Download PDF | Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern, Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria, 2nd , Central European University Press (2006).
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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
My cordial thanks are extended to Sorin Antohi who kindly urged me, during our wonderful stay at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 2004-2005, to submit Balkan Family Structureand theE uropean Pattern to the Central European University Press for a second edition. The book appeared in 1993 in a very small print and, a couple of years later, was already out of print. In 2002, a Bulgarian translation was published in Sofia.1
The present edition is an updated and revised version of the first. Some minor changes have been made in the text, chiefly updating names, improving explanations, rectifying errors, and adding references. While I have not undertaken additional primary research or added new sources, in the past dozen years after the publication of the volume, I published several articles on this problematic issue that strengthen or refine the major conclusions of the work. They have been included in the bibliography, and one of them—“On the Epistemological Value of Family Models: the Balkans within the European pattern”—has been added as Appendix VI. The present bibliography, while not pretending to be exhaustive, has added a considerable number of titles that appeared in the past decade. I continue to stand by the main results of this study and, to my great pleasure, these have been reflected in the major syntheses on the European family that have appeared recently.2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My grateful thanks are due to a number of individuals and institutions. The late Prof. Tsonko Genov and Bozhidar Dimitrov from the National Museum in Sofia alerted me to the presence of several newly acquired Catholic registers in the archives of the museum. They gave me kind permission to work with them even before they were catalogued. The parish priest of the Saint Michael Archangel church in Rakovski, despite his bitter experience with and often justified distrust of authorities and individuals, put the church collection at my disposal. The personnel of the City and District Archives of Plovdiv were particularly helpful in locating the existing parish registers in their collection which, although catalogued, do not appear in the published guide to the archive. I wish to thank them for their hospitality and for their promptness in preparing the microfilms. As always, the staff of the “Historical heritage” Directorate at the Chief Management of the Archives in Sofia, and especially its head Panto Kolev have been most helpful with all kinds of technical assistance. P. Kolev also permitted me to use some of the newly received Catholic documents in the archives.
The same generous attitude was displayed by the personnel of the Oriental Department of the St. Cyril and Methodius National Library in Sofia. My personal thanks go to my two teachers in Ottoman Turkish paleography: Stefan Andreev and Asparukh Velkov. Likewise, the friendly help of Anni Kirilova from the Archives of the Ethnographic Institute and Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences facilitated my work with the ponderous collection of the institute. My short stay at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign permitted me to work with the Philip Mosely Collection. I thank the librarians for alerting me to its location and helping me in every possible way to find as much as possible in the short time I had at my disposal.
A grant from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences enabled me to spend a month with the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in 1987, and a month with the Laboratoire de démographie historique at the Maison de l’homme in Paris. I could profit from their unique collections of literature in historical demography, as well as from interesting contacts which they made possible. A fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1988 enabled me not only to use the unlimited resources of the Library of Congress but also provided me with the wonderful atmosphere for writing and intellectual exchange without the onerous demands of teaching and the stress of academic competition. Two chapters of the book were written there. I benefited particularly from the final colloquium at the Wilson Center and from the comments of John Gillis and Gay Gulickson.
A Fulbright scholarship for teaching and a Mellon Distinguished Visiting Professorship from Rice University, although not directly related to my project, enabled me to finish my manuscript at a time when the fascinating, but all too exciting events in my country would have prevented me from concentrating on anything without “democracy” in the title. I will specially cherish the memory of the stimulating and congenial relations in the Department of History at Rice University. I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to all these agencies and institutions.
Some parts of chapters VI, VI and VIII are extended versions of, or are based on material previously published in articles which have appeared in E tudes balkaniques, Istoricheski pregled, and E ast E uropean Politics and Societies. The publishers of these journals have given their kind permission to use this previously published material here.
Finally, and most importantly, several colleagues read earlier or final versions of the manuscript: Joel Halpern, Nikolai Botev, John Lampe, Tanya Boneva. I am indebted to them not only for their careful reading and many helpful suggestions, but also for the numerous conversations and constant friendly encouragement.
INTRODUCTION
Rethinking the Unknown
Speaking about the falling rate of out-wedlock conceptions in Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, Edward Shorter observed: This precipitous drop in illegitimate fertility extended to virtually every province of every country in Europe, save Bulgaria. (What was happening in Bulgaria, nobody knows) (Shorter 1977, 83).
