Social Development of a Tyrolean Village

Abstract

survey of thirty peoples, mostly primitive tribes. Now we report its application to a small community of mountain peasants in the Upper Inn district of the western Tyrol. The proposed preliminary index involves three basic factors: local community population, occupational specialization, and organizational ramification. As a measure of each of these three, the 1956 paper offered three indicators defined in great detail: settlement population, craft specialization and team type count. It illustrated the use of these three indicators to construct an index of social development. The village of Kaunertal does not to be sure have a sufficiently distinct culture to make it a suitable unit of comparison in a crosscultural survey. While Kaunertal does differ in minor details from neighboring villages, it is part of a small culture area called the Upper Inn Valley. The Upper Inn Valley is not a political unit, not a team; but it has a distinct dialect, a distinct peasant holiday costume and, as a ceremonial organization, its own regiment of peasant village rifle companies. It is thus coordinate with other nearby cultural areas of mountain peasants which are named from mountain valleys: Stanzertal, Paznauntal, Pitztal, 6tztal and so on. The appropriate unit for cross-cultural survey purposes in our opinion would consist of a larger area: all domestic speakers of peasant dialects in the western Tyrol. Eastern Tyroleans, like people of other neighboring German-speaking provinces, differ in dialect to the point of unintelligibility; important differences in other cultural patterns accompany this difference in speech. The city people and rural gentry who speak literary German in the home likewise need to be considered