Family, Household and Kin

Abstract

The relationship between peasant families and their land sits at the core of the majority of investigations of the peasantry. Family, as a preoccupation of peasant culture and life, is seen as of central importance and, for some historians, without evidence of this preoccupation the identification of a society as ‘peasant’ becomes problematic.¹ A simple model of peasant agriculture and everyday existence posits a collectivist enterprise in which each member of the peasant family neglects individual endeavour in favour of mutual responsibilities to the wider domestic group. In these ‘true’ peasantries, it is the family and not the individual that is significant. This close categorisation of the peasantry as family-centred has had implications for historians’ preparedness to conceive of a peasantry operating within wider spheres. If the peasant thinks first and foremost of his or her responsibility to his or her relations, then his or her motives for interacting with the outside world are likely to be limited. Furthermore, since a linked assumption about such peasant activity is that the collective activity of the peasant family is primarily concerned with self-sustaining agriculture, it may also be presumed that the peasantry’s focus of attention is almost wholly inward.