Suchergebnisse

Various forms of family organization among Russian peasants and urban dwellers coexisted from the sixteenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The correlation of family types changed and was a function of circumstances and economic conditions. The available data indicate that from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, extended and multiple families predominated among peasants, though the relationship between single-family and multifamily households changed. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a steady process of nuclearization of family structure began, as a result of which the simple family gradually replaced multiple families at first in the cities later in the villages.

A forum on Boris Mironov's Russian and English editions of The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (2000) offers the comments of four scholars on different aspects of Mironov's work. David L. Ransel introduces the forum with a consideration of whether Russian and western historical scholarship has been or should be converging, and he reviews the Russian-language response to Mironov's book. William G. Wagner discusses Mironov's key conclusions: that the imperial period was marked by the development of a more individualistic personality, the democratic nuclear family, civil society, and a state order based on the rule of law. He questions, however, the validity of the modernization paradigm as an adequate tool for analyzing these developments. Willard Sunderland comments on the use of the concept of empire in Mironov's book, calling attention to the assertion that imperial Russia was a "normal" European state and that it was not a "true colonial state." The focus of the book, he argues, remains Russian society within the space of the empire, not the society of the empire as a whole. Steven L. Hoch considers Mironov's chapter on demographic processes, criticizing the use of demographic theory and its application to problems such as fertility and mortality. He also argues that Mironov accepts too uncritically the utility of the statistical data at hand. Boris Mironov responds to Wagnar, Sunderland, and Hoch in turn.

In my view, the skeptical comments of Steven L. Hoch, whether intentionally or not, undeservedly discredit human height data as an indicator of the physiological status and well-being of populations, and possibly represent the historiographical appearance of a postmodern intellectual ideology, whose representatives look with distrust on historical sources. Hoch repeats some traditional objections connected with data on height: 1) terminal height—that is, the height a person attains by the age of 20 to 25–is not a true indicator of the physiological status and well-being of a population; 2) the precision of height data falls below the standard scientific requirements for reliable indicators; 3) periodization of the dynamics of physiological status of the population and of basic data on height is impossible in principle; 4) the reasons for changes in physiological status cannot be subjected to rigorous analysis.

Scholars generally agree on the relationship between the physical stature, or height, of children and adults, and their quality of life, or their biological status, including diet, illnesses, intensity and conditions of work, availability of medical care, living conditions, psychological well-being, climate, water, air, and other environmental factors that have impinged on their lives prior to the point at which their height is measured. Genetic factors have an important effect on individual height, but genetic distinctions lose their significance when masses of individuals are measured and average heights are compared. The same effect holds at the level of entire populations: differences in height are determined, not by ethnic or racial attributes, but by living conditions.