Shaking off the Domestic Yoke, or the Sociological Significance of Residence

Abstract

The recent incursion of historians into the ‘history of the family’ raises a number of crucial problems from which anthropologists and sociologists seem to have shied away. Dealing with a topic new to the historical discipline, some of these historians have turned to anthropologists for theoretical inspiration. It will thus come as no surprise that what they have found and reproduced is the very conceptual discord so endemic in anthropological circles (see Laslett 1972 and Berkner 1975 for antithetical stances). This controversy, however, in one way represents only a minor aspect of the problem. Equally if not more important is the fact that the phenomena which fall under historical and sociological/anthropological investigation may not be the same after all. This is intrinsically related to their respective subject-matter and the type of evidence they have to rely upon.