Apart from the fact that “nobody knows” should be translated as “the author does not know” or as “there is nothing available in the English language,” this is a statement typical of most works in historical demography, with their tendency to venture into the stormy sea of broad comparisons. On one hand, little, if any historical demographic work is known to have been done on Bulgaria. On the other hand, the country is not completely overlooked; rather, it is included by induction in generalizations about Eastern Europe, thus providing yet another unproven proof for historical stereotypes.
There are clearly two aspects to this study. Primarily, and emotionally, it was conceived as a reaction to excessive generalizations based on the Western European experience, hence the inclusion of “rethinking” in the otherwise pompous title of this introductory chapter.! These generalizations concern first and foremost the place of the Balkans in the model of the European family.
The study of family history has developed rapidly since the early 1960s. In the process it has produced a few generalizations, and has refuted a lot of erstwhile truths. The hectic pace of change can be attributed to an enormous increase in the number of sources and a new emphasis on quantitative data.2
Previous ideas on the European families of the past rested primarily on speculative theories based on nineteenth century evolutionary thinking. This included the idea of stages of family history, of a progressive and irreversible evolution from complex/large forms to simple/small ones. It also included a certain deterministic trait, an assumption that mankind as a whole would necessarily pass through all the phases of the supposed evolution. It is by no means irrelevant that the existing ideas on the European family were formed primarily by sociologists. Historians had accomplished little if any research in the field. With the advent of the new evidence, this comfortable picture was exploded. What came instead was a complexity and richness very difficult to frame into a new grand theory. The historians who had had the greatest luck with a long tradition of systematically kept records, pertinent to a historical-demographic analysis, were the English and the French. Naturally, they were the first ones to refute a lot of the commonly held beliefs and, significantly enough, also the first ones to embark on a new theorizing effort.
Here I will be dealing only with the attempt to create a regional model of the historic European family. The first ground-breaking conclusion, based on Northwestern European evidence (primarily British, Dutch and Northern French), was the fact of the predominance and importance of the simple or nuclear family household already by the sixteenth century, and very probably earlier (though this is not so well documented).
One important effort was (and still is) the elaboration of an adequate conceptual framework general enough to embrace all possible variations and consequently permit a proper comparative approach. Among a number of very good general treatments of the subject of European family history, two collective works (both published by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure) stand out as landmarks in this respect. One was produced in 1972 by Laslett and Wall. It offered a typology and attempted to make a global comparison, based on data from five historic regions—England, Western Europe, Serbia, Japan and North America. In fact, since the early 1970s most comparative studies on household type and structure have followed the classification proposed by P. Laslett in this volume (Laslett and Wall 1972, 31). As remarked by a member of the Cambridge group, “one of the great successes of Household and family in past time could be said to be the table on household by kin composition. It is the table most often replicated even by those who maintain a formal antipathy to household studies per se” (Wall, Robin and Laslett 1983, 5).
The second volume—F amily Forms in H istoric E urope (Wall, Robin and Laslett 1983)—appeared some eleven years later. It was less ambitious in scope (comprising only Europe), but significantly more elaborate and sophisticated. It postulated the existence of four basic regions in traditional Europe where a fourfold tendency in household composition could be observed. This model came to substitute (or rather elaborate) the previously accepted one of two regions with the symbolic demarcation line running roughly from Leningrad to Trieste (Wall, Robin and Laslett 1983, 5).
The zone to the north and west of this boundary had been depicted as the region of the unique European marriage pattern (defined by high marriage ages for both sexes and a high degree of celibacy) and ergo, a unique family, a unique household and all of the following unique consequences; the rest of Europe (as well as the rest of the world) was characterized by the non-European or traditional marriage pattern, typified by a low age at marriage of both partners and where marriage is practically universal marriages.
The four-region hypothesis of household typology can be summarized briefly as follows: It subdivides the European region into a “west and north-west,” a “west/central or middle,” a “southern or Mediterranean” and an “eastern” zone (Laslett 1983, 513). Geographically the zones have not been and cannot be meticulously defined. As some scholars point out “the within-region variability might exceed the between-region variability in respect of a number of characteristics” (Laslett 1983, 525).
The regions are defined on the basis of four sets of criteria: the occasion and method of domestic group formation, procreational and demographic characteristics, kin composition of groups, organization of work and welfare. Applying a classification difficult to define in quantitative terms, the model argues that the long-term history of the family in each of these regions has been following a common evolution different from that of the other regions (Laslett 1983, 526-527).
