246 paola sacchi and pier paolo viazzo
The resilience of household and family as welfare agencies thus qualifies as a
unifying trait of the Mediterranean region—and possibly an alarming one, as it may
have perverse effects in offering cultural legitimacy to shrinking state intervention at
a time when there is a general consensus among scholars about the need to expand
state services. Unfortunately, this recognized need collides with a tendency for most
states to retreat from social welfare, and insufficient help can be expected from other
collective bodies: although the charitable activities of religious organizations have
historically been significant in Orthodox Greece, in the Catholic countries of south-
western Europe, and in the Islamic societies of the south-eastern shore, they are
unlikely to be able to mobilize the resources which large-scale elderly care requires. In
Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece a convenient and distinctive variant of family assis-
tance consists today in recourse to migrant elderly carers, but experts are casting
doubts over its long-term viability. It is therefore not inconceivable that the family,
economically impoverished and weakened in its numbers, will be left almost alone.
It should be added that until very recently a commonality between the countries on
the two shores of the Mediterranean, and a marker vis-à-vis northern Europe, was rep-
resented not only by a much more pronounced propensity for parents and children to
live under the same roof or close to one another, but also by the continuing centrality
of marriage. The last decades have witnessed major changes in nuptiality patterns all
over the Mediterranean. In Turkey and in the Arab countries men and especially women
are marrying at increasingly high ages, and universal marriage is also in decline (Engelen
and Puschmann, 2011; Singermann, 2011). Even more spectacularly, in the northern
shore countries cohabitation is spreading rapidly and sociologists are wondering about
the impact this can have on inter-generational support. So far, however, there are signs
that in southern Europe moral obligations remain remarkably strong in the face of new
patterns of household formation and dissolution. Likewise, in the countries on the
southern shore of the Mediterranean, kinship ties appear to retain their essential role in
elderly support ultimately because of equally-strong moral commitments (Yount and
Sibai, 2009: 290–297), in spite of the emergence of marriage and residential patterns
which are formally similar to the ones found by Hajnal and Laslett in historic north-
western Europe. This suggests that “family forms” may well converge, but the differing
ethics underlying kinship relations tend nevertheless to persist. Such persistence of inter-
generational solidarity within the boundaries of kinship and the family, possibly rede-
fined and expanded to include the bonds generated by new forms of partnership and
cohabitation and possibly also other kinds of relationships based on emotional attach-
ment—like the qarayib encountered by the ethnographers working in Cairo in the
1980s—might prove a resource for survival in times of dearth. Indeed, to quote the
words of one of these ethnographers, it may not be necessary for the family to have a set
definition to exert a strong hold on its members or society as a whole: “on the contrary,
the combination of flexibility within a strong structure of expectations allows a manipu-
lation of family to meet both old and new needs more effectively” (Rugh, 1984: 67).
ReferencesAbu-Lughod, L. (1986) Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Bianco, C. (1988) The Mezzadria family: A study of kinship roles in the life cycle. Ethnologia
Europaea, 18: 135–148.