Family and social change in a Catalan village

Abstract

This article is concerned with the slow erosion of traditional legal and social practices under the impact of industrialisation and of modernisation of farming in a rural district of Northern Catalonia (Spain) in the period following the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). In the early 1940's the economy of the area was agrarian in character and the stem family, tied to a system of impartible inheritance, was the typical domestic and residential arrangement. When in the early 1960's industrialisation set in and many peasants left their farmsteads to migrate to town in search of new economic opportunities, family form was bound to change. Through a survey of over 500 cases of marriage, the paper examines the process of family transformation stressing the resilience of the stem family which, although a decaying institution in the modern conditions, has adapted well to the new situation both in the farming and the urban area of the rural district.