3 - The ideology of the house

Summary

The concept of “the household” implies a domestic unit with decision-making autonomy about production and consumption.

- Jane Guyer

This chapter deals with the way people in Neckarhausen conceptualized relations between husbands and wives. The analysis revolves around the word “Haus,” which appears in the village records by itself only twice, but occurs in many compounds or other word forms, most frequently as the verb hausen. It is the equivalent of the English term “house,” and is used in many contexts where we would today employ the word “family.” And yet its field of meaning goes well beyond the latter term. Therefore, we need to examine closely the many ways in which it was used. Familie itself occurs far less frequently as it did not really become established until well after 1800, mostly in contexts where the need was felt to name an entity rather than describe an action or a role. We will assume that when “natives” used these concepts, they were asserting a view about reality, establishing relations among each other, and making claims about the partition of resources and the distribution of rights. Therefore, in each situation we will want to ask who used particular terms: a wife, a husband, the pastor, the village Schultheiss, or a state official. The sources for most of this investigation are court protocols, which provide a great deal of information about the wider field of action, related assertions of value, and relationships.