Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of figures
- List of illustrations
- List of plates
- Acknowledgements
- 1 An ‘egalitarian’ Iberian community?
- 2 Open fields and communal land
- 3 Social groups
- 4 Cooperative labour
- 5 Matrimony and patrimony
- 6 Minimal marriage
- 7 The fulcrum of inheritance
- 8 Conclusion
- Appendix I The landholding survey
- Appendix II Social groups in 1851 and 1892
- Appendix III The Parish Register
- Appendix IV Household structure, 1977
- Appendix V Baptisms of bastards, 1870–1978
- Glossary of Portuguese terms
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of figures
- List of illustrations
- List of plates
- Acknowledgements
- 1 An ‘egalitarian’ Iberian community?
- 2 Open fields and communal land
- 3 Social groups
- 4 Cooperative labour
- 5 Matrimony and patrimony
- 6 Minimal marriage
- 7 The fulcrum of inheritance
- 8 Conclusion
- Appendix I The landholding survey
- Appendix II Social groups in 1851 and 1892
- Appendix III The Parish Register
- Appendix IV Household structure, 1977
- Appendix V Baptisms of bastards, 1870–1978
- Glossary of Portuguese terms
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology
Summary
Throughout this book I have been placing great emphasis upon economic and social distinctions within a small Portuguese rural community. Rather than summarize or repeat the major arguments, let me synthesize a few of the main strands woven within my principal theme. Three points are of particular relevance here.
Firstly, the question of egalitarian social structures. My major aim in this study has been to ‘deconstruct’ the image of the harmonious rural community. This has been done through a shift of focus from aspects of equality to aspects of inequality and social hierarchy. Alan Macfarlane has pointed, for the case of England, to erroneous assumptions about the existence of ‘less mobility’ and less social contact in the rural communities of the past. He states that the solution to this problem (such assumptions) ‘does not lie in finding more archetypal secluded communities’ (1977a:635–6). I have attempted to tackle the same problem in an Iberian context but from another angle, by demonstrating that even within such an archetypal secluded community forms of rigid economic and social differentiation prevail. In other words, I have deliberately used precisely the same object of study (a small mountain hamlet) as that analysed by previous ethnographers of the Northern Iberian Peninsula, but have come up with a substantially altered picture.
One of the more elegant illustrations of this problem can be found in a passage from the Travels of the Duke de Chatelet in Portugal (1809). The Duke's journeys throughout Portugal in 1777–8 were commented on in the Editor's Supplement to that volume in the following fashion.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Social Inequality in a Portuguese HamletLand, Late Marriage, and Bastardy, 1870–1978, pp. 341 - 349Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987