Toward a conceptual framework for the variation in historical family and household systems across Eurasia

Abstrakt

Toward a conceptual framework for the variation in historical family and household systems across Eurasia

Recognising the unprecedented opportunities for new developments in the comparative analysis of domestic groups and living arrangements in historic Eurasia, the essay proposes a broader conceptual framework which could be useful to scholars engaged in large-scale attempts to situate historical household patterns within multilevel associations, and to embed contextual influences in diverse spatial circumstances. Drawing on considerations from anthropology, sociology, history, demography and other disciplines — like cultural ecology or even sociobiology — the author of the essay introduces a heuristic device which can be applied to a wide variety of regional studies of family organisation. The conceptual framework proposed here could be used in future studies to organise the growing and disparate empirical evidence on family and household systems, and thus could help future scholars to provide better answers to the most pertinent research questions of the discipline.