relationship of the idiosyncratic to the hegemonic.

Included in the dozen presentations was David Gerber's paper, 'Acts of Deceiving and Withholding in British Immigrant Letters', which exemplified the spirit of the conference, arguing that immigrant letters to and from home were by no means a clear window to the past or repository of truth. By focusing on the...