238 paola sacchi and pier paolo viazzo
rather than dominant characteristics. The nuclear family is flourishing. The
Mediterranean extended households and lineage societies appear, increasingly, as rel-
ics from an undifferentiated world.” The archival studies of the 1980s demonstrated
that the dominance of nuclear families in the southern regions of Italy and Iberia was
not the outcome of relatively recent processes of modernization, as anthropologists
had been inclined to believe, but was part of a broad regional picture of contrasting
family structures already visible in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In a different vein, it is no less important to observe that these findings from south-
ern Europe have been repeatedly produced—especially by historical anthropologists
or micro-historians influenced by anthropology—as damning evidence of the substan-
tive and theoretical inadequacy of the “Mediterranean model” and more generally to
suggest that “the whole enterprise of branding major areas of Europe as having a
particular type of household system” was misleading (Kertzer, 1991: 156). Instead of
looking for broad regional uniformities, the task of family historians was to develop a
more subtle approach where political, economic, demographic, ecological and cul-
tural factors were to be taken into account in order to better understand what deter-
mines co-residential arrangements in any time or place. The focus on residential
groups was also severely criticized and the need to look at “kinship beyond the house-
hold” strongly emphasized.
Anomalies partly violating the expectations induced by the newly-established para-
digm in family history were brought to light also by scholars working on the southern
and eastern shores. For instance, in their pioneering dissection of the Istanbul cen-
suses of 1885 and 1907, Duben and Behar (1991: 48–129) identified a “Mediterranean”
marriage pattern, with men marrying at approximately 30 years of age and women at
20, but the incidence of nuclear households turned out to be fairly high—presumably
a constant or at least recurrent feature in large towns and cities, as hinted by studies
of urban families in other countries surrounding the Mediterranean like Italy or Spain.
However, potentially more corrosive criticisms came from feminist historians and
anthropologists who were concentrating their attention on women’s family and kin-
ship networks and their spaces (and limits) of action, whether they emerged from
archival sources such as the marriage contracts recorded by Islamic courts in Ottoman
Palestine (Tucker, 1988) or from an ethnographic observation of everyday life in the
polygynous households of a Bedouin group in the Egyptian desert (Abu-Lughod,
1986). If historians were keen to dispute untested assumptions about the “Arab,”
“Islamic” or “Oriental” family as a monolithic and a-historic institution, resting on
honor and women’s submission, anthropologists denounced the shortcomings of kin-
ship studies in the Middle East, still stranded in the analysis of lineage and tribal poli-
tics. A novel approach was felt to be especially urgent to dismantle the blanket notion
of patriarchy in favor of what Kandiyoti (1988: 275) famously termed “patriarchal
bargain,” a set of constraints which may exhibit variations according to class, caste and
ethnicity and to which both genders accommodate and acquiesce, yet which may
nonetheless be contested, redefined and renegotiated.
A quite different anthropological criticism was leveled by Goody (1983), in a book
where he belittles the differences between the various parts of Europe and asserts that
the really important issue is to understand why European marriage and kinship sys-
tems came to diverge from those they had once shared with a larger geographical area
including North Africa and a part of Asia, where the tendency was and still is for