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Home > Activities > Committees >Committee on Historical Demography

International Seminar on the New history of kinship

Organized by the IUSSP Scientific Committee on Historical Demography, INED and l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Paris, 30 September - 2 October 2004

Call For Papers

The historical demographic study of kinship has experienced tremendous change over the last fifteen years. Historians of population have demonstrated the importance of kinship networks to understand demographic and social processes. Studies of extended kinship have stimulated new analytical approaches and have produced findings that are among the most innovative and productive lines of inquiry in population and social history. Historical demographers, economic historians and sociologists have identified the social and demographic consequences of familial and kin networks in the past and in so doing have expanded the databases of familial and demographic information to include notarial archives, taxes records, land registers, and especially genealogical information. Simultaneously, scholars in anthropology and human genetics have used similar historical genealogical and social information to expand research in their respective fields.

This rapid growth in historical demographic studies and novel approaches to records, methodologies and issues makes it imperative to bring together international specialists in this new field to assess each other's findings, and begin a discussion on the new issues raised, the ideas, concepts and tools to be developed and the lines of research to be encouraged. Extended kinships must enter into the equation to develop a better understanding of the demographic behaviours of past societies and to forge a link with a broader social history. In addition, extended kinships can be used to identify the presence of disease aggregation in families and to study the association of consanguinity and health outcomes. But the exact procedures and methodological implications of that remain wide open. The programme for such a forum must cover a range of topics

I. Sources and methods

This new history of the family to some extent developed out of a move away from the conventional main sources--vital registration data, population lists--of historical demography. New research has expanded such sources to include published or reconstituted genealogies, solicitors' records, references to witnessing, god-father and-mothership, in particular, to clarify kinship ties and to understand their implications. All involve new problems: the complexity of extraction and database management and missing documents, particularly serious when dealing with interpersonal configurations. Comparison of sources, the issue of trade-offs between the cost and time of extraction for marginal information yields, the search for less cumbersome - but less reliable - alternative solutions (such as the use of patronymic chains) will be the subject of the first line of discussion. The seminar will not be purely methodological or programmatic: all papers presented at the conference will be based on "positive" new research and findings.

Major progress in techniques of processing relational data over the past two decades has still left a great number of loose ends. Standardization has made little headway, as evidenced, for example, by the wide range of genealogical tools available. The integration of "horizontal" (kinship as a network of relationships) and "vertical" analyses (kinship as lineage, and arguably a collection of individual trajectories) is still shrouded in uncertainty.

In addition to this technical dimension, many open statistical and epistemological questions remain. Is representativeness still a relevant concept for genealogical or family-structured databases? What data presentation formats should be used for genealogies in particular? The symposium will put a special focus on applying tools developed by geneticists to present family linkages, and the heuristic, not to say ideological, biases that this may entail for the social sciences.

II. Definitions and concepts

The new history of the family was developed, as a sort of reversal of its predecessor. Whereas previous methods posited a preset framework of classification, the relational method, based on an epistemology focused on the observation of practices, refrains, ill-advisedly perhaps, from preconceptions about kinship. This requires first an investigation of what is too often an implicit choice of theory. How do these new approaches articulate with major definitions and distinctions forged by the anthropology of kinship: between residential and non-residential, biological and non-biological kin, between cognatic (mothers') and agnatic (fathers') sides?

The Seminar will provide an opportunity to discuss the heuristic benefits of these new methods. The pragmatist method allows one to reason from "what happens" at the bounds of kinship. The external bounds first: where do the relevant ties stop, where does the world of non-kin start? Then the internal bounds, or to be more accurate, hierarchies: how do observing ties as they are lived inform our understanding of age-, gender- and kinship-related categories and modes of domination?

