family and household 245
rules prescribed or favored the formation of complex households, extended families
were still unlikely to be numerous at any point in time, mostly because of the severe
constraints exerted by high mortality, and unlikely to be self-sufficient in welfare
terms—an assessment partly based on demographic modeling and partly on the lack
of evidence in the sources of men and women cooperating with, or benefiting from,
members of a large supportive household. What Horden (1998) finds in an avowedly
fragmentary documentation spanning 2000 years is, rather, a mixed economy of care
in which informal networks often looked more important than the immediate family
and the household care the latter could supply. However, networks too had their
limitations and were themselves part of a set of welfare agencies whose interaction was
far more complex than a widespread tendency to think of familial, communal, and
institutional care in terms of mutual opposition would lead us to believe. Also, one
should not forget that vertical ties (such as those linking patrons and clients, or ben-
efactors and the poor) have always coexisted, and often been intimately bound, with
the horizontal ones of mutual support within the household and beyond its bounda-
ries, and that near-residence may have outweighed co-residence, as graphically dem-
onstrated by the “tentholds” of contemporary Middle Eastern nomadic groups
studied by anthropologists (Horden, 1998: 39–49).
Based on scanty and piecemeal evidence from the distant past, the differing
views put forward by Hübner and Horden offer a helpful conceptual grid to
reflect on the vast mass of systematically-collected data yielded by the many inter-
national research projects that have investigated the relations between family,
social security and the welfare state in contemporary Europe. Perhaps the main
result to come out of these studies is that a marked contrast exists between north-
ern and southern Europe. The living arrangements of the elderly have once again
proved a telling indicator. As shown by the most important of these large-scale
surveys, in 2004 only 1% of Swedes aged 80 years or more and 4% of Danes lived
with a child, compared to 23% of Italians and 34% of Spaniards, and these differ-
ences turned out to be no less conspicuous when close residential proximity
between the elderly and their children was used as a measure (Kohli, Künemund
and Ludicke, 2006). These findings suggest that, although clearly there is every-
where in Europe a mixed economy of care, nevertheless the relative weight of the
different components may vary significantly. All over the continent spatial prox-
imity between the homes of aging parents and those of their adult children offers
today a more widespread and important means of providing support to the elderly
than co-residence, but in Mediterranean Europe the role of the latter is not neg-
ligible—and taken together, these two “familistic” ways of caring for the elderly
draw a fairly neat boundary between southern and northern Europe and point,
instead, to similarities between the countries on the two shores of the
Mediterranean. Even if the amount and the detail of information are not yet fully
comparable to what we know for south-western Europe, over the past 15 years
data have started to pile up both on Turkey and on the Arab countries which indi-
cate that the countries on the southern shore are aging very rapidly and that the
family continues to be the main source of support for the elderly. As in southern
Europe, and indeed to a greater degree, co-residence is reported to be all-impor-
tant to meet the needs of older adults; but the extended family is also known to
be declining and assistance is increasingly ensured by a marked tendency for older
and younger generations to live in close proximity (Yount and Sibai, 2009).