Introduction: The History of the “Balkan Family”

[摘要] In 1996, the freshly created journal “The History of the Family” devoted its fourth issueto the Balkan Family. It was a valuable drawing up of the balance of existing scholarshipon the structural study of the family, and included six articles by ten scholars, almostexclusively from the USA and Austria, together with an introduction on household andfamily contexts in the Balkans by the editor Karl Kaser, who offered a comparative typologyof the various household formation patterns (Kaser 1996).1 Based on original source materialfrom the seventeenth to the twentieth century, the articles touched centrally or peripherallyon the large complex households and the different types of factors—economic, social,political, cultural, and environmental—that contributed to their formation and spread, aswell as the presence and ideology of patriarchal family structures. The one exception dealtwith the effect of available land on fertility and the exchange of oxen as capital in a regimeof scarcity. The articles reflected the different views and debates on the spread of the jointfamily, specifically the zadruga, and while not skirting over strong differences about theposited uniqueness of the Balkans, there was tentative consent that the area displayed anenormous family diversity, and there is no single type of Balkan family.

[学科分类] 公共、环境与职业健康