Ethnologia Europaea

Life-histories and biographical portraits frequently fall into the trap of “the typical” – the narrator is presumed to represent a key element supposedly common to most or all other members of a culture. Avoiding this path, we focus on the lifecourses of two women in a Portuguese hamlet pertaining to the upper and lower extremes of a manifold social hierarchy. These two villagers’ individual life-cycles, their marital and familial universes, and their total socialworlds are indeed so divergent that we are led inexorably to the question – despite their common place of residence, do they have anything in common at all?Three major phases of the two women’s life paths are sketched – childhood and adolescence, adulthood and marriage, oldage and death – highlighting the Central European features of this community in Trás-os-Montesprovince, and stressing its profound dissimilarity from the Mediterranean culture area. A number of theoretical stances within the field of biographical studies hover in the background: classic anthropological texts recited by one ego, more sociological angles on social mobility and group trajectories, philosophical oriented hermeneutical portraits, and recent forays into post-modernist schemes focused in the dialogic relation between the observer and the observed. This paper falls clearly into the second of these trends. Might there not be at least two or even three “typical” life courses within the European villages of this kind?

During the 19th century and into the 20th the general attitude towards women was that they should be obliging and submissive. Contesting notions that this pattern should be a historical universal this paper suggests that there have been associations of married women as collective standard setters. Serving as collective authority units such associations have supported and directed patterns of female authority within household circles. Exploring this view circumstantial evidence has been found in folklore and observation of Norwegian folk life. Continuing a discussion started by the Finn Uno Harva (1944) additional material has been provided from communities in contemporary Greece where annual celebrations take place among married women to celebrate fertility with the midwife as the centre of the festival. Finally, a guild model for married women’s societies is proposed, suggesting that their main product – vital for the well-being of the community as a whole – is the offspring, not at the moment of birth, but nurtured and shaped into the approved standard.

In Griechenland zahlt traditionellerweise die Braut einen Brautpreis. Demnach muss der Vater der Braut am Tage ihrer Verehelichung ihr und ihrem zukünftigen Ehemann zumindest ein Haus oder – in der Stadt – eine Eigentumswohnung übereignen, kann er es sich erlauben, auch noch Geld und Land. Dieser Mitgift-Brauch wurde in den 70er Jahren von der griechischen Frauenbewegung als ein „Verschachern“ der Frau heftig angegriffen. Trotzdem erfreut sich heute die ‘prika‘ – die Mitgift, zu der auch das Haus gehört – wachsender Beliebtheit und zwar in dem Maße, wie zunehmend mehr Geld – im Ausland oder auch im Land selbst – verdient werden kann. Wie die ‘prika‘ die Stellung der Frau in der heutigen griechischen Gesellschaft kulturelle definiert bzw. umgekehrt: wie die Stellung der Frau im Mitgift-Brauch ihren kulturellen Ausdruck findet, wird hier dargestellt und es wird gezeigt, daß das Haus, ökonomisch und ideologisch zur Frau gehörig, einen gewichtigen Gegenpol zur patriarchalischen Dominanz des Mannes in der gesellschaftlichen Öffentlichkeit bildet.

Célébrée tous les 25 novembre par les catherinettes, célibataires de 25 ans, par les ouvrières et les employées, la fête de sainte Catherine connaît dans les années 1920 une expansion considérable qui en fait une véritable institution parisienne que la presse ne manque pas de commenter. En ces Années folles, défilés, bals, concours de chapeau de Catherinette et marches de Catherinettes animent le capital qui devient, dans un tel contexte, terrain à des débordements. L’Église scandalisée réagit et s’empresse, a fin prône-t-elle de retrouver l’ordre, de réactiver de messes en l’honneur de sainte Catherine.Cet article examine donc une fête traditionnelle en mouvance à travers les discours de la presse de l’époque et montre ainsi son rôle dans le développement des festivités urbaines.

The following study focuses on the history of bodily movements as a category ofsocial action. A twofold comparison is attempted, first between bodily movements and in dancing, second between changes in these movements during the 15th century, on the one side, and, on the other, during the 18th century. The result of the first comparison is that bodily movements, neither in the military nor in dancing, are autonomous; they do not follow some motivation resulting from internal factors in either the military or in dancing; instead, they correlate with forms of behaviour which can be found contemporaneously in other walks of life. The result of the second comparison is that, during the15th century, an equilibrium position emerged, first in dancing, out of which many different movements could be performed; in the 18th century, this equilibrium position was given up, first in the military, in favour of a position which forced the individual to a dynamic flexibility of the body and into a tension; through its release, the tension enhanced movements. Again, this change can be traced in many contemporaneous aspects of 18th-century European culture.

The article discusses the reasons for high appraisal of Lewis Henry Morgan’s ethnological heritage in Russian/Soviet social scholarship. Morgan’s social evolutionism, attached to Marxism by Frederick Engels, sounded attractive for the Soviet scholarship, which pulled Morgan’s ideas out of context of the nineteenth century thought and planted to the social scholarship of the 1930s-1980s.From the early 1930s anthropological officialdom in the firmer USSR canonized Morgan’s ideas, especially his matriarchy thesis and the prophesy about there turning to the classless society in the new advanced form. Until the early 1980s the Soviet anthropology, reduced to the study of the “primitive communist formation”, developed in the rigid framework of the Morgan-Engels’s concept. The article is based on the original Russian/Soviet sources.