The Basque Stem Family Household: Myth or Reality?

In: Journal of family history: studies in family, kinship and demography, Band 13, Heft 1, S. 75-89

Abstract

Observers of rural Basque society have regularly contended that its basic social unit is the stem family household associated with the baserria system of agricultural production. The stem family household has long been an object of speculation, and its sanctity and preservation was a common theme in Basque literature. A close analysis of the population records of the village of Echalar in Navarre, making use of both synchronic and longitudinal analysis, suggests that the stem family household was indeed realized regularly in Echalar, and the fact of its statistical minority at any one point in time was due more to demographic limitations rather than to the presence of a competing family ethos.