The argumentation of this model is logical and sophisticated; it is worded very cautiously and with a proclaimed readiness to retreat from any overgeneralization whenever the contrary could be proven. The models’ only shortcoming is the quantity of evidence used for each region. The sources typifying3 each case are separate villages in the four respective areas: England, Germany, Italy and Russia. The problem arises when the evidence is judged as a reliable sample. The first two regions, and especially the north-western one, can be said to be very well documented and studied. A vast body of local studies has been produced and some excellent generalizations have appeared (Wrigley and Schofield 1981; Mitterauer and Sieder 1982; Plakans 1984; Segalen 1986; Anderson 1980; Burguiére et al, 1986).
Studies in family history for the Mediterranean and especially the East European regions are much more limited. A number of reasons account for this: a later interest in the field; the difficulty of discovering and interpreting (from the point of view of paleography and diplomatics) appropriate sources in traditionally multinational, multilingual and politically turbulent regions; the incomparably scarcity of documentary evidence.
The southern model is based almost entirely on Italian material, whereas the eastern one rests exclusively on the few, if pioneering and good studies on several Russian villages, Hungary, Poland and the Baltic area (Czap 1983; Kochanowicz 1983; Plakans 1983; Palli 1983; Andorka and Farag6 1983; as well as the literature cited in these works).
The fourfold model does not explicitly position the Balkans in any one of the four (or, as is to be expected, in one of the two latter) regions, since there has been comparatively little statistical research.4 But whenever overall accounts or conclusions are presented, the approach to Southeastern Europe (the Balkans) vacillates between neglect (i.e. this part of Europe simply does not exist) and ignorance (i.e. unchecked traditional stereotypes are attributed to the region).5
One of the most recent and sophisticated contemporary treatments of the regional model of the European family has been done by André Burguiére (Burguiére et al. 1986, v.2, 25-58). His excellent synthesis of existing scholarship warns against the pitfalls of specific research techniques, the character of historical sources, and airy generalizations. Significantly enough, Burguiére does not make specific attempts to place the Balkans in any of the big historical or geographical areas of the European family model. He sticks to the existing studies, which for Southeastern Europe are practically absent. Only in one instance does he allow himself a generalization, namely that:
From Serbia in the south to Courland or Estonia in the north, passing through Poland and Russia, one encounters certain common features: a household size (with an average of 8 to 9 individuals) which is much larger than in the West, and a strong propensity for multiple households. These are two characteristics which carry to the extreme the trends already visible in Central Europe (Burguiére et al. 1986, v.2, 38).
Burguiére’s analysis is important in the discussion of the factors contributing to a tendency toward communal family life. Burguiére refuses to attribute this propensity solely to serfdom, but sees it in the broader context of the economic structure of specific societies. He concludes with a typically cautious remark: “The situation, however, varies so strongly from one region to another that it is difficult to come up with a homogeneous model” (Burguiére et al. 1986, v.2. 38).
Less cautious generalizations have been made which depict the Balkan area as having, as one scholar has said, “a very persistent tendency towards household complexity,” where “the joint patrilinear household still holds pride of place” (Plakans 1986, 9).
In The European Family: patriarchy to partnership from the M iddle A ges to the Present, an important summary of recent scholarship on the European family, the Southeast European area was described as par excellence the region of large families along with Russia and the Baltic region:
The best-known and most intensively investigated example of the large family is the so-called zadruga in the Balkans. It occurs in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria and in historic times was the dominant type of family in large areas (Mitterauer and Sieder 1982, 29).
This abobe statement pinpoints the phenomenon of the large family in its local attire, using the term zadruga. Many authors would employ the term interchangeably with extended, multiple, complex, large, communal family, but practically no one has dared ignore it, if for no other reason, then at least for the unique local flavor it conveys.
Thus, the attempt at a reassessment of the traditional stereotype concerning the place of the Balkans in the model of the European family leads one to examine the size and structure of family households in a comparative European framework as well as to deal with the problem of one particular family form: the South Slav zadruga, and its development and distribution in the Balkans, particularly among the Bulgarians. At the same time an attempt has been made to demythologize the character of the zadruga in the existing literature.
Secondly, the present volume can be treated as a case study of an underinvestigated area, hence the use of the word “unknown” in this chapter’s title. This book’s immediate goal is to provide a synthesis of the existing sources (albeit fragmentary) and of the existing research (albeit meager).
