Family And Economic Activity. Reprodutive Strategies Of The Galician Households, 1880-1930

The legal and anthropological studies more frequently mentioned assign to the “house” in a traditional agrarian society like the Galician society in the period 1880-1930, a meaning that goes through the mere places of residence and farmer exploitation centre, to form itself like a “institution” that it has in the unequal hereditary system of “improvement” and in the cooperative familiar formula of working in the “house” its firmer foundations. Nevertheless, as the most recent investigations reveal and it is showed in this work, the arguments that sustain to the old paradigm “marriage-patrimony” hit with the reality of the farmer world analyzed, that shows a great diversity and internal heterogeneity. In that context, the exhaustive study of the reprodutive strategy of the families of fourteen Galician parishes reveals clearly the insufficiency of the concept “house”, whereas unifier of the rural world, because it does not respond to the diversity of the familiar structures that are typified in this investigation. In the same one it is analyzed, firstly, the hereditary practices and other institutions to the service of the “house”, secondly, the structure of domestic aggregates, and, finally, the variations in the professional distribution according to the type of family.