The spatial structure of kinship (on the example of the Zharkovsky settlement of the Tver Region)[Пространственная Структура Родственных Связей (На Примере Поселка Жарковский Тверской Области)]

The article considers the spatial structure of relationships of families in the peripheral settlement Zharkovsky (3 thousand inhabitants) with their children and relatives in oth- er cities and villages. There are 180 members in 90 surveyed families of the village that has been losing population for the last 50 years, and its “diaspora” has spread from Dublin to Vladivostok and from Murmansk to Amman. The children of Zharkovsky’s res- idents are mostly students in two nearest regional centers — Tver and Smolensk, and also in Moscow and Saint Petersburg; educational institutions in medium-sized and small cities are less popular. Other relatives live in the same cities, but are much more dispersed in the cities of Siberia, the Kaliningrad Region, Belarus, etc. Most of the households under study consist of middle-aged parents or, more often, only of a mother, or elderly parents, whose children have already left the village. The spatial structure of kinship is usually “centrifugal”: the majority of relatives in other places are those who left the village. However, sometimes children live in the village while parents live in oth- er places: these are children who left the villages of the Zharkovsky district, in which their elderly parents still live. Thus, there is also a “centripetal” structure of kinship ties: some residents of the village are recent immigrants from other places.