The setting is Ottoman Bulgaria with a heavy emphasis on the nineteenth century. This emphasis is to be explained primarily by the character of the sources, which for the given type of analysis are reliable (though not necessarily representative), only for the nineteenth century, as will be shown later. Still, why Bulgaria, and why the nineteenth century?
It could be argued that the nineteenth century is of particular importance for the Balkan region. It has been rightly labelled the century of the Balkan national revolutions in recognition of the massive and successful uprisings that followed nearly 500 years of Ottoman domination (e.g., the Serbian revolts of 1804 and 1815, the Greek war for independence of 1821, the Romanian revolutions of 1821 and 1848, the series of Bulgarian revolts culminating with the April insurrection of 1876) (Djordjevic 1965; Djordjevic and Galati 1981). It was also the century of the establishment of the Balkan national states, otherwise referred to by exasperated Western politicians as the “Balkanization” of the Ottoman Empire (see the establishment of Serbia in 1830 as an autonomous principality, recognized as independent in 1878; the Greek kingdom in 1830; unified Romania in 1861 and its independence in 1878; the independence of Bulgaria, de facto in 1878 and de jure in 1908; the independence of Albania in 1913) (Jelavich 1977).
Accompanying or underlying social changes such as urbanization, industrialization, intensified social differentiation, bureaucratization after the creation of the autonomous or independent nation states, and the growth of literacy saw their beginnings during the nineteenth century. However, it would be “modernizing” modernization too much to maintain that all these phenomena were in full swing during the nineteenth century. They were essentially characteristic only for the end of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries (Lampe and Jackson 1982; Kasaba 1988).
From a demographic point of view, the nineteenth century was the eve of the Balkan demographic transition. The traditional typology of the demographic transition generally outlines three major types:
1 the transition characteristic for the countries of Europe, with an annual rate of natural population increase below 2 percent and a long transition period (75 to 200 years);
2 an intermediate type, sometimes called semi-transition, characteristic for the major destination of immigrants, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia;
3 the transition typical for developing countries, which experience a relatively short transition period of 40 to 80 years, with a considerable drop in fertility, and a natural population increase exceeding 2 percent.
The first type has three subgroups, which offer three models of transition. The northern, exemplified by Sweden, Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom, Denmark and the Netherlands, has a very long transition period (over a century and a half) and reached the plateau of maximum growth in the 1870s. The western transition period (Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Poland) lasted about a century and peaked by 1900. The southern period (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and the U.S.S.R) had a somewhat shorter transition period (between 70 and 90 years) from the late 1870s to the 1960s, and was marked by a long plateau in the first decades of the twentieth century (Chesnais 1983, 107-113).6
For Bulgaria it has been convincingly shown that the beginning of the demographic transition falls in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and is fully underway after the second decade of the twentieth (Donkov 1979, 28-47). Thus, the Ottoman segment of the nineteenth century (roughly 1800 to 1880) offers the very image of a traditional society on the eve of major changes; this is the Bulgarian ancien régime.
As for geography, Bulgaria, more than any other Balkan country, can claim the dubious privilege of being really and entirely Balkan. It is located in the heart of the Balkan peninsula, and the Balkan range (the ancient Haemus, the Stara planina) which gave their name to the region are almost entirely in Bulgaria, dividing the country into northern and southern halves. Because of its geographic location Bulgaria was more isolated than Greece, Serbia or Romania, which experienced outside influences to a greater extent and at an earlier time. More important, as all of these countries were in fact borderlands of the Ottoman Empire, the great struggle of the Ottomans against Venice, the Habsburgs and Russia was played more often and more intensively in their territories. Not only the warfare and the shifting frontiers but also the very fact of the existence of neighboring states outside the Ottoman political sphere obviously had great repercussions on the movement of the population.
Bulgaria, being in fact the greater European hinterland of the capital Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), was under its immediate control until 1878. This is not meant to say that it avoided the demographic consequences of political dynamics, such as the upheavals accompanying the decentralization of the empire, and particularly the wars of the nineteenth century, most of which were fought on its territory. The emigration of Bulgarians to the Danubian principalities and to Russia during the latter half of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century is well known and has been the object of scholarly research (Veliki and Traykov 1980; Meshcheryuk 1965; Doynov 1974). However, the extent of this emigration was less pronounced and not on a permanent basis comparative to that of contemporary Yugoslavia (Samardzi¢ and Djordjevic 1989; Ekmecié 1972-1973; Halpern 1975; Halpern 1987).
