The self-sufficient household? An anthropological reconsideration of the Italian evidence

Peter Laslett’s choice to concentrate Household and family in past time exclusively on relationships within the co-residential domestic group is held by his critics to have been responsible for encouraging family historians to overlook kinship relations extending beyond the household. Evidence from historical research on the Italian family has often been used by these critics to argue that households were not self-sufficient units of analysis and could be understood only in the context of wider social networks. This article surveys the literature on family and kinship in Italy and shows that the interpretations offered by several leading historians have been strongly influenced by anthropological approaches focused on the study of ‘horizontal’ kinship ties and the manipulation of social networks. Such a theoretical stance may have somehow obscured the significance, in many parts of historic Italy, of ‘vertical’ ties producing lineage-like kinship groups.