Ethnologia Europaea

Until recently, human life spans were very unreliable. Our ancestors counterbalanced this insecurity by pursuing various non-egocentered strategies. With the life span's increasing length and standardization, these became obsolete and were abandoned. Today, almost all of us have the chance of living life to its maturity. In order to make full use of it, however, we must plan full-size life careers from a very early stage. Otherwise the years gained will largely be wasted. The article starts by summarizing demographic development over the last three centuries. These "hard facts" are then correlated with evidence from other sources, for example from fairy tales and sayings. Finally, recent developments in Japan, the country with the highest life expectancy in the world today, are discussed.

Within the literature on household and family in past time it has become accepted wisdom that the households of the poor were particularly small in size and simple in structure. There is good reason, however, to call this view in question. First, a critical reassessment of the two types of source material which have hitherto been used to substantiate this view leaves serious doubts as to their suitability for a statistical analysis of pauper households. It can be shown that listings of inhabitants do not normally indicate which households are poor while pauper lists do not record households at all. Second, there is numerical evidence to show that the households of the poor could actually be larger and more complex than those in the rest of the population. The example of the Essex village of Ardleigh in 1 796 is quoted to this effect, suggesting further that the record linkage oflistings of inhabitants with pauper lists is the only effective method of producing reliable comparative statistics on the size, composition and structure of the pauper household.

An enigma in the research on the bourgeoisie is the lack of definition. Fieldwork as done by the two authors in Paris provides ample evidence of a specific social group answering to the popular acknowledgement of the word. The non-definition of the bourgeoisie is an intrinsic attribute of its structure, tied to change, and of its ideology, burdened with a derogatory term. The bourgeoisie should not be enclosed by boundaries contrary to its essence. Its existence cannot be denied and it can be reached by appropriate ethnological description and analysis.

Anthropologists and folklorists have described and, albeit to a lesser extent, analysed the occurrence of taboos in maritime communities. Following Malinowski’s anxiety-ritual proposition, the former stress personal risks and/or economic uncertainties involved in fishing as the cause of the observance of prohibitions. The author notices the omnipresence of distinct taboos in the fishing-villages of the North Atlantic fringe. Some of these are dealt with in detail. It is argued that these prohibitions are part and parcel of rites of territorial passage. The reason why particular creatures, objects, acts etcetera should be avoided is hardly ever scrutinized. Nevertheless, this is one of the more challenging problems on the subject of fishermen's taboos. In this paper some tentative explanations concerning this phenomenon are offered. Lastly, some attention is paid to the question of why taboos change or disappear over a span of time.

The concept of agro-town was elaborated by the geographers to describe a settlement that although it is chiefly populated by farmers and agricultural labourers has the size of a town and often includes urban institutions, urban social strata and functions. Such settlements are surrounded by vast areas of extensively used land which may extend to several tens of thousands of square kilometres. Agro-towns constitute settlement networks in themselves, without or with very few villages. In Europe agro-town regions are found in Andalusia, Southern Italy, Sicily and on the Great Hungarian Plain. In this paper the author makes a detailed study of the Hungarian agro-towns, describing their physical and social structure as well as their life-style and culture, and tracing their development and transformations back to the late Middle Ages. In the concluding chapter the Hungarian agro-towns are compared with their Mediterranean parallels. In spite of apparent differences (e.g. a general 'urbanity' and 'urban ethos' in the Mediterranean, and 'ruralness' in the Hungarian Plain) the paper points out basic similarities in the historic development and social significance of the agro-towns. The similar traits are interpreted as adaptations to more or less analogous situations in the periphery of the European continental division of labor.