Abstract
This chapter is a kind of transition between the static description of the community and the narrative of events. Kinship was the context and language through which social and economic relations were expressed. The criterion of the shared surname—which aggregated and established behavioral norms for a group of people whose relations were arbitrary from the perspective of blood ties—was the most peculiar aspect of the cultural and social organization of the local communities. The judicial sources show that the kin group emerged as a social construction that was capable of producing and structuring everyday practices and representations, and of orienting individual and collective behavior.
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Notes
- 1.
However, as I have noted, this was not the case everywhere in Liguria. The historical records do not shed light on the Republic’s entire territory, but if we take the peace agreements as indicators, the idiom of the ‘kin group’ appears to have been dominant in the valleys just behind Genoa and in almost all of the communities in the Levante, both in mountainous and coastal zones. For the Ponente I have found some evidence from the areas near Triora, Taggia, and Pieve di Teco. But research that examines the notarial and criminal records simultaneously, confronting them with cadastral sources and demographic data in order to illustrate local practices and social language, remains to be carried out.
- 2.
On this issue, see the studies on kin groups as symbolic systems, especially those of David M. Schneider who wrote an excellent synthesis: A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor, 1985). On the need to build a model in which the “natives” conceptualize and employ the category of kinship (and as the basis for comparing different ethnographic data), see R. Needham, Remarks and Invention: Skeptical Essays about Kinship (London, 1974).
- 3.
See P. Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (Geneva, 1972). The concept of habitus (defined by Bourdieu as a system of dispositions) can express several things: the matrix of perception and actions, the result of an organizing action, and a way of being.
- 4.
ASG, Senato-Atti, filza 1434, copy of the records of the trial held at the court of Chiavari.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
ANC, Notary Gio Angelo della Cella, filza 3426, no. 572.
- 7.
ASCR, Criminalium, reg. 5.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
ASG, Senato-Atti, filza 1720 and ASCR, Extraordinariorum, reg. 7. All inhabitants of the parishes and villages, and not only those who gave testimony in judicial tribunals, knew the origin, the kin group, and maybe even the genealogies of the persons whom they encountered almost every day. They knew where to place them in the webs of relations and in alignments based on friendship or enmity “from times immemorial.” The rhetorical image that resulted helped create an image of unchangeable stability in the social structure, in which the destinies of particular individuals lost their importance.
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Raggio, O. (2018). The Construction of Social Reality. In: Feuds and State Formation, 1550–1700. Early Modern History: Society and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94643-6_7
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