Changing Social Environments in Spain

We conceive society as a dynamic, integrated, and interconnected system in which relations are marked by inequality. The legal model of the Ancien Régime, built around privilege, was defined by kinship and vertical and horizontal social relations, and also by other factors, such as wealth and political power. As such, kinship, extra-domestic social relations, and professional interaction are implicit in, and cannot be separated from, the concept of family in Ancien Régime Spain. We need to retrieve the meaning and symbology of the family in Ancien Régime society. Social groups become richer to the observer when they are not seen in isolation; relational networks are one of the tools to explain, from and towards the family, the pillars of social organisation.

At first,⁵ we focused on sociocultural reproduction strategies: kinship (based on blood or not); transmission (material and immaterial capital); social relations (friendship, shared geographical origins, patronage); and domination (political and economic). Social groups and families are not only defined by status, but also by their strength in terms of social relations and reproduction. This created new perspectives to analyse the diversity and complexity of social organisation in Spain.

The study of sociocultural reproduction strategies pointed us towards two concepts: “conflict” and “social change”, the polysemic diversity of which – especially concerning the latter – is key to understand sociocultural values and common denominators in behaviour, attitudes, emotions, and individual and collective feelings. Our second project (2010–2013), Realidades familiares hispanas en conflicto: de la sociedad del linaje a la sociedad de los individuos (siglos XVII-XIX), plunged head-first into this issue. The project aimed to understand the slow decline, in family dynamics, of such determinant variables as lineage, ancestry, and aristocratic survival ideals, within a framework of new social relations that begin to consider individual merit and wealth and, in consequence, to side-line the former importance of blood.

In this context, in order to understand the development of new strategies based on broader social links, it is important to consider social promotion processes and new social dialectics that were anything but conflict-free (for instance, the survival of primogeniture principles). It is also important to take into account the growth of the State, which began taking over fields that were previously the exclusive remit of families, as well as the impact on families of legal change, an important variable to gauge social change.

Familias e individuos: patrones de modernidad y cambio social (Siglos XVI-XXI and Entornos sociales de cambio. Familias, nuevas solidaridades y ruptura de je-rarquías (siglos XVI-XX) were the projects undertaken in the 2014–2021 period. These projects analysed the factors that triggered change in family models and individual dialectics within family structures. The projects examined the tense coexistence, weaknesses, and contradictions of two sociocultural and family models during the 19th and 20th centuries. The transition from family to individual is not a trivial development. The idea was to avoid tautological or finalist explanations of the transition from patriarchal to conjugal families, and to explain continuity and change within the framework of new social relations that, for the first time, consider individual merit and the accumulation of capital. This was also a world in which feelings and emotion began to play a major role and, even, to feature in the written record.

We witness the separation of the political and the socio-familial spheres, the formation of separate identities and representations, which gave shape to a new socio-political and cultural system. To date, all attention had focused on political change, without taking families, the new relations of close kinship, and the decline of classic sociocultural hierarchies into consideration.

Understanding and explaining this ongoing process gives family history a dimension that demands historical nuance and rejects easy presentist arguments, but which also provides tools to analyse complex processes of social promotion and change and the role played by the family in them. Since the 1980s, the access of women to the labour market, an ageing population, and the need to care for the elderly, a role traditionally assigned to women, have transformed family behaviour and sociability patterns. Tradition remains strong, but the cracks widen with the new generations that enter marriage and parenthood from a perspective of independence and, especially, individuality.

Family groups still act as a support network during hard times; all surveys confirm that, for young Europeans, family is still, to a large extent, regarded as a basic social institution and space; this illustrates the complex situation that we see today. The contradictions explain why, despite the important social role played by families, they have not been regarded as a historical subject until recently.

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Often, theoretical and epistemological renovation revolves around the creation of new subjects of research. Interdisciplinarity has turned what used to be the outcome of the interaction of history and the social sciences into autonomous subjects. This has led to theoretical and methodological fluidity. In our opinion, by developing autonomously, some objects, such as women, the family, the State, and social groups, have brought about veritable theoretical revolutions, drawing solid interdisciplinary links and attracting categories and methods from other social sciences to historical analysis. Particularly, the adoption of the nominative method, rather than the aggregative, has had far-reaching implications, as illustrated by the interrelated use of prosopographic and biographical sources and databases; the crossbreeding of data to reconstruct parishes rather than families; and network analysis. In many instances, this has resulted in the revision of existing sources and the addition of new ones.

The main problem is how to adjust methods adopted from other social sciences to the categories and sources of each discipline, considering that, when it comes to history, time, context, differences in social systems and conceptions of space, force us to be thoroughly critical with sources and methods. As pointed out by Gerard Delille, the historian cannot be the anthropologist of the 15th, 16th, 17th, or 18th century, and the same could be said about the remaining social sciences. However, analytical categories such as social reproduction and promotion, or methods like microhistory or social networking, have exponentially, comprehensively, and logically expanded historical analysis.

One of the most significant novelties is the emergence of the individual in legal, political, and social spaces, beginning with the family and, from there, with the household, the parish, the guild, the brotherhood, the council and, more broadly, the community. Obviously, each of these socio-political scales presents, from the family perspective, wide analytical horizons, insofar as concepts such as life cycle, trajectory, and strategy are part of the analysis which, from the nominative approach and by integrating the family object in the explanation of social organisation, considers temporal and genealogical dimensions alongside horizontal relational factors between the individuals that form a community.

In this way, historiography’s main challenge was to try to understand and explain processes of continuity and change triggered by specific historical events and resulting in legal reforms promoted by certain social groups within a set socio-political framework. In consequence, the study, analysis, and understanding of everyday reality rests on a historical process characterised by complex, diverse, and multicausal factors.

Now that the isolation of scientific disciplines, the histoire en miettes⁶ (the result of the multiplicity of objects), is something of the past, we are demanded global and longue durée explanations. Only synthetic and integrating hypotheses, references, definitions, and notions can capture the true evolution of this, extremely complex, 150 year-long process (circa 1750–circa 1900) of political-legal and social change.

New problems loom over the horizon: 1) hot to integrate kinship in its social dimension; 2) to analyse and explain links between individuals; and 3) situate families within solidarity networks, relations of dependence, and the life cycle. Kinship and, in this context, anthropology, becomes the mortar that holds these basic approaches together.

2.1. Historical time

The social contract that consolidated in the late 19th century, which was inspired by the principles and values of the Enlightenment, sprang from the transformations that allowed the emergence of the class system in the closing decades of the century. Particularly, the decline of lineage; the end of primogeniture as a system to regulate social reproduction of elite groups, and its immediate outcome: the dissolution of the difference between first- and later-born children and the equalisation of siblings; the co-narrative of individualism; increasingly endogamic marriages, caused by changes in degrees of consanguinity (1917); and the gradual disappearance of matrimonial reciprocity along with the acceptance of sororate and levirate (marriage of widowers with the deceased wife’s sisters, or of widows with the deceased husband’s brothers). All these factors force us to challenge classic historical periodisation, too often understood as a division into sealed compartments with no point of contact with one another; no explanation is possible without a degree of chronological continuum.

American sociologist and social theorist Andrew Abbot argues that time is the main category in the social sciences.⁷ Seeking continuity and change over long time periods opens the way to think about the historical relations of the social actors that trigger social events with their actions. The study of families allows us to detect, understand, and illustrate behaviours that reflect changes in broader communities. They can be the true gauge of major historical processes – e.g. the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Bourgeois Revolution – or highlight the need to add nuance to our definitions, stretch them over longer time spans, or simple replace them with new ones. Let us see three examples: