Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (review)

Sabean’s earlier studies of the village of Neckarhausen—especially Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 1990)—suggested that behind the social and economic transactions of the villagers lay kinship networks that had their own internal history. The present book is that history, and it was well worth the wait. This volume is without doubt the most theoretically well-informed, methodologically most sophisticated, and archivally best-researched work in English on the history of community-level kinship in the European past.

The daunting task for Sabean was to superimpose the record of socioeconomic connections between individuals upon hundreds of intermeshing genealogies, examine the resulting identifiable kin-use patterns, and describe how these patterns had changed during the period covered. Everyday social life being endlessly complex, not all connections were scrutinized for their kin content; the author chose to work with marriage, godparentage, naming, guardianship, property sales, representation in public business (Kriegsvogtschaft), and pledging (standing surety). Similarly, village life being a seamless web in time, not all of the residents of the community during the given time period could be examined. Sabean chose to follow the cohorts born c. 1700, 1740, 1780, 1820, and 1860.

A close study of these groups led to the following conclusions. At the start of the eighteenth century, marriage alliances in Neckarhausen tended to link people vertically: Those with property and power frequently married those with less of these desired goods. In time, however, the dominant shape of kinship connections changed, as established patrilines more often than not sought links with others similar to them. The village population became increasingly stratified, and agnatic (father’s side) links reinforced the stratification system.

But in the first half of the nineteenth century, another shift took place in the dominant shape of the system: Though the force of patrilineality was still felt, kinship nets came to be increasingly cultivated and managed by senior women, and kinship (now being relegated to the “private sphere”) took on “matrifocal” characteristics (362–367). Whether these shifts took place in villages of propertied peasants elsewhere, and whether kinship change unfolded temporally in the same way in the European areas (largely the east) where peasants were not propertied, remains to be seen. But Sabean’s work convincingly demonstrates that in the everyday life of Neckarhausen, “kinship was not a dependent variable but an active factor in constructing class-based networks and providing essential class experience” (449).

A most satisfying characteristic of this study is Sabean’s quantum leap beyond the old line of thought about the history of European kinship, namely, pre-modern = complex, and modern = simple. Complexity had different forms, and it neither disappeared nor was reduced during the course of the nineteenth century, at least not in Neckarhausen. Indeed, given Sabean’s demonstration of the protean nature of kinship ties (they can be recognized, forgotten, and revived later, depending on social need), one can hardly detect a developmental trajectory of any kind.

As befits the careful study of kinship, Sabean’s argument relies heavily on kinship diagrams and other instruments of this specialized field, about all of which he is somewhat apologetic (14–15). It is difficult to see, however, how kinship relations can be summarized more economically than in diagrams: The historical “facts” in this domain of social relations require precise pictorial representation if the argument is to be credible. Balancing the diagrams, however, are dozens of flesh-and-blood stories of how individuals used kin ties and for what purpose. The entire project is placed in the twin contexts of anthropological kinship theory and quantitative evidence, which is summarized in 125 tables in the Appendix.