Ithas been argued that incorporation of the Ottoman empire into the European world economy took place approximately from 1750 to 1815, and that the real impetus to intensive trade came from the wars and revolutions of the late eighteenth century which created favorable conditions for the expansion of Ottoman production and trade (Kasaba 1988, 20). The fact that the Balkans were the first Ottoman territories to be integrated into the European economy can be explained by a cluster of factors, chiefly geographic proximity, but also stronger ideological and cultural influences. In the course of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries a fairly strong stratum of local merchants and entrepreneurs was formed. It acquired the role of mediator between Europe per se and the Levant. This new merchant class, aptly called “the conquering Balkan Orthodox merchant,” was responsible in part for an intensified population movement both within and outside Ottoman territories (Stoianovich 1960). There were numerous Balkan merchant colonies prospering in Vienna, Budapest, Leipzig, Marseilles, Paris, London, Odessa, Moscow, and other major commercial centers of the time (Paskaleva 1962 and 1968; Karidis 1981). While these colonies were predominantly Greek, and were perceived as such, they contained significant populations of all the other Orthodox Balkan nations: Serbs, Bulgarians, Vlachs, and Albanians.
In the Bulgarian case, the merchant bourgeoisie began acting as an entity distinct from the Greek community about 1820. However, a significant merchant diaspora occurred primarily in the two decades from the end of the Crimean War until Bulgaria’s secession from the Ottoman Empire (1856-1878). The chief centers of Bulgarian industrial and commercial activities were in Vienna, Bucharest, Braila, Brasov, Odessa, Moscow, Istanbul (Genchev 1988; Gandev 1943-1944; Iurdanov 1938). While qualitatively extremely important, the role of the merchant class should not be overestimated in quantitative terms. The two most important centers, Istanbul and Bucharest, were both outside the immediate Bulgarian lands but very much within the Ottoman Empire. This is not meant to underestimate the activities of Bulgarian merchants in Odessa, Vienna, Leipzig, Moscow, and other cities. The point to be stressed here is that the new social trends, however radical and revolutionary, were not accompanied by drastic population shifts from or to the Bulgarian territories, and not on a par with the population movement of the Greeks.
During the nineteenth century, there were significant movements within the Bulgarian territories. These comprised the slow, but permanent trend of increasing urban populations, thanks primarily to the constant flow of the rural population to the cities. For example, Northern Bulgaria, a territory with a comparatively strong urban tradition and continuity of urban life from pre-Ottoman times, had an urban population of nearly 18% by the 1870s (Todorov 1983, 322). The corresponding figure for Greece is 16.8% for 1870, and for Serbia 9.5% (Todorov 1983, 329, 332, 335, 338). A closely connected phenomenon was the rate of internal migrations. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the percentage of urban migrants comprised from 0.5% to 4% of the towns’ population. In a typical migratory region, such as Northeast Bulgaria and the Dobrudzha, this percentage would rise to 6% of the total urban population (Todorov 1983, 366-383, 461-462). These migrants, who were primarily of urban origin, resettled in cities.
In the last decades of Ottoman rule there was also a substantial rural migration, primarily a flow of workers from the mountain regions to the valleys. This migration was exclusively seasonal. Despite all this evidence for an increasing social mobility particularly after the middle of the nineteenth century, it seems that, as a whole, the Bulgarian population can be treated as approximating the case of a closed population.7
Ottoman Bulgaria during the nineteenth century also represents a curious cluster of diverse, sometimes conflicting, but usually co-existing traditions: religious (Greek Orthodoxy, Islam, Catholicism, Judaism and other minor denominations) and cultural (stemming from local differences and the co-existence of numerous ethnic groups: Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks, Gypsies, Armenians, Jews and many more smaller communities). Unlike Greece and Serbia, which with independence and autonomy in 1830 assumed the character of homogeneous national states, Bulgaria until 1878 came closer to displaying the ethnic and religious diversity typical for the Ottoman Empire as a whole.
All this in itself might be considered a sufficient answer to the legitimate question asked by a social scientist: Why Ottoman Bulgaria and why the nineteenth century (the presumption being that an experiment is set in a given context and a given period, in order to answer a specific set of questions concerning differ-ent aspects of the demographic behavior of the population)? As already mentioned, one of the foci of this study is the family structure in nineteenth century Ottoman Bulgarian society in the context of the European pattern. It has been deemed necessary to do this against a more general background, providing an adequate analysis, as far as the sources permit, of the age and sex structure of the population, and the patterns of nuptiality, fertility and mortality.