These new approaches can only establish their full legitimacy through a proven ability to force a rethinking of the traditional subjects of demography and social history. The concept of migration, for example, is profoundly affected by research that gets to grips with the relational dimension of social identity, replacing it with a framework for analysis in which the concept of movement is more relevant than that of mobility, where the distinction between familiar spaces and unknown spaces is more significant than that between near and far-off destinations

Likewise, the concept of family solidarities, all too often conceived as a "hot" unit of social action as opposed to the "cold" market or institutions, is a more ambiguous construct. Attempts to reconstitute the complexity of these uncover what they imply for exclusion (from the family group or within the family group), obligations (legal and contractual), and interconnections with the surrounding society. Beyond the morphology of ties, studying their substantive content gives a clearer understanding not only of how kinship works, but also how it connects up with the broader environmental dynamics.

Finally, thought must be given to the inherent limitations of approaches based on the study of extended kinship ties: do they help identify non-kin, and if not, what is the cost of their going unidentified? Is the nature of family ties an automatic function of the effects of kin-group size, such that relational approaches need to be rethought in strictly demographic terms?

III. Interdisciplinary approaches to kinship

The increasing interest in biological processes and theories among historical demographers has been motivated by the fact that demography has long studied phenomena central to biology (fertility, mortality, and longevity). Genetic, demographic, social and health outcomes can incorporate many concepts including kinship systems, socio-economic status, and social change. Both geneticists and historical demographers may modify their models as they identify important factors to include or control. For example, in studies of the genetics of complex diseases - genetic epidemiology - economic and social aspects of kinship issues could systematically be brought into the models. We will also face the controversy on whether models used by historical demographers should, likewise, include family/kinship characteristics and heritability to a larger extent than today.

Longitudinal databases, based on family reconstitutions, population registers or genealogies, provide another shared interest and address many common questions. Founder effects can be examined to determine whether a set of kin with a common (often distant) ancestor has a greater likelihood of possessing potential candidate genes associated with specific disease outcomes, but also key demographic outcomes such as mortality. Consanguinity can usually be ascertained both to establish prevalence in historic populations but also to assess its impact on the health of progeny born to genetically related parents. While kin availability and co-residence patterns have been common themes in historical demography, the geographical proximity of available kin can have a significant effect on fertility and mortality patterns depending upon patterns of social support.

Finally, it is important to stress that the new approaches to kinship are global. While they may not literally be worldwide (Europe and North America remain the main foci), they do apply to various regions, partaking of an ideal "world history", the narrative of which runs through contemporary historiography. Taking as a starting point studies relating to Europe, North America and Asia, the symposium will be an opportunity to address issues related to the comparison of ostensibly far-removed, and long-impermeable forms. Putting Euro-centricity to the test in this way will offer another critical approach to self-proclaimed universal kinship analytical categories that were actually developed in a confined anthropological research area west of the "European isthmus".

This International Seminar will bring together historical demographers, economic historians, sociologists, anthropologists, geneticists, as well as scholars from other disciplines interested to exchange the latest scientific knowledge on forms and effects of kinship on demographic and social behavior. The seminar to be organized by the IUSSP, INED and École des hautes études en sciences sociales will be held in Paris, 30 September - 2 October, 2004.

The IUSSP Scientific Committee on Historical Demography invites researchers in the field to submit a 200-word abstract and curriculum vitae before February 1, 2004 to Paul-André Rosental (rosental@ehess.fr) with a copy to Madeleine Jarl (Madeleine.Jarl@ekh.lu.se). While participants are encouraged to seek their own funding for traveling, the organizers will support the stay in Paris for all participants and to a very limited extent travel costs. Those who apply for financial assistance for traveling should indicate their intention clearly in the cover letter of their application papers at the time of submission by the above deadline. The applicants will be informed of their application status before March 1, 2004.

The Seminar will be limited to a maximum of 20 contributed papers. Proceedings or an edited volume will be produced after the seminar.

Program Committee: Tommy Bengtsson, chair (Lund University), James Lee (University of Michigan), Geri Mineau (University of Utah) and Paul-André Rosental (École des hautes études en sciences sociales/INED).