Sociology of the FamilyWeek 5Families in Historical Perspective

No serious scholarly work available on families and households for the period before the nineteenth century.

Faroqhi: “Before the 19th century, there is no way to learn about family structure and marriage patterns.”

16th century - Ottoman tax registers17-19th centuries – dark ages of

Ottoman social history◦Fragmentary registers, encompass small

areas◦Dispersal of dense net of villages◦Renomadization of segments of population

Mid-nineteenth century – increasing urban population, more consistent censuses, and court records.

Early 19th century – 1940s(Tanzimat, 1839) - post World War IIDespite introduction of administrative

measures, life didn’t change dramatically for the rural population until the 1950s.

Duben’s analyses are limited to present-day Turkey and to families and households of settled agricultural and urban segments of the society, and to Muslim Turks.

Duben’s analyses based on secondary sources, classical ethnographies of the 1940s, hence geographically diverse and harder to generalize (though consistent patterns emerge across regions).

Turkish household structuresAile (Arabic)Hane (Persian)Hane is different from ev since it

invokes both the building and the corresponding social group.

Aile denotes (i) a person’s wife, (ii) a relative, and (iii) members of the household (Devellioğlu).

Emphasizing a kinship relationship, particularly conjugal bond.

Yasa (1944, Hasanoğlan, Ankara)◦Aile refers to wives, namely the

mother of thier children.Berkes (1940-41, Ankara)

◦Aile composes of husband, wife and their children, yet not an economic unit.

Stirling (1949, Sakaltutan and Elbaşı, Kayseri)◦Aile refers to a social group composing

of father, mother and children (grandchildren) without entailing common residence.

Özertuğ (1970s, central Anatolia)◦Three folk definitions of aile:

Wife Married couple with/without offsprings,

widow or widower with/without offsprings An ego-centered kin group.

Aile not considered a social unit in village society as hane is. Aile is the married couple with/out children, located in a house and is the subdivision of hane. It is the unit of biological reproduction of society.

Hane is the major unit of production and consumption in rural society and in traditional urban society of artisans and traders.

“a single purse and a single pot”No consensus whether hane is a

residential unit or not, and the criteria for membership in it.

From Ottoman administrative point of view hane is the unit of taxation.

Berkes does not consider coresidence a sufficient condition for hane membership, though a necessary one. Accordingly, one must be a kinsman and also part of a production unit to be considered a member of the hane.

Hence, resident laborers and servants are not considered hane members in rural society, yet they are in certain cases in the urban society (concubines (cariye) and nannies (dadı) were given certain rights the same as female household members, such as right to a dowry).

In order to be considered a hane member if one is not a blood relative, one had to claim a relationship by marriage (sıhriyet).

Berkes: Emphasis on blood connections. For a bride to be considered a full member of the hane, she had to give birth to a child, hence be linked with her husband’s hane consanguineally (through blood).

Hane: Shared activity (independent economic unit), shared kinship ties and coresidence (solidified form of kinship relations in space).

The actual residential unit is the hane, where each of its parts (oda) are occupied by one family (aile), structurally similar conjugal units.

The hane as a coresidential unit is a segmental structure in the Durkheimian sense.

Hanes and odas put together by juxtaposition and composed the larger hane by agglutination (coming together). They were flexible, can be added to and deleted from each other with ease, and could be located at various degrees of proximity to each other.

Public space connecting them could be a sofa, a courtyard, a street, or they could share a modern apartment building.

However, to have constituted a hane as a total social unit sharing location is not sufficient, they must have also shared production and consumption.

As units of production and consumption, hanes are organic structures in the Durkheimian sense.

The division of labor in work and patterns of consumption did not break down family by family, but rather followed lines of sex and age.

Hence, interconnecting diverse members of the families of the hane as individuals in a dependency that turned them into a corporate unit (in a way that the family (aile) in itself was not).

Families were residentially autonomous, yet connected as individuals to their hane as a corporate group.

In the hane, the rights of individuals (to property ) were not sanctioned if they opposed the interests of the household (hane) as a corporate unit.

Household formationHajnal’s European household formation

rulesJoint household system (non-European).

◦Men and women marry early and start married life in a household in which an older couple is and remains in charge.

◦A system of fission in which several married couples split to form two or more households. The timing of the split is important in terms of the size and composition of households.

Marriage as the central feature of household formation in Europe. Whereas marriage has little impact on household formation in Russia, the Balkans (Eastern Europe) and Turkey.◦Residence for the newly wed couple was

patrivirilocal (with the husband’s father)◦Authority remained in the hands of the

patriarch, young couple had no control over factors of production (inheritance delayed until the death of the father).

Household formation in late Ottoman AnatoliaMarriage not as significant as in

Western Europe. Marked initiation of biological reproduction of a new generation.

Mortality rather than nuptiality was the engine pulling the system.

Realignment of authority, relocation of residence, and devolution (transfer) of property rights were based on the death of the patriarch.

In western Europe, substantial share of inheritance was received at marriage. Whereas in Turkey devolution of property was post mortem (after death).

Marriage meant the entrance into the husband’s household of a gelin and the formation of a new conjugal unit. But it did not change the structure of the hane as a production and consumption unit, or property rights.

The patriarch, however, was responsible for providing residential quarters for the new conjugal unit either under the same roof or in close proximity.

Residential quarters furnished either by the groom or the bride’s family, varying according to region.

Marriage also involved the transfer of wealth in the form of bride-price, either to the bride herself (mehir, in accordance with hanefi school of Islamic law), or to the father of the bride (başlık, in contravention of Islamic precepts).

Inheritance practices◦Division of property among all offsprings

regardless of gender◦Fragmentation of the estate under Islamic

law and interests of the state (preventing the emergence of powerful landowners)

◦Preservation of land and preventing parcelization (miri land, timar system)

◦Disinheriting all but the senior sun (evlatlık vakfı)

◦Common practice was equal division of land among all sons upon the death of the patriarch.

Death of the patriarch determines the timing of fission.

Daughters are replaced by gelins as sons marry and daughters leave their natal house when they marry.

After patriarch’s death married brothers seldom continue to live together, the division of the estate eventually means the break-up of the hane.

Partible inheritance system◦Low man to land ratio◦Worked as an economic safety valve,

preventing amassing of large estatesEarly age at first marriage

◦Honor defined through female sexuality, early marriage as a safety strategy

◦Marriage not linked to devolution of property

◦No need to be self-supporting upon marriage

Turkish families differ from Russian and Mediterranean families with regard to remarriage.

Remarriage◦Economic necessity◦Imbalance in sex ratio◦Levirate (marrying brother’s wife

upon his death, yenge) and sororate (marrying wife’s sister upon her death, baldız) marriages

Why more simple families?More than 60% of all households

were simpleSize and complexity of

households are a function of three demographic factors:◦Number of sons surviving to

marraigeable age◦The age at which they marry◦The age at the death of the patriarch

Partible inheritance system lead to fragmentation of holdings, hence only small and simple households could survive.

Households passed through stages◦Nuclear/extended family hh soon after the

death of the father◦Multiple family hh when sons of the sons

got married◦Once again nuclear/extended family hh

upon the death of the sons