Changes to the structure of family and population in the industrial regions

Abstract

In the last chapter we learnt about people who were ostensibly born into a peasant community and culture, but who remained in reality cut off and excluded from it. If we are to investigate the specifically folklorist question of how traditional ways of life and their manifestations in the popular culture of the Oberland changed with the advent of industrialisation, we must be fully aware that the innovations arose only partly out of a peasant world. We will find the purest and most clearly defined forms of a new ‘industrial’ possibility of existence, with its appropriate cultural expressions, among those sectors of the population which were never able to become rooted in an agricultural community. We can formulate our question even more precisely, and thus on a more theoretical level: in the following pages we want to find out whether and how the basic conditions of human society were changed when the Oberland was industrialised. The most disparate areas of human life can reveal how industrialisation created new possibilities for existence, giving rise to new forms of community and a new popular culture. This sort of question gives rise to a few methodological difficulties: first of all, our enquiry into the emergence of new ways of life needs to be treated historically, meaning that attention must be paid to the period and the mentality which provided the historical background. For these reasons we have limited ourselves to the period before 1800, a time when the Oberland relied chiefly on domestic spinning. The collapse of hand spinning and the great transition to domestic weaving and machine spinning in the Oberland can only be briefly scanned at the close of this work.