However, being primarily a historian of the Balkans, and particularly of the nineteenth century, rather than a social scientist, I share with other historians what may be considered both a fallacy and a virtue, namely the habit not of asking questions which should be answered by sources, but of asking the sources which questions they can answer and to what extent. To a great degree, therefore, the character of this work is shaped by the types of sources at my disposal (see Appendix I).
It ought to be emphasized in this context that the chief problem with historical studies of the Balkans, and particularly of Bulgaria prior to the twentieth century, is the comparatively meager documentary base. It is to be expected that a great amount of quantitative material would stem from the records left by the ruling Ottoman bureaucracy. However, one is faced, rather relative deficiency and unavailability of the Ottoman material. This deficiency is relative in so far as the sheer number of materials kept, for example, in the Oriental Department of the St. Cyril and Methodius National Library in Sofia is staggering. This is, unfortunately, a seeming abundance because most often there is an accumulation of documents of one type for only several periods. On the other hand, the rich archives of Turkey have been inaccessible to Bulgarian historians before the end of the Cold War, when the empirical material for this study was assembled.8
Still, some of the available Ottoman registers, chiefly of a fiscal character, constitute an important part of the source material for this work. Their detailed characteristics and assessment, as well as of the other types of sources, can be found in the relevant chapters and paragraphs (see Appendix I, sec. A).
Many of the modern historical demographic studies is based on specific sources such as parish registers, and specific techniques, chiefly the so-called family reconstitution method. Consequently, these studies are almost completely limited to the territories under the administration of the Catholic or Protestant churches, i.e., to Western Europe and later to North and South America. The practice of keeping parish registers was never introduced as an obligatory rule by the Greek Orthodox Church. The OrthodoxChurch also registered christenings, marriages and burials, but only for accounting purposes and on a more sporadic basis. Therefore, it has not left a heritage of methodically maintained and complete registers.
Trying to trace the documentation of the Bulgarian Catholics I came across some parish registers for several Catholic villages in the Plovdiv district (see Appendix I, sec. B). These registers constitute the second group of sources for this analysis. Presumptuous as it may sound, given the history of Catholicism in Bulgaria (its later spread and even later affirmation among heretical groups which seceded from the Orthodox church), as well as the ethnographic characteristics of the population of these villages, it can be safely argued that the Catholic population is representative of the village population if one overlooks confessional differences.
A third group of sources comes from the Archives of the Ethnographical Institute and Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (EIM/BAN). These archives include a number of questionnaires by the members of the institute from the 1950s to 1970s, as well as earlier observations by teachers from the 1930s and 1940s. The interviewed informants were usually born in the last decades of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus, it can be argued that the information they gave could be considered authentic at least from the middle of the nineteenth century, and possibly earlier. This source has no statistical character, but represents valuable additional illustrative material, which confirms or explains certain observations. In addition, for regions where statistical information of any kind is lacking, these data can be helpful (see Appendix I, sec. C).
Fom a purely statistical and demographic point of view, the representativeness of the material is rather questionable, its stochastic part being too great. However, from the perspective of the social and demographic historian, who is sadly aware of the dearth of sources in the Balkan context, this material is indeed unique. Besides, it has been attempted to make up partly for the scarcity of the quantitative material by drawing on a variety of sources, and by applying an interdisciplinary approach.
In the end, what has hopefully been achieved is a plausible compromise between social history—especially family history—historical demography, anthropology, and intellectual history, specifically B egriffsgeschichte.
From a methodological standpoint, in some ways this study might not be in line with the newest developments in the field of family history, historical demography, or anthropology. For example, the realization that kinship subsumes far more than the primary relationships and coresidence, has directed the field to the exploration of the wider dimensions of kinship, overcoming the initial obsession with the household and the demographic processes. The same can be said about the recent emphasis on the life-course approach, which has introduced a developmental dimension to family studies, or the inclusion of family history in the greater themes of social change. Another important direction of research, considered by some as an “alternate tradition” in the field, is the study of mentalité which compensates for the danger of ahistoricism inherent in many of the quantitative studies (Wheaton 1987; Hareven 1987; Tilly 1987).
However, as already indicated, the character of this work was dictated primarily by the amount and type of the available sources and of previous scholarship. In the face of the very limited number of studies for the Balkan region, and Bulgaria in particular, any approach, however démodé, can be justified as pioneering. When nothing, or almost nothing, has been done in an abandoned, or unused field, it might be well to start with a preliminary plowing up before applying the latest fertilizers.
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