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This work analyses shifts in the relations of families, households, and individuals in a single German village during the transition to a modern social structure and cultural order. The findings call into question the idea that the more modern society became, the less kin mattered. Rather, the opposite happened. During 'modernization', close kin developed a flexible set of exchanges, passing marriage partners, godparents, political favors, work contacts, and financial guarantees back and forth. Sabean also argues that the new kinship systems were fundamental for class formation, and he repositions women in the center of a political culture of alliance construction. One of a series of important local studies coming out of the Max Planck Institute for History, it is the most thorough-going attempt to work between the disciplines of social and cultural history and anthropology, and it demonstrates the power of microhistory to reconceptualize general historical trends

During the last several decades, the history of the self, its nature, essential shifts, and trajectory have undergone considerable re-examination. The Western Civilization textbook premise that the history of the West and the rise of individualism correlate closely with each other is being critically examined. There are a number of different historical, anthropological, literary, and sociological discourses about bodies, memory, conscience, subjectivity, identity, privacy, sexuality, and gender, which have developed separate narratives about the self, frequently (mostly) in isolation from one another. Some recent feminist theory finds the thesis of individualism irrelevant for women and suggests that the self as a continuing story (autobiography) is gendered. Some theorists counter the creative possibilities of forgetting to a self constructed around a memory core. Multiple selves, schizoid selves, and decentered selves challenge older ideas of identity. The dialectic between public and private produces new problems about who "owns" the self, its image, and its location. Bodies, sexualities, and desire turn out to be shaped and disciplined within hidden forms of power. Old ideas about the rise of the individual and new ones about the pathologies of the self make the self and its history a central issue for contemporary debate.

"The notion of 'selfhood' conjures up images of self-sufficiency, integrity, introspectiveness, and autonomy - characteristics typically associated with 'modernity.' The seventeenth century marks the crucial transition to a new form of 'bourgeois' selfhood, although the concept goes back to the pre-modern and early modern period. A richly interdisciplinary collection, Space and Self integrates perspectives from history, history of literature, and history of art to link the issue of selfhood to the new and vital literature on space

Recently considerable interest has developed about the degree to which anthropological approaches to kinship can be used for the study of the long-term development of European history. From the late middle ages to the dawn of the twentieth century, kinship - rather than declining, as is often assumed - was twice reconfigured in dramatic ways and became increasingly significant as a force in historical change, with remarkable similarities across European society. Applying interdisciplinary approaches from social and cultural history and literature and focusing on sibling relationships, this vo

Kinship in Europe : a new approach to long-term development / David Warren Sabean and Simon Teuscher -- Bringing it all back home : kinship theory in anthropology / Sylvia J. Yanagisako -- Lordship, kinship, and inheritance among the German high nobility in the Middle Ages and early modern period / Karl-Heinz Spiess -- Politics of kinship in the city of Bern at the end of the Middle Ages / Simon Teuscher -- Sisters, aunts, and cousins : familial architectures and the political field in early modern Europe / Michaela Hohkamp -- Political power, inheritance, and kinship relations : the unique features of southern France (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries) / Bernard Derouet -- The making of stability : kinship, church, and power among the Rhenish imperial knighthood, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries / Christophe Duhamelle -- Rights and ties that bind : mothers, children, and the state in Tuscany during the early modern period / Giulia Calvi -- Kinship, marriage, and politics / Gérard Delille -- Kinship and mobility : migrant networks in Europe / Laurence Fontaine -- Kin marriages : trends and interpretations from the Swiss example / Jon Mathieu -- Kinship and gender : property, enterprise, and politics / Elisabeth Joris -- Kinship, civil society, and power in nineteenth-century Vannes / Christopher H. Johnson -- Middle-class kinship in nineteenth-century Hungary / Gábor Gyáni -- Kinship and class dynamics in nineteenth-century Europe / David Warren